You don't want that. The DMCA prevents bypassing encryption to violate copyright. Since the phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government, the copyright for whatever is stored on there belongs to them. So there's no copyright violation. (Or more precisely, since they're a government agency, there is no copyright. Whatever they recover from the phone could be obtained by anyone with a FOIA request.)
If you argue it's somehow violating Apple's copyright, you're essentially saying Apple holds the copyright for everything stored on your iPhone. That is a precedent, much, much worse than what the FBI is trying to do. Basically you'd be saying the copyright for everything you're storing on Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. belongs to those respective companies instead of to you.
When you say renting, the term is typically associated with paying someone $x/mo so you can live in an apartment, or drive one pre-selected car..
With these music and movie streaming services, it's like paying someone $x/mo so you can live in any apartment or drive any car. Use the same one all month, or change to a different apartment/car each day if you want. Even the new model that just completed construction and became available yesterday.
Heck, if there were a similar service for cars, I daresay most people would rent instead of buying a car. Use a small economy car for your solo daily commute, a bigger car for when the wife and kids decide you should go to a restaurant for dinner, a big minivan or RV for your annual week-long vacation. The conflicting constraints of being able to afford only one or two cars, while needing different size cars for different purposes leads to a lot of inefficiency.
What color is the sky on your planet? A peer to peer system with all peers being equal? Never been true in practice since the internet was founded.
It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware. (Well, the email was usually provided by your work or school, but stuff for the web was your own responsibility.)
But people are lazy and cheap. When someone offered to do all that setup for them, and especially when someone offered to pay for it for them, then flocked to that "service" and uploaded all their content there. GeoCities, MySpace, Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, etc. They all make it easier to put your content on the web, but you give up direct control and the availability of your content is subject to the whims of those companies and their policies.
Ok Neitsche, calm down. Sounds like you were a young idealist and you've grown up and figured out that the world is a touch more complicated than you hoped it would be.
No, he's right. We fought this fight in the 1980s and 1990s and won. CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, AOL, heck even Microsoft (MSN was originally their attempt at a paid online dialup service, a joint effort with NBC, hence MSNBC) tried to make the online world a walled garden where you paid them for access and they controlled all content you could access "online." BBSes and eventually the Internet allowed you to share your personal content without any corporate oversight - you controlled access to and the availability of your own stuff. It didn't matter if nobody was coming to see it, as long as you paid to keep the hardware running and the Internet connection up, it was still available. This is why Windows didn't get a TCP/IP stack until Windows 95. Gates tried to dissuade people from using the Internet because it was a competitor to MSN. You had to be a bit of a hacker and get Trumpet Winsock installed onto Windows 3.x (wasn't a simple click installer) to make it able to connect to the Internet. Until demand became overwhelming and he had to make it easy to access the Internet with Windows or risk people flocking to a different OS.
But the laziness and cheapness of people in the 2000s and 2010s have allowed that control to creep back into the hands of these large corporations. They got their walled gardens back, they just operate on top of the Internet instead of in competition with it.
I pay a couple hundred bucks a year for a reseller's account at a web hosting service, and give free server and website space to my friends and relatives who ask for it. I guide them through registering their own domain and setting up their own website and installing their own web packages to host their own content (the web host makes it pretty easy). Once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard. But it's not as easy as typing a URL into your web browser, logging into your account at that website, and clicking the "upload" button. The masses got to choose between freedom and easy, and they picked easy.
Manufacturing industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Come up with a fix and issue a recall at your expense to implement your fix in every product out there that you sold."
Toy industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Pull it off the market. Have the people who bought it return it, and give them their money back."
Software industry: "Our product is dangerous. I know! Let's fix it, but only put the fix in our latest version to force people to upgrade and pay us more money." Government says "Great! We'd like to buy a million copies of the new version."
Given Microsoft's history with free security updates, I thought they understood the difference between a bug fix and a feature upgrade. But between this and rolling out unwanted adware and spyware as "important updates" I guess not.
You don't need a super-accurate clock. All you need is a timer with good resolution on the car, and a keyfob which is programmed to always take the same amount of time to reply to a query. The car can then measure the elapsed time between when it sends the challenge and when it receives the response. Subtract the time the keyfob spends generating an (encrypted) reply, and you get the travel time for the radio signal. That tells you how far the keyfob is from the car. The keyfob doesn't even need a clock.
Just get one of the RFID-blocking pouches that's big enough to fit your key fob. Easy enough to test that it works. Or if you're into the classics, build one yourself out of tin foil.
