I run Ghostery and uBlock Origin in a Chrome incognito window for my regular browsing. Forbes first opens up to a welcome page. But every Forbes link after that opens up to the article without ads. Am I doing something wrong (right)?
Hey, all you people who think it's such a great idea to build stuff to use all that open space on the ocean: Talk to a few boat owners first. You'll quickly come to understand that between wave action, salt water spray getting into every crack and crevice, corrosion, and biological fouling (both below from crustaceans and seaweed, and above from bird and seal droppings), you're constantly fighting to keep the damn thing from falling apart within a few years.
Just save yourself a lot of heartache and build the thing on land, or even on top of freshwater reservoirs. Anywhere but the ocean. You don't put structures there unless you have to.
The $35 billion appears to include financing costs. Wikipedia says the plant will have a nameplate capacity of 3200 MW. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. Estimate wholesale electricity prices at $50/MWh (they actually estimate it could rise up to about $90/MWh - environmentalists scoff, but I think it's very likely given inflation), and a operational lifespan of 35 years, and you get:
If you figure 750 employees at the plant making an average $100,000/yr, over 35 years that adds $2.625 billion in costs. Toss in a few billion for maintenance, and you're at $40 billion in costs vs a minimum $44 billion in revenue, or a healthy 10% profit margin.
Of course it carries with it all the risk that comes with a 35 year bet. (Note that other power generation infrastructure makes the same bet, since they're usually designed to remain in operation for ~30 years. Yeah the total dollar amount per installation is lower. But if you're pushing, say, a national solar program, the total installed cost could easily exceed $35 billion worth of installed panels.)
Credit card companies are extremely lenient when it comes to subscriptions. I guess they receive way more complaints from people whose subscriptions were canceled because they forgot to update their credit card info (with a replacement for a lost/stolen or expired card), than they do from people who have illegitimate subscription charges placed on their card.
I once lost my credit card and canceled it. They sent me a new card. A month later a mysterious charge appeared on my new card. When I investigated, it turned out someone had found my old card, and used it to charge a subscription processed as a charge dated to before I lost my card (not all businesses post all their CC transactions every night). When my credit card company received it, they assumed it pre-dated my lost/stolen card report, and "helpfully" transferred the charge to my new card with a totally different number because I wouldn't want to miss out on my legit subscription, right?
I think it's more a message to content producers to stop dropping the ball and start releasing your content in all markets, rather than hiding behind geo-blocking as a way to delay releasing it in markets where it's "inconvenient" or "doesn't fit with your profit-maximizing release schedule." If you want to implement different pricing in different markets, then sure go ahead. But don't stupidly withhold content from certain markets while the Internet is abuzz with talk about what happened in the latest episode, then come to the country's government complaining that people in that country are pirating the show.
If those Australian show producers don't want to bother with separate releases in the U.S., then just allow people in the U.S. to subscribe to them online as if they were in Australia. Or if they are contracted with a U.S. affiliate to release those shows, then pressure those affiliates to release them in a timely manner. (And vice versa for shows from other countries in Australia of course.)
Typically, in a contract where you hire the photographer (pay his 4200 Euro expenses) to specifically take photos of certain things, it's a work for hire. You're paying for everything, including the photographer's expertise and labor, so even though the photographer took the photos, the copyright belongs to the person or company paying for it. This is the way most of the entertainment and advertising industry works - with copyright being held by the hiring company as a work for hire. Though the usual reason is so that creative differences don't sink the entire project, because e.g. a cameraman refuses to allow his video to be used unless you change the soundtrack, and the sound artist refuses to let you use his audio unless you use different video. The contracts in these cases very clearly state that the company (or some cases individual) doing the hiring will retain all copyright as a condition of employment.
If the photographer is acting as an independent (pays his own expenses, shoots on his own time), then he'll retain his copyright and the company simply buys rights to those copyrights. That sounds like what the photographer is claiming here (except for the 4200 Euro in expenses). It's up to the purchaser to buy the appropriate rights, whether it be a quarter page in an internal publication, or a full two-page spread in a national newspaper. The cost for a license to use the copyrighted work in publications depends on the size you're going to print the photo, B&W or color, approximately how many copies you're going to print or (in the case of static ads like billboards) approximately how many people will see it, type of use (internal reports, press publications, or public advertisements), and whether it's one-time use or will include rights for x number of reprints or for use in perpetuity.
If the company didn't specify these things in the contract and they violated the original publication agreement, then they are screwed. The law errs on the side of the copyright holder. You only have permission to reproduce a copyrighted work if the copyright holder explicitly gives you permission. Even if the copyright holder hasn't pressed charges against you for decades, he can suddenly change his mind and decide to sue you - unless you have a signed contract where he gives you rights to print his work. (The opposite is true for trademark - you have to actively defend your trademark against infringement or risk losing it.) Their only recourse would be to argue that the photos were shot as a work for hire, and they dismissed the photographer's notices of copyright licensing as insane ramblings by some guy who didn't read the contract he signed.
No, those are the equivalent of IRC. You type a line, and it isn't sent until you hit the enter (or send) key.
This is more like the old Unix talk program. Every key you type gets sent as you type it. The recipient can watch the other person type, including correcting mistakes. It doesn't have the "I'll get to it when I have time" nature of SMS, email, etc. where you can just ignore an incoming message and reply to it later. It's more interactive, and real-time - like a phone call. Which is why it's of interest for deaf people. I would've thought the old teletype protocol could've been easily incorporated into to an app, but I guess not (cell phone voice transmissions are sent a different way than data, and this sort of device has to use the voice channel to maintain compatibility with landline units which may be in a location without Internet).
Back in 1991, California spent $12.5 million extending the 55 freeway for easier access to Newport Beach. Shortly before it was set to open, they discovered a mother fox had had kits in burrow on the side of the extension. The kits would've been easy to collect, but they didn't want to separate them from the mother. For about a month they tried all sorts of things to capture her. But she proved wily enough to elude traps, bait, and even tranquilizer darts. Eventually they finally caught her, and the extended portion of the freeway finally opened - a month behind schedule.
I don't need or want desktop search to go out on the internet; that's what the search in my browser is for.
