About 15% of the people killed in the Hiroshima atomic bombing were Koreans brought over as a slave labor force. They're just classified as Japanese deaths because Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 and Korea politically ceased to exist. That didn't stop the Japanese from denying them health benefits for surviving the atomic bombings.
On a personal level, Japanese soldiers forced my grandmother to watch as they raped then killed her sister and niece. All as a ploy to coerce my grandfather (the village doctor) into treating their commanding officer. That's the sort of stuff the people against the atomic bombings are advocating the Allies should have let continue for who knows how many more months.
To quote a geek favorite line: "With great power comes great responsibility." Funny how that goes out the window when that power is abused in a way that favors your personal opinion.
If you're going to proffer a service to the masses with the algorithmically simple concept of showing you the most popular things people are talking about, then that's what it should do, period. If you take it upon yourself to modify that algorithm so that it deviates from what you've marketed it as, you need to disclose that. Most already do for the topics you've mentioned - the EULA for most sites explicitly states that racist comments, spam, nudity, excessive swearing, and illegal materials like child pornography and copyrighted works will be deleted. If Facebook wants to extend that policy to include right-leaning political materials only, then they are free to do so, But they need to disclose it and bear whatever consequences that arise.
I'm of the opinion that openly partisan sites (and magazines and TV news channels), by insulating their users from alternative political points of view, increase political polarization and reduce people's willingness to compromise. So they're partially responsible for the increasing dysfunction of modern politics. I won't go so far as to say that the press and the companies running these sites need to be forced to be less partisan. But we do need to recognize that this is a factor when debating how to address situations like this.
If those a/v companies built a ~$1B business based upon the acquisition of free data for which they have no long-term contract to obtain, then those companies do not deserve to continue to be in business.
I'd be more worried about the programmer who thinks of a clever new way to detect viruses while in the shower, but can't easily test how effective it is because there's no large public database of viruses. He can't afford the time or several tens of thousands of dollars to get a dataset just to test out a hunch, so the idea dies on the vine instead of being developed.
As you allude, ideally they'd restrict access for companies with large revenue while keeping it free for the little guy. But the problem with giving stuff away for free is you're not collecting enough info to distinguish the big guy from the little guy.
Amazon is the 900 pound gorilla in cloud server and storage services. Sites that use Amazon Web Services include Netflix, Expedia, Adobe, Pinterest, Smugmug, Reddit, Tumblr, and until recently Dropbox.
However, their service interface is really geared for enterprises which can devote a team of IT professionals to managing it. That's why companies like Dropbox were able to successfully re-sell Amazon's cloud storage to the home and SMB user with a shiny user-friendly interface on top. A lot of us have been wondering when Amazon would wake up and clean up their interface to make it easier for the average Joe to store their files directly, instead of using a middleman like Dropbox. I've already moved my photo backup to Amazon (free unlimited photo storage with a Prime account). It used to be with Google Photo, but theirs was only free up to 2048x2048 resolution, which was ok when I started using it back around 2007 but is kinda low resolution for a photo nowadays. My video storage is still with Google Photo (free unlimited storage for videos up to 2 GB), but I'd probably transfer those to Amazon as well if they made it free with Prime.
The crumple zone doesn't seem to have collapsed. It seems to have sheared off. In a collapsed crumple zone, you expect to see pillars and beams which have accordioned, thus absorbing the maximum amount of energy possible for the weight of the structure. A large chunk of my graduate structural engineering class was calculating these modes of failures for different shapes, so you could design the beam, sheet, whatever to deliberately buckle in this energy-absorbing way. The beams I can make out in the pics are bent and dislocated, suggesting the main impact wasn't head-on. So the crumple zone likely had little to do with their survival (other than it did shatter and fragment like it's designed to - so the vehicle can shed kinetic energy by losing pieces).
It looks like they crashed into a soft tilled dirt field. Probably the best possible place to crash. The soft material yields, helping to absorb energy. And it conforms to distribute forces over a large contact area, helping to more evenly spread forces over the car's structure. A crash into a concrete barrier is a completely different story. Like how it's difficult to crack an egg in your palm, but really easy with a hard edge.
There's no mention of the speed. Without knowing the speed, it's really impossible to say how well the car performed.
If they were traveling in excess of 150 kph, then this is damned impressive - the passenger compartment is nearly undistorted despite a roll, and it looks like they were able to just open the door to get people out.
If they were traveling around 100 kph, then it performed about as expected, especially given the soft dirt field.
If they were traveling around 50 kph, then this is terrible. There's no way the front should have suffered that much damage at such a low velocity.
Given that most of the glass is still intact, I'm leaning towards this being either a low velocity impact, or a med/high velocity crash spread over a long distance and time (which also means low impact forces). Which means the fact that the front end shattered like that is really troubling. Perhaps the additional mass of the battery pack (the Tesla weighs as much as an SUV because of the battery pack) contributed to demolishing the front end despite the low impact forces? In an ICE vehicle, the bulk of the mass (engine) is in the front and it absorbs impact forces directly instead of through the structural beams. In a Tesla, the bulk of the mass is in the battery pack underneath the passenger compartment. Since the passenger compartment is designed to remain intact, the kinetic energy of the battery pack has to be fully absorbed by the structural beans in the front or rear.
I would assume Tesla strengthened the beams by a corresponding amount to pass the crash safety tests. But those tests only cover direct front impacts, not a car leaving the ground and impacting the ground at (say) a slight nose-down pitch. The cantilever forces in such an impact due to the additional torque caused by the heavy battery pack behind it could account for the front shattering and shearing off like that.
I grew up in a similar timeframe. I have the philosophically opposite viewpoint. That doesn't mean I think you should splash every embarrassing photo of your kids on social media to torment them in perpetuity; but that I don't think we should be trying to hide our dirty laundry under a false veneer of cleanliness.
Have you ever read books or stories written from around the 1950s or earlier? They're remarkably sterile in that it's incredibly rare for anyone to swear. The one big exception is stories told from front-line soldiers' point of view during WWII. Suddenly every other word coming out of everyone's mouth is cursing. Why the disparity? This goes back even to ancient literature, where the recorded word is usually suitable to read to your children, but a sampling of what people were actually saying is enough to turn your ears red.
For some reason, society has developed a notion of "proper" behavior which deviates substantially from how people actually behave. You put on your Sunday best when going to church. An attorney dresses up the defendant in a suit and tie even though the guy never wore them before in his life. You clean up your house when you have guests coming over.
Whatever the reason, I think this disconnection between expected behavior and actual behavior is harmful. You're basically teaching people that it's OK, and even beneficial to lie. You put on a dog and pony show for a potential customer, where you demonstrate your software (only the parts which work well - gotta hide the parts that don't work well) to try to convince him to buy. Its detrimental effect is especially pronounced in politics. We've come to expect our elected officials to all have spotless records (no skeletons in the closet) and behave properly all the time. Well I'm sorry, but the only people who can meet that standard are ones whose behavior is so deviant from the norm that they're not really fit to represent the people they're supposed to be representing, or pathological liars. That's why politics is chock full of the latter - we ourselves have filtered out the more honest candidates because they're honest enough to tell us about their past screwups. The net result being the liars who successfully deny and cover up their screwups are elected.