I'm curious though why the press seems to have latched onto the idea of putting it in the freezer, when the refrigerator would work just as well. So would a metal toolbox.
I also wonder why they couldn't have some means of shutting off the radio in the keyfob so it didn't produce a signal that could be relayed to the car.
Because people are lazy and don't want to turn their wireless key off. They want it to just work without any user interaction. Well, this is what happens when you remove the user interaction. "It just works."
How NASA came up with the 1 loss per 100,000 figure is a great lesson in misapplied statistics. Most of that risk was due to O-ring failure. Mating the segments of the SRBs was a difficult task, and inspection of the SRBs after test firings showed that something like 1 in 50 O-rings sealing the joint was failing (burning through). This was correctly deemed unacceptable. NASA's "solution" was to put in 3 O-rings at each joint. That triple redundancy meant that the chance of a complete burn-through (failure of all three O-rings) was 1 in 50*50*50 = 1 in 125,000. Presto! You've taken a system with unacceptably high risk, and through the clever use of statistics turned it into something reliable.
Unfortunately, that math only works when the failures are independent events. When a common event compromises all three O-rings - like cold weather - they all fail together and your redundancy offers no additional protection.
The same thing happened at Fukushima. They knew the nuclear plant would need diesel generators for backup power in an emergency. Diesel generators can be finicky to start, especially if they haven't been usd much for years. So they added redundancy by installing multiple generators - 2 per reactor, plus a switching station which would allow them to shunt power from any generator to any reactor. 12 diesel generators in all for the plant.
Again, that assumes the diesel generator failures are independent events. A common event (flooding from a tsunami) wiped out all but 2 of the generators, and those 2 (in another reactor further up the hill that had been shut down for maintenance) were useless because the flooding also wiped out the switching station.
When you took Intro to Statistics the book said to get the overall probability, you multiply probabilities for independent events. That little bit at the end there is really important.
The "U.S. killed Concorde by prohibiting it from flying over land" theory is cute. But there were plenty of over-land routes in Europe and Asia that Concorde could've been flying even towards the end if it had in fact been economically viable.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo and subsequent spike in fuel prices is what really killed Concorde. Fuel prices climbing to 2.5x higher than when you began designing the plane, and 5x higher than design price within 4 years of first flight will do that to a fuel-guzzling plane.
Meh, seems pretty simple to me. Lots of people argued about which strategy was better but nobody could really prove it one way or the other. So we tried the "trade and seduce them with capitalism" method with China, and the "boycott and try to starve them into changing" method with Cuba. The China method seems to work better, so now we're going to use that method on Cuba.
It's not hypocritical at all to try different methods if you aren't sure which will work best. The real problem is that in order to save face, politics often dictates that you pretend you know exactly what you're doing when you really don't.
It's plainly obvious if you look at the IRS individual tax stats. Click on 2013 since it's the latest and load it into a spreadsheet program.
The column of interest is T. This is the amount of income tax each bracket pays as a percent of their adjusted gross income (i.e. before deductions and exemptions) (T). As income increases, so does the percent paid as taxes up til about $1.5 million. There it starts to stall, and by the time you get to $5+ million, it's actually decreasing. As a fiscal conservative, I say this needs to be fixed so it continues to go up through each income bracket.
Also, note that contrary to what most people think, the 15% capital gains tax rate is not low. Due to income tax brackets being graduated and the wide availability of deductions, taxpayers don't exceed a real 15% income tax rate until they're making on average around $150,000/yr (T22-T23). In other words, when Warren Buffet said he paid less in taxes than his secretary, it was because his secretary made a lot more money than the typical secretary or even executive. However, this still points to another problem. Because the capital gains tax does not scale with income, it effectively discourages "regular" people from investing, thus relegating them to low-interest bank savings accounts. People complain that the wealthy make most of their money from investments, yet we have a tax mechanism in place which discourages the poor and middle class from investing. This needs to be fixed as well.
Also if you add up columns e24-e29, you find that people making $500,000+/yr (the top 0.72%) only account for 17.4% of all income. They make $1.2 trillion/yr, and already pay $333 billion of that in taxes. To cover the $483b deficit last year, you'd have to raise their effective income tax rate from ~28% to 68%. You're not realistically gonna be able to balance the budget by raising taxes on only them, at least not without a huge fight. The meat of the income base is between $50,000/yr to $500,000/yr (63% of all income). That's where you have to raise taxes if you want it to make an appreciable increase in tax revenue for relatively small increases in tax rate.
