A person who's in a house talking to another person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy because even though I could bounce a laser off the window from a hidden location and pick up what was being said, that's something that needs a warrant, or at least provable justification. More or less the same level for a muted plane.
We came dangerously close to losing that expectation in 2001. 5-4 Supreme Court decision. It's something I would've expected to be 9-0 or 8-1, or maybe 7-2 at worst. That it came out 5-4 says something about how little weight privacy rights carry in the minds of most Americans.
Don't look for politics - the breakdown was across party lines with both conservative and liberal justices assenting and dissenting. So this isn't something that can be solved by voting one party in or out. This is an issue which needs to be addressed at a more fundamental level. As an immigrant coming from a country where it was taken for granted that the government was eavesdropping in on your phone conversations, I think the problem is that Americans just don't have a sense of the chilling effect that widespread government surveillance has on how you speak and behave. It's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal unless you've experienced it as an oppressive part of your everyday life. I thought it was all a conspiracy theory until my GF got a call from the government about my travel plans - something I had only discussed with her on the phone, indicating they were listening in on our phone conversations.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: [about Data's recent violin concert] Your playing is quite beautiful.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bron-Ken.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Is there nothing of Data in what I'm hearing? You see, you chose the violinist. Heifetz and Bron-Ken have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet... you combined them, successfully.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: I suppose I have learned to be... creative, sir - when necessary.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Mr. Data, I look forward to your next concert.
The DMCA only applies to circumventing encryption for the purpose of violating copyright. The phone is widely misreported in the media as belonging to the shooter. It actually belongs to the San Bernardino County government - it was assigned to the shooter as his work phone. Consequently, the county holds the copyright to everything on the phone (or more precisely since the government cannot hold a copyright, it is not copyrighted). Hence the DMCA doesn't apply.
When they tell you not to use your work phone for personal stuff, this is why - ultimately you don't own the phone, your employer does. Most employers would rather not get into a situation where they forcibly have to repossess a phone, while you refuse on the grounds it contains personal video of you having sex with your SO. So they tell you up-front not to store your personal stuff on a work phone (or laptop or whatever). That way you've been duly notified of the consequences, and it's your own damn fault for making/keeping such materials on the phone.
(And before you start thinking about getting too clever, there's actually a provision in the DMCA which prevents using it to protect yourself for the purpose of violating copyright. So encrypting your emails about illegally copying movies doesn't mean the Copyright Police is violating the DMCA by decrypting your emails. Hollywood was very thorough when they bought this law.)
I've been doing this for about 10 years now. Most of the spam-producers have been small or little-known sites. The two big exceptions are Microsoft and Adobe. Both either sold or lost my email address. With Adobe I suspect it was theft because it only happened once (I started getting spam all at once, and it gradually tapered off after about a year) shortly after they publicly notified me their customer database had been hacked. Microsoft was more continuous, coming as a wave every couple years. The last one was about 3-4 years ago though, so maybe they've stopped.
The flip side is that the vast majority of companies I sign up for or correspond with do seem to abide by their privacy policy and keep your email address private. A bigger problem has been people I email getting malware which steals their address book, or unwittingly agreeing to let a site spam everyone in their address book (e.g. Linkedin). I don't try to spoof my "From" address, so people I send emails to get my real email address. But I arranged my aliases as a double-alias specifically to handle this possibility. So instead of microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com forwarding to myrealemail@mydomain.com, they forward to pointer@mydomain.com. pointer@mydomain.com is what forwards to myrealemail@mydomain.com. If spam sent directly to myrealemail@mydomain.com ever gets bad, I can just retire it, create mynewrealemail@mydomain.com, and change pointer@mydomain.com to forward to mynewrealemail@mydomain.com. I just need to change that one line and all my aliases now forward to my new real email address.
I'm a U.S. citizen. I worked in Canada for a few years. U.S. tax law is crazy. The IRS taxes everything you make regardless of where you make it. Canada tax law is somewhat sane and taxes based on (1) where you earn it, and (2) where you reside (which is why all the Canadians working in the U.S. have to be careful not to spend more than half their time in Canada, lest they become Canadian residents and owe Canadian taxes on their U.S. income).
The net result is double taxation. Canada taxes you because you made the money in Canada and (for the purposes of this story) you're living in Canada. The U.S. taxes you because you're a U.S. citizen. Now, there is a tax treaty between the two countries which lets you take the taxes paid in one country and use it as a tax credit in the other. Since Canadian taxes are higher, you basically pay the Canadian taxes and don't owe U.S. taxes. But the treaty only covers earned income (wages). It doesn't cover unearned income (interest, capital gains, etc). Have an interest-bearing bank account? Double taxed. Sell some of your stock portfolio at a profit? Double taxed. Buy a house, then sell it a few years later at a profit? Double taxed. Get married and have kids who are dual citizens by birth and one of them decides to move back to the U.S. when he's an adult? He'll be double taxed (have to pay U.S.back taxes) on all the unearned income he made while living in Canada from when he was 18 til when he decided to move.
On top of that, you'll experience the joy of having to pay a specialist CPA who is licensed in both countries, because you sure as hell aren't going to be able to figure out how to file your taxes correctly by yourself. I was fortunate to find one who was willing to do it for "only" $500, but my taxes were simple. It's not uncommon for this to cost $1000 or more. (Note: the better employers will help you out with this - either providing a CPA or directing you to one and they'll cover the filing expenses.)
If you're gonna flee to Canada on principle, you're gonna have to go all the way. Apply for Canadian citizenship and renounce your U.S. citizenship.
Internet and Web are capitalized because they refer to one specific internet or web, thus making them proper nouns. The best non-technical example is "mother". If you're talking about mothers in general, it's not capitalized: "A mother's job is never done." If you're talking about one specific mother, it's a proper noun and thus capitalized. "I wanted to have chocolate, but Mother said it would spoil my dinner." (Referring specifically to your mother.)