This is all coming to a head now that the Internet and social media is becoming such a big part of our lives. A faux pas which in the past would've been forgotten (except maybe as an embarrassing anecdote told by a best man at his friend's wedding), is instead documented with pictures, video, and everyone's immediate reactions, digitally preserved for all eternity. You believe the solution is to return to our past ways and try to hide these misdeeds from a wayward past. To put on a false facade for our daily interactions with friends, co-workers, and people who may hear about you; while revealing our true selves only to our closest and most trusted family and friends.
I say we've passed the point of no return and can't go back to that past. Society needs to come to grips with the new reality that's been created by the permanence of digital information storage. We need to accept that everyone makes mistakes. That we weren't born with a copy of the criminal code emblazoned in our cortex, and the only way to learn the social rules of proper behavior is to transgress them yourself and become subject to the scorn of people who follow such rules (nearly everyone), or watch someone else go through that process. A Presidential candidate used to smoke crack. So what? We were all young and stupid at some point. How s/he learned from that experience and used it to make better decisions in the future is much more important in determining their fitness to be President I think.
Getting to that point requires a widespread acceptance of what people are really like - swearing, drinking, yielding to peer pressure,
Literally the smartest person I know is a woman who had an affair with a married man because he assured her is wife would be OK with it -- and she believed him.
Borderline autistic here (who also happened to go to MIT, though that's not really relevant).
Seems to me that was the logical thing for her to do. Normally in a case like this, the guy lies and claims he's going to leave/divorce his wife in order to get the woman to sleep with him. By making her think they were going to be together eventually in a long-term relationship, he can trick her into doing something she might not want to do until she's in that long-term relationship (sleep with him). However, the guy's lie in this case makes no such promise. No carrot of a long-term relationship dangled to entice her into doing something she was reluctant to do. So clearly this isn't a case of the woman pining for the guy, and being gullible enough to believe his attempt to trick her into sleeping with him in exchange for some promise.
The only possibility that leaves is that the woman wanted to sleep with the guy (and vice versa), but was refusing to do so out of respect for his relationship with his wife. The fact that he told her this particular lie instead of the divorce lie suggests that he was aware this was her reason too. When he told her his wife would be OK with them sleeping together, that reason evaporated regardless of whether or not he was lying.
If he was telling the truth, then there would be no problem with the two of them sleeping together since the wife would be OK with it.
If he was lying, then clearly he does not respect his relationship with his wife. And thus there is no longer any need for the woman to respect that relationship either, and she can just sleep with him like she wanted to.
Crucially, if it is a lie, responsibility for any negative consequences from the event falls entirely upon the guy. At least to the autistic mind, which doesn't understand the social rule that you're "not supposed to" sleep with someone else's spouse. For such a rule to exist, both partners in the relationship have to adhere to it. And in this case clearly one partner was not adhering to it, and he claimed the other partner was not as well. So if I turn off my "social awkwardness detector" I've built up over 40+ years of trying to make sense of seemingly random social rules and customs, her behavior makes perfect sense. If she was autistic or borderline autistic like me, she probably didn't foresee that she would be criticized for her behavior because she "should have known" you aren't supposed to sleep with someone else's spouse, period.
Out of curiosity, does that position include other luxuries such as cable and internet service?
[...]
Maybe we should let the phone company dial back their service in unprofitable areas.
Or how about electricity? Same thing.
Nobody will argue that necessities for a modern lifestyle shouldn't be made available to all.
They will however argue that same-day delivery from Amazon is not a necessity for a modern lifestyle. OP opened with, "same day delivery is a luxury." Not sure where you get off implying cable and internet are luxuries, then seguing into phone and electricity as if they too were luxuries. They are not at all the "same thing."
It's also worth pointing out that the unprofitability of installing landline phone service in Africa has been made moot by widespread cellular phone service. If we'd forced companies to install landline phone lines in Africa, it would've become a waste of money circa 2000. Sometimes the expense of an older tech is what helps fuel a newer tech's widespread adoption. Forcing the subsidized adoption of the older tech in the pursuit of "fairness" can weaken the incentive and demand to roll out the newer tech. My workplace is in a low-income area which long ago contracted with Verizon to offer DSL to all customers. Since everyone can get Internet (albeit 1.5 Mbps Internet), the local government lost any leverage to force cable companies (which began offering Internet later) to provide service to everyone. So you have this weird patchwork where a few areas get 45 Mbps, while everyone else gets 1.5 Mbps.
Allow anyone to file a public domain patent at no cost (or a trivial cost, like $10). So if you've got an idea you think is so simple that it shouldn't be patentable, but you're worried that if you don't patent it someone else might succeed at tricking the patent office into granting it and suing you, you can just file it as a public domain patent. You cannot make any money off of it, so you aren't charged much money for it.
Basically it flips around the first-to-file concept of invalidating a patent if you can prove you thought of the idea before the patent filing date. Under that model you have to first be sued for patent infringement, then have to come up with the proof invalidating it and hope it sticks. Under this model, you can file the proof ahead of time, and it will serve as your guaranteed get out of patent infringement free card - automatically invalidating any future patents incorrectly granted for the same concept.
I don't use Facebook. That doesn't stop my friends from tagging my face when I'm in one of their photos which they post on Facebook.
This whole face recognition thing started as a useful tool - software can automatically add keyword tags to photos. So if you want to show someone the funny picture you took of Joe at the Grand Canyon on your 25th birthday, you can search for "Joe" "Grand Canyon" and "2009" and it'll return a dozen pics for you sift through, instead of of the thousands of pics on your HDD.
But when they started using it to figure out who knows whom based on how many photos they showed up in together, that's when it changed from useful tool to creepy stalker.
I agree with Musk that we need to move away from fossil fuels, but gasoline vehicles have a net tax, not a subsidy. Going through the first page of Google hits, the biggest figure for oil industry subsidies in the U.S. I can find is $37.5 billion/yr. (Note that the dollar amount of a tax exemption or a deduction is not equal to the subsidy dollar amount.)
The average fuel tax on gasoline in the U.S. is 48.7 cents/gallon. So gasoline has a net tax on it - it is taxed more than the subsidy it receives.
The difference is even starker in other OECD countries, where gasoline is taxed to the tune of several dollars a gallon. We are addicted to gasoline and fossil fuels because the easy access to energy acts as a multiplier for our productivity, allowing us to increase our standard of living relatively cheaply (in terms of financial cost). Even with the net tax, we are still addicted to it. So even if all the complaining about oil subsidies works and they're completely rescinded, it won't make a dent in our oil consumption. The price of gasoline has fluctuated more this year due to market forces, than the above calculated subsidy amount.
A -453F temperature is only a problem at higher pressures, when there's lots of stuff (air) at that temperature to carry heat away. In a thin or non-existent atmosphere, the outside temperature may be that low, but the rate of heat loss is near zero because there just isn't enough air to conduct heat away. The problem spacecraft have is actually cooling their electronics. Usually it's sent via heat pipes to radiator fins or panels, where it's rejected as EM (infrared) radiation.
Wow, that's a shockingly egregious example of how to mis-use statistics.
The "analysis" looked at such a short time period, there were only 64 cases the SCotUS took appeals from a U.S. Court of Appeals. Just by pure chance alone, you'd expect a 12.5% variance in their decisions (that is, whether a case where the SCotUS or USCoA would disagree or agree came up by random chance). The variance is even higher for the individual Federal Courts. The SCotUS only reviewed 24 cases from the 9th USCoA, so the expected random variance is 20%. That is, the 9th Circuit Court's reversal rate was 90.5% +/- 20%. By giving percentages to one decimal place, the article gives the impression that it's doing a precise statistical analysis with 3 significant figures of accuracy, when in truth there's less than one significant figure of precision here.