Was Win95 exciting? Hell yeah! True 32bit, a genuine GUI instead of a tack-on.
FYI, Win95 was still a tack-on GUI. Microsoft just combined the DOS and Windows installer. It was still a GUI running on top of DOS (MS-DOS 7.x), and if you hacked it enough you could get it to boot to a DOS shell. (They probably did this to thwart DR-DOS, which was starting to eat into their DOS sales.)
Win98 and Windows ME were the same for that matter. Which is why all of these were so prone to crashing. The first widespread release of Windows not based on DOS was Windows 2000, based on NT.
Which gets us back to the topic at hand. Most of the time these new releases are just marketing gimmicks to try to sell you the same old thing dressed up in a new skin and some "new" features which could've just been added with a software update. e.g. There was no reason to prohibit Siri on older iPhones, since all the phone does is capture the audio and transmits it over the Internet to a server which does the heavy voice recognition lifting.
The Shannon noisy channel theorem only applies to shared bandwidth. Right now wifi bandwidth is shared because transmitters (and receivers) are omnidirectional. That limitation goes away if your transmitters/receivers are directional. 802.11ac is the first step to making wifi directional. The 2x2 and 3x3 designation means it's transmitting 2 or 3 wifi signals simultaneously at the same frequencies. They're just transmitted in slightly different directions, and the receiver uses 2 or 3 antennas to sense the difference in multipath to distinguish the individual signals.
Scale this up and you basically end up with a big phased array antenna. A brief handshaking burst would allow the two devices to establish where they are relative to each other in orientation. Further communications can then be done directionally. In the direction the phased array is "pointed", the signals sent by each element in the array line up to create a high amplitude signal. In other directions, the signals don't line up and you end up with low amplitude noise. The end result is like a narrow pencil-beam channel between the transmitter and receiver which can't see nor be seen by other narrow pencil-beam transmissions. Thus no Shannon limit. Same way you can (barely) see the letters on a laptop screen in sunlight even though the sun is millions of times brighter (generates far more noise than the signal coming off the screen). The sunlight and laptop are in different directions, and you are able to point your eyes so they center on the laptop while the sun is way off in the edge of your vision.
They make sliding bluetooth keyboards which snap onto the back of your phone. Yeah they're all for landscape orientation. You can thank Blackberry for suing anyone who makes a keyboard in portrait orientation.
False. Monsanto routinely went after organic farms for using their seed. These were farms that didn't want the seed in the first place - they considered it a weed because it would upset their customers. It had contaminated their fields.either by blowing there or by cross-pollination.
The one case involved a farmer who went out of his way to gather the seeds from his neighbor's crops and use them in preference to other seeds.
That's the way Monsanto portrayed it. Fact is, the judgment against the farmer was reduced by the Canadian Supreme Court to $1 because he didn't do anything to take advantage of the Monsanto seed. He didn't use Round-Up on his crops - he couldn't afford to use it on his fields. He only used it in ditches surrounding his farm to prevent weeds from encroaching into his fields. So there was zero benefit to him going "out of his way to gather the seeds from his neighbor's crops and use them in preference to other seeds." He had no motive for behaving as Monsanto claimed he did. (Incidentally, the resistant seed came from canola in one of these ditches - what he thought was his canola. It was theorized that it was instead blown there from a neighboring farm, or seed which had fallen off a truck driving down the intervening road. He did not gather the seeds from his neighbor as you portray.)
The Canadian Supreme Court let the ruling against the farmer stand however because they believed Monsanto's argument that its Round-Up Ready resistance could not be spread by pollination, and so the farmer "ought to have known" that any canola which survived being sprayed with Round-Up was their patented seed. This was later shown to be false as they've found the GMO portions of Round-Up Ready resistance in wild plants.
But the damage was done, and the reason there haven't been recent cases of Monsanto going after farmers is because they've mostly thrown in the towel and just pay Monsanto if they suspect they've got Round-Up Ready crops in their field even if they never knowingly planted it. Which is Monsanto's real goal here - charging rent for the privilege of farming.
In terms of IP law, this combined with the dismissal of organic farms' opposition is a terrible precedent because it decouples risk from reward. If Monsanto's seed finds its way onto your farm and you benefit from it, Monsanto profits from it. If Monsanto's seed finds it way onto your farm and you are harmed by it, Monsanto is not liable for it. It cannot work that way. Either you are allowed to release a product and profit from it but are liable for the harm it causes, or you are not allowed to release it.