Wait a sec. Doesn't Apple have a patent on searching the local computer + the Internet at the same time? (Not saying such a thing should be worthy of a patent. I just distinctly recall the feature being pulled from Android when Apple started waving the patent bat around.)
The problem is an income isn't something you can just assign willy nilly. Incomes, currency value, and productivity are all interconnected. Incomes naturally try to align with each worker's productivity (or what he can claim to be his productivity in the case of managers and scam artists). So if someone decides to quit working and live off a basic income, that will cause a shift in the value of currency to make his basic income try to match his productivity (zero).* To make it work, you need to either fix prices (which ruins your economy). Or decouple the basic income from your currency. e.g. Anyone who needs it drops by the local food distribution center and picks up a week's worth of standard grocery rations, thus bypassing currency as an intermediary in your basic income.
* Imagine a vastly simplified economy of 100 people where the only good produced and consumed is milk. Average income is $30k/yr and each person on average produces 10,000 gallons of milk. Total productivity for this country is thus 1 million gallons of milk/yr, and total income is $3 million/yr.. The price of milk is thus $3/gal. And each person buys (consumes) 10,000 gallons of milk/yr.
You decide each person needs a minimum 5,000 gallons/yr of milk to live, so you implement a basic income of $15k/yr. Say 50 of the people become bums - quit working and start living off the basic income. Total income drops to 50*$15k + 50*$30k = $2.25 million/yr. Total milk production drops to 500,000 gallons/yr, or 5000 gallons per capita. This causes the price of milk to rise to $4.50/gal - enough for your basic income to buy only 3333 gallons/yr of milk.
If you resist the urge to break the economy by implementing price controls, milk producing companies are now making more money per gallon sold. Consequently they can pay their workers more (each employee is still producing 10,000 gallons/yr). The wage of a worker thus increases from $30k/yr to $45k/yr. Total income is now 50*$15k + 50*$45k = $3 million/yr, while milk production stays at 500,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $6/gal, reducing the purchasing power of your basic income to 2500 gallons/yr of milk
And so on. By the 10th iteration a working person's income is $180k and the basic income buys only 769 gallons/yr. By the 100th iteration a working person's income is $1.515 million, and the basic income only buys 98 gallons/yr. The series tries to equalize at a point where each person's income matches their productivity. In other words a basic income doesn't work - the value of the basic income tends towards the productivity of the people receiving it. If their average productivity is zero, the value of the basic income trends towards zero (the series is divergent). If their average productivity is 10% that of a full worker, the value of the basic income tends towards 10% that of the full worker. etc. The value of a basic income doesn't stay at the value you originally assigned it if you try to allocate it in currency.
This is what makes a market economy work. Incomes naturally try to gravitate towards whatever value people assign to your work productivity. Prices naturally tend to gravitate towards whatever value people assign to the product * their ability to pay. If you try to pretend the market doesn't work and arbitrarily set an income which doesn't match productivity, the market just pivots around that fixed point and adjusts currency values and other incomes to "correct" your "mistake". That's not to say there aren't ways around it (like the food distribution center idea I mentioned). It's just that implementing a basic income without ruining the economy involves a lot more complexity than just "pay people a basic income."
The new Skylake Core M processors are actually better than a mobile i5 (they have 4MB cache like an i7, vs the 3MB of the i5). They just throttle more aggressively when hitting thermal limits because the manufacturer has put in a smaller cooling system. It's why you see them beating i5 laptops on certain benchmarks, while losing badly to them in others. If the benchmark is short, the Core M doesn't thermal throttle, and the larger cache gives it an edge. If the benchmark is long, the Core M throttles and is loses. (This wasn't true of the Broadwell Core M - those would only turbo boost on a single core. But the Skylake Core M will turbo on both cores just like an i5 or i7.)
I'm wondering if some manufacturer will notice this, and stick a Core M in their laptop with a regular-sized cooler, to effectively give you a "cheap i7" (only difference between the mobile dual core i7 and i5 is 4MB vs 3MB cache).
The major distinguishing features of the MBP are:
Calibrated 100% sRGB screen. Lots of other laptops have screens which hit 100% sRGB or close, a few even cover 100% Adobe RGB. But if you don't do graphics, photo, or video work, you're not gonna notice the difference between a 100% sRGB screen and a 80% sRGB screen (pretty much all IPS-type displays can hit at least 80%). 100% Adobe RGB OTOH is very noticeable (think of the AMOLED screens on Samsung phones), and it's sad that we went backwards from NTSC (roughly the same color gamut as Adobe RGB) in the CRT days, to sRGB as a standard on flat panels. The MBPs are one of the few laptops whose screens are calibrated at the factory. But anybody doing color-critical work will own their own colorimeter and do their own calibration, rather than rely on a generic color profile.
Iris graphics. This is just Apple's way of bypassing a design flaw in the Macbooks. They don't have vent holes, so the insides get really toasty. No the metal chassis does not help heat transfer because there's a layer of insulating air between the hot parts and the chassis. When you combine a heat insulator with a conductor, the insulator wins. A better solution is to use vent holes to remove the heated air and replace it with cool air. The lack of vents on the MBPs means a discrete GPU is out of the question, forcing Apple to resort to other means to improve 3D graphics performance.
PCIe SSDs. While these can exceed the SATA 3 limits, they only do so for sequential read/writes. That makes the extra speed only really useful for certain tasks. The vast majority of computing tasks are bound by the 4k read/write speeds, which are still around 30-70 MB/s unqueued for the best SSDs - well under the SATA 3 limit. Video editing is one of the few tasks which benefits from the higher sequential read/write speeds (which admittedly many MBPs are used for). But if you're not doing that sort of thing, about the only time you'll see the extra speed of the PCIe SSD is if you're copying movie files to/from an external PCIe SSD. Otherwise its performance will be indistinguishable from a regular SATA 3 SSD.
The MBPs are extremely good tools for the intended audience, and I recommend them in a heartbeat for anyone in those fields (graphics artists, photographers, videographers). But for anyone else, you're wasting a lot of money on features which won't benefit you in any way.