The analysis doesn't provide raw data for the 3rd and 5th Circuit Court cases so I can't calculate proper variances. But the remaining SCotUS cases (73 - 24 = 49) divided over the remaining 11 Circuit Courts (49 / 11 = 4.45 per Court) gives a best case variance of 47%. If a Circuit Court got fewer than 4.45 cases, its random variance would be even bigger. The uncertainty due to just random chance for this sample size is bigger than the difference from the 9th Circuit's overturn rate, meaning these numbers don't show anything. If the author had turned this article in as his homework for a statistics course, he would've gotten an F.
To demonstrate a trend (or lack of one) with statistics, you need a large enough sample to eliminate random variance. That's why statistical fields like drug approval studies, epidemiology, etc. are so difficult, slow, and expensive. You need a minimum sample on the order of 400-1000 to really start proving a statistical trend is emerging. This article is just some guy punching numbers into his calculator, hitting the % button, and is happy they (randomly) came out the way he wanted so he published them.
Actually, Apple pretty much did just that. You remember when Google got in trouble with the EU for recording too much wifi info while its street view cars were driving around taking pictures? The reason they were recording wifi info was to correlate the SSIDs with physical locations. That way, even if your GPS is off, Google can make a pretty good guess at your general location.
When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations. The first year they paid for a database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record every wifi hotspot's SSID? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who traveled around recording the locations of every SSID on Earth. Given that they got away with it, while Google got sued by the EU for trying to do it the non-evil way and paying to send their own cars around to record it, I expect next time Google will just secretly harvest the data from its users.
Already the corporations have shifted all of their tax burden to the individuals.
FTFY. Who do you think really pays the taxes on corporate profits? The customers, of course, Taxes are a cost of doing business, and they get passed on just like the cost of electricity or labor.
By definition, corporations can't pay taxes because they're just paper entities. All the productivity they generate is generated by the employees. When you talk about "Walmart", you're actually talking about the sum total of everyone who works at Walmart or owns it. What Walmart does is what they do. Money Walmart makes is what they make. Money Walmart pays to suppliers is what they pay. Money Walmart wastes is money its employees waste.
So of course corporate taxes are paid for by its customers (as higher prices) or its employees (as lowered wages). The whole definition of a government tax is shifting part of the country's productivity to government control, so the government can direct and disburse it as it sees fit. Since only people can generate productivity, only people can pay taxes. Taxing a corporation makes about as much sense as taxing a gumball machine. The gumball machine isn't going to pay the tax. The tax money is going to come from the people who put money into it, and/or the owner who takes the money out of it. Individuals pay all taxes no matter what point in the economy you collect it from.
That's why the Mayor's argument is stupid. The Apple employees who are using Cupertino's public services, roads, and transportation already pay taxes just like every other Cupertino or Santa Clara County or California resident (U.S. property taxes are collected at the county level, sales taxes at the county or state level). Apple can't use those services because it's just a paper entity. Taxing Apple just because they're based in Cupertino is an unfair additional tax on those employees above and beyond what other city residents pay.
Let's take the Mayor's argument to its full conclusion. He probably believes in "no taxation without representation." So if Cupertino successfully taxes Apple on its global profit, Apple will probably end up funding most of Cupertino's budget. Therefore, Apple should get the majority of the representation of Cupertino's government, and they can recall the Mayor and get this tax rescinded (unless they like having control of the city government, in which case they may decide to keep paying to keep control).
This is what's so stupid about this whole "corporations aren't paying their fair share of taxes!" thing. It's hypocritical (unless you also believe corporations should have representation in government). And the taxes just end up being paid by individuals anyway - it's just hidden from you in the form of higher prices and lower wages. That's the reason governments love to tax corporations - because they can increase their tax rate far beyond what the citizens would tolerate, without alerting them that they're being taxed that much. Instead the voters marvel that their "benevolent" government is giving them all these services like health care "for free." It's not free. TANSTAAFL. Someone always has to pay for it by having part of their productivity diverted to the government. Either directly via individual taxes, or indirectly via corporate taxes.
If that rankles your beliefs on who should pay taxes, let's flip it around. Starting tomorrow, there is no more individual income or sales tax. All taxes will be paid for entirely and only by corporations. Sound wonderful? Think again. How do you think those corporations are going to pay for their suddenly increased tax burden? That's right - by raising prices and lowering your wages. The increased prices and your lowered wages will exactly counter the extra money you get by not having to pay taxes, and your purchasing power will be exactly the same as before taxes were shifted
I've had two computer service calls from people with small (128 GB) SSDs complaining their drives are full even though they hardly have any programs or files. The culprit turns out to be Apple's Mobile Sync. When you plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer to transfer some files, it defaults to keeping a copy of everything on the mobile device on your C: drive. No user queries, it just does it automatically. I can sorta understand that for photos and videos, but it makes no sense for iTunes music since that can be downloaded again if needed. Somewhere buried in the software, I found an option to disable it. A better solution would've been to move the backup location to the mostly-empty 2TB HDD, but I wasn't able to fine a setting for that in the short time I had (there were other more serious problems to fix).
I really like how Apple simplifies user interfaces so a monkey could use it. But this has to be backed up with the ability for users to easily drill down and change options if they want. This "one size fits all" attitude which has become the mantra of many Apple fans after Jobs introduced the iPhone (any size screen you want, as long as it's 3.5") is pure poison.
You're thinking like a software programmer. Hardware engineers don't have the luxury of rebooting to try again or restoring from a backup, so they try to avoid single points of failure - they build redundancy into the system. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope has 6 gyors (only needs 3 to function). And why the Kepler spacecraft had 4 reaction wheels - so the thing could keep operating even if one wheel failed. (Unfortunately two failed, which forced a kludge fix using two reaction wheels and thrusters.)
Your car is built similarly. It has four wheels so it won't go wildly out of control if it loses one wheel. It has three independent braking systems (the pedal controls hydraulic brakes, but switches to a mechanical linkage of you press down really hard, and the parking brake is usually connected via cables). So logically, an autonomous robot whose functionality completely depends on self propulsion should continue to work even after a seemingly-crucial part falls off.
Any control meant to be operated in a moving or vibrating environment need to be tactile. Trying to make fine movements and selections on a touchscreen in a moving car is an exercise in frustration. The car's vibration-induced spring-mass-damper movement of the screen does not match the spring-mass-damper movement of your arm, and you're constantly having to readjust your arm's position just to keep your finger in one place, much less make it move to a specific different location.
A knob OTOH allows your hand to latch onto the control and maintain contact with it in the x, y, z axes, while the control adjustment is performed via an independent input (rotation).
I had a PDA back in those days. It was obvious to most everyone (except Microsoft, who completely missed the boat) that PDAs and phones were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs were going to pick up phone capability, or if phones were going to pick up PDA capability. Microsoft was in a position to make the former happen - they had vanquished Palm and controlled most of the PDA market with Windows CE/Mobile/their name of the year. But even when HP tried to make a WinCE PDA which could also make phone calls, Microsoft didn't lift a finger to help them.