Whether or not it's GMO is completely immaterial to the product.
I agree. Which is why they should've labeled it without a fuss to start with. At the least, they should've labeled it the same time they started labeling non-GMO products.
But instead they listened to some marketer who insisted that labeling it would make some people think there was something wrong with it. Well, now with how hard they've been fighting the label, they've succeeded in convincing even more people that there is in fact something wrong with it.
I've even lived in a city (Columbus OH), which often omits sidewalks in highly congested areas.
In other countries I've been in, if the city needs to expand its roads, it just seizes the land adjacent to the road and expands it.
In the U.S. the government is required to compensate landowners for the market value of the seized land. So if traffic was highly congested as you say, the city probably made an accounting decision that it was congested enough to eliminate the sidewalks for an extra lane, but not congested enough to use Eminent Domain to take the surrounding property and pay off the landowners to keep the sidewalks..
They try to cover a representative subsample of ever possible situation. They're based on the premise that if you're cognizant enough to figure out what to do in those situations, you're cognizant enough to figure out the common sense thing to do in other situations which aren't being tested.
A machine built to only pass the situations being tested should automatically fail. The actual "rules" of the road is the State driving code, which is usually several hundred pages long and probably filled with situationally contradictory requirements (e.g. if stopped at a 4-way stop sign and you're on the right, you have the right of way. Unless the other guy goes first in which case he has the right of way).
There are reading applications where you want bigger images and a lot more space than a paperback book page. A 13.3" e-ink display would be a wonderful alternative the huge stack of music books I have next to my piano.
The problem is regional licensing. Geographical borders don't really mean much to a medium which can circle the globe in 0.13 seconds. It may have made sense back in the days when books and film took months to transport across oceans by ship, but not anymore.
Posting because I've seen too many programmers misunderstand this and screw things up when using floats. This does not mean you can do whatever you want with floats and your accuracy will be at least 1.5 inches within a 25 billion mile radius. It means an individual double float number has a precision of 17 significant figures, nothing more. When you start doing math with that number, the precision can quickly go out the window.
For example, if you add a large float to a small float, say 3.14159265359x10^8 + 2.7182818284x10^-3, the latter number doesn't actually matter because it's largest digit is smaller than the uncertainty (the last significant figure) in the first number. In other words, floating point's accuracy decreases the further you get from zero. A solar system modeled with ints will have the same resolution everywhere, which is how people want to think significant figures work. But a solar system modeled with double floats will have very fine resolution close to the origin, lousy resolution out near the edges.
To do this sort of math accurately using float (e.g. calculating docking coordinates for two spacecraft orbiting Jupiter), you are better off first doing a coordinate transform to center your zero closer to where everything is happening, do your math, then transform the results back to your original coordinates (or keep them in your new coordinate system if you plan to do more math there later). Obviously that's a pointless exercise with this simplified math problem, but it can make a big difference in accuracy with more complex math.
For a real-world example, we once networked two flight simulators together and tried to make them fly in formation. The position of the second plane appeared to jump all over the place when viewed from the first plane, and vice versa. What was happening was our coordinate system was fixed to the Earth. Planes fly on the order of 1000 kph. At that speed, a transient network lag error of only 10 milliseconds results in a position error of several meters (dp = v * dt). It didn't matter that we knew the velocities to 7 significant figures or even if we'd known them to 17 significant figures, because the error in the timestamp overwhelmed that accuracy. The fix was to define a new coordinate system centered on the first plane. The velocity of the second plane was then only a few cm/sec relative to the first plane (since they're flying in formation), and the jumping disappeared since a 10 ms error only resulted in only a few millimeters of error.
it's that this was a party that employees of a company were presumably encouraged to attend as well as an event showcasing the company's public face. In that environment, everyone should feel comfortable.
As an introvert, let me just say that parties with crowds make me feel uncomfortable.
I've accepted that my personality means I'm disadvantaged when it comes to certain social functions and celebrations. But if you're proposing that it doesn't have to be that way and that events should be designed so that everyone is comfortable, I'll just throw my personality quirk into the ring as well.
Technically, you can run OS X on non-Mac hardware. The only thing preventing you is Apple's license (you can run OS X in a VM if you ignore Apple's license and hack a flag). In that respect, the preference for OS X is the path of least resistance.
That said, I agree with you. Windows is... unsuitable for hardcore development. And Linux just has too many idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies due to the myriad versions out there. OS X is the best overall choice for cross-platform development. (Native Office support I'm not so keen on - as the vector of a lot of malware I prefer to run it in a VM. And if you need to run Photoshop your OS choice is going to be dictated by things like color profile support which both Windows and Linux are terrible at.)
