As an employer, I can kinda understand Whole Foods' situation here. If you prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the workers' rights folks claim you're trying to hide abuses in the workplace. If you don't prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the privacy rights folks claim you're not doing enough to protect your employees' privacy in the workplace (essentially extending the corporate shield to also protect your employees from liability, not just the owners).
By letting the government make the ruling, the matter is settled and the company doesn't have to worry about liability either way.
This sort of thing is a good lesson for those who erroneously believe in absolutes (the tone of TFA is that there is a "right" and "wrong" answer to this). It is exceptionally rare for a single principle on any issue to always be correct. There is almost always a situation where that principle will be wrong because some other principle will overrule it. In this case, you have the right to privacy in the workplace butting heads with the right to publicize workplace abuses. I'm not sure what the correct balance is, and I'm not sure the government does either. But at least this way the company doesn't get caught in the crossfire. All a company has to do is comply with the government ruling, and the fight over the correct balance will bypass them and go straight to the courts. So even though Whole Foods lost the case, they still won.
I'm on Sprint, and Sprint is worse in the Bay area.
What's really needed is to decouple the network from the service providers. Right now the carriers control the network, the service plans, and the phones. Those all need to be decoupled (de-tripled?) so each is forced to compete on their own merits, not subsidized by inefficiencies in an unrelated market. There should be companies which own networks of cell towers, who compete to provide the best coverage. The carriers should provide service plans and nothing more, using part of that revenue to rent time from tower networks. And you should be buying your phone from the manufacturer via retail stores like Best Buy and Amazon, not from the carrier.
Do that and an area with bad coverage becomes an opportunity for someone to build towers and make money. Not something a carrier can ignore because it's "good enough" and their better coverage elsewhere means people are afraid to switch to a different carrier.
A basic income, and attempts to make a minimum wage into a livable wage, suffer from the same problem - an assumption that money has a fixed value.
Money doesn't have a fixed value. Its value is the sum total of all the productivity of your citizens, divided by (roughly speaking) the sum total of how much everyone is paid. Consequently, an increase in real income (amount of stuff you can buy with your income, not the amount of money you're paid) depends entirely on increasing the average productivity of your citizens.
If you try to increase income by just increasing the amount people are paid, without a corresponding increase in productivity, you're just increasing the denominator. A fixed amount of productivity is now represented by a greater amount of income. Or in other words, the price of staple goods and services will rise to match your legislation mandating increased wages. Think about it. If the government announced that on Jan 1, everyone's income and savings would be increased 100x, would that really turn everyone into millionaires? No, prices would just rise 100x to match, and you would be able to afford to buy exactly what you can now. The only change would be that the denomination of your bills would have a couple more zeroes on it.
That's not to say these programs are useless. They're essentially wealth redistribution, which can be handy to counter forces leading to income inequality (e.g. the stratospheric pay of CEOs, though IMHO these these are better tackled directly). And as temporary income (e.g. unemployment pay) they can help increase economic stability. But a system built entirely upon their premise will simply see prices rise until it's no longer a livable wage.
The only way to avoid that fate, the only way for this to actually work, is if your average productivity is sufficiently high enough that a livable wage constitutes a small fraction of the mean productivity. Small enough to basically be roundoff error so (1) those doing more productive work don't really notice nor care and the incentive to do more productive work remains, and (2) the excess income it generates isn't enough to cause a large rise in prices. But considering the GDP per capita of the U.S. (one of the wealthier nations) is only around $55k/yr, a modest livable wage of say $20k/yr is a substantial fraction of that average. A 5:1 or 10:1 ratio is about where I think it would start to have a shot of working. To reach that point, you'd first need to massively increase average productivity, which is why this sort of thing works in futuristic settings like Star Trek. But that sort of massive productivity increase relies upon using cheap energy to leverage each individual's work to multiply their productivity. And ironically the people advocating a livable wage are often the very same people advocating more expensive energy and a throwback to older inefficient production methods like growing your own food in a garden.
Anyways, never forget that real wealth, real income increases come only from increased productivity. It's not something you can legislate by mandating higher incomes. People have to actually go out there and do more work, or figure out more efficient ways of doing the same thing with less work (and use the time that frees up to do more different work).
A similar thing happens to credit card debt stats. Among households which carry a balance, the average (mean) debt is about $15,000. The median credit card debt among those households is about $3500 though. What's going on is that a small fraction of households (about 1 in 10) which carry a credit card balance have a huge amount of credit card debt - like $20,000 to $100,000. So when you use the average (mean), it gets heavily skewed by those few people with huge debt and make the stats look a lot worse than they really are.
On top of that, the above stats apply only to the households which carry a balance - about a third of all households. Another third pays off their cards every month (no debt), and a third have no credit cards (also no CC debt). So the median credit card debt nationwide is actually $0. But when someone in the press wants to write an article about the horrible state of credit card debt (or divorce), they glom onto those alarming but irrelevant statistics. Many of them have never taken a statistics course so they don't know what they're doing, they just find these juicy numbers which seems to prove their point, so they write an article without really understanding what they're writing about.
Anyway, if you want the actual marriage/divorce stats, they're on the US Census website. A quick glance over the numbers confirms that the majority of first marriages succeed. The percent of people who have ever been divorced is less than half the percent of people who have ever been married. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks like about 2/3rds of first marriages succeed (do not or have not yet ended in divorce). The divorce numbers are just hyper-inflated by a small number of people (about 3%) who get married and divorced many times.