And "illegal immigrant" is correct. The press has collectively decided to use "undocumented immigrant" to try to legitimize their status (because such immigrants would overwhelmingly vote for the party they favor if granted citizenship). I'm wondering when they will begin to refer to murderers as "unlicensed executioners" and bank robbery as "unauthorized withdrawals."
Didn't read TFA. But your critique sounds like an argument for losing money with each sale, but making it up with volume.
The question isn't the number of orders Tesla has gotten or how strong demand is. It's whether or not Tesla can fill that demand while making a profit. If they end up losing money with each sale, higher sales numbers actually make their finances worse. I mean if Apple offered to sell iPhones for 1 cent each, the demand would be close to 7 billion units. They'd sew up 100% of the market, then promptly go bankrupt. You don't want to invest in a company that does that.
We know Tesla can make a $80,000 car with a 25% profit margin (i.e. manufacturing cost of $60,000). They're jumping from that to a $35,000 car with presumably some profit margin. That's a huge leap - big enough to generate a large amount of uncertainty, which translates into a large amount of risk for the investor. That's the reason for the anti-Tesla articles surrounding the Model 3 - healthy skepticism about whether or not they can pull it off.
The USA Army walked over the iraqi army like it wasn't there. however once the big army battles were done, then the real trouble began. Only idiots didn't see it coming.
Agree with what you say except this part. A bunch of friends and I share a forum, and took a poll before the second Iraq War how long we thought the U.S. would be there. Everyone, including those against the war, estimated 2-5 years. My estimate was the longest - 2 years of actual combat, 8 years of reconstruction. And I only gave that figure because I thought if I said what I really thought (about 20 years), I would become the laughingstock of the forum for the next 5 years.
So no, pretty much everyone didn't see it coming. I think my estimate was more accurate because I'm Korean, and I've seen first-hand what a PITA it is to try to reconstruct a country whose fundamental social structure has been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Someone else has already covered the MEID/IMEI part, so...
Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls, and roaming charges when you have not even left the country.
Phone service in the U.S. was originally like the rest of the world. When you made a long distance call from a landline, the person making the call paid the long distance connection fee of x cents/min. But by the time mobile phones rolled onto the market, most of the U.S. landline market had switched to fixed rate monthly billing. That is, you paid a fixed x dollars each month, and in exchange you could make an unlimited number of long distance calls. This is fundamentally incompatible with charging based on which number you are calling. It's not a "flat rate plan" if at the end of the month you get a hundred surcharges for making calls to mobile phone numbers which cost x cents/min extra.
Also, the U.S. developed cellular phone networks first, and the original costs were exorbitant. Like $1/min or more. So if you were calling a mobile number, the question came down to who is the person really benefiting from the mobile phone - the person calling from a landline, or the person enjoying the freedom and mobility that a mobile phone provides? Obviously it's the latter, so the person who owns the mobile phone paid the original $1/min cost of calls incoming on their mobile phone.
To preserve these billing practices, the phone owner pays for their connection and use. For a flat-rate landline phone, it's a fixed monthly fee and incoming calls are free. For a mobile phone, it was originally $ per min for both incoming and outgoing calls (plus any long distance fees). But lately most mobile plans have switched to a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of minutes each month..
When mobile phones came to the market in the rest of the world, most countries were still on per-minute billing of the person making the phone call, and mobile phone rates had dropped to roughly the same magnitude as long distance rates. So the decision was made to treat mobile phone numbers as a long distance call, and have the caller pay for the extra connection fee.
And roaming within your country happens when your phone carrier's network has poor coverage but a competitor's network has good coverage. If the two have come to a revenue-sharing agreement, your phone can roam onto the competing network and get the better coverage. In a country like the U.S. where a lot of R&D and experimentation of new technologies went on, each carrier put together their own tower network however they saw fit. So certain networks will perform better than others', and companies can cover gaps in each others' failed experiments with good roaming agreements, instead of having to tear down and rebuild their tower network.
Countries where mobile networks rolled out later got the benefit of this experimentation, and could place their cellular towers optimally, so all the carriers may operate using the same towers and there is no need for roaming agreements. But this would not have been possible - you would not have known what the "optimal" spacing and positioning of the towers was - without information gleaned from the experimental networks first put up in the U.S. Obviously from a service standpoint the U.S. would be better off tearing down the experimental towers and putting up new ones optimally spaced. But the cost of doing that is more than the cost of maintaining existing towers and using roaming agreements. Instead what they're doing is "repositioning" towers as newer technologies like LTE roll out - stuff that requires them to replace the tower equipment anyway - they just put it in a new tower.
No, the rest of the world caught up to the U.S. You know that GSM vs CDMA war? CDMA won. GSM is the old tech, CDMA is the new tech.
Most 3G data service on GSM use CDMA or wideband CDMA. CDMA is just vastly superior at allocating bandwidth between users than GSM's original protocol (TDMA). GSM couldn't compete so they were forced to license CDMA and add it to their spec for data services. You know how you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM phones? That's because it has a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. Pure CDMA phones like Verizon/Sprint originally couldn't do this because they only had a single CDMA radio which is used for both voice and data, but not simultaneously.
If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA networks, the data speeds on your GSM phone today would be down near 1 Mbps. We wouldn't have LTE today either - it is very similar to CDMA, using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was needed as a "proof of concept" market test case that this orthogonality stuff really worked when scaled up to about a hundred simultaneous users per cell.
Summary asks to reduce glare, but then describes a problem with brightness. Glare is a hotspot created by a bright light source reflecting off a screen displaying a dark image. Even though coated glass only reflects less than 1% of the light that strikes it, with a sufficiently bright external light, the reflection can be brighter than the image. And you get glare. The easy fix for glare is to orient the screen so you no longer see the reflection, or a matte screen protector which will diffuse the reflection (spread it out so any one part is no longer brighter than the image on the screen).