Your kids have also seen lots of books and videos about talking dogs, alien invaders, and self-aware toys. Seeing it live with your own eyes is what drives the point home that these things are real, while the stuff you see in books and on screens can be pretend. If anything, the same computer technology which enabled the Internet has also taught me to be even more skeptical of photo and video evidence. The stuff has gotten too easy to fake.
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You don't want that. The DMCA prevents bypassing encryption to violate copyright. Since the phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government, the copyright for whatever is stored on there belongs to them. So there's no copyright violation. (Or more precisely, since they're a government agency, there is no copyright. Whatever they recover from the phone could be obtained by anyone with a FOIA request.)
If you argue it's somehow violating Apple's copyright, you're essentially saying Apple holds the copyright for everything stored on your iPhone. That is a precedent, much, much worse than what the FBI is trying to do. Basically you'd be saying the copyright for everything you're storing on Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. belongs to those respective companies instead of to you.
When you say renting, the term is typically associated with paying someone $x/mo so you can live in an apartment, or drive one pre-selected car..
With these music and movie streaming services, it's like paying someone $x/mo so you can live in any apartment or drive any car. Use the same one all month, or change to a different apartment/car each day if you want. Even the new model that just completed construction and became available yesterday.
Heck, if there were a similar service for cars, I daresay most people would rent instead of buying a car. Use a small economy car for your solo daily commute, a bigger car for when the wife and kids decide you should go to a restaurant for dinner, a big minivan or RV for your annual week-long vacation. The conflicting constraints of being able to afford only one or two cars, while needing different size cars for different purposes leads to a lot of inefficiency.
It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware. (Well, the email was usually provided by your work or school, but stuff for the web was your own responsibility.)
But people are lazy and cheap. When someone offered to do all that setup for them, and especially when someone offered to pay for it for them, then flocked to that "service" and uploaded all their content there. GeoCities, MySpace, Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, etc. They all make it easier to put your content on the web, but you give up direct control and the availability of your content is subject to the whims of those companies and their policies.
No, he's right. We fought this fight in the 1980s and 1990s and won. CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, AOL, heck even Microsoft (MSN was originally their attempt at a paid online dialup service, a joint effort with NBC, hence MSNBC) tried to make the online world a walled garden where you paid them for access and they controlled all content you could access "online." BBSes and eventually the Internet allowed you to share your personal content without any corporate oversight - you controlled access to and the availability of your own stuff. It didn't matter if nobody was coming to see it, as long as you paid to keep the hardware running and the Internet connection up, it was still available. This is why Windows didn't get a TCP/IP stack until Windows 95. Gates tried to dissuade people from using the Internet because it was a competitor to MSN. You had to be a bit of a hacker and get Trumpet Winsock installed onto Windows 3.x (wasn't a simple click installer) to make it able to connect to the Internet. Until demand became overwhelming and he had to make it easy to access the Internet with Windows or risk people flocking to a different OS.
But the laziness and cheapness of people in the 2000s and 2010s have allowed that control to creep back into the hands of these large corporations. They got their walled gardens back, they just operate on top of the Internet instead of in competition with it.
I pay a couple hundred bucks a year for a reseller's account at a web hosting service, and give free server and website space to my friends and relatives who ask for it. I guide them through registering their own domain and setting up their own website and installing their own web packages to host their own content (the web host makes it pretty easy). Once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard. But it's not as easy as typing a URL into your web browser, logging into your account at that website, and clicking the "upload" button. The masses got to choose between freedom and easy, and they picked easy.
Manufacturing industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Come up with a fix and issue a recall at your expense to implement your fix in every product out there that you sold."
Toy industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Pull it off the market. Have the people who bought it return it, and give them their money back."
Software industry: "Our product is dangerous. I know! Let's fix it, but only put the fix in our latest version to force people to upgrade and pay us more money." Government says "Great! We'd like to buy a million copies of the new version."
Given Microsoft's history with free security updates, I thought they understood the difference between a bug fix and a feature upgrade. But between this and rolling out unwanted adware and spyware as "important updates" I guess not.
You don't need a super-accurate clock. All you need is a timer with good resolution on the car, and a keyfob which is programmed to always take the same amount of time to reply to a query. The car can then measure the elapsed time between when it sends the challenge and when it receives the response. Subtract the time the keyfob spends generating an (encrypted) reply, and you get the travel time for the radio signal. That tells you how far the keyfob is from the car. The keyfob doesn't even need a clock.