The usual MO for these deep water species is to stay in deep water during the day for protection, and rise closer to the surface at night to feed (there being more stuff to eat per cubic meter closer to the surface). That works fine in the open ocean, but if they get too close to the shore it isn't exactly obvious which direction they need to swim to get back to the open ocean. This is especially true for harbors, which if you've ever gone boating is basically a man-made maze to block incoming waves and swells. It is very easy for a deep water animal to enter a harbor during its normal feeding cycle at night, then get stuck trying to find its way back to deeper water at day.
I'd recommend Authy instead of Google Authenticator. Authy requires you to enter a 4-digit PIN to use it. Anyone who has access to your phone (if it's lost, stolen, or borrowed without a passcode) can use Authenticator. Authy also allows you to sync it with multiple devices on multiple platforms, not just your phone/tablet.
The other part was the airlines' growing limits on "excess" baggage, plus their tendency to fly your luggage to some place remote from where they were flying you. People reported that handing it over to the package-shipping people to deliver to your destination did an end run around the airlines' lost luggage issue and the government's incompetent security theater
You're actually more likely to have your packages lost than have the airlines lose your luggage. A loss rate of 0.5%-1.2% for package delivery vs 0.3% for the airlines. The main reason to ship your luggage is to avoid slowdowns due to airport security, and because the airlines make it a PITA to get the compensation you're entitled to if they lose a bag. Whereas when you ship a package, the compensation is pre-negotiated - you declare its value on the waybill and (presumably) insure it for that amount.
Anything with substantial monetary or sentimental value goes in my carry-on bag. The stuff that goes in my check-in bags can all be easily replaced in any developed country.
Obviously he's a pirate. And the music industry will soon sue this company into oblivion for failing to cut off customers who are pirating. Because in the new reality they're trying to create, you are liable for what your customers do with your product.
Non-refundable tickets doesn't mean the tickets become worthless if you miss your flight. Every airline I know of will change the date of your non-refundable tickets for a fee within 1 year of the original flight date. Typically $100 + any difference in cost of the flight if you rebook on a more expensive flight. Many will even let you apply the value of the tickets to a completely different flight (if it turns out you don't actually need to go to the original destination). But saying the airline wouldn't refund their $13,340 cost of the flight is a lot more dramatic than saying the airline charged them an extra $100 (well, $1100 since they had 11 people in their party).
I sympathize with your frustration. The bureaucracy can be mindboggling at times.
(basically the same questions on the visa waiver, including the one about "moral turpitude")
That question isn't there because they expect criminals to confess their criminal intent. Is there so they can nail someone for a fraudulent visa application if they should enter into the country, commit a crime, and background check shows a criminal history.
It is Exactly. The. Same. To the letter, *apart* from the issue date at the bottom. Exactly the same. Of course now I have a non-refundable flight ticket that I can't use because another round-trip time of my passport to the embassy means I have to wait another 10 days.
Most airlines let you rebook non-refundable tickets for a different date for a fee (typically about $100) within 1 year of the original flight date. While it's not free, it's almost always a lot cheaper than having to buy new tickets. Non-refundable just means you can't convert them back into cash.
The photographer has rights to the photo, but the model has rights to how the his/her likeness is used. In most countries this only covers commercial use, but this court decision establishes that in Germany the model has controlling rights for private use.
For profession photo shoots, the model typically gives up his/her rights to control how the photo is used by signing a photo release in exchange for compensation. This is why you often see faces of people in the background blurred out in photos or videos. It's not because they're trying to protect the person's identity, it's because they weren't able to get a photo release from the person, and don't want said person suing them for illegally using their likeness without their consent.
There's nothing really wrong with the German court's decision. It's just different (and more complicated) from how it's done in the rest of the world. The main complication I can see is you taking pictures while on vacation in Germany and someone who thinks they were in the background of your photo demanding that you delete the photos. This decision would mean that they have that right, but in some locations it is virtually impossible to take a casual vacation photo without getting some extraneous people in the background.
If I'm reading this right, ZFS sync opens up one other huge, huge possibility. I had this idea nearly 15 years ago (shortly after Napster), but didn't have the technical expertise to implement it: A distributed redundant filesystem.
ZFS doesn't think in terms of files. It thinks in terms of blocks, and in a redundant z-volume (similar to a RAID array) it distributes those blocks over multiple virtual devices (vdevs) - you can think of them as disks, but they don't have to be. These vdevs can be a disk, a partition, a file on a disk, or more crucially a SAN or iSCSI - disks which aren't connected directly to the computer but are accessed over a network. Til now, those last two have been disks on the same premise, just not in the saem computer. ZFS sync could open it up to any networked vdev anywhere in the world.
So what's the big deal? The big deal is that in a redundant filesystem, you cannot reconstruct the original data from any single vdev. If you have 4 drives in RAID 5, no single drive has a complete file. You need all of the data off of at least 3 drives to reconstruct a file. The same goes for ZFS - if you're using 2-drive redundancy and you have 6 vdevs, you need the data off of at least 4 vdevs to reconstruct the file.