Blackberry ended up taking the first step to adding general-purpose computing to a phone. Once they opened that floodgate, it was a race to see who could make their phone the most general general-purpose computer (except Microsoft, even though that was exactly what they were trying to do with PDAs - trying to port the Windows API to PDAs).
The only real contributions of the iPhone was lack of a physical keyboard - everyone else (except LG) was using a Blackberry-style keyboard, or a sliding keyboard, or a Palm Graffiti-style writing space. That was a huge bet by Apple, and the iPhone served as the proof of concept which green-lighted everyone else's touch-only on-screen keyboards most of them were already playing with in R&D. (The app ecosystem - instead of a handful of apps baked into the phone by the manufacturer - came later). A lot of the form and functionality people attribute to the iPhone actually came out first in the LG Prada, indicating the industry was already moving in that direction even when the iPhone hadn't yet seen the light of day.
People vastly overestimate how infallible people are (especially themselves). The rate at which humans make errors is about 0.5%. Which if you think about all the things you do in the course of a day, is a really big number.
If 250,000 of them died, then fatality rate due to medical errors is about 1.1%. Which is in line with the average error rate compounded over multiple ways in which errors could kill a hospital patient.
If you want to reduce the fatality rate, you either need to get people out of the system (e.g. autonomous cars - but they make people uncomfortable even though they're statistically safer), or implement automated checks to supplement people's work. We're already doing the latter with prescriptions - computers now automatically check for dangerous interactions between medications prescribed to the same person. More operating rooms scan all equipment used during surgery, and re-scans at the end to make sure it's all accounted for, and nothing has accidentally been left inside the patient. And some hospitals are starting to use barcode and RFID scanners to double-check that the medication being administered is the proper one for that particular patient.
It's a democracy, right?
The majority wins, even if they later on have to say autsch!, it hurts.
The problem is, Trump isn't really winning the majority. Here's the breakdown of the popular vote. Trump has won less than 42% of the popular vote (votes cast for other candidates who dropped out aren't included). So he's nowhere near a majority.
Our plurality wins voting system is what allows basically anyone reasonably popular (supported by >1/n fraction of the population, where n is the number of candidates running) to win an election if the other more-desirable candidates split their vote. It's why we have a two-party system - having two parties is the best strategy for minimizing this vote-splitting. While a perfectly fair voting system is impossible, we badly need to switch to a voting system where people can vote their conscience without fear of vote-splitting leading to some wacky lunatic winning.
The problem has been that the two parties are staunchly opposed to a better voting system. Having two parties doesn't just minimize the chances of splitting the vote, it also maximizes the power of the extremists in the parties. If you imagine the country's population as a bell curve (or even a flat line), and divide it into two smaller left and right curves representing the two parties, the weighted middle of those smaller curves (the political ideology of the median party member and thus the likely nominee) is furthest from the center of the big curve when there are only two parties.
Instant-runoff voting would result in more centrist and more moderate candidates winning. Good for the country, bad for the extremists who wield heavy control of the parties. So the parties have no interest in pushing for it.
it's not a peaceful, painless death. In many instances it could only be described as torture.
You're comparing to a nonexistent zero base state. 99% of animals left alone by humans die a painful, tortuous death - usually in the jaws of a predator. I've seen them swallowed alive and struggling inside the belly of a predator, cut in half, skinned alive, limbs gnawed off while still alive, attempting to flee with entrails hanging out, all without any human nearby. It is extraordinarily rare for a wild animal to die of old age. The methods humans have developed to slaughter livestock do not purport to be peaceful or painless, they just needed to be less painful than the death most wild animals would experience naturally to justify the killing as an improvement (from the animal's perspective) from a wild death.
I've killed (and continue to kill) my share of animals for meat. It is not the cold, emotionless process we've developed in slaughterhouses hidden from view of the supermarket shelves. You become intimately aware that this is a living thing struggling to survive, and you're ending its life so you can eat. You gain a tremendous respect for the creature that gave its life to become your dinner, and are less likely to do things like dump a half-eaten burger into the trash.
That's the question I raise to people (non-vegetarians) I meet who are offended that I "enjoy killing wild animals" for meat (fishing). The animals I catch spend their entire lives free in the sea to do as they wish, except for the last 5 minutes before I kill them and make a best effort to eat as much of the meat as I can. The animals they eat spend their entire lives penned up in captivity, basically as part of a meat assembly line, until they're slaughtered, and they probably throw away unused meat simply because it's inconvenient or doesn't taste good anymore. Yet somehow in their minds, I am the bad guy because I make the animal suffer more?
,br>
If "cultivated meat" becomes affordable, I will probably eat it most of the time for convenience and to decrease my environmental impact. But I will still catch the occasional fish and eat it myself, to remind myself what the natural ecosystem is and to respect it, and not live completely isolated from it within the artificial biosphere that modern humans have created.
That's what I'm wondering too. First, humans were hunter-gatherers. Then we domesticated plants (developed agriculture).
Then we got upset that wild herbivores were eating all the crops we had put so much effort into cultivating. So we fenced them out. But they kept breaking in so we hunted them down and ate them.
Then we noticed it was getting harder to catch wild herbivores to eat, so we began domesticating those as well.
Wild predators were having trouble finding enough to eat (because we'd eaten most of the wild herbivores). And they turned to the only remaining viable food source - our domesticated herbivores. We tried the fence thing with them too, but again we eventually hunted down and killed them as well. They don't taste as good, so we mostly used their skins or mounted them as trophies.
The end result of thousands of years of doing this is a seriously screwed up ecosystem. You're not going to be able to fix it simply by eliminating domestic livestock. It's going to take a multi-pronged, controlled reintroduction of wild predators, wild herbivores, and wild plants in order to jump-start the ecosystem back to the way it was. If we adopt the PETA dream of simply stopping eating meat, the ecosystem is going to go through decades if not centuries of wild flora and fauna populations cycling through overpopulation, overgrazing, flooding, starvation, overgrowth, fire, repeat over and over until the fluctuations dampen out naturally.
Our current CO2 concentrations are about the lowest they've been in Earth's history. Granted, industrialization has increased it from a low of about 180 ppm to over 400 ppm in an alarmingly short span of time. But over the last few hundred million years, it's averaged a couple thousand ppm, with an estimated high around 7000 ppm. Temperatures are also currently some of the coldest they've ever been (we are just coming off an ice age after all). Throughout much of Earth's history, it's been about 6-8 C hotter than our current climate.
If CO2 levels a little higher than the current 400 ppm and elevated temperatures were enough to wipe out higher forms of marine life, we would've seen it in the fossil record. Unless they're hypothesizing that it's the rapidness of the current change which causes the problem, not the high CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures themselves. (This doesn't diminish the danger of global warming, since sea levels were also much higher during those times. High enough to be catastrophic to our current civilization. But a hypothesis that rising temperatures alone will wipe out marine life is an extraordinary claim.)
My uncle's print shop has an old transparency film printer from the early 1990s. Its manufacturer went bankrupt shortly after its release, and the only drivers available for it are for Mac OS 6 and Windows 3.1, and when I tried to pull the drivers off the floppies I found that the first floppy was no longer readable. So the only backkup they have is an image of the working HDD.