Just get one of the RFID-blocking pouches that's big enough to fit your key fob. Easy enough to test that it works. Or if you're into the classics, build one yourself out of tin foil.
I'm curious though why the press seems to have latched onto the idea of putting it in the freezer, when the refrigerator would work just as well. So would a metal toolbox.
Because people are lazy and don't want to turn their wireless key off. They want it to just work without any user interaction. Well, this is what happens when you remove the user interaction. "It just works."
How NASA came up with the 1 loss per 100,000 figure is a great lesson in misapplied statistics. Most of that risk was due to O-ring failure. Mating the segments of the SRBs was a difficult task, and inspection of the SRBs after test firings showed that something like 1 in 50 O-rings sealing the joint was failing (burning through). This was correctly deemed unacceptable. NASA's "solution" was to put in 3 O-rings at each joint. That triple redundancy meant that the chance of a complete burn-through (failure of all three O-rings) was 1 in 50*50*50 = 1 in 125,000. Presto! You've taken a system with unacceptably high risk, and through the clever use of statistics turned it into something reliable.
Unfortunately, that math only works when the failures are independent events. When a common event compromises all three O-rings - like cold weather - they all fail together and your redundancy offers no additional protection.
The same thing happened at Fukushima. They knew the nuclear plant would need diesel generators for backup power in an emergency. Diesel generators can be finicky to start, especially if they haven't been usd much for years. So they added redundancy by installing multiple generators - 2 per reactor, plus a switching station which would allow them to shunt power from any generator to any reactor. 12 diesel generators in all for the plant.
Again, that assumes the diesel generator failures are independent events. A common event (flooding from a tsunami) wiped out all but 2 of the generators, and those 2 (in another reactor further up the hill that had been shut down for maintenance) were useless because the flooding also wiped out the switching station.
When you took Intro to Statistics the book said to get the overall probability, you multiply probabilities for independent events. That little bit at the end there is really important.
The "U.S. killed Concorde by prohibiting it from flying over land" theory is cute. But there were plenty of over-land routes in Europe and Asia that Concorde could've been flying even towards the end if it had in fact been economically viable.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo and subsequent spike in fuel prices is what really killed Concorde. Fuel prices climbing to 2.5x higher than when you began designing the plane, and 5x higher than design price within 4 years of first flight will do that to a fuel-guzzling plane.
Meh, seems pretty simple to me. Lots of people argued about which strategy was better but nobody could really prove it one way or the other. So we tried the "trade and seduce them with capitalism" method with China, and the "boycott and try to starve them into changing" method with Cuba. The China method seems to work better, so now we're going to use that method on Cuba.
It's not hypocritical at all to try different methods if you aren't sure which will work best. The real problem is that in order to save face, politics often dictates that you pretend you know exactly what you're doing when you really don't.
It's plainly obvious if you look at the IRS individual tax stats. Click on 2013 since it's the latest and load it into a spreadsheet program.
The column of interest is T. This is the amount of income tax each bracket pays as a percent of their adjusted gross income (i.e. before deductions and exemptions) (T). As income increases, so does the percent paid as taxes up til about $1.5 million. There it starts to stall, and by the time you get to $5+ million, it's actually decreasing. As a fiscal conservative, I say this needs to be fixed so it continues to go up through each income bracket.
Also, note that contrary to what most people think, the 15% capital gains tax rate is not low. Due to income tax brackets being graduated and the wide availability of deductions, taxpayers don't exceed a real 15% income tax rate until they're making on average around $150,000/yr (T22-T23). In other words, when Warren Buffet said he paid less in taxes than his secretary, it was because his secretary made a lot more money than the typical secretary or even executive. However, this still points to another problem. Because the capital gains tax does not scale with income, it effectively discourages "regular" people from investing, thus relegating them to low-interest bank savings accounts. People complain that the wealthy make most of their money from investments, yet we have a tax mechanism in place which discourages the poor and middle class from investing. This needs to be fixed as well.
Also if you add up columns e24-e29, you find that people making $500,000+/yr (the top 0.72%) only account for 17.4% of all income. They make $1.2 trillion/yr, and already pay $333 billion of that in taxes. To cover the $483b deficit last year, you'd have to raise their effective income tax rate from ~28% to 68%. You're not realistically gonna be able to balance the budget by raising taxes on only them, at least not without a huge fight. The meat of the income base is between $50,000/yr to $500,000/yr (63% of all income). That's where you have to raise taxes if you want it to make an appreciable increase in tax revenue for relatively small increases in tax rate.