Now what if each of those vdevs were located in different places around the world? One could be Google Drive, another Dropbox, another Microsoft OneDrive, etc. Your data could be on the cloud, and it would still be accessible even if one service went down or even shut down completely. ZFS would just treat it like a drive failure. It would re-verify and recover after the service came back online. Or you could simply replace it with a vdev on a different cloud service. (ZFS redundancy is on a block level, so a block failure doesn't mean it drops the entire vdev from the array like RAID does with a disk which generates an error. It simply marks the block as bad and tries to reconstruct it from redundant info on other vdevs. Other blocks stored on that vdev are assumed to still be good, until you access it and the checksum says it's bad.)
Also, no single cloud service provider would have a complete copy of your data. Hackers could manage to break into a service and get all your data stored at that service. But unless they managed to get data from (n-r) services (n = number of cloud vdevs you're using, r = redundancy level), they couldn't reconstruct your data. More to the point, if said service notified you of the breach in a timely manner, you could respond by creating new vdevs with different encryption, copying your data from the old vdevs to the new, then erasing the old vdevs. Unless the hackers managed to simultaneously hack (n-r) cloud services, your data cannot be compromised. (Or if you're on the dark side, Hollywood could get the feds to raid a cloud storage service and get all your data there, but unless they did it simultaneously with (n-r) services, they wouldn't be able to see that you have copies of pirated movies stored on those services.)
I've been trying to set up something similar between my sister's, my parents', and my house, with our NASes backing up each other so we won't lose our data if one house burns down. But it's been a PITA with rsync. Because rsync thinks in terms of files, each house has to have a complete copy of the other houses' data. If I were able to do it with ZFS vdevs, it would represent a 50% space savings. More if I had more homes to work with.
Last year, the departmentâ(TM)s own inspector general declared that DHS drone purchasing program, which had spent $360 million since 2005 â" $62 million in 2013 alone â" was largely a failure.
[...]
DHS anticipated that the cost per flight hour would be $2,468, far lower than the actual $12,225. The agency was using accounting tricks to move the costs of pilots, equipment, and overhead off the books. Even the actual flights hours â" 5,102 â" were a fraction of the promised 23,296.
$12,225/hr * 5,102 hrs = $62.4 million, which is exactly the 2013 budget for this program. 23,296 hours over 11 drones over one year is 24% flight time per drone which sounds like a pretty reasonable expectation. Over 8 years ramped up (constant rate of drone purchases throughout the period), it would be only 6% flight time, which seems highly unlikely. If they bought the drones all at once at the start of the program, it would be 3% expected flight time, which if true you'd be questioning why the program was even approved in the first place. So most likely those hour figures are for 2013 only.
If you take $12,225/hr of fixed costs, and distribute them over 23,296 hrs instead of 5,102 hrs, you get $12225*5102/23296 = $2,677/hr. Only 8% more than the anticipated $2,468/hr.
So basically, the program has cost only 8% more than what they estimated it would cost. They've just been able to keep the drones aloft for a lot fewer hours than expected (cost of pilots being traded off for cost of maintenance crew). The reporter, trying to exaggerate things to make his story sound bigger than it really is, then converted that overall cost into cost per flight hour and compared on that basis since it showed the biggest cost overrun.
Quick rule of thumb. Cost (dollars) is an amount. $/hr is a rate (first derivative of the amount). If you see an article claiming something about an amount (cost overrun), but then shows comparisons of a rate, that's a big red flag. Something deceptive may be going on, and you should do some number checking to figure out what the real story is.
Yeah, that was my first thought when I heard they were landing it back at the Cape. You're using a lot of excess energy doing that.
You burn a lot of energy to send the rocket at high velocity in one direction,
then you have to burn more energy to stop it from moving it in that direction,
then you have to burn even more energy to get it moving in the other direction,
then you have to burn yet more energy to get it to stop moving again.
The sea platform landing only has the first two energy burns, so should represent a substantial increase in payload or delta-v. You'd better have a damn good reason to want your rocket back at the launch site that quickly to justify the additional fuel cost. I suspect returning to the launch site will be the exception, and the sea platform landing will be the norm.
FWIW, the Apple design patent on the round edges and single button on the iPad was invalidated during the Samsung trial. Their design patent of the same on the iPhone was invalidated earlier this year, although curiously almost none of the mainstream press covered it.
That patent needs to die too. All it is is the response of an underdamped harmonic oscillator. Fundamental math and physics which has been known about for centuries. Just because you implemented it or something that looks like it in software doesn't mean you "invented" it.
The economy in Northern Europe works because it's diversified with hundreds of millions of people working for millions of different companies doing tens of thousands of doing things.
The economy in Venezuela is in shambles because 40% of government revenue, 11% of GDP is based on oil exports. And oil just dropped from over $100/bbl to $35/bbl in less than 2 years. Diversification helps shield you from major fluctuations in a single economic sector, much less a single commodity. (A lot of the blame goes to the Venezuelan government though, for using those oil revenues for welfare programs instead of modernizing the country like Iran and many other OPEC nations do. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day, Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.)
Ironically, most of those oil exports are to the U.S. Venezuelan crude is heavy and loaded with sulfur. Very few refineries can process it, and most of those are in the U.S. So despite the hatred between the U.S. and Venezuela, the two are tied at the hip economically.