The dirty little secret of the laptop industry is that the big-name laptop brands - Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, etc. - do not actually make laptops. They're made by Taiwanese companies called ODMs - Original Design Manufacturers. They're like OEMs, except they also design the product. The brand name just slaps it in one of their boxes before re-shipping it to you. About the only thing the brand name tells you is what type of warranty service to expect. The entire industry is very secretive about this, and makes it nearly impossible to tell which ODM actually made each particular model laptop (most brands use multiple ODMs).
The Macbooks are made by Quanta (they're the only ODM Apple is currently using for their laptops; the old plastic Macbooks were made by Asus/Pegatron). Quanta also happens to make most of HP's laptops. This is why all those "laptop reliability reports" which break it down by brand name are bunk.
No, the intended purpose of the 5th Amendment is to prohibit use of a refusal to testify as evidence of guilt. In the bad old days, a ruler or government would put you on trial and tell you to confess. And if you refused, your refusal was accepted as evidence of your guilt, thus creating a catch-22. The 5th Amendment's protection against being forced to testify against yourself put a cold stop to that.
If the court has reason to believe someone is hiding evidence, the State compelling him to give it up is not prohibited by the 5th Amendment. e.g. If the State is reasonably sure a guy killed his wife (blood all over the house, bloody knife with his fingerprints all over it, bloody drag marks to the garage, and blood in the trunk), they can press him to reveal where he dumped the body. The 5th Amendment does not protect him from that. All it does is prohibit using his refusal to cooperate as evidence of his guilt.
If there's a transgression here, it would be the 6th Amendment - right to a speedy trial. This is actually a hole in our legal system. While you cannot be held indefinitely if the police (executive branch) does not press charges, you can be held indefinitely if the court (judicial branch) gives you an order and you refuse to obey it (contempt of court - no trial needed). About a decade ago there was some journalist who spent 2 years in jail because a court ordered him to reveal his source for a story, and he refused.
Not only are they confusing the two, they're accusing someone of flip-flopping based on their speculation as to his motives. Cruz's stance only appears inconsistent if you took the cynical view that he supported H1-Bs because he wanted cheap foreign indentured servants. Now suddenly he wants to put a $110k floor on H1-B salary, and you think he's had a conversion.
If Cruz truly believed H1-B visas are being used properly, then there is absolutely nothing inconsistent about his previous stance and current stance. He strongly supported H1-B visas because he felt they were a valuable tool for bringing over highly skilled foreigners as workers, and as a first step to making them U.S. citizens. A bunch of people complained that H1-Bs are also being abused for low-income labor, so he is taking steps to prohibit such abuse and preserve what he feels is the proper use of H1-Bs. It is not a conversion because he never believed H1-Bs were supposed to be abused that way, as the cynics speculated.
Amazon requires their app be installed on the device and you to be logged in for any apps purchased from their store to run. Or at least they did when I played around with their store a few years ago (back when they were giving away a free app every day). I just created extra Amazon accounts and bought kids apps that way with rebate credit cards (so they couldn't be used to make more charges after the money was gone). But I expect most parents didn't think that through as much as I did.
Normally an app store will add parental controls which allow you to add a password or passcode to confirm purchases. But Amazon's big thing is one-click ordering, and they like to enable it by default. I had to dig through my settings to find where to disable one-click ordering. I want to see a confirmation page, I want to double-check to make sure the correct credit card is being charged, I want to pick and choose the type of shipping especially since they're now giving free digital credits if I don't need a purchase delivered within 2 days. And most importantly, I don't want the kids to be able to buy stuff on my Amazon account by just clicking things when I happen to step away from the computer for a few minutes because the doorbell rang. Even then, their one-click ordering still bites me now and then. I accidentally "bought" an episode of a TV show when my browser froze. Apparently one of my clicks to try to unfreeze it landed on their one-click order button and went through, and apparently the setting to disable one-click ordering for regular Amazon purchases does not apply to digital purchases - there is a separate setting for that. (They refunded it because the entire series was included with my Prime account, so there was no reason for me to buy a single episode. Not sure what would've happened if that wasn't the case, since their policy is no refunds on digital purchases.)
So yeah, I completely blame Amazon for this one. They are way too aggressive with one-click ordering.
Copyright gives the copyright holder control over distribution. In the past, distribution was physical so it made sense to restrict availability based on geographical location.
Today distribution is mostly electronic, so geographical location means nothing. But copyright holders insist on clinging to their old model of limiting availability based on location. That's what's causing conflicts like this. (To be fair, economic normalization has not yet caught up to the information age. So the $10/mo Netflix subscription which is pocket change in the West is still a significant chunk of change in the developing world. The copyright holder may thus feel justified in being able to offer a lower price in certain locations. But those sorts of price differences are what lead to higher wages in the developing world. If they want Netflix but $10/mo is too expensive for them, they will demand higher wages instead of settling for being paid 10 cents/hr.)
Any organization will develop a hierarchical operating structure. Even when there is no formal hierarchical structure (e.g. high school, or Valve), one naturally develops. We as human beings have an innate desire to conform with society, and those with the position or influence to determine what "society" is naturally end up on top.
Consider that their parents were probably doing well in the 80s when they were kids. House prices were booming, the move towards taking on massive debts to buy stuff was in full swing
Holy crap. Were you even around in the 1980s? Interest rates were around 20%. Home prices were stagnant from about 1979 til the late 1990s. We took on massive debts to buy stuff because it was the only way you could afford to own a house. Taking out loans to buy a huge house (or second home) to turn it into a giant credit card from appreciating real estate prices didn't become a thing until the 2000s.
If that's the rose-colored glasses through which Millennials view the past, no wonder they're dissatisfied. They're comparing their current reality to a past nirvana which never existed.
If you ask me, capitalism works better than any other system I've seen tried, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is that certain goods remain scarce regardless of how much demand there is for it. A good example is housing (or at least housing in locations where people want to live). With the shift from single-income households in the 1950s to two-income households in the 1980s, you would've expected a smaller share of total household income to go to housing, with a greater share left over to be spent on quality of life things like entertainment. Instead what happened is that housing in desirable locations remained scarce (there is only so much real estate). So competing dual-income households bid up home prices, and the second income went almost entirely into paying for the higher home price.