It's a small shop - he handles the client contacts, one employee does the graphics prep work, and another employee does the physical silkscreen printing from the film onto the final medium (poster, t-shirt, banner, whatever). He says he can't afford the ~$15k a new film printer would cost. So he has two 1990-era Mac Quadras with the print drivers installed. (One is a replacement they bought off eBay in a panic when the original failed. It turned out the failure was due to bad RAM, so after I moved the RAM from the eBay computer to the original, it worked again. They keep the eBay one as insurance against future hardware failures.) They're connected to his ethernet network, and a modern Mac (where they do the layout and prep work) sends the print job to the Quadra, which sends it to the printer.
They things are so old one of the support calls I got was to fix a broken power button. It turned out the Quadra's power button is mounted at the end of a piece of plastic, and the plastic acts like a spring. Well, after 20 years, the plastic had turned brittle with age and snapped off, and the power button had fallen inside the case. I had to jerry rig a replacement spring with some new plastic and epoxy to get it working again. Another call was that the printer had suddenly stopped working. I opened it up and... you don't want to know what 20 years of dust buildup looks like. Fortunately there was a filter keeping the dust out of the film's print path. But the fan was completely clogged and the thing was overheating.
Slashdot Mirror
About 15% of the people killed in the Hiroshima atomic bombing were Koreans brought over as a slave labor force. They're just classified as Japanese deaths because Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 and Korea politically ceased to exist. That didn't stop the Japanese from denying them health benefits for surviving the atomic bombings.
On a personal level, Japanese soldiers forced my grandmother to watch as they raped then killed her sister and niece. All as a ploy to coerce my grandfather (the village doctor) into treating their commanding officer. That's the sort of stuff the people against the atomic bombings are advocating the Allies should have let continue for who knows how many more months.
To quote a geek favorite line: "With great power comes great responsibility." Funny how that goes out the window when that power is abused in a way that favors your personal opinion.
If you're going to proffer a service to the masses with the algorithmically simple concept of showing you the most popular things people are talking about, then that's what it should do, period. If you take it upon yourself to modify that algorithm so that it deviates from what you've marketed it as, you need to disclose that. Most already do for the topics you've mentioned - the EULA for most sites explicitly states that racist comments, spam, nudity, excessive swearing, and illegal materials like child pornography and copyrighted works will be deleted. If Facebook wants to extend that policy to include right-leaning political materials only, then they are free to do so, But they need to disclose it and bear whatever consequences that arise.
I'm of the opinion that openly partisan sites (and magazines and TV news channels), by insulating their users from alternative political points of view, increase political polarization and reduce people's willingness to compromise. So they're partially responsible for the increasing dysfunction of modern politics. I won't go so far as to say that the press and the companies running these sites need to be forced to be less partisan. But we do need to recognize that this is a factor when debating how to address situations like this.
I'd be more worried about the programmer who thinks of a clever new way to detect viruses while in the shower, but can't easily test how effective it is because there's no large public database of viruses. He can't afford the time or several tens of thousands of dollars to get a dataset just to test out a hunch, so the idea dies on the vine instead of being developed.
As you allude, ideally they'd restrict access for companies with large revenue while keeping it free for the little guy. But the problem with giving stuff away for free is you're not collecting enough info to distinguish the big guy from the little guy.
Amazon is the 900 pound gorilla in cloud server and storage services. Sites that use Amazon Web Services include Netflix, Expedia, Adobe, Pinterest, Smugmug, Reddit, Tumblr, and until recently Dropbox.
However, their service interface is really geared for enterprises which can devote a team of IT professionals to managing it. That's why companies like Dropbox were able to successfully re-sell Amazon's cloud storage to the home and SMB user with a shiny user-friendly interface on top. A lot of us have been wondering when Amazon would wake up and clean up their interface to make it easier for the average Joe to store their files directly, instead of using a middleman like Dropbox. I've already moved my photo backup to Amazon (free unlimited photo storage with a Prime account). It used to be with Google Photo, but theirs was only free up to 2048x2048 resolution, which was ok when I started using it back around 2007 but is kinda low resolution for a photo nowadays. My video storage is still with Google Photo (free unlimited storage for videos up to 2 GB), but I'd probably transfer those to Amazon as well if they made it free with Prime.
Given that most of the glass is still intact, I'm leaning towards this being either a low velocity impact, or a med/high velocity crash spread over a long distance and time (which also means low impact forces). Which means the fact that the front end shattered like that is really troubling. Perhaps the additional mass of the battery pack (the Tesla weighs as much as an SUV because of the battery pack) contributed to demolishing the front end despite the low impact forces? In an ICE vehicle, the bulk of the mass (engine) is in the front and it absorbs impact forces directly instead of through the structural beams. In a Tesla, the bulk of the mass is in the battery pack underneath the passenger compartment. Since the passenger compartment is designed to remain intact, the kinetic energy of the battery pack has to be fully absorbed by the structural beans in the front or rear.
I would assume Tesla strengthened the beams by a corresponding amount to pass the crash safety tests. But those tests only cover direct front impacts, not a car leaving the ground and impacting the ground at (say) a slight nose-down pitch. The cantilever forces in such an impact due to the additional torque caused by the heavy battery pack behind it could account for the front shattering and shearing off like that.
I grew up in a similar timeframe. I have the philosophically opposite viewpoint. That doesn't mean I think you should splash every embarrassing photo of your kids on social media to torment them in perpetuity; but that I don't think we should be trying to hide our dirty laundry under a false veneer of cleanliness.
Have you ever read books or stories written from around the 1950s or earlier? They're remarkably sterile in that it's incredibly rare for anyone to swear. The one big exception is stories told from front-line soldiers' point of view during WWII. Suddenly every other word coming out of everyone's mouth is cursing. Why the disparity? This goes back even to ancient literature, where the recorded word is usually suitable to read to your children, but a sampling of what people were actually saying is enough to turn your ears red.
For some reason, society has developed a notion of "proper" behavior which deviates substantially from how people actually behave. You put on your Sunday best when going to church. An attorney dresses up the defendant in a suit and tie even though the guy never wore them before in his life. You clean up your house when you have guests coming over.
Whatever the reason, I think this disconnection between expected behavior and actual behavior is harmful. You're basically teaching people that it's OK, and even beneficial to lie. You put on a dog and pony show for a potential customer, where you demonstrate your software (only the parts which work well - gotta hide the parts that don't work well) to try to convince him to buy. Its detrimental effect is especially pronounced in politics. We've come to expect our elected officials to all have spotless records (no skeletons in the closet) and behave properly all the time. Well I'm sorry, but the only people who can meet that standard are ones whose behavior is so deviant from the norm that they're not really fit to represent the people they're supposed to be representing, or pathological liars. That's why politics is chock full of the latter - we ourselves have filtered out the more honest candidates because they're honest enough to tell us about their past screwups. The net result being the liars who successfully deny and cover up their screwups are elected.
This is all coming to a head now that the Internet and social media is becoming such a big part of our lives. A faux pas which in the past would've been forgotten (except maybe as an embarrassing anecdote told by a best man at his friend's wedding), is instead documented with pictures, video, and everyone's immediate reactions, digitally preserved for all eternity. You believe the solution is to return to our past ways and try to hide these misdeeds from a wayward past. To put on a false facade for our daily interactions with friends, co-workers, and people who may hear about you; while revealing our true selves only to our closest and most trusted family and friends.