Baseball especially is jam-packed full of stats, and most kids that age are into baseball (or some other sport that makes use of statistics). You won't get into the complex stuff like permutations or z-scores, but it's a good way to teach the simple stuff like averages, difference between expectation (probability) and prediction, and some of the wackier stuff that can arise from just those simple stats like the Pirates beating the Yankees in the 1960 World Series even though the Yankees destroyed the Pirates in almost every individual stat.
What? You thought every teaching tool had to be online?
Not sure why OP was modded up. The 1977 Star Wars movie saw Kenner sell $100 million in tie-in toys by 1978. Fox wasn't sold on the idea of a western set in space, so Lucas agreed to receive $500,000 less pay in exchange for keeping the merchandising rights for himself. You bet your ass he exploited the tie-in toys to try to make back that money. I was 8 when the movie came out, and nearly all my friends had the toys (I didn't like the movie so I never bugged my parents for toys). There were fast food tie-ins. And ESB and RotJ were advertised up the wazoo (which really annoyed me since I didn't like the first film) with huge opening-night lines. There was even an ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special on TV.
I don't really see why merchandising is considered "unpure" either. If the kid wants a Star Wars toy, then it's better to get him one than for there not to be one for him to get. It only becomes a problem if the kid wants one only because his friends have one (which is a jealousy/parenting problem), or if you're an obsessed collector who has to buy every toy that's out there (which is a mental health problem).
Part of the goal of companies in doing this is that the US is almost unique , in that it taxes the profits on foreign sales, after they have been taxed in the country of sale. Very few other countries do this. Most countries don't double tax like this.
People really need to understand this before jumping on the "Evil corporation dodging taxes" bandwagon. The U.S. has an illogical tax policy. And it doesn't just cover corporations - it applies to individuals as well. If you're a U.S. citizen, the IRS will want to tax any money you make even if you're living abroad and working for a foreign company. You hear about people who are dual citizens of the U.S. and another country? Sounds convenient if you want to travel, right? Well it's a total nightmare if you don't live in the U.S. and don't file annual tax returns.
The U.S. government's "solution" to this illogical setup is tax treaties, where if the country you're working in has a tax treaty with the U.S., taxes you pay in the other company can be used as credit against U.S. tax obligations. But it doesn't cover everything. I ran across this when I was working in Canada. I was liable for Canadian taxes because I was living in Canada, and I was liable for U.S. taxes because I was a U.S. citizen. The tax treaty between the two countries meant the Canadian taxes I paid (they have the higher tax rate) essentially zeroed out my U.S. tax on wages. But the tax treaty didn't cover certain types of unearned income. Interest I earned on my Canadian bank account got double-taxed. If I'd bought a house in Canada and sold it when I changed jobs, I would've been double-taxed on the capital gains.
The problem here isn't Apple or other corporations in a similar situation. The problem is that U.S. tax law needs to be changed to make sense - if you make the money outside the U.S., the U.S. has no business trying to tax it.
I think if history judges the presence of this wind farm unfavorably, they can, you know, just tear it down.
Structures built in/on the ocean aren't typically torn down. The metal superstructure would either be dismanntled and sold for scrap, or just dumped into the nearby sea if the scrap value isn't high enough. The concrete foundations would either remain, or if they're judged to be a hazard to shipping they'd be blasted into small pieces and left in the sea. I'm not sure what would happen to the fiberglass blades. They're not typically recyclable, but aren't heavy enough to sink and form an artificial reef. So they'd probably have to be transported back to shore and buried in a landfill.
It seems much easier to undo the damage of a wind farm than it does, say, a coal plant.
Yes the damage from the coal ash and exhaust makes it pretty much the worst possible choice for power. However, for an equivalent MWe of generation capacity, the amount of steel and concrete needed to construct wind turbines is about 5x more than for a coal plant, an order of magnitude more than for a nuclear plant, and two orders of magnitude more than needed for a gas plant.
Wind is even worse if you compare based on the actual amount of electricity generated, since wind has about half the capacity factor of coal and gas, and nearly 1/4th that of nuclear. (Capacity factor is what fraction of the plant's generating capacity is actually fulfilled on average over a year of operation. Wind is around 0.25, coal and gas about 0.4-0.6, nuclear around 0.9.)
Note: I don't oppose wind. I actually support it, as its cost has come down enough that it's starting to become cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. I just try to counter the misinformation put out there by the unicorn and rainbows crowd who've convinced the public that wind, solar, and hydro have no drawbacks. Every power source has drawbacks, and picking the right one requires an honest and thorough comparison of all the real advantages and drawbacks.
NIH got a massive budget increase under Bush, nearly doubling their budget. Obama has been more or less holding it constant (slight decrease) at that higher spending level (nearly half of all Federal research spending).
If a decade after a huge budget increase, maintaining that level of high spending is considered "keeping the lights on," then it's no wonder we have a massive budget deficit. Perhaps NIH should have its budget reduced to Clinton-era levels for one year so they can once again appreciate just how much more money they've been receiving.
German Muslim: 'Islam Is Coming And Your Daughters Will Wear The Hijab'
That actually highlights a problem with any type of anti-hate legislation which I first ran across in Everquest. Sony's anti-harassment policy said you could be banned for targeting another player for harassment. Which on the face of it sounds fine.
The problem came when a griefer parked himself in an area messing things up for other players trying to complete quests in that area. Any player. In other words, the griefer wasn't targeting any particular player, and thus his behavior was legal under the harassment policy. The people who tried to impede the griefer however (e.g. surrounding him with fat ogre characters so he couldn't move or target anything), they were targeting a specific player, and thus they got banned. The anti-harassment policy ended up protecting the harasser and banning the people trying to end the harassment.