Insufficient brightness is a different matter. It has to do with the brightness of the the screen relative to the surroundings. Your pupils will contract to restrict light based on the brightness of the surroundings. Unfortunately this will also restrict light coming from the screen. So the only thing you can do is to reduce the brightness of the surroundings. Cupping your hands around the screen to block outside light is one obvious way, if clumsy. A more practical way is to move to an environment where the background is not so bright. Looking down at your phone while you're walking on a white sunlit sidewalk will just make your pupils smaller and the screen harder to see. Walking on dark green grass will allow your pupils to dilate a bit, allowing more light from the screen into your eyes. (This is also why a viewing bright screen in a dark room causes eyestrain - your pupils constantly try to adjust between the bright screen and the dark surroundings. The most comfortable viewing is when the screen and the surroundings are about the same brightness.)
To a lesser extent the problem is also the brightness of your black point. The contrast ratio (ratio of brightest white to darkest black) of your screen is a big factor in legibility. In sunlight, the black point is raised by sunlight bouncing off the black screen. It's not perfectly black, so the black screen basically becomes gray in sunlight. Meanwhile, the white point is still limited by the strength of your backlight (unless you've got a transreflective screen). This reduces the contrast ratio and reduces legibility. The simple fix is to hold the screen in the shade, out of direct sunlight.
One trick that might work is polarized sunglasses. Most LCD screens give off polarized light. Most of the light from the background is unpolarized. Polarized sunglasses will cut the brightness of this unpolarized background light by 50%, but will not appreciably dim the brightness of the LCD screen. The downside is that this will only work in one orientation. On most phones it's portrait mode - in landscape mode the screen becomes completely black when viewed through polarized glasses. Some LCD screens attempt to allow both orientations to be used with polarized glasses by polarizing at 45 degrees. This means polarized glasses will only be most effective if viewing the screen at this 45 degree angle. In landscape or portrait mode, the glasses will allow 70.7% of the screen light through, which is better than the 50% of the background light, but not the optimal 2:1 ratio. (There are some very rare screens which use a quarter wave plate to eliminate the polarization entirely. And AMOLED screens are unpolarized, though I've seen polarized stress lines in some of the screen glass from manufacturing. Basically, get yourself a cheap pair of polarized glasses and try it out on different screens.)
Um, this isn't like a freeway or a library that everyone uses "for free" and you have to set aside new money each year to maintain it. This is a pay-as-you-go public transport system - the people riding it pay for each ride. Theoretically, the maintenance and operations costs scale with number of riders. So as long as you're pricing it correctly, money for maintenance and operations (and hopefully modest improvements) is always there.
Now, if you're deliberately under-pricing it to make the public think it's cheaper than it really is, or you're siphoning off revenue to cover shortfalls elsewhere in your budget, then yeah you're not going to have enough money for maintenance or improvement. If you're under-pricing it to discourage use of cars (which I can totally see happening in the Bay Area not just because it's for all intents and purposes socialist, but because the traffic there is some of the worst in the country), then you should be charging car owners additional registration fees or fuel taxes or parking taxes or even turning some of those freeways into toll roads, and using that money to subsidize your public transportation system.
If you don't have enough money to at the very least maintain a pay-as-you-go system like this, it's because you've made stupid decisions which ignore basic math and accounting. It's a self-correcting problem in the private sector because companies which make those kinds of decisions go bankrupt. Governments which make those kind of decisions need to be voted out and replaced with people who will make better decisions. But the voters need to be able to see past all the CYA smoke the politicians will blow to try to shift the blame elsewhere.
In a normal mostly hands-off (liberterian) state, that's true.
A lot of things change once you mandate publicly funded health care. Now when the idiot is hit by a car at the intersection because he was texting instead of watching for traffic, his medical costs are borne by society instead of by only himself. Society has an interest in reducing overall medical costs. Thus it has a justification to pass laws prohibiting risky behaviors like texting while walking.
(In case you're wondering, I don't consider myself to be for or against private or public health care. I just see them as different ways of doing things. But I have noticed that those for public health care often don't consider the full ramifications of their stance. And FWIW, this isn't a slam against Obamacare. We already had pretty much the same thing for as long as I've been alive. Most states had laws requiring hospital emergency rooms treat patients regardless of ability to pay. So their medical costs were already borne by the public (other patients at the hospital), and could be used to justify laws requiring things like seat belt and motorcycle helmet use)
There's a large psychological component. The more you think about getting/being sick, the greater your chances of getting sick. Every time I've gotten seasick while deep sea fishing, it went away if we started catching lots of fish and my mind got distracted from being seasick.
For that reason, I don't say anything to discourage the people who use things like those acupressure wrist beads to ward off seasickness. If the peace of mind they get from believing those things help keeps their mind off seasickness, they're less likely to get sick.
Contrary to the anti-Samsung rhetoric among the press about the "uselessness" of curved displays, curves help stiffen and strengthen an otherwise flat structure by converting stresses along the weak axis (normal to the screen - its thinnest dimension) into shear stresses which allow a stronger (thicker) axis to take some of that stress. Take a sheet of paper and stand it on its end. It's not even strong enough to support its own weight. Now curve that paper by rolling it into a cylinder. It's now strong enough to support itself plus your phone. With a flat sheet of paper, a tiny force against its thinnest dimension would cause it to flop over. When you curve the paper, this same force ends up partially redirected into compressing and stretching the length of the paper in the part of the curve that runs in the same direction as the force. It's why the body panels on your car are curved. If they left the sheet metal flat, just leaning on the car would permanently deform it.
If you look at the Samsung Edge display, imagine you're sitting on the phone so the top and bottom are bent towards each other. With a flat display, the bending moment is around the thinnest axis of the display so the display offers almost no resistance to such bending. But with a curved display, such bending moments are now partially acting along the thicker glass of the curved edge. To bend the display, you literally have to compress that glass. Glass is really strong in compression. (It's weak in tension, but that's compensated for by tempering. Tempered glass is basically pre-compressed, so that even a tensile force just reduces the amount of compression instead of becoming a true tensile load.)