The education that their parents got for free or at low cost is now going to put them in massive, long term debt.
The cost of higher education has gone through the roof because of a toxic combination of (1) socialists' desire to subsidize it to make it more affordable, and (2) capitalists' desire to leave it regulated by market forces. The compromise they came up with was the subsidized student loan. You still had to pay for the school, but you could do so by borrowing money at below normal interest rates.
Unfortunately, college tuitions are one of these goods that remained scarce. Lots of people want to send their kids to an Ivy League school, but those schools only admit a certain number of students each year. So supply was more or less fixed. Consequently, allowing kids to shift their future earnings into the present via loans just increased demand (more of them could afford college). And what happened is what naturally happens any time you have fixed supply and increased demand - people bid up the cost of tuition.
At this point, it's too far gone for a simple fix. But what needs to happen is:
Get rid of all student loans. Make it illegal to time-shift money from the future into the present to pay for education. If you can't afford to send your kids to a prestigious private school with the money you have today, tough.
Use the subsidy money instead to expand quality public universities. Basically inject the money into the supply side instead of on the demand side like with loans. Cap their tuition at a certain % of the median household income. Prevent them from shifting their cost burden over to the demand side.
Continue to allocate a portion of that subsidy money to scholarships for low-income and economically distressed students. No reason to deny a smart kid an education just because his/her parents can't afford it. But don't go crazy with it because this too is equivalent to increasing demand. Most of the money should instead be spent on the previous bullet point, which increases supply - that's what keeps prices low, not subsidies.
Rather than the EPA pay to test every model vehicle released every year, it has the car companies test it themselves. Then the EPA tests a random sample to make sure the car companies were being honest. If a car company decides to cheat, they might get away with it for a few years, but probability says the longer they continue to cheat, the less likely they are to continue to get away with it. If Mitsubishi has been doing this for 25 years and never gotten caught, the Japanese government has apparently never bothered checking automakers' claims.
This practice of sampling is used widely in industry as well. Instead of testing every bottle of Coke to make sure it has the right mix of ingredients, you only test about one in 10,000. If a sample turns up out of spec, it costs less to stop production to fix the problem and discard the bad product between the bad sample and the previous good (in-spec) sample, than it would cost to test every single bottle.
The same misconception - that the best solution is to test everything thoroughly - is driving up auto costs in California. Requiring every car to get a smog inspection every year made sense when a lot of cars were failing. But if the inspection cost is $30 and the cost of letting a polluting car operate for an extra year is (say) $900 of environmental damage, then once the pass rate exceeds 97%, the inspections actually become more expensive than the pollution cost. The solution is more expensive than the problem. The government has reduced inspections to once every 2 years in response, but smog inspection has become a multi-billion dollar business so the gas stations and mechanics lobby to keep requiring them more frequently than they're actually needed.
It's not just temperature which leads to more mosquitoes. Southern California has ideal temperatures for mosquito breeding, but almost no mosquitoes. The reason is the dry climate - standing water is extremely rare, meaning there's no place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs. So for mosquito growth, you need both warm temperatures and enough humidity to prevent standing water from evaporating. That's why mosquito control isn't just spraying pesticides, it's eliminating places where standing water can pool (e.g. disposed tires) for about the week mosquito larvae need to grow, and setting up honeypot pools which attract mosquitoes to lay their eggs there but which are poisoned to kill the larvae.
Correct. TFA is making the assumption that the test limits are never supposed to be exceeded, which is a questionable assumption. The EU test is radically unlike typical driving, which unless the EU states otherwise suggests the correct interpretation is that normal operating emissions are supposed to be x times more than test emissions. TFA presents nothing new. It's been widely known within the industry for years that EU testing conditions generated less emissions than normal operation.
This ambiguity was also present in the U.S. tests. After the truck diesel scandal around 1998-2000, the EPA firmly established that the test limits are not supposed to be exceeded during normal operation, and the test was merely sampling certain operating conditions to make sure the vehicles were in compliance. The EPA test however is more representative of typical driving.
Oh, I know a neural net can learn and tweak its responses based on past experiences. The beauty of bluffing is it can totally screw up that learning process
For years, Ty Cobb famously overran 3rd base instead of stopping every time a certain player fielded the ball. That forced the player to throw the ball to third base to force Cobb back. Eventually the player got used to Cobb overrunning third base and his throws to force him back got lazy and slow. Then one day in an important game with the score tied, Ty Cobb overran third base, the player made a lazy throw to third to force him back, and Cobb broke for home and scored the winning run.
Really good players develop an innate sense for when an opponent is bluffing. I can't explain how it works, but I know it does. When I was kid, I had this innate sense for The Price is Right. I could predict with about 95% accuracy when the announcer was going to say the prize was a new car. I have no idea how I did it, but my subconscious was getting some sort of signal from the inflection of his voice or the delay in his speech or something that told my conscious mind that he was going to say a new car. Ty Cobb was also exceptional at this sort of thing. When a teammate once asked him how he was able to hit so well against a certain pitcher who gave everyone else problems, Cobb replied that the pitcher's ears wiggled every time he was about to throw a curve.
This works when your mind is flexible enough to consider all possible inputs, even the seemingly irrelevant ones. It doesn't work with an AI programmed to look at only a limited number of "important" inputs to keep the CPU load down.
Through years of trial and error, Starcraft build orders (the order in which you build units and buildings) have been optimized to get you to a certain build state in the minimum amount of time. Build orders are queued, which means there's no human-induced delay. An AI will have little to no advantage there - it could gain a slight advantage with building placement to minimize unit travel times.
If you've watched any advanced Starcraft tournament games, the end result usually comes down to players' ability to micro while maintaining these build queues (an AI would probably win at those), or to bluffing. That's when you fake out an opponent by showing him a unit or building to make him think you're going for a certain build, but then you go for a different build. Your opponent scouts you, guesses what build you're going for, and modifies his build to counter yours. But you know you've been scouted so you change your build. Then when he's built up his army and encounters you again, he finds you've switched to a different build that his is ineffective against. And since different builds require different buildings and technology trees, it's too late to switch builds. Your opponent has to try to hold on with his inferior build as best as he can until he can get a new tech build up and running, all the while hoping your next tech shift won't counter that.