In the same way, the Muslim making that general statement you've quoted is not targeting a particular religion or ethnic group. And thus this new policy does not apply to his statement. People criticizing him for making such an inflammatory statement though could be (mis)construed as inciting violence against his religion or ethnicity, and their posts classified as hate speech and deleted.
The problem crops up any time you outlaw a certain behavior only if it's targeted at certain groups or individuals. Basically all anti-hate legislation which tries to protect certain groups from "hate", rather than protecting the general population from "hate". Your laws have to be consistent whether applied to part of the population, or the entire population. Any law which tries to provide additional protection to just a part of the population basically amounts to the same thing as legislating a privileged class.
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As an employer, I can kinda understand Whole Foods' situation here. If you prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the workers' rights folks claim you're trying to hide abuses in the workplace. If you don't prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the privacy rights folks claim you're not doing enough to protect your employees' privacy in the workplace (essentially extending the corporate shield to also protect your employees from liability, not just the owners).
By letting the government make the ruling, the matter is settled and the company doesn't have to worry about liability either way.
This sort of thing is a good lesson for those who erroneously believe in absolutes (the tone of TFA is that there is a "right" and "wrong" answer to this). It is exceptionally rare for a single principle on any issue to always be correct. There is almost always a situation where that principle will be wrong because some other principle will overrule it. In this case, you have the right to privacy in the workplace butting heads with the right to publicize workplace abuses. I'm not sure what the correct balance is, and I'm not sure the government does either. But at least this way the company doesn't get caught in the crossfire. All a company has to do is comply with the government ruling, and the fight over the correct balance will bypass them and go straight to the courts. So even though Whole Foods lost the case, they still won.
I'm on Sprint, and Sprint is worse in the Bay area.
What's really needed is to decouple the network from the service providers. Right now the carriers control the network, the service plans, and the phones. Those all need to be decoupled (de-tripled?) so each is forced to compete on their own merits, not subsidized by inefficiencies in an unrelated market. There should be companies which own networks of cell towers, who compete to provide the best coverage. The carriers should provide service plans and nothing more, using part of that revenue to rent time from tower networks. And you should be buying your phone from the manufacturer via retail stores like Best Buy and Amazon, not from the carrier.
Do that and an area with bad coverage becomes an opportunity for someone to build towers and make money. Not something a carrier can ignore because it's "good enough" and their better coverage elsewhere means people are afraid to switch to a different carrier.
A basic income, and attempts to make a minimum wage into a livable wage, suffer from the same problem - an assumption that money has a fixed value.
Money doesn't have a fixed value. Its value is the sum total of all the productivity of your citizens, divided by (roughly speaking) the sum total of how much everyone is paid. Consequently, an increase in real income (amount of stuff you can buy with your income, not the amount of money you're paid) depends entirely on increasing the average productivity of your citizens.
If you try to increase income by just increasing the amount people are paid, without a corresponding increase in productivity, you're just increasing the denominator. A fixed amount of productivity is now represented by a greater amount of income. Or in other words, the price of staple goods and services will rise to match your legislation mandating increased wages. Think about it. If the government announced that on Jan 1, everyone's income and savings would be increased 100x, would that really turn everyone into millionaires? No, prices would just rise 100x to match, and you would be able to afford to buy exactly what you can now. The only change would be that the denomination of your bills would have a couple more zeroes on it.
That's not to say these programs are useless. They're essentially wealth redistribution, which can be handy to counter forces leading to income inequality (e.g. the stratospheric pay of CEOs, though IMHO these these are better tackled directly). And as temporary income (e.g. unemployment pay) they can help increase economic stability. But a system built entirely upon their premise will simply see prices rise until it's no longer a livable wage.
The only way to avoid that fate, the only way for this to actually work, is if your average productivity is sufficiently high enough that a livable wage constitutes a small fraction of the mean productivity. Small enough to basically be roundoff error so (1) those doing more productive work don't really notice nor care and the incentive to do more productive work remains, and (2) the excess income it generates isn't enough to cause a large rise in prices. But considering the GDP per capita of the U.S. (one of the wealthier nations) is only around $55k/yr, a modest livable wage of say $20k/yr is a substantial fraction of that average. A 5:1 or 10:1 ratio is about where I think it would start to have a shot of working. To reach that point, you'd first need to massively increase average productivity, which is why this sort of thing works in futuristic settings like Star Trek. But that sort of massive productivity increase relies upon using cheap energy to leverage each individual's work to multiply their productivity. And ironically the people advocating a livable wage are often the very same people advocating more expensive energy and a throwback to older inefficient production methods like growing your own food in a garden.
Anyways, never forget that real wealth, real income increases come only from increased productivity. It's not something you can legislate by mandating higher incomes. People have to actually go out there and do more work, or figure out more efficient ways of doing the same thing with less work (and use the time that frees up to do more different work).
Minor semantics. DOE is the Department of Energy. The Department of Education is ED (Education Department).