Basically the press is so enamored with Apple, they ridicule anything different despite it taking advantage of well-known principles of physics and engineering design. (Personally I think a better long-term solution is making phones more flexible, relying on disposable clear plastic display covers to ward off scratches. But Samsung is complying with the current market reality where Apple has convinced the masses who don't know anything about structural engineering that a stiff metal phone is best, by designing an even stiffer phone.)
I think by law, that whenever this happens, the company 's owner should have their house destroyed - along with all of their personal photos, keepsakes and see if they think it is a big deal.
What if the company owner implements an official policy is to triple check all paperwork, house numbers, road signs, knock on the neighbors' doors to confirm they've got the right street. And the error is made because an employee is lazy and decides to skip some of these checks?
While it's fun to fantasize about revenge which satisfies your sense of Schadenfreude, the reality is that costs aren't absorbed, they're merely shifted. If you compound the cost of an erroneous demolition by forcing another unnecessary demolition, the cost of that second demolition will just be priced into the original demolitions. Basically, the people who need to have a home demolished have to pay for the penalty you're trying to foist upon the demolition company owner.
They abandoned the political tradition required to make this country function: Argue in chambers and then go to dinner together afterwards. Negotiate and compromise. They just don't do that any more since GW Bush Jr's 1st term. And they became the party of "NO" in 2009.
This simply isn't true. The Washington Post keeps a database of votes by Congresscritters and Senators. If you click on the right-most column ("Party"), it sorts each member by how often they voted with their own party.
109th Congress when R held the House (2005-2007). R were more likely to vote with their party in the 109th Congress, but so were a lot of D. And if you look at the bottom (least likely to vote with their party) it's a scattered mix of R and D.
110th Congress when D held the House (2007-2009). Now look at the 110th Congress when D took back the House. With the exception of one R, the entire top half of people who voted mostly with their party is D. If you look at the bottom, it's mostly R who voted against their party. In other words, Repubicans in the 110th Congress were more cooperative than Democrats in the 109th Congress.
The 111th Congress (D held, 2009-2011) is more of the same. An almost solid block of D in the top half of most likely to vote with their party. Republicans were more likely to vote with the Democrat party in 2007-2011 than Democrats were likely to vote with the Republican party in 2005-2007. The exact opposite of the obstructionist claim.
Same thing in the Senate. In the 109th Senate when R held the majority, there's no real pattern to who voted most with their party, But in the 110th Senate when D held the majority, it is by far D who voted most with their party and R who voted most against theirs. Same pattern holds for the 111th Senate.
It's the Democrats who were uncompromising in 2007-2011. The Republicans were more cooperative in those years than Democrats were in 2005-2007. The general trend is that the party in power tends to have more "faithful" members. But this is much more true when D is in power than when R is in power.
A bomb is probably the worst way to deliver this type of attack, because it immediately alerts everyone that an attack has taken place. The longer the contamination is allowed to spread without anyone knowing an "attack" is going on, the greater the damage and cleanup cost. In that respect I'm thankful for Hollywood and the news media's ignorance because they're sending potential terrorists barking up the wrong tree.
Everyone is getting all in a tizzy about protecting our nuclear reactors. It's our hospitals we should be worried about. If someone were to steal a radiation treatment source and
scatter it around a city unbeknownst to its residents, the economic cost of cleanup would be massive. Easily hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions. Brazil only had to pay about $20 million in cleanup costs because the woman who brought the material to the hospital and to the attention of the authorities just by pure luck happened to transport it in a plastic bag. No plastic bag and the bus she rode on, all the people in it and all the places they went, the hospital, and the people visiting the hospital and everywhere they went would've been contaminated.
You ever wonder why screensavers are called that? Because they were invented to help prevent burn-in on CRTs (the phosphors would degrade with use over time), thus saving the screen. Seriously, this problem was solved decades ago. The only usage where you need to watch out for burn-in is for always-on displays, like airport flight schedule displays.
On a phone or tablet, you can help by using the device in different orientations or upside down - the software doesn't care, and only the position of the physical volume buttons changes (the screen off button doesn't really matter with AMOLED since it doesn't have a backlight to turn off). Heck, I grab my phone upside down half the time anyway.
I much prefer this little nuisance over the poor blacks and lousy color saturation (sRGB was a huge step backwards from the NTSC color space that was used in the CRT days) everyone seems to have gotten used to with LCDs.
FYI, the Macbooks are made by Quanta, a Taiwanese ODM which uses manufacturing factories in China. Nearly all laptops are made by ODMs - they're like OEMs except they also design the product. Quanta also happens to make most of HP's laptops. The entire industry is very hush hush about this. The reality is the name brand of the laptop doesn't really tell you much except how good the aftermarket service will be.
The top of the line Sony Vaio laptops (Z series) used to be designed and manufactured in Japan (with later manufacturing in Mexico) instead of using an ODM, but then Sony sold the business and I don't know what the new owners are doing. The IBM Thinkpads were designed and made in the U.S. at one point. Dunno how that has changed with the sale to Lenovo. Those were the only two laptop lines I know weren't made by an ODM, and my info is now out of date.
It was absurd paranoia back then because 30 years ago we were in a Cold War against an opponent notorious for limiting its citizens' freedoms and spying on everything they were doing. Our leaders had to constantly portray themselves as the polar opposite of that, or risk being voted out of office. Even after the Cold War ended, that mentality lingered.
Then 15 years ago, 9/11 happened. And suddenly it became "important" for the government to know everything you were doing and saying in private, because Terrorism! It's pretty sad when you start to think the Cold War days were better.
If they were dumping their petro stocks for financial reasons, the time to drop them would've been back when oil began falling from $100/bbl.