This is why in Starcraft it's not just important to scout, it's important to know how much of your base your opponent has scouted. You'll see advanced players do all sorts of crazy things like start constructing a building, then when their opponent's scout has left or been killed, they'll destroy the building and construct a completely different one. All the unit strength the AI can muster won't do it any good if the human has bluffed it into building ground combat units, while the human has built up a massive army of air units. And like the early computer chess games, once word gets out that an AI is vulnerable to a certain bluff, people will abuse it over and over.
1) Why does that chart show Apple at 92% and Samsung at 14% of all global smartphone profits?
2) It contradicts the common belief that Apple hardware is better. The 4Q 2014 sales figures pegged Apple's smartphone profit at $18.8 billion, while iPhone sales were 74.5 million. $18.8b / 74.5m = a staggering $252 profit per phone. For anyone who denies an Apple tax exists, there it is right there.
In other words, your $650 iPhone isn't a $650 phone. It's a $400 phone that Apple is selling to you for $650. Meanwhile the other smartphone manufacturers operate with a 2%-5% margin (typical for the computer industry). So when they sell you a $650 smartphone, you're getting $625 worth of hardware. You could argue Apple designs their stuff better so is able to get the same performance out of less money. But the only part they design is the SoC. They buy all the other parts - screen, battery, camera, memory, etc. - from the same suppliers as everyone else.
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I always thought Randall should do a followup to this XKCD comic with "hold him down and swipe his finger on his phone to unlock it."
I run Ghostery and uBlock Origin in a Chrome incognito window for my regular browsing. Forbes first opens up to a welcome page. But every Forbes link after that opens up to the article without ads. Am I doing something wrong (right)?
Hey, all you people who think it's such a great idea to build stuff to use all that open space on the ocean: Talk to a few boat owners first. You'll quickly come to understand that between wave action, salt water spray getting into every crack and crevice, corrosion, and biological fouling (both below from crustaceans and seaweed, and above from bird and seal droppings), you're constantly fighting to keep the damn thing from falling apart within a few years.
Just save yourself a lot of heartache and build the thing on land, or even on top of freshwater reservoirs. Anywhere but the ocean. You don't put structures there unless you have to.
The $35 billion appears to include financing costs. Wikipedia says the plant will have a nameplate capacity of 3200 MW. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. Estimate wholesale electricity prices at $50/MWh (they actually estimate it could rise up to about $90/MWh - environmentalists scoff, but I think it's very likely given inflation), and a operational lifespan of 35 years, and you get:
(3200 MW) * 0.9 * (8766 hours/year) * (35 years) * ($50 / MWh) = $44.16 billion revenue.
If you figure 750 employees at the plant making an average $100,000/yr, over 35 years that adds $2.625 billion in costs. Toss in a few billion for maintenance, and you're at $40 billion in costs vs a minimum $44 billion in revenue, or a healthy 10% profit margin.
Of course it carries with it all the risk that comes with a 35 year bet. (Note that other power generation infrastructure makes the same bet, since they're usually designed to remain in operation for ~30 years. Yeah the total dollar amount per installation is lower. But if you're pushing, say, a national solar program, the total installed cost could easily exceed $35 billion worth of installed panels.)
Credit card companies are extremely lenient when it comes to subscriptions. I guess they receive way more complaints from people whose subscriptions were canceled because they forgot to update their credit card info (with a replacement for a lost/stolen or expired card), than they do from people who have illegitimate subscription charges placed on their card.
I once lost my credit card and canceled it. They sent me a new card. A month later a mysterious charge appeared on my new card. When I investigated, it turned out someone had found my old card, and used it to charge a subscription processed as a charge dated to before I lost my card (not all businesses post all their CC transactions every night). When my credit card company received it, they assumed it pre-dated my lost/stolen card report, and "helpfully" transferred the charge to my new card with a totally different number because I wouldn't want to miss out on my legit subscription, right?
I think it's more a message to content producers to stop dropping the ball and start releasing your content in all markets, rather than hiding behind geo-blocking as a way to delay releasing it in markets where it's "inconvenient" or "doesn't fit with your profit-maximizing release schedule." If you want to implement different pricing in different markets, then sure go ahead. But don't stupidly withhold content from certain markets while the Internet is abuzz with talk about what happened in the latest episode, then come to the country's government complaining that people in that country are pirating the show.
If those Australian show producers don't want to bother with separate releases in the U.S., then just allow people in the U.S. to subscribe to them online as if they were in Australia. Or if they are contracted with a U.S. affiliate to release those shows, then pressure those affiliates to release them in a timely manner. (And vice versa for shows from other countries in Australia of course.)
Typically, in a contract where you hire the photographer (pay his 4200 Euro expenses) to specifically take photos of certain things, it's a work for hire. You're paying for everything, including the photographer's expertise and labor, so even though the photographer took the photos, the copyright belongs to the person or company paying for it. This is the way most of the entertainment and advertising industry works - with copyright being held by the hiring company as a work for hire. Though the usual reason is so that creative differences don't sink the entire project, because e.g. a cameraman refuses to allow his video to be used unless you change the soundtrack, and the sound artist refuses to let you use his audio unless you use different video. The contracts in these cases very clearly state that the company (or some cases individual) doing the hiring will retain all copyright as a condition of employment.
If the photographer is acting as an independent (pays his own expenses, shoots on his own time), then he'll retain his copyright and the company simply buys rights to those copyrights. That sounds like what the photographer is claiming here (except for the 4200 Euro in expenses). It's up to the purchaser to buy the appropriate rights, whether it be a quarter page in an internal publication, or a full two-page spread in a national newspaper. The cost for a license to use the copyrighted work in publications depends on the size you're going to print the photo, B&W or color, approximately how many copies you're going to print or (in the case of static ads like billboards) approximately how many people will see it, type of use (internal reports, press publications, or public advertisements), and whether it's one-time use or will include rights for x number of reprints or for use in perpetuity.