A similar thing happens to credit card debt stats. Among households which carry a balance, the average (mean) debt is about $15,000. The median credit card debt among those households is about $3500 though. What's going on is that a small fraction of households (about 1 in 10) which carry a credit card balance have a huge amount of credit card debt - like $20,000 to $100,000. So when you use the average (mean), it gets heavily skewed by those few people with huge debt and make the stats look a lot worse than they really are.
On top of that, the above stats apply only to the households which carry a balance - about a third of all households. Another third pays off their cards every month (no debt), and a third have no credit cards (also no CC debt). So the median credit card debt nationwide is actually $0. But when someone in the press wants to write an article about the horrible state of credit card debt (or divorce), they glom onto those alarming but irrelevant statistics. Many of them have never taken a statistics course so they don't know what they're doing, they just find these juicy numbers which seems to prove their point, so they write an article without really understanding what they're writing about.
Anyway, if you want the actual marriage/divorce stats, they're on the US Census website. A quick glance over the numbers confirms that the majority of first marriages succeed. The percent of people who have ever been divorced is less than half the percent of people who have ever been married. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks like about 2/3rds of first marriages succeed (do not or have not yet ended in divorce). The divorce numbers are just hyper-inflated by a small number of people (about 3%) who get married and divorced many times.
The usual MO for these deep water species is to stay in deep water during the day for protection, and rise closer to the surface at night to feed (there being more stuff to eat per cubic meter closer to the surface). That works fine in the open ocean, but if they get too close to the shore it isn't exactly obvious which direction they need to swim to get back to the open ocean. This is especially true for harbors, which if you've ever gone boating is basically a man-made maze to block incoming waves and swells. It is very easy for a deep water animal to enter a harbor during its normal feeding cycle at night, then get stuck trying to find its way back to deeper water at day.
I'd recommend Authy instead of Google Authenticator. Authy requires you to enter a 4-digit PIN to use it. Anyone who has access to your phone (if it's lost, stolen, or borrowed without a passcode) can use Authenticator. Authy also allows you to sync it with multiple devices on multiple platforms, not just your phone/tablet.
You're actually more likely to have your packages lost than have the airlines lose your luggage. A loss rate of 0.5%-1.2% for package delivery vs 0.3% for the airlines. The main reason to ship your luggage is to avoid slowdowns due to airport security, and because the airlines make it a PITA to get the compensation you're entitled to if they lose a bag. Whereas when you ship a package, the compensation is pre-negotiated - you declare its value on the waybill and (presumably) insure it for that amount.
Anything with substantial monetary or sentimental value goes in my carry-on bag. The stuff that goes in my check-in bags can all be easily replaced in any developed country.
Obviously he's a pirate. And the music industry will soon sue this company into oblivion for failing to cut off customers who are pirating. Because in the new reality they're trying to create, you are liable for what your customers do with your product.
Non-refundable tickets doesn't mean the tickets become worthless if you miss your flight. Every airline I know of will change the date of your non-refundable tickets for a fee within 1 year of the original flight date. Typically $100 + any difference in cost of the flight if you rebook on a more expensive flight. Many will even let you apply the value of the tickets to a completely different flight (if it turns out you don't actually need to go to the original destination). But saying the airline wouldn't refund their $13,340 cost of the flight is a lot more dramatic than saying the airline charged them an extra $100 (well, $1100 since they had 11 people in their party).
That question isn't there because they expect criminals to confess their criminal intent. Is there so they can nail someone for a fraudulent visa application if they should enter into the country, commit a crime, and background check shows a criminal history.
Most airlines let you rebook non-refundable tickets for a different date for a fee (typically about $100) within 1 year of the original flight date. While it's not free, it's almost always a lot cheaper than having to buy new tickets. Non-refundable just means you can't convert them back into cash.
The photographer has rights to the photo, but the model has rights to how the his/her likeness is used. In most countries this only covers commercial use, but this court decision establishes that in Germany the model has controlling rights for private use.
For profession photo shoots, the model typically gives up his/her rights to control how the photo is used by signing a photo release in exchange for compensation. This is why you often see faces of people in the background blurred out in photos or videos. It's not because they're trying to protect the person's identity, it's because they weren't able to get a photo release from the person, and don't want said person suing them for illegally using their likeness without their consent.
There's nothing really wrong with the German court's decision. It's just different (and more complicated) from how it's done in the rest of the world. The main complication I can see is you taking pictures while on vacation in Germany and someone who thinks they were in the background of your photo demanding that you delete the photos. This decision would mean that they have that right, but in some locations it is virtually impossible to take a casual vacation photo without getting some extraneous people in the background.
If I'm reading this right, ZFS sync opens up one other huge, huge possibility. I had this idea nearly 15 years ago (shortly after Napster), but didn't have the technical expertise to implement it: A distributed redundant filesystem.
ZFS doesn't think in terms of files. It thinks in terms of blocks, and in a redundant z-volume (similar to a RAID array) it distributes those blocks over multiple virtual devices (vdevs) - you can think of them as disks, but they don't have to be. These vdevs can be a disk, a partition, a file on a disk, or more crucially a SAN or iSCSI - disks which aren't connected directly to the computer but are accessed over a network. Til now, those last two have been disks on the same premise, just not in the saem computer. ZFS sync could open it up to any networked vdev anywhere in the world.
So what's the big deal? The big deal is that in a redundant filesystem, you cannot reconstruct the original data from any single vdev. If you have 4 drives in RAID 5, no single drive has a complete file. You need all of the data off of at least 3 drives to reconstruct a file. The same goes for ZFS - if you're using 2-drive redundancy and you have 6 vdevs, you need the data off of at least 4 vdevs to reconstruct the file.