Selling off stocks after they've seemingly hit their nadir is a common mistake rookie investors make. When a stock bottoms out, that's actually the best time to buy them. So the fact that they're selling it now actually lends credence to the backstory that they're doing it for environmental reasons. Only way your theory would fit is if they thought oil was going to go even lower than the current $40/bbl. The inflation-adjusted 70-year average price of oil is $42/bbl.
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We came dangerously close to losing that expectation in 2001. 5-4 Supreme Court decision. It's something I would've expected to be 9-0 or 8-1, or maybe 7-2 at worst. That it came out 5-4 says something about how little weight privacy rights carry in the minds of most Americans.
Don't look for politics - the breakdown was across party lines with both conservative and liberal justices assenting and dissenting. So this isn't something that can be solved by voting one party in or out. This is an issue which needs to be addressed at a more fundamental level. As an immigrant coming from a country where it was taken for granted that the government was eavesdropping in on your phone conversations, I think the problem is that Americans just don't have a sense of the chilling effect that widespread government surveillance has on how you speak and behave. It's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal unless you've experienced it as an oppressive part of your everyday life. I thought it was all a conspiracy theory until my GF got a call from the government about my travel plans - something I had only discussed with her on the phone, indicating they were listening in on our phone conversations.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: [about Data's recent violin concert] Your playing is quite beautiful.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bron-Ken.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Is there nothing of Data in what I'm hearing? You see, you chose the violinist. Heifetz and Bron-Ken have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet... you combined them, successfully.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: I suppose I have learned to be... creative, sir - when necessary.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Mr. Data, I look forward to your next concert.
The DMCA only applies to circumventing encryption for the purpose of violating copyright. The phone is widely misreported in the media as belonging to the shooter. It actually belongs to the San Bernardino County government - it was assigned to the shooter as his work phone. Consequently, the county holds the copyright to everything on the phone (or more precisely since the government cannot hold a copyright, it is not copyrighted). Hence the DMCA doesn't apply.
When they tell you not to use your work phone for personal stuff, this is why - ultimately you don't own the phone, your employer does. Most employers would rather not get into a situation where they forcibly have to repossess a phone, while you refuse on the grounds it contains personal video of you having sex with your SO. So they tell you up-front not to store your personal stuff on a work phone (or laptop or whatever). That way you've been duly notified of the consequences, and it's your own damn fault for making/keeping such materials on the phone.
(And before you start thinking about getting too clever, there's actually a provision in the DMCA which prevents using it to protect yourself for the purpose of violating copyright. So encrypting your emails about illegally copying movies doesn't mean the Copyright Police is violating the DMCA by decrypting your emails. Hollywood was very thorough when they bought this law.)
I've been doing this for about 10 years now. Most of the spam-producers have been small or little-known sites. The two big exceptions are Microsoft and Adobe. Both either sold or lost my email address. With Adobe I suspect it was theft because it only happened once (I started getting spam all at once, and it gradually tapered off after about a year) shortly after they publicly notified me their customer database had been hacked. Microsoft was more continuous, coming as a wave every couple years. The last one was about 3-4 years ago though, so maybe they've stopped.
The flip side is that the vast majority of companies I sign up for or correspond with do seem to abide by their privacy policy and keep your email address private. A bigger problem has been people I email getting malware which steals their address book, or unwittingly agreeing to let a site spam everyone in their address book (e.g. Linkedin). I don't try to spoof my "From" address, so people I send emails to get my real email address. But I arranged my aliases as a double-alias specifically to handle this possibility. So instead of microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com forwarding to myrealemail@mydomain.com, they forward to pointer@mydomain.com. pointer@mydomain.com is what forwards to myrealemail@mydomain.com. If spam sent directly to myrealemail@mydomain.com ever gets bad, I can just retire it, create mynewrealemail@mydomain.com, and change pointer@mydomain.com to forward to mynewrealemail@mydomain.com. I just need to change that one line and all my aliases now forward to my new real email address.
I'm a U.S. citizen. I worked in Canada for a few years. U.S. tax law is crazy. The IRS taxes everything you make regardless of where you make it. Canada tax law is somewhat sane and taxes based on (1) where you earn it, and (2) where you reside (which is why all the Canadians working in the U.S. have to be careful not to spend more than half their time in Canada, lest they become Canadian residents and owe Canadian taxes on their U.S. income).
The net result is double taxation. Canada taxes you because you made the money in Canada and (for the purposes of this story) you're living in Canada. The U.S. taxes you because you're a U.S. citizen. Now, there is a tax treaty between the two countries which lets you take the taxes paid in one country and use it as a tax credit in the other. Since Canadian taxes are higher, you basically pay the Canadian taxes and don't owe U.S. taxes. But the treaty only covers earned income (wages). It doesn't cover unearned income (interest, capital gains, etc). Have an interest-bearing bank account? Double taxed. Sell some of your stock portfolio at a profit? Double taxed. Buy a house, then sell it a few years later at a profit? Double taxed. Get married and have kids who are dual citizens by birth and one of them decides to move back to the U.S. when he's an adult? He'll be double taxed (have to pay U.S.back taxes) on all the unearned income he made while living in Canada from when he was 18 til when he decided to move.
On top of that, you'll experience the joy of having to pay a specialist CPA who is licensed in both countries, because you sure as hell aren't going to be able to figure out how to file your taxes correctly by yourself. I was fortunate to find one who was willing to do it for "only" $500, but my taxes were simple. It's not uncommon for this to cost $1000 or more. (Note: the better employers will help you out with this - either providing a CPA or directing you to one and they'll cover the filing expenses.)
If you're gonna flee to Canada on principle, you're gonna have to go all the way. Apply for Canadian citizenship and renounce your U.S. citizenship.
Kinda ironic that this article comes just before an article on the spread of ignorance.
Internet and Web are capitalized because they refer to one specific internet or web, thus making them proper nouns. The best non-technical example is "mother". If you're talking about mothers in general, it's not capitalized: "A mother's job is never done." If you're talking about one specific mother, it's a proper noun and thus capitalized. "I wanted to have chocolate, but Mother said it would spoil my dinner." (Referring specifically to your mother.)