I say we've passed the point of no return and can't go back to that past. Society needs to come to grips with the new reality that's been created by the permanence of digital information storage. We need to accept that everyone makes mistakes. That we weren't born with a copy of the criminal code emblazoned in our cortex, and the only way to learn the social rules of proper behavior is to transgress them yourself and become subject to the scorn of people who follow such rules (nearly everyone), or watch someone else go through that process. A Presidential candidate used to smoke crack. So what? We were all young and stupid at some point. How s/he learned from that experience and used it to make better decisions in the future is much more important in determining their fitness to be President I think.
Getting to that point requires a widespread acceptance of what people are really like - swearing, drinking, yielding to peer pressure,
Borderline autistic here (who also happened to go to MIT, though that's not really relevant).
Seems to me that was the logical thing for her to do. Normally in a case like this, the guy lies and claims he's going to leave/divorce his wife in order to get the woman to sleep with him. By making her think they were going to be together eventually in a long-term relationship, he can trick her into doing something she might not want to do until she's in that long-term relationship (sleep with him). However, the guy's lie in this case makes no such promise. No carrot of a long-term relationship dangled to entice her into doing something she was reluctant to do. So clearly this isn't a case of the woman pining for the guy, and being gullible enough to believe his attempt to trick her into sleeping with him in exchange for some promise.
The only possibility that leaves is that the woman wanted to sleep with the guy (and vice versa), but was refusing to do so out of respect for his relationship with his wife. The fact that he told her this particular lie instead of the divorce lie suggests that he was aware this was her reason too. When he told her his wife would be OK with them sleeping together, that reason evaporated regardless of whether or not he was lying.
Crucially, if it is a lie, responsibility for any negative consequences from the event falls entirely upon the guy. At least to the autistic mind, which doesn't understand the social rule that you're "not supposed to" sleep with someone else's spouse. For such a rule to exist, both partners in the relationship have to adhere to it. And in this case clearly one partner was not adhering to it, and he claimed the other partner was not as well. So if I turn off my "social awkwardness detector" I've built up over 40+ years of trying to make sense of seemingly random social rules and customs, her behavior makes perfect sense. If she was autistic or borderline autistic like me, she probably didn't foresee that she would be criticized for her behavior because she "should have known" you aren't supposed to sleep with someone else's spouse, period.
Nobody will argue that necessities for a modern lifestyle shouldn't be made available to all.
They will however argue that same-day delivery from Amazon is not a necessity for a modern lifestyle. OP opened with, "same day delivery is a luxury." Not sure where you get off implying cable and internet are luxuries, then seguing into phone and electricity as if they too were luxuries. They are not at all the "same thing."
It's also worth pointing out that the unprofitability of installing landline phone service in Africa has been made moot by widespread cellular phone service. If we'd forced companies to install landline phone lines in Africa, it would've become a waste of money circa 2000. Sometimes the expense of an older tech is what helps fuel a newer tech's widespread adoption. Forcing the subsidized adoption of the older tech in the pursuit of "fairness" can weaken the incentive and demand to roll out the newer tech. My workplace is in a low-income area which long ago contracted with Verizon to offer DSL to all customers. Since everyone can get Internet (albeit 1.5 Mbps Internet), the local government lost any leverage to force cable companies (which began offering Internet later) to provide service to everyone. So you have this weird patchwork where a few areas get 45 Mbps, while everyone else gets 1.5 Mbps.
Allow anyone to file a public domain patent at no cost (or a trivial cost, like $10). So if you've got an idea you think is so simple that it shouldn't be patentable, but you're worried that if you don't patent it someone else might succeed at tricking the patent office into granting it and suing you, you can just file it as a public domain patent. You cannot make any money off of it, so you aren't charged much money for it.
Basically it flips around the first-to-file concept of invalidating a patent if you can prove you thought of the idea before the patent filing date. Under that model you have to first be sued for patent infringement, then have to come up with the proof invalidating it and hope it sticks. Under this model, you can file the proof ahead of time, and it will serve as your guaranteed get out of patent infringement free card - automatically invalidating any future patents incorrectly granted for the same concept.
I don't use Facebook. That doesn't stop my friends from tagging my face when I'm in one of their photos which they post on Facebook.
This whole face recognition thing started as a useful tool - software can automatically add keyword tags to photos. So if you want to show someone the funny picture you took of Joe at the Grand Canyon on your 25th birthday, you can search for "Joe" "Grand Canyon" and "2009" and it'll return a dozen pics for you sift through, instead of of the thousands of pics on your HDD.
But when they started using it to figure out who knows whom based on how many photos they showed up in together, that's when it changed from useful tool to creepy stalker.
I agree with Musk that we need to move away from fossil fuels, but gasoline vehicles have a net tax, not a subsidy. Going through the first page of Google hits, the biggest figure for oil industry subsidies in the U.S. I can find is $37.5 billion/yr. (Note that the dollar amount of a tax exemption or a deduction is not equal to the subsidy dollar amount.)
The U.S. uses about 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year. So even if you assumed the entirety of that subsidy were on gasoline (less than half of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline), that works out to a subsidy of just 26.8 cents per gallon.
The average fuel tax on gasoline in the U.S. is 48.7 cents/gallon. So gasoline has a net tax on it - it is taxed more than the subsidy it receives.
The difference is even starker in other OECD countries, where gasoline is taxed to the tune of several dollars a gallon. We are addicted to gasoline and fossil fuels because the easy access to energy acts as a multiplier for our productivity, allowing us to increase our standard of living relatively cheaply (in terms of financial cost). Even with the net tax, we are still addicted to it. So even if all the complaining about oil subsidies works and they're completely rescinded, it won't make a dent in our oil consumption. The price of gasoline has fluctuated more this year due to market forces, than the above calculated subsidy amount.
A -453F temperature is only a problem at higher pressures, when there's lots of stuff (air) at that temperature to carry heat away. In a thin or non-existent atmosphere, the outside temperature may be that low, but the rate of heat loss is near zero because there just isn't enough air to conduct heat away. The problem spacecraft have is actually cooling their electronics. Usually it's sent via heat pipes to radiator fins or panels, where it's rejected as EM (infrared) radiation.
Wow, that's a shockingly egregious example of how to mis-use statistics.
The "analysis" looked at such a short time period, there were only 64 cases the SCotUS took appeals from a U.S. Court of Appeals. Just by pure chance alone, you'd expect a 12.5% variance in their decisions (that is, whether a case where the SCotUS or USCoA would disagree or agree came up by random chance). The variance is even higher for the individual Federal Courts. The SCotUS only reviewed 24 cases from the 9th USCoA, so the expected random variance is 20%. That is, the 9th Circuit Court's reversal rate was 90.5% +/- 20%. By giving percentages to one decimal place, the article gives the impression that it's doing a precise statistical analysis with 3 significant figures of accuracy, when in truth there's less than one significant figure of precision here.
The analysis doesn't provide raw data for the 3rd and 5th Circuit Court cases so I can't calculate proper variances. But the remaining SCotUS cases (73 - 24 = 49) divided over the remaining 11 Circuit Courts (49 / 11 = 4.45 per Court) gives a best case variance of 47%. If a Circuit Court got fewer than 4.45 cases, its random variance would be even bigger. The uncertainty due to just random chance for this sample size is bigger than the difference from the 9th Circuit's overturn rate, meaning these numbers don't show anything. If the author had turned this article in as his homework for a statistics course, he would've gotten an F.