Now what if each of those vdevs were located in different places around the world? One could be Google Drive, another Dropbox, another Microsoft OneDrive, etc. Your data could be on the cloud, and it would still be accessible even if one service went down or even shut down completely. ZFS would just treat it like a drive failure. It would re-verify and recover after the service came back online. Or you could simply replace it with a vdev on a different cloud service. (ZFS redundancy is on a block level, so a block failure doesn't mean it drops the entire vdev from the array like RAID does with a disk which generates an error. It simply marks the block as bad and tries to reconstruct it from redundant info on other vdevs. Other blocks stored on that vdev are assumed to still be good, until you access it and the checksum says it's bad.)
Also, no single cloud service provider would have a complete copy of your data. Hackers could manage to break into a service and get all your data stored at that service. But unless they managed to get data from (n-r) services (n = number of cloud vdevs you're using, r = redundancy level), they couldn't reconstruct your data. More to the point, if said service notified you of the breach in a timely manner, you could respond by creating new vdevs with different encryption, copying your data from the old vdevs to the new, then erasing the old vdevs. Unless the hackers managed to simultaneously hack (n-r) cloud services, your data cannot be compromised. (Or if you're on the dark side, Hollywood could get the feds to raid a cloud storage service and get all your data there, but unless they did it simultaneously with (n-r) services, they wouldn't be able to see that you have copies of pirated movies stored on those services.)
I've been trying to set up something similar between my sister's, my parents', and my house, with our NASes backing up each other so we won't lose our data if one house burns down. But it's been a PITA with rsync. Because rsync thinks in terms of files, each house has to have a complete copy of the other houses' data. If I were able to do it with ZFS vdevs, it would represent a 50% space savings. More if I had more homes to work with.
$12,225/hr * 5,102 hrs = $62.4 million, which is exactly the 2013 budget for this program. 23,296 hours over 11 drones over one year is 24% flight time per drone which sounds like a pretty reasonable expectation. Over 8 years ramped up (constant rate of drone purchases throughout the period), it would be only 6% flight time, which seems highly unlikely. If they bought the drones all at once at the start of the program, it would be 3% expected flight time, which if true you'd be questioning why the program was even approved in the first place. So most likely those hour figures are for 2013 only.
If you take $12,225/hr of fixed costs, and distribute them over 23,296 hrs instead of 5,102 hrs, you get $12225*5102/23296 = $2,677/hr. Only 8% more than the anticipated $2,468/hr.
So basically, the program has cost only 8% more than what they estimated it would cost. They've just been able to keep the drones aloft for a lot fewer hours than expected (cost of pilots being traded off for cost of maintenance crew). The reporter, trying to exaggerate things to make his story sound bigger than it really is, then converted that overall cost into cost per flight hour and compared on that basis since it showed the biggest cost overrun.
Quick rule of thumb. Cost (dollars) is an amount. $/hr is a rate (first derivative of the amount). If you see an article claiming something about an amount (cost overrun), but then shows comparisons of a rate, that's a big red flag. Something deceptive may be going on, and you should do some number checking to figure out what the real story is.
The sea platform landing only has the first two energy burns, so should represent a substantial increase in payload or delta-v. You'd better have a damn good reason to want your rocket back at the launch site that quickly to justify the additional fuel cost. I suspect returning to the launch site will be the exception, and the sea platform landing will be the norm.
FWIW, the Apple design patent on the round edges and single button on the iPad was invalidated during the Samsung trial. Their design patent of the same on the iPhone was invalidated earlier this year, although curiously almost none of the mainstream press covered it.
That patent needs to die too. All it is is the response of an underdamped harmonic oscillator. Fundamental math and physics which has been known about for centuries. Just because you implemented it or something that looks like it in software doesn't mean you "invented" it.
The economy in Northern Europe works because it's diversified with hundreds of millions of people working for millions of different companies doing tens of thousands of doing things.
The economy in Venezuela is in shambles because 40% of government revenue, 11% of GDP is based on oil exports. And oil just dropped from over $100/bbl to $35/bbl in less than 2 years. Diversification helps shield you from major fluctuations in a single economic sector, much less a single commodity. (A lot of the blame goes to the Venezuelan government though, for using those oil revenues for welfare programs instead of modernizing the country like Iran and many other OPEC nations do. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day, Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.)
Ironically, most of those oil exports are to the U.S. Venezuelan crude is heavy and loaded with sulfur. Very few refineries can process it, and most of those are in the U.S. So despite the hatred between the U.S. and Venezuela, the two are tied at the hip economically.
Baseball especially is jam-packed full of stats, and most kids that age are into baseball (or some other sport that makes use of statistics). You won't get into the complex stuff like permutations or z-scores, but it's a good way to teach the simple stuff like averages, difference between expectation (probability) and prediction, and some of the wackier stuff that can arise from just those simple stats like the Pirates beating the Yankees in the 1960 World Series even though the Yankees destroyed the Pirates in almost every individual stat.
What? You thought every teaching tool had to be online?