FYI, Win95 was still a tack-on GUI. Microsoft just combined the DOS and Windows installer. It was still a GUI running on top of DOS (MS-DOS 7.x), and if you hacked it enough you could get it to boot to a DOS shell. (They probably did this to thwart DR-DOS, which was starting to eat into their DOS sales.)
Win98 and Windows ME were the same for that matter. Which is why all of these were so prone to crashing. The first widespread release of Windows not based on DOS was Windows 2000, based on NT.
Which gets us back to the topic at hand. Most of the time these new releases are just marketing gimmicks to try to sell you the same old thing dressed up in a new skin and some "new" features which could've just been added with a software update. e.g. There was no reason to prohibit Siri on older iPhones, since all the phone does is capture the audio and transmits it over the Internet to a server which does the heavy voice recognition lifting.
I dunno. Do you really want to trust the judgment of someone who hasn't yet found a partner after 500 dates?
The Shannon noisy channel theorem only applies to shared bandwidth. Right now wifi bandwidth is shared because transmitters (and receivers) are omnidirectional. That limitation goes away if your transmitters/receivers are directional. 802.11ac is the first step to making wifi directional. The 2x2 and 3x3 designation means it's transmitting 2 or 3 wifi signals simultaneously at the same frequencies. They're just transmitted in slightly different directions, and the receiver uses 2 or 3 antennas to sense the difference in multipath to distinguish the individual signals.
Scale this up and you basically end up with a big phased array antenna. A brief handshaking burst would allow the two devices to establish where they are relative to each other in orientation. Further communications can then be done directionally. In the direction the phased array is "pointed", the signals sent by each element in the array line up to create a high amplitude signal. In other directions, the signals don't line up and you end up with low amplitude noise. The end result is like a narrow pencil-beam channel between the transmitter and receiver which can't see nor be seen by other narrow pencil-beam transmissions. Thus no Shannon limit. Same way you can (barely) see the letters on a laptop screen in sunlight even though the sun is millions of times brighter (generates far more noise than the signal coming off the screen). The sunlight and laptop are in different directions, and you are able to point your eyes so they center on the laptop while the sun is way off in the edge of your vision.
They make sliding bluetooth keyboards which snap onto the back of your phone. Yeah they're all for landscape orientation. You can thank Blackberry for suing anyone who makes a keyboard in portrait orientation.
That's the way Monsanto portrayed it. Fact is, the judgment against the farmer was reduced by the Canadian Supreme Court to $1 because he didn't do anything to take advantage of the Monsanto seed. He didn't use Round-Up on his crops - he couldn't afford to use it on his fields. He only used it in ditches surrounding his farm to prevent weeds from encroaching into his fields. So there was zero benefit to him going "out of his way to gather the seeds from his neighbor's crops and use them in preference to other seeds." He had no motive for behaving as Monsanto claimed he did. (Incidentally, the resistant seed came from canola in one of these ditches - what he thought was his canola. It was theorized that it was instead blown there from a neighboring farm, or seed which had fallen off a truck driving down the intervening road. He did not gather the seeds from his neighbor as you portray.)
The Canadian Supreme Court let the ruling against the farmer stand however because they believed Monsanto's argument that its Round-Up Ready resistance could not be spread by pollination, and so the farmer "ought to have known" that any canola which survived being sprayed with Round-Up was their patented seed. This was later shown to be false as they've found the GMO portions of Round-Up Ready resistance in wild plants.
But the damage was done, and the reason there haven't been recent cases of Monsanto going after farmers is because they've mostly thrown in the towel and just pay Monsanto if they suspect they've got Round-Up Ready crops in their field even if they never knowingly planted it. Which is Monsanto's real goal here - charging rent for the privilege of farming.
In terms of IP law, this combined with the dismissal of organic farms' opposition is a terrible precedent because it decouples risk from reward. If Monsanto's seed finds its way onto your farm and you benefit from it, Monsanto profits from it. If Monsanto's seed finds it way onto your farm and you are harmed by it, Monsanto is not liable for it. It cannot work that way. Either you are allowed to release a product and profit from it but are liable for the harm it causes, or you are not allowed to release it.
I agree. Which is why they should've labeled it without a fuss to start with. At the least, they should've labeled it the same time they started labeling non-GMO products.