To demonstrate a trend (or lack of one) with statistics, you need a large enough sample to eliminate random variance. That's why statistical fields like drug approval studies, epidemiology, etc. are so difficult, slow, and expensive. You need a minimum sample on the order of 400-1000 to really start proving a statistical trend is emerging. This article is just some guy punching numbers into his calculator, hitting the % button, and is happy they (randomly) came out the way he wanted so he published them.
Actually, Apple pretty much did just that. You remember when Google got in trouble with the EU for recording too much wifi info while its street view cars were driving around taking pictures? The reason they were recording wifi info was to correlate the SSIDs with physical locations. That way, even if your GPS is off, Google can make a pretty good guess at your general location.
When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations. The first year they paid for a database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record every wifi hotspot's SSID? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who traveled around recording the locations of every SSID on Earth. Given that they got away with it, while Google got sued by the EU for trying to do it the non-evil way and paying to send their own cars around to record it, I expect next time Google will just secretly harvest the data from its users.
By definition, corporations can't pay taxes because they're just paper entities. All the productivity they generate is generated by the employees. When you talk about "Walmart", you're actually talking about the sum total of everyone who works at Walmart or owns it. What Walmart does is what they do. Money Walmart makes is what they make. Money Walmart pays to suppliers is what they pay. Money Walmart wastes is money its employees waste.
So of course corporate taxes are paid for by its customers (as higher prices) or its employees (as lowered wages). The whole definition of a government tax is shifting part of the country's productivity to government control, so the government can direct and disburse it as it sees fit. Since only people can generate productivity, only people can pay taxes. Taxing a corporation makes about as much sense as taxing a gumball machine. The gumball machine isn't going to pay the tax. The tax money is going to come from the people who put money into it, and/or the owner who takes the money out of it. Individuals pay all taxes no matter what point in the economy you collect it from.
That's why the Mayor's argument is stupid. The Apple employees who are using Cupertino's public services, roads, and transportation already pay taxes just like every other Cupertino or Santa Clara County or California resident (U.S. property taxes are collected at the county level, sales taxes at the county or state level). Apple can't use those services because it's just a paper entity. Taxing Apple just because they're based in Cupertino is an unfair additional tax on those employees above and beyond what other city residents pay.
Let's take the Mayor's argument to its full conclusion. He probably believes in "no taxation without representation." So if Cupertino successfully taxes Apple on its global profit, Apple will probably end up funding most of Cupertino's budget. Therefore, Apple should get the majority of the representation of Cupertino's government, and they can recall the Mayor and get this tax rescinded (unless they like having control of the city government, in which case they may decide to keep paying to keep control).
This is what's so stupid about this whole "corporations aren't paying their fair share of taxes!" thing. It's hypocritical (unless you also believe corporations should have representation in government). And the taxes just end up being paid by individuals anyway - it's just hidden from you in the form of higher prices and lower wages. That's the reason governments love to tax corporations - because they can increase their tax rate far beyond what the citizens would tolerate, without alerting them that they're being taxed that much. Instead the voters marvel that their "benevolent" government is giving them all these services like health care "for free." It's not free. TANSTAAFL. Someone always has to pay for it by having part of their productivity diverted to the government. Either directly via individual taxes, or indirectly via corporate taxes.
If that rankles your beliefs on who should pay taxes, let's flip it around. Starting tomorrow, there is no more individual income or sales tax. All taxes will be paid for entirely and only by corporations. Sound wonderful? Think again. How do you think those corporations are going to pay for their suddenly increased tax burden? That's right - by raising prices and lowering your wages. The increased prices and your lowered wages will exactly counter the extra money you get by not having to pay taxes, and your purchasing power will be exactly the same as before taxes were shifted
I've had two computer service calls from people with small (128 GB) SSDs complaining their drives are full even though they hardly have any programs or files. The culprit turns out to be Apple's Mobile Sync. When you plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer to transfer some files, it defaults to keeping a copy of everything on the mobile device on your C: drive. No user queries, it just does it automatically. I can sorta understand that for photos and videos, but it makes no sense for iTunes music since that can be downloaded again if needed. Somewhere buried in the software, I found an option to disable it. A better solution would've been to move the backup location to the mostly-empty 2TB HDD, but I wasn't able to fine a setting for that in the short time I had (there were other more serious problems to fix).
I really like how Apple simplifies user interfaces so a monkey could use it. But this has to be backed up with the ability for users to easily drill down and change options if they want. This "one size fits all" attitude which has become the mantra of many Apple fans after Jobs introduced the iPhone (any size screen you want, as long as it's 3.5") is pure poison.
You're thinking like a software programmer. Hardware engineers don't have the luxury of rebooting to try again or restoring from a backup, so they try to avoid single points of failure - they build redundancy into the system. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope has 6 gyors (only needs 3 to function). And why the Kepler spacecraft had 4 reaction wheels - so the thing could keep operating even if one wheel failed. (Unfortunately two failed, which forced a kludge fix using two reaction wheels and thrusters.)
Your car is built similarly. It has four wheels so it won't go wildly out of control if it loses one wheel. It has three independent braking systems (the pedal controls hydraulic brakes, but switches to a mechanical linkage of you press down really hard, and the parking brake is usually connected via cables). So logically, an autonomous robot whose functionality completely depends on self propulsion should continue to work even after a seemingly-crucial part falls off.
Any control meant to be operated in a moving or vibrating environment need to be tactile. Trying to make fine movements and selections on a touchscreen in a moving car is an exercise in frustration. The car's vibration-induced spring-mass-damper movement of the screen does not match the spring-mass-damper movement of your arm, and you're constantly having to readjust your arm's position just to keep your finger in one place, much less make it move to a specific different location.
A knob OTOH allows your hand to latch onto the control and maintain contact with it in the x, y, z axes, while the control adjustment is performed via an independent input (rotation).
I had a PDA back in those days. It was obvious to most everyone (except Microsoft, who completely missed the boat) that PDAs and phones were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs were going to pick up phone capability, or if phones were going to pick up PDA capability. Microsoft was in a position to make the former happen - they had vanquished Palm and controlled most of the PDA market with Windows CE/Mobile/their name of the year. But even when HP tried to make a WinCE PDA which could also make phone calls, Microsoft didn't lift a finger to help them.
Blackberry ended up taking the first step to adding general-purpose computing to a phone. Once they opened that floodgate, it was a race to see who could make their phone the most general general-purpose computer (except Microsoft, even though that was exactly what they were trying to do with PDAs - trying to port the Windows API to PDAs).
The only real contributions of the iPhone was lack of a physical keyboard - everyone else (except LG) was using a Blackberry-style keyboard, or a sliding keyboard, or a Palm Graffiti-style writing space. That was a huge bet by Apple, and the iPhone served as the proof of concept which green-lighted everyone else's touch-only on-screen keyboards most of them were already playing with in R&D. (The app ecosystem - instead of a handful of apps baked into the phone by the manufacturer - came later). A lot of the form and functionality people attribute to the iPhone actually came out first in the LG Prada, indicating the industry was already moving in that direction even when the iPhone hadn't yet seen the light of day.
People vastly overestimate how infallible people are (especially themselves). The rate at which humans make errors is about 0.5%. Which if you think about all the things you do in the course of a day, is a really big number.