Not sure why OP was modded up. The 1977 Star Wars movie saw Kenner sell $100 million in tie-in toys by 1978. Fox wasn't sold on the idea of a western set in space, so Lucas agreed to receive $500,000 less pay in exchange for keeping the merchandising rights for himself. You bet your ass he exploited the tie-in toys to try to make back that money. I was 8 when the movie came out, and nearly all my friends had the toys (I didn't like the movie so I never bugged my parents for toys). There were fast food tie-ins. And ESB and RotJ were advertised up the wazoo (which really annoyed me since I didn't like the first film) with huge opening-night lines. There was even an ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special on TV.
I don't really see why merchandising is considered "unpure" either. If the kid wants a Star Wars toy, then it's better to get him one than for there not to be one for him to get. It only becomes a problem if the kid wants one only because his friends have one (which is a jealousy/parenting problem), or if you're an obsessed collector who has to buy every toy that's out there (which is a mental health problem).
People really need to understand this before jumping on the "Evil corporation dodging taxes" bandwagon. The U.S. has an illogical tax policy. And it doesn't just cover corporations - it applies to individuals as well. If you're a U.S. citizen, the IRS will want to tax any money you make even if you're living abroad and working for a foreign company. You hear about people who are dual citizens of the U.S. and another country? Sounds convenient if you want to travel, right? Well it's a total nightmare if you don't live in the U.S. and don't file annual tax returns.
The U.S. government's "solution" to this illogical setup is tax treaties, where if the country you're working in has a tax treaty with the U.S., taxes you pay in the other company can be used as credit against U.S. tax obligations. But it doesn't cover everything. I ran across this when I was working in Canada. I was liable for Canadian taxes because I was living in Canada, and I was liable for U.S. taxes because I was a U.S. citizen. The tax treaty between the two countries meant the Canadian taxes I paid (they have the higher tax rate) essentially zeroed out my U.S. tax on wages. But the tax treaty didn't cover certain types of unearned income. Interest I earned on my Canadian bank account got double-taxed. If I'd bought a house in Canada and sold it when I changed jobs, I would've been double-taxed on the capital gains.
The problem here isn't Apple or other corporations in a similar situation. The problem is that U.S. tax law needs to be changed to make sense - if you make the money outside the U.S., the U.S. has no business trying to tax it.
Video demonstrating the phenomenon.
Structures built in/on the ocean aren't typically torn down. The metal superstructure would either be dismanntled and sold for scrap, or just dumped into the nearby sea if the scrap value isn't high enough. The concrete foundations would either remain, or if they're judged to be a hazard to shipping they'd be blasted into small pieces and left in the sea. I'm not sure what would happen to the fiberglass blades. They're not typically recyclable, but aren't heavy enough to sink and form an artificial reef. So they'd probably have to be transported back to shore and buried in a landfill.
Yes the damage from the coal ash and exhaust makes it pretty much the worst possible choice for power. However, for an equivalent MWe of generation capacity, the amount of steel and concrete needed to construct wind turbines is about 5x more than for a coal plant, an order of magnitude more than for a nuclear plant, and two orders of magnitude more than needed for a gas plant.
Wind is even worse if you compare based on the actual amount of electricity generated, since wind has about half the capacity factor of coal and gas, and nearly 1/4th that of nuclear. (Capacity factor is what fraction of the plant's generating capacity is actually fulfilled on average over a year of operation. Wind is around 0.25, coal and gas about 0.4-0.6, nuclear around 0.9.)
Note: I don't oppose wind. I actually support it, as its cost has come down enough that it's starting to become cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. I just try to counter the misinformation put out there by the unicorn and rainbows crowd who've convinced the public that wind, solar, and hydro have no drawbacks. Every power source has drawbacks, and picking the right one requires an honest and thorough comparison of all the real advantages and drawbacks.
NIH got a massive budget increase under Bush, nearly doubling their budget. Obama has been more or less holding it constant (slight decrease) at that higher spending level (nearly half of all Federal research spending).
If a decade after a huge budget increase, maintaining that level of high spending is considered "keeping the lights on," then it's no wonder we have a massive budget deficit. Perhaps NIH should have its budget reduced to Clinton-era levels for one year so they can once again appreciate just how much more money they've been receiving.
That actually highlights a problem with any type of anti-hate legislation which I first ran across in Everquest. Sony's anti-harassment policy said you could be banned for targeting another player for harassment. Which on the face of it sounds fine.
The problem came when a griefer parked himself in an area messing things up for other players trying to complete quests in that area. Any player. In other words, the griefer wasn't targeting any particular player, and thus his behavior was legal under the harassment policy. The people who tried to impede the griefer however (e.g. surrounding him with fat ogre characters so he couldn't move or target anything), they were targeting a specific player, and thus they got banned. The anti-harassment policy ended up protecting the harasser and banning the people trying to end the harassment.
In the same way, the Muslim making that general statement you've quoted is not targeting a particular religion or ethnic group. And thus this new policy does not apply to his statement. People criticizing him for making such an inflammatory statement though could be (mis)construed as inciting violence against his religion or ethnicity, and their posts classified as hate speech and deleted.
The problem crops up any time you outlaw a certain behavior only if it's targeted at certain groups or individuals. Basically all anti-hate legislation which tries to protect certain groups from "hate", rather than protecting the general population from "hate". Your laws have to be consistent whether applied to part of the population, or the entire population. Any law which tries to provide additional protection to just a part of the population basically amounts to the same thing as legislating a privileged class.