But instead they listened to some marketer who insisted that labeling it would make some people think there was something wrong with it. Well, now with how hard they've been fighting the label, they've succeeded in convincing even more people that there is in fact something wrong with it.
In other countries I've been in, if the city needs to expand its roads, it just seizes the land adjacent to the road and expands it.
In the U.S. the government is required to compensate landowners for the market value of the seized land. So if traffic was highly congested as you say, the city probably made an accounting decision that it was congested enough to eliminate the sidewalks for an extra lane, but not congested enough to use Eminent Domain to take the surrounding property and pay off the landowners to keep the sidewalks..
They try to cover a representative subsample of ever possible situation. They're based on the premise that if you're cognizant enough to figure out what to do in those situations, you're cognizant enough to figure out the common sense thing to do in other situations which aren't being tested.
A machine built to only pass the situations being tested should automatically fail. The actual "rules" of the road is the State driving code, which is usually several hundred pages long and probably filled with situationally contradictory requirements (e.g. if stopped at a 4-way stop sign and you're on the right, you have the right of way. Unless the other guy goes first in which case he has the right of way).
There are reading applications where you want bigger images and a lot more space than a paperback book page. A 13.3" e-ink display would be a wonderful alternative the huge stack of music books I have next to my piano.
The problem is regional licensing. Geographical borders don't really mean much to a medium which can circle the globe in 0.13 seconds. It may have made sense back in the days when books and film took months to transport across oceans by ship, but not anymore.
Posting because I've seen too many programmers misunderstand this and screw things up when using floats. This does not mean you can do whatever you want with floats and your accuracy will be at least 1.5 inches within a 25 billion mile radius. It means an individual double float number has a precision of 17 significant figures, nothing more. When you start doing math with that number, the precision can quickly go out the window.
For example, if you add a large float to a small float, say 3.14159265359x10^8 + 2.7182818284x10^-3, the latter number doesn't actually matter because it's largest digit is smaller than the uncertainty (the last significant figure) in the first number. In other words, floating point's accuracy decreases the further you get from zero. A solar system modeled with ints will have the same resolution everywhere, which is how people want to think significant figures work. But a solar system modeled with double floats will have very fine resolution close to the origin, lousy resolution out near the edges.
To do this sort of math accurately using float (e.g. calculating docking coordinates for two spacecraft orbiting Jupiter), you are better off first doing a coordinate transform to center your zero closer to where everything is happening, do your math, then transform the results back to your original coordinates (or keep them in your new coordinate system if you plan to do more math there later). Obviously that's a pointless exercise with this simplified math problem, but it can make a big difference in accuracy with more complex math.
For a real-world example, we once networked two flight simulators together and tried to make them fly in formation. The position of the second plane appeared to jump all over the place when viewed from the first plane, and vice versa. What was happening was our coordinate system was fixed to the Earth. Planes fly on the order of 1000 kph. At that speed, a transient network lag error of only 10 milliseconds results in a position error of several meters (dp = v * dt). It didn't matter that we knew the velocities to 7 significant figures or even if we'd known them to 17 significant figures, because the error in the timestamp overwhelmed that accuracy. The fix was to define a new coordinate system centered on the first plane. The velocity of the second plane was then only a few cm/sec relative to the first plane (since they're flying in formation), and the jumping disappeared since a 10 ms error only resulted in only a few millimeters of error.
As an introvert, let me just say that parties with crowds make me feel uncomfortable.
I've accepted that my personality means I'm disadvantaged when it comes to certain social functions and celebrations. But if you're proposing that it doesn't have to be that way and that events should be designed so that everyone is comfortable, I'll just throw my personality quirk into the ring as well.
Technically, you can run OS X on non-Mac hardware. The only thing preventing you is Apple's license (you can run OS X in a VM if you ignore Apple's license and hack a flag). In that respect, the preference for OS X is the path of least resistance.
That said, I agree with you. Windows is... unsuitable for hardcore development. And Linux just has too many idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies due to the myriad versions out there. OS X is the best overall choice for cross-platform development. (Native Office support I'm not so keen on - as the vector of a lot of malware I prefer to run it in a VM. And if you need to run Photoshop your OS choice is going to be dictated by things like color profile support which both Windows and Linux are terrible at.)
Your kids have also seen lots of books and videos about talking dogs, alien invaders, and self-aware toys. Seeing it live with your own eyes is what drives the point home that these things are real, while the stuff you see in books and on screens can be pretend. If anything, the same computer technology which enabled the Internet has also taught me to be even more skeptical of photo and video evidence. The stuff has gotten too easy to fake.