About 7.3% of the population were hospitalized overnight or longer (23 million people).
If 250,000 of them died, then fatality rate due to medical errors is about 1.1%. Which is in line with the average error rate compounded over multiple ways in which errors could kill a hospital patient.
If you want to reduce the fatality rate, you either need to get people out of the system (e.g. autonomous cars - but they make people uncomfortable even though they're statistically safer), or implement automated checks to supplement people's work. We're already doing the latter with prescriptions - computers now automatically check for dangerous interactions between medications prescribed to the same person. More operating rooms scan all equipment used during surgery, and re-scans at the end to make sure it's all accounted for, and nothing has accidentally been left inside the patient. And some hospitals are starting to use barcode and RFID scanners to double-check that the medication being administered is the proper one for that particular patient.
The problem is, Trump isn't really winning the majority. Here's the breakdown of the popular vote. Trump has won less than 42% of the popular vote (votes cast for other candidates who dropped out aren't included). So he's nowhere near a majority.
Our plurality wins voting system is what allows basically anyone reasonably popular (supported by >1/n fraction of the population, where n is the number of candidates running) to win an election if the other more-desirable candidates split their vote. It's why we have a two-party system - having two parties is the best strategy for minimizing this vote-splitting. While a perfectly fair voting system is impossible, we badly need to switch to a voting system where people can vote their conscience without fear of vote-splitting leading to some wacky lunatic winning.
The problem has been that the two parties are staunchly opposed to a better voting system. Having two parties doesn't just minimize the chances of splitting the vote, it also maximizes the power of the extremists in the parties. If you imagine the country's population as a bell curve (or even a flat line), and divide it into two smaller left and right curves representing the two parties, the weighted middle of those smaller curves (the political ideology of the median party member and thus the likely nominee) is furthest from the center of the big curve when there are only two parties.
Instant-runoff voting would result in more centrist and more moderate candidates winning. Good for the country, bad for the extremists who wield heavy control of the parties. So the parties have no interest in pushing for it.
You're comparing to a nonexistent zero base state. 99% of animals left alone by humans die a painful, tortuous death - usually in the jaws of a predator. I've seen them swallowed alive and struggling inside the belly of a predator, cut in half, skinned alive, limbs gnawed off while still alive, attempting to flee with entrails hanging out, all without any human nearby. It is extraordinarily rare for a wild animal to die of old age. The methods humans have developed to slaughter livestock do not purport to be peaceful or painless, they just needed to be less painful than the death most wild animals would experience naturally to justify the killing as an improvement (from the animal's perspective) from a wild death.
I've killed (and continue to kill) my share of animals for meat. It is not the cold, emotionless process we've developed in slaughterhouses hidden from view of the supermarket shelves. You become intimately aware that this is a living thing struggling to survive, and you're ending its life so you can eat. You gain a tremendous respect for the creature that gave its life to become your dinner, and are less likely to do things like dump a half-eaten burger into the trash.
That's the question I raise to people (non-vegetarians) I meet who are offended that I "enjoy killing wild animals" for meat (fishing). The animals I catch spend their entire lives free in the sea to do as they wish, except for the last 5 minutes before I kill them and make a best effort to eat as much of the meat as I can. The animals they eat spend their entire lives penned up in captivity, basically as part of a meat assembly line, until they're slaughtered, and they probably throw away unused meat simply because it's inconvenient or doesn't taste good anymore. Yet somehow in their minds, I am the bad guy because I make the animal suffer more?
,br> If "cultivated meat" becomes affordable, I will probably eat it most of the time for convenience and to decrease my environmental impact. But I will still catch the occasional fish and eat it myself, to remind myself what the natural ecosystem is and to respect it, and not live completely isolated from it within the artificial biosphere that modern humans have created.
That's what I'm wondering too. First, humans were hunter-gatherers. Then we domesticated plants (developed agriculture).
Then we got upset that wild herbivores were eating all the crops we had put so much effort into cultivating. So we fenced them out. But they kept breaking in so we hunted them down and ate them.
Then we noticed it was getting harder to catch wild herbivores to eat, so we began domesticating those as well.
Wild predators were having trouble finding enough to eat (because we'd eaten most of the wild herbivores). And they turned to the only remaining viable food source - our domesticated herbivores. We tried the fence thing with them too, but again we eventually hunted down and killed them as well. They don't taste as good, so we mostly used their skins or mounted them as trophies.
The end result of thousands of years of doing this is a seriously screwed up ecosystem. You're not going to be able to fix it simply by eliminating domestic livestock. It's going to take a multi-pronged, controlled reintroduction of wild predators, wild herbivores, and wild plants in order to jump-start the ecosystem back to the way it was. If we adopt the PETA dream of simply stopping eating meat, the ecosystem is going to go through decades if not centuries of wild flora and fauna populations cycling through overpopulation, overgrazing, flooding, starvation, overgrowth, fire, repeat over and over until the fluctuations dampen out naturally.
Our current CO2 concentrations are about the lowest they've been in Earth's history. Granted, industrialization has increased it from a low of about 180 ppm to over 400 ppm in an alarmingly short span of time. But over the last few hundred million years, it's averaged a couple thousand ppm, with an estimated high around 7000 ppm. Temperatures are also currently some of the coldest they've ever been (we are just coming off an ice age after all). Throughout much of Earth's history, it's been about 6-8 C hotter than our current climate.
If CO2 levels a little higher than the current 400 ppm and elevated temperatures were enough to wipe out higher forms of marine life, we would've seen it in the fossil record. Unless they're hypothesizing that it's the rapidness of the current change which causes the problem, not the high CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures themselves. (This doesn't diminish the danger of global warming, since sea levels were also much higher during those times. High enough to be catastrophic to our current civilization. But a hypothesis that rising temperatures alone will wipe out marine life is an extraordinary claim.)
My uncle's print shop has an old transparency film printer from the early 1990s. Its manufacturer went bankrupt shortly after its release, and the only drivers available for it are for Mac OS 6 and Windows 3.1, and when I tried to pull the drivers off the floppies I found that the first floppy was no longer readable. So the only backkup they have is an image of the working HDD.
It's a small shop - he handles the client contacts, one employee does the graphics prep work, and another employee does the physical silkscreen printing from the film onto the final medium (poster, t-shirt, banner, whatever). He says he can't afford the ~$15k a new film printer would cost. So he has two 1990-era Mac Quadras with the print drivers installed. (One is a replacement they bought off eBay in a panic when the original failed. It turned out the failure was due to bad RAM, so after I moved the RAM from the eBay computer to the original, it worked again. They keep the eBay one as insurance against future hardware failures.) They're connected to his ethernet network, and a modern Mac (where they do the layout and prep work) sends the print job to the Quadra, which sends it to the printer.
They things are so old one of the support calls I got was to fix a broken power button. It turned out the Quadra's power button is mounted at the end of a piece of plastic, and the plastic acts like a spring. Well, after 20 years, the plastic had turned brittle with age and snapped off, and the power button had fallen inside the case. I had to jerry rig a replacement spring with some new plastic and epoxy to get it working again. Another call was that the printer had suddenly stopped working. I opened it up and... you don't want to know what 20 years of dust buildup looks like. Fortunately there was a filter keeping the dust out of the film's print path. But the fan was completely clogged and the thing was overheating.