And "illegal immigrant" is correct. The press has collectively decided to use "undocumented immigrant" to try to legitimize their status (because such immigrants would overwhelmingly vote for the party they favor if granted citizenship). I'm wondering when they will begin to refer to murderers as "unlicensed executioners" and bank robbery as "unauthorized withdrawals."
Didn't read TFA. But your critique sounds like an argument for losing money with each sale, but making it up with volume.
The question isn't the number of orders Tesla has gotten or how strong demand is. It's whether or not Tesla can fill that demand while making a profit. If they end up losing money with each sale, higher sales numbers actually make their finances worse. I mean if Apple offered to sell iPhones for 1 cent each, the demand would be close to 7 billion units. They'd sew up 100% of the market, then promptly go bankrupt. You don't want to invest in a company that does that.
We know Tesla can make a $80,000 car with a 25% profit margin (i.e. manufacturing cost of $60,000). They're jumping from that to a $35,000 car with presumably some profit margin. That's a huge leap - big enough to generate a large amount of uncertainty, which translates into a large amount of risk for the investor. That's the reason for the anti-Tesla articles surrounding the Model 3 - healthy skepticism about whether or not they can pull it off.
Agree with what you say except this part. A bunch of friends and I share a forum, and took a poll before the second Iraq War how long we thought the U.S. would be there. Everyone, including those against the war, estimated 2-5 years. My estimate was the longest - 2 years of actual combat, 8 years of reconstruction. And I only gave that figure because I thought if I said what I really thought (about 20 years), I would become the laughingstock of the forum for the next 5 years.
So no, pretty much everyone didn't see it coming. I think my estimate was more accurate because I'm Korean, and I've seen first-hand what a PITA it is to try to reconstruct a country whose fundamental social structure has been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Phone service in the U.S. was originally like the rest of the world. When you made a long distance call from a landline, the person making the call paid the long distance connection fee of x cents/min. But by the time mobile phones rolled onto the market, most of the U.S. landline market had switched to fixed rate monthly billing. That is, you paid a fixed x dollars each month, and in exchange you could make an unlimited number of long distance calls. This is fundamentally incompatible with charging based on which number you are calling. It's not a "flat rate plan" if at the end of the month you get a hundred surcharges for making calls to mobile phone numbers which cost x cents/min extra.
Also, the U.S. developed cellular phone networks first, and the original costs were exorbitant. Like $1/min or more. So if you were calling a mobile number, the question came down to who is the person really benefiting from the mobile phone - the person calling from a landline, or the person enjoying the freedom and mobility that a mobile phone provides? Obviously it's the latter, so the person who owns the mobile phone paid the original $1/min cost of calls incoming on their mobile phone.
To preserve these billing practices, the phone owner pays for their connection and use. For a flat-rate landline phone, it's a fixed monthly fee and incoming calls are free. For a mobile phone, it was originally $ per min for both incoming and outgoing calls (plus any long distance fees). But lately most mobile plans have switched to a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of minutes each month..
When mobile phones came to the market in the rest of the world, most countries were still on per-minute billing of the person making the phone call, and mobile phone rates had dropped to roughly the same magnitude as long distance rates. So the decision was made to treat mobile phone numbers as a long distance call, and have the caller pay for the extra connection fee.
And roaming within your country happens when your phone carrier's network has poor coverage but a competitor's network has good coverage. If the two have come to a revenue-sharing agreement, your phone can roam onto the competing network and get the better coverage. In a country like the U.S. where a lot of R&D and experimentation of new technologies went on, each carrier put together their own tower network however they saw fit. So certain networks will perform better than others', and companies can cover gaps in each others' failed experiments with good roaming agreements, instead of having to tear down and rebuild their tower network.
Countries where mobile networks rolled out later got the benefit of this experimentation, and could place their cellular towers optimally, so all the carriers may operate using the same towers and there is no need for roaming agreements. But this would not have been possible - you would not have known what the "optimal" spacing and positioning of the towers was - without information gleaned from the experimental networks first put up in the U.S. Obviously from a service standpoint the U.S. would be better off tearing down the experimental towers and putting up new ones optimally spaced. But the cost of doing that is more than the cost of maintaining existing towers and using roaming agreements. Instead what they're doing is "repositioning" towers as newer technologies like LTE roll out - stuff that requires them to replace the tower equipment anyway - they just put it in a new tower.
No, the rest of the world caught up to the U.S. You know that GSM vs CDMA war? CDMA won. GSM is the old tech, CDMA is the new tech.
Most 3G data service on GSM use CDMA or wideband CDMA. CDMA is just vastly superior at allocating bandwidth between users than GSM's original protocol (TDMA). GSM couldn't compete so they were forced to license CDMA and add it to their spec for data services. You know how you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM phones? That's because it has a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. Pure CDMA phones like Verizon/Sprint originally couldn't do this because they only had a single CDMA radio which is used for both voice and data, but not simultaneously.
If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA networks, the data speeds on your GSM phone today would be down near 1 Mbps. We wouldn't have LTE today either - it is very similar to CDMA, using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was needed as a "proof of concept" market test case that this orthogonality stuff really worked when scaled up to about a hundred simultaneous users per cell.
Summary asks to reduce glare, but then describes a problem with brightness. Glare is a hotspot created by a bright light source reflecting off a screen displaying a dark image. Even though coated glass only reflects less than 1% of the light that strikes it, with a sufficiently bright external light, the reflection can be brighter than the image. And you get glare. The easy fix for glare is to orient the screen so you no longer see the reflection, or a matte screen protector which will diffuse the reflection (spread it out so any one part is no longer brighter than the image on the screen).