If the company didn't specify these things in the contract and they violated the original publication agreement, then they are screwed. The law errs on the side of the copyright holder. You only have permission to reproduce a copyrighted work if the copyright holder explicitly gives you permission. Even if the copyright holder hasn't pressed charges against you for decades, he can suddenly change his mind and decide to sue you - unless you have a signed contract where he gives you rights to print his work. (The opposite is true for trademark - you have to actively defend your trademark against infringement or risk losing it.) Their only recourse would be to argue that the photos were shot as a work for hire, and they dismissed the photographer's notices of copyright licensing as insane ramblings by some guy who didn't read the contract he signed.
No, those are the equivalent of IRC. You type a line, and it isn't sent until you hit the enter (or send) key.
This is more like the old Unix talk program. Every key you type gets sent as you type it. The recipient can watch the other person type, including correcting mistakes. It doesn't have the "I'll get to it when I have time" nature of SMS, email, etc. where you can just ignore an incoming message and reply to it later. It's more interactive, and real-time - like a phone call. Which is why it's of interest for deaf people. I would've thought the old teletype protocol could've been easily incorporated into to an app, but I guess not (cell phone voice transmissions are sent a different way than data, and this sort of device has to use the voice channel to maintain compatibility with landline units which may be in a location without Internet).
Back in 1991, California spent $12.5 million extending the 55 freeway for easier access to Newport Beach. Shortly before it was set to open, they discovered a mother fox had had kits in burrow on the side of the extension. The kits would've been easy to collect, but they didn't want to separate them from the mother. For about a month they tried all sorts of things to capture her. But she proved wily enough to elude traps, bait, and even tranquilizer darts. Eventually they finally caught her, and the extended portion of the freeway finally opened - a month behind schedule.
Wait a sec. Doesn't Apple have a patent on searching the local computer + the Internet at the same time? (Not saying such a thing should be worthy of a patent. I just distinctly recall the feature being pulled from Android when Apple started waving the patent bat around.)
The problem is an income isn't something you can just assign willy nilly. Incomes, currency value, and productivity are all interconnected. Incomes naturally try to align with each worker's productivity (or what he can claim to be his productivity in the case of managers and scam artists). So if someone decides to quit working and live off a basic income, that will cause a shift in the value of currency to make his basic income try to match his productivity (zero).* To make it work, you need to either fix prices (which ruins your economy). Or decouple the basic income from your currency. e.g. Anyone who needs it drops by the local food distribution center and picks up a week's worth of standard grocery rations, thus bypassing currency as an intermediary in your basic income.
* Imagine a vastly simplified economy of 100 people where the only good produced and consumed is milk. Average income is $30k/yr and each person on average produces 10,000 gallons of milk. Total productivity for this country is thus 1 million gallons of milk/yr, and total income is $3 million/yr.. The price of milk is thus $3/gal. And each person buys (consumes) 10,000 gallons of milk/yr.
You decide each person needs a minimum 5,000 gallons/yr of milk to live, so you implement a basic income of $15k/yr. Say 50 of the people become bums - quit working and start living off the basic income. Total income drops to 50*$15k + 50*$30k = $2.25 million/yr. Total milk production drops to 500,000 gallons/yr, or 5000 gallons per capita. This causes the price of milk to rise to $4.50/gal - enough for your basic income to buy only 3333 gallons/yr of milk.
If you resist the urge to break the economy by implementing price controls, milk producing companies are now making more money per gallon sold. Consequently they can pay their workers more (each employee is still producing 10,000 gallons/yr). The wage of a worker thus increases from $30k/yr to $45k/yr. Total income is now 50*$15k + 50*$45k = $3 million/yr, while milk production stays at 500,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $6/gal, reducing the purchasing power of your basic income to 2500 gallons/yr of milk
And so on. By the 10th iteration a working person's income is $180k and the basic income buys only 769 gallons/yr. By the 100th iteration a working person's income is $1.515 million, and the basic income only buys 98 gallons/yr. The series tries to equalize at a point where each person's income matches their productivity. In other words a basic income doesn't work - the value of the basic income tends towards the productivity of the people receiving it. If their average productivity is zero, the value of the basic income trends towards zero (the series is divergent). If their average productivity is 10% that of a full worker, the value of the basic income tends towards 10% that of the full worker. etc. The value of a basic income doesn't stay at the value you originally assigned it if you try to allocate it in currency.
This is what makes a market economy work. Incomes naturally try to gravitate towards whatever value people assign to your work productivity. Prices naturally tend to gravitate towards whatever value people assign to the product * their ability to pay. If you try to pretend the market doesn't work and arbitrarily set an income which doesn't match productivity, the market just pivots around that fixed point and adjusts currency values and other incomes to "correct" your "mistake". That's not to say there aren't ways around it (like the food distribution center idea I mentioned). It's just that implementing a basic income without ruining the economy involves a lot more complexity than just "pay people a basic income."
I'm wondering if some manufacturer will notice this, and stick a Core M in their laptop with a regular-sized cooler, to effectively give you a "cheap i7" (only difference between the mobile dual core i7 and i5 is 4MB vs 3MB cache).
The major distinguishing features of the MBP are:
The MBPs are extremely good tools for the intended audience, and I recommend them in a heartbeat for anyone in those fields (graphics artists, photographers, videographers). But for anyone else, you're wasting a lot of money on features which won't benefit you in any way.
The dirty little secret of the laptop industry is that the big-name laptop brands - Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, etc. - do not actually make laptops. They're made by Taiwanese companies called ODMs - Original Design Manufacturers. They're like OEMs, except they also design the product. The brand name just slaps it in one of their boxes before re-shipping it to you. About the only thing the brand name tells you is what type of warranty service to expect. The entire industry is very secretive about this, and makes it nearly impossible to tell which ODM actually made each particular model laptop (most brands use multiple ODMs).
The Macbooks are made by Quanta (they're the only ODM Apple is currently using for their laptops; the old plastic Macbooks were made by Asus/Pegatron). Quanta also happens to make most of HP's laptops. This is why all those "laptop reliability reports" which break it down by brand name are bunk.
No, the intended purpose of the 5th Amendment is to prohibit use of a refusal to testify as evidence of guilt. In the bad old days, a ruler or government would put you on trial and tell you to confess. And if you refused, your refusal was accepted as evidence of your guilt, thus creating a catch-22. The 5th Amendment's protection against being forced to testify against yourself put a cold stop to that.
If the court has reason to believe someone is hiding evidence, the State compelling him to give it up is not prohibited by the 5th Amendment. e.g. If the State is reasonably sure a guy killed his wife (blood all over the house, bloody knife with his fingerprints all over it, bloody drag marks to the garage, and blood in the trunk), they can press him to reveal where he dumped the body. The 5th Amendment does not protect him from that. All it does is prohibit using his refusal to cooperate as evidence of his guilt.
If there's a transgression here, it would be the 6th Amendment - right to a speedy trial. This is actually a hole in our legal system. While you cannot be held indefinitely if the police (executive branch) does not press charges, you can be held indefinitely if the court (judicial branch) gives you an order and you refuse to obey it (contempt of court - no trial needed). About a decade ago there was some journalist who spent 2 years in jail because a court ordered him to reveal his source for a story, and he refused.
Not only are they confusing the two, they're accusing someone of flip-flopping based on their speculation as to his motives. Cruz's stance only appears inconsistent if you took the cynical view that he supported H1-Bs because he wanted cheap foreign indentured servants. Now suddenly he wants to put a $110k floor on H1-B salary, and you think he's had a conversion.
If Cruz truly believed H1-B visas are being used properly, then there is absolutely nothing inconsistent about his previous stance and current stance. He strongly supported H1-B visas because he felt they were a valuable tool for bringing over highly skilled foreigners as workers, and as a first step to making them U.S. citizens. A bunch of people complained that H1-Bs are also being abused for low-income labor, so he is taking steps to prohibit such abuse and preserve what he feels is the proper use of H1-Bs. It is not a conversion because he never believed H1-Bs were supposed to be abused that way, as the cynics speculated.
Fiorina OTOH...
Amazon requires their app be installed on the device and you to be logged in for any apps purchased from their store to run. Or at least they did when I played around with their store a few years ago (back when they were giving away a free app every day). I just created extra Amazon accounts and bought kids apps that way with rebate credit cards (so they couldn't be used to make more charges after the money was gone). But I expect most parents didn't think that through as much as I did.
Normally an app store will add parental controls which allow you to add a password or passcode to confirm purchases. But Amazon's big thing is one-click ordering, and they like to enable it by default. I had to dig through my settings to find where to disable one-click ordering. I want to see a confirmation page, I want to double-check to make sure the correct credit card is being charged, I want to pick and choose the type of shipping especially since they're now giving free digital credits if I don't need a purchase delivered within 2 days. And most importantly, I don't want the kids to be able to buy stuff on my Amazon account by just clicking things when I happen to step away from the computer for a few minutes because the doorbell rang. Even then, their one-click ordering still bites me now and then. I accidentally "bought" an episode of a TV show when my browser froze. Apparently one of my clicks to try to unfreeze it landed on their one-click order button and went through, and apparently the setting to disable one-click ordering for regular Amazon purchases does not apply to digital purchases - there is a separate setting for that. (They refunded it because the entire series was included with my Prime account, so there was no reason for me to buy a single episode. Not sure what would've happened if that wasn't the case, since their policy is no refunds on digital purchases.)
So yeah, I completely blame Amazon for this one. They are way too aggressive with one-click ordering.
Copyright gives the copyright holder control over distribution. In the past, distribution was physical so it made sense to restrict availability based on geographical location.
Today distribution is mostly electronic, so geographical location means nothing. But copyright holders insist on clinging to their old model of limiting availability based on location. That's what's causing conflicts like this. (To be fair, economic normalization has not yet caught up to the information age. So the $10/mo Netflix subscription which is pocket change in the West is still a significant chunk of change in the developing world. The copyright holder may thus feel justified in being able to offer a lower price in certain locations. But those sorts of price differences are what lead to higher wages in the developing world. If they want Netflix but $10/mo is too expensive for them, they will demand higher wages instead of settling for being paid 10 cents/hr.)
Any organization will develop a hierarchical operating structure. Even when there is no formal hierarchical structure (e.g. high school, or Valve), one naturally develops. We as human beings have an innate desire to conform with society, and those with the position or influence to determine what "society" is naturally end up on top.
Holy crap. Were you even around in the 1980s? Interest rates were around 20%. Home prices were stagnant from about 1979 til the late 1990s. We took on massive debts to buy stuff because it was the only way you could afford to own a house. Taking out loans to buy a huge house (or second home) to turn it into a giant credit card from appreciating real estate prices didn't become a thing until the 2000s.
If that's the rose-colored glasses through which Millennials view the past, no wonder they're dissatisfied. They're comparing their current reality to a past nirvana which never existed.
If you ask me, capitalism works better than any other system I've seen tried, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is that certain goods remain scarce regardless of how much demand there is for it. A good example is housing (or at least housing in locations where people want to live). With the shift from single-income households in the 1950s to two-income households in the 1980s, you would've expected a smaller share of total household income to go to housing, with a greater share left over to be spent on quality of life things like entertainment. Instead what happened is that housing in desirable locations remained scarce (there is only so much real estate). So competing dual-income households bid up home prices, and the second income went almost entirely into paying for the higher home price.
The cost of higher education has gone through the roof because of a toxic combination of (1) socialists' desire to subsidize it to make it more affordable, and (2) capitalists' desire to leave it regulated by market forces. The compromise they came up with was the subsidized student loan. You still had to pay for the school, but you could do so by borrowing money at below normal interest rates.
Unfortunately, college tuitions are one of these goods that remained scarce. Lots of people want to send their kids to an Ivy League school, but those schools only admit a certain number of students each year. So supply was more or less fixed. Consequently, allowing kids to shift their future earnings into the present via loans just increased demand (more of them could afford college). And what happened is what naturally happens any time you have fixed supply and increased demand - people bid up the cost of tuition.