Insufficient brightness is a different matter. It has to do with the brightness of the the screen relative to the surroundings. Your pupils will contract to restrict light based on the brightness of the surroundings. Unfortunately this will also restrict light coming from the screen. So the only thing you can do is to reduce the brightness of the surroundings. Cupping your hands around the screen to block outside light is one obvious way, if clumsy. A more practical way is to move to an environment where the background is not so bright. Looking down at your phone while you're walking on a white sunlit sidewalk will just make your pupils smaller and the screen harder to see. Walking on dark green grass will allow your pupils to dilate a bit, allowing more light from the screen into your eyes. (This is also why a viewing bright screen in a dark room causes eyestrain - your pupils constantly try to adjust between the bright screen and the dark surroundings. The most comfortable viewing is when the screen and the surroundings are about the same brightness.)
To a lesser extent the problem is also the brightness of your black point. The contrast ratio (ratio of brightest white to darkest black) of your screen is a big factor in legibility. In sunlight, the black point is raised by sunlight bouncing off the black screen. It's not perfectly black, so the black screen basically becomes gray in sunlight. Meanwhile, the white point is still limited by the strength of your backlight (unless you've got a transreflective screen). This reduces the contrast ratio and reduces legibility. The simple fix is to hold the screen in the shade, out of direct sunlight.
One trick that might work is polarized sunglasses. Most LCD screens give off polarized light. Most of the light from the background is unpolarized. Polarized sunglasses will cut the brightness of this unpolarized background light by 50%, but will not appreciably dim the brightness of the LCD screen. The downside is that this will only work in one orientation. On most phones it's portrait mode - in landscape mode the screen becomes completely black when viewed through polarized glasses. Some LCD screens attempt to allow both orientations to be used with polarized glasses by polarizing at 45 degrees. This means polarized glasses will only be most effective if viewing the screen at this 45 degree angle. In landscape or portrait mode, the glasses will allow 70.7% of the screen light through, which is better than the 50% of the background light, but not the optimal 2:1 ratio. (There are some very rare screens which use a quarter wave plate to eliminate the polarization entirely. And AMOLED screens are unpolarized, though I've seen polarized stress lines in some of the screen glass from manufacturing. Basically, get yourself a cheap pair of polarized glasses and try it out on different screens.)
Um, this isn't like a freeway or a library that everyone uses "for free" and you have to set aside new money each year to maintain it. This is a pay-as-you-go public transport system - the people riding it pay for each ride. Theoretically, the maintenance and operations costs scale with number of riders. So as long as you're pricing it correctly, money for maintenance and operations (and hopefully modest improvements) is always there.
Now, if you're deliberately under-pricing it to make the public think it's cheaper than it really is, or you're siphoning off revenue to cover shortfalls elsewhere in your budget, then yeah you're not going to have enough money for maintenance or improvement. If you're under-pricing it to discourage use of cars (which I can totally see happening in the Bay Area not just because it's for all intents and purposes socialist, but because the traffic there is some of the worst in the country), then you should be charging car owners additional registration fees or fuel taxes or parking taxes or even turning some of those freeways into toll roads, and using that money to subsidize your public transportation system.
If you don't have enough money to at the very least maintain a pay-as-you-go system like this, it's because you've made stupid decisions which ignore basic math and accounting. It's a self-correcting problem in the private sector because companies which make those kinds of decisions go bankrupt. Governments which make those kind of decisions need to be voted out and replaced with people who will make better decisions. But the voters need to be able to see past all the CYA smoke the politicians will blow to try to shift the blame elsewhere.
In a normal mostly hands-off (liberterian) state, that's true.
A lot of things change once you mandate publicly funded health care. Now when the idiot is hit by a car at the intersection because he was texting instead of watching for traffic, his medical costs are borne by society instead of by only himself. Society has an interest in reducing overall medical costs. Thus it has a justification to pass laws prohibiting risky behaviors like texting while walking.
(In case you're wondering, I don't consider myself to be for or against private or public health care. I just see them as different ways of doing things. But I have noticed that those for public health care often don't consider the full ramifications of their stance. And FWIW, this isn't a slam against Obamacare. We already had pretty much the same thing for as long as I've been alive. Most states had laws requiring hospital emergency rooms treat patients regardless of ability to pay. So their medical costs were already borne by the public (other patients at the hospital), and could be used to justify laws requiring things like seat belt and motorcycle helmet use)
There's a large psychological component. The more you think about getting/being sick, the greater your chances of getting sick. Every time I've gotten seasick while deep sea fishing, it went away if we started catching lots of fish and my mind got distracted from being seasick.
For that reason, I don't say anything to discourage the people who use things like those acupressure wrist beads to ward off seasickness. If the peace of mind they get from believing those things help keeps their mind off seasickness, they're less likely to get sick.
Contrary to the anti-Samsung rhetoric among the press about the "uselessness" of curved displays, curves help stiffen and strengthen an otherwise flat structure by converting stresses along the weak axis (normal to the screen - its thinnest dimension) into shear stresses which allow a stronger (thicker) axis to take some of that stress. Take a sheet of paper and stand it on its end. It's not even strong enough to support its own weight. Now curve that paper by rolling it into a cylinder. It's now strong enough to support itself plus your phone. With a flat sheet of paper, a tiny force against its thinnest dimension would cause it to flop over. When you curve the paper, this same force ends up partially redirected into compressing and stretching the length of the paper in the part of the curve that runs in the same direction as the force. It's why the body panels on your car are curved. If they left the sheet metal flat, just leaning on the car would permanently deform it.
If you look at the Samsung Edge display, imagine you're sitting on the phone so the top and bottom are bent towards each other. With a flat display, the bending moment is around the thinnest axis of the display so the display offers almost no resistance to such bending. But with a curved display, such bending moments are now partially acting along the thicker glass of the curved edge. To bend the display, you literally have to compress that glass. Glass is really strong in compression. (It's weak in tension, but that's compensated for by tempering. Tempered glass is basically pre-compressed, so that even a tensile force just reduces the amount of compression instead of becoming a true tensile load.)
Basically the press is so enamored with Apple, they ridicule anything different despite it taking advantage of well-known principles of physics and engineering design. (Personally I think a better long-term solution is making phones more flexible, relying on disposable clear plastic display covers to ward off scratches. But Samsung is complying with the current market reality where Apple has convinced the masses who don't know anything about structural engineering that a stiff metal phone is best, by designing an even stiffer phone.)
Reminds me of the arguments we had about green vs. amber vs. white monitors back in the 1980s.
Yeah, our screen tech was so bad back then our displays only had one color. Now get off my lawn.
What if the company owner implements an official policy is to triple check all paperwork, house numbers, road signs, knock on the neighbors' doors to confirm they've got the right street. And the error is made because an employee is lazy and decides to skip some of these checks?
While it's fun to fantasize about revenge which satisfies your sense of Schadenfreude, the reality is that costs aren't absorbed, they're merely shifted. If you compound the cost of an erroneous demolition by forcing another unnecessary demolition, the cost of that second demolition will just be priced into the original demolitions. Basically, the people who need to have a home demolished have to pay for the penalty you're trying to foist upon the demolition company owner.
I always wondered when someone would use the webcam to create a "chrome" desktop icon which reflected like real chrome.
This simply isn't true. The Washington Post keeps a database of votes by Congresscritters and Senators. If you click on the right-most column ("Party"), it sorts each member by how often they voted with their own party.
109th Congress when R held the House (2005-2007). R were more likely to vote with their party in the 109th Congress, but so were a lot of D. And if you look at the bottom (least likely to vote with their party) it's a scattered mix of R and D.
110th Congress when D held the House (2007-2009). Now look at the 110th Congress when D took back the House. With the exception of one R, the entire top half of people who voted mostly with their party is D. If you look at the bottom, it's mostly R who voted against their party. In other words, Repubicans in the 110th Congress were more cooperative than Democrats in the 109th Congress.
The 111th Congress (D held, 2009-2011) is more of the same. An almost solid block of D in the top half of most likely to vote with their party. Republicans were more likely to vote with the Democrat party in 2007-2011 than Democrats were likely to vote with the Republican party in 2005-2007. The exact opposite of the obstructionist claim.
Same thing in the Senate. In the 109th Senate when R held the majority, there's no real pattern to who voted most with their party, But in the 110th Senate when D held the majority, it is by far D who voted most with their party and R who voted most against theirs. Same pattern holds for the 111th Senate.
It's the Democrats who were uncompromising in 2007-2011. The Republicans were more cooperative in those years than Democrats were in 2005-2007. The general trend is that the party in power tends to have more "faithful" members. But this is much more true when D is in power than when R is in power.
A bomb is probably the worst way to deliver this type of attack, because it immediately alerts everyone that an attack has taken place. The longer the contamination is allowed to spread without anyone knowing an "attack" is going on, the greater the damage and cleanup cost. In that respect I'm thankful for Hollywood and the news media's ignorance because they're sending potential terrorists barking up the wrong tree.
Everyone is getting all in a tizzy about protecting our nuclear reactors. It's our hospitals we should be worried about. If someone were to steal a radiation treatment source and scatter it around a city unbeknownst to its residents, the economic cost of cleanup would be massive. Easily hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions. Brazil only had to pay about $20 million in cleanup costs because the woman who brought the material to the hospital and to the attention of the authorities just by pure luck happened to transport it in a plastic bag. No plastic bag and the bus she rode on, all the people in it and all the places they went, the hospital, and the people visiting the hospital and everywhere they went would've been contaminated.
You ever wonder why screensavers are called that? Because they were invented to help prevent burn-in on CRTs (the phosphors would degrade with use over time), thus saving the screen. Seriously, this problem was solved decades ago. The only usage where you need to watch out for burn-in is for always-on displays, like airport flight schedule displays.
On a phone or tablet, you can help by using the device in different orientations or upside down - the software doesn't care, and only the position of the physical volume buttons changes (the screen off button doesn't really matter with AMOLED since it doesn't have a backlight to turn off). Heck, I grab my phone upside down half the time anyway.
I much prefer this little nuisance over the poor blacks and lousy color saturation (sRGB was a huge step backwards from the NTSC color space that was used in the CRT days) everyone seems to have gotten used to with LCDs.
FYI, the Macbooks are made by Quanta, a Taiwanese ODM which uses manufacturing factories in China. Nearly all laptops are made by ODMs - they're like OEMs except they also design the product. Quanta also happens to make most of HP's laptops. The entire industry is very hush hush about this. The reality is the name brand of the laptop doesn't really tell you much except how good the aftermarket service will be.
The top of the line Sony Vaio laptops (Z series) used to be designed and manufactured in Japan (with later manufacturing in Mexico) instead of using an ODM, but then Sony sold the business and I don't know what the new owners are doing. The IBM Thinkpads were designed and made in the U.S. at one point. Dunno how that has changed with the sale to Lenovo. Those were the only two laptop lines I know weren't made by an ODM, and my info is now out of date.
It was absurd paranoia back then because 30 years ago we were in a Cold War against an opponent notorious for limiting its citizens' freedoms and spying on everything they were doing. Our leaders had to constantly portray themselves as the polar opposite of that, or risk being voted out of office. Even after the Cold War ended, that mentality lingered.
Then 15 years ago, 9/11 happened. And suddenly it became "important" for the government to know everything you were doing and saying in private, because Terrorism! It's pretty sad when you start to think the Cold War days were better.
If they were dumping their petro stocks for financial reasons, the time to drop them would've been back when oil began falling from $100/bbl.
Selling off stocks after they've seemingly hit their nadir is a common mistake rookie investors make. When a stock bottoms out, that's actually the best time to buy them. So the fact that they're selling it now actually lends credence to the backstory that they're doing it for environmental reasons. Only way your theory would fit is if they thought oil was going to go even lower than the current $40/bbl. The inflation-adjusted 70-year average price of oil is $42/bbl.