At this point, it's too far gone for a simple fix. But what needs to happen is:
That'l
Rather than the EPA pay to test every model vehicle released every year, it has the car companies test it themselves. Then the EPA tests a random sample to make sure the car companies were being honest. If a car company decides to cheat, they might get away with it for a few years, but probability says the longer they continue to cheat, the less likely they are to continue to get away with it. If Mitsubishi has been doing this for 25 years and never gotten caught, the Japanese government has apparently never bothered checking automakers' claims.
This practice of sampling is used widely in industry as well. Instead of testing every bottle of Coke to make sure it has the right mix of ingredients, you only test about one in 10,000. If a sample turns up out of spec, it costs less to stop production to fix the problem and discard the bad product between the bad sample and the previous good (in-spec) sample, than it would cost to test every single bottle.
The same misconception - that the best solution is to test everything thoroughly - is driving up auto costs in California. Requiring every car to get a smog inspection every year made sense when a lot of cars were failing. But if the inspection cost is $30 and the cost of letting a polluting car operate for an extra year is (say) $900 of environmental damage, then once the pass rate exceeds 97%, the inspections actually become more expensive than the pollution cost. The solution is more expensive than the problem. The government has reduced inspections to once every 2 years in response, but smog inspection has become a multi-billion dollar business so the gas stations and mechanics lobby to keep requiring them more frequently than they're actually needed.
It's not just temperature which leads to more mosquitoes. Southern California has ideal temperatures for mosquito breeding, but almost no mosquitoes. The reason is the dry climate - standing water is extremely rare, meaning there's no place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs. So for mosquito growth, you need both warm temperatures and enough humidity to prevent standing water from evaporating. That's why mosquito control isn't just spraying pesticides, it's eliminating places where standing water can pool (e.g. disposed tires) for about the week mosquito larvae need to grow, and setting up honeypot pools which attract mosquitoes to lay their eggs there but which are poisoned to kill the larvae.
Correct. TFA is making the assumption that the test limits are never supposed to be exceeded, which is a questionable assumption. The EU test is radically unlike typical driving, which unless the EU states otherwise suggests the correct interpretation is that normal operating emissions are supposed to be x times more than test emissions. TFA presents nothing new. It's been widely known within the industry for years that EU testing conditions generated less emissions than normal operation.
This ambiguity was also present in the U.S. tests. After the truck diesel scandal around 1998-2000, the EPA firmly established that the test limits are not supposed to be exceeded during normal operation, and the test was merely sampling certain operating conditions to make sure the vehicles were in compliance. The EPA test however is more representative of typical driving.
Oh, I know a neural net can learn and tweak its responses based on past experiences. The beauty of bluffing is it can totally screw up that learning process
For years, Ty Cobb famously overran 3rd base instead of stopping every time a certain player fielded the ball. That forced the player to throw the ball to third base to force Cobb back. Eventually the player got used to Cobb overrunning third base and his throws to force him back got lazy and slow. Then one day in an important game with the score tied, Ty Cobb overran third base, the player made a lazy throw to third to force him back, and Cobb broke for home and scored the winning run.
Really good players develop an innate sense for when an opponent is bluffing. I can't explain how it works, but I know it does. When I was kid, I had this innate sense for The Price is Right. I could predict with about 95% accuracy when the announcer was going to say the prize was a new car. I have no idea how I did it, but my subconscious was getting some sort of signal from the inflection of his voice or the delay in his speech or something that told my conscious mind that he was going to say a new car. Ty Cobb was also exceptional at this sort of thing. When a teammate once asked him how he was able to hit so well against a certain pitcher who gave everyone else problems, Cobb replied that the pitcher's ears wiggled every time he was about to throw a curve.
This works when your mind is flexible enough to consider all possible inputs, even the seemingly irrelevant ones. It doesn't work with an AI programmed to look at only a limited number of "important" inputs to keep the CPU load down.
Through years of trial and error, Starcraft build orders (the order in which you build units and buildings) have been optimized to get you to a certain build state in the minimum amount of time. Build orders are queued, which means there's no human-induced delay. An AI will have little to no advantage there - it could gain a slight advantage with building placement to minimize unit travel times.
If you've watched any advanced Starcraft tournament games, the end result usually comes down to players' ability to micro while maintaining these build queues (an AI would probably win at those), or to bluffing. That's when you fake out an opponent by showing him a unit or building to make him think you're going for a certain build, but then you go for a different build. Your opponent scouts you, guesses what build you're going for, and modifies his build to counter yours. But you know you've been scouted so you change your build. Then when he's built up his army and encounters you again, he finds you've switched to a different build that his is ineffective against. And since different builds require different buildings and technology trees, it's too late to switch builds. Your opponent has to try to hold on with his inferior build as best as he can until he can get a new tech build up and running, all the while hoping your next tech shift won't counter that.
This is why in Starcraft it's not just important to scout, it's important to know how much of your base your opponent has scouted. You'll see advanced players do all sorts of crazy things like start constructing a building, then when their opponent's scout has left or been killed, they'll destroy the building and construct a completely different one. All the unit strength the AI can muster won't do it any good if the human has bluffed it into building ground combat units, while the human has built up a massive army of air units. And like the early computer chess games, once word gets out that an AI is vulnerable to a certain bluff, people will abuse it over and over.
1) Why does that chart show Apple at 92% and Samsung at 14% of all global smartphone profits?
2) It contradicts the common belief that Apple hardware is better. The 4Q 2014 sales figures pegged Apple's smartphone profit at $18.8 billion, while iPhone sales were 74.5 million. $18.8b / 74.5m = a staggering $252 profit per phone. For anyone who denies an Apple tax exists, there it is right there.
In other words, your $650 iPhone isn't a $650 phone. It's a $400 phone that Apple is selling to you for $650. Meanwhile the other smartphone manufacturers operate with a 2%-5% margin (typical for the computer industry). So when they sell you a $650 smartphone, you're getting $625 worth of hardware. You could argue Apple designs their stuff better so is able to get the same performance out of less money. But the only part they design is the SoC. They buy all the other parts - screen, battery, camera, memory, etc. - from the same suppliers as everyone else.