Agreed Thunderbird works well for an archive. There are just two gotchas I've encountered.
1. The MBOX format gloms all your mail into one continuous text file. It does not have a special string to denote the beginning of a new mail message. It uses "From " (F r o m + a space) to figure out where the beginning of a mail message is. Consequently, if an email has a line in the body where someone has actually typed "From " as the beginning of a sentence, Thunderbird can mistake that as the beginning of a new email (there are a couple other checks it does - read the link if you want the details).
2. If you used Thunderbird as an actual email client in the past, getting it to stop trying to login to check for new emails can be problematic. My Thunderbird setup was extensively customized with mail sorted into different folders by subject. I don't want to lose that sorting so I can't simply dump it into a new Thunderbird install (at least not with a lot of work setting it up again). So I just put up with the program occasionally hanging for 10-15 seconds while it tries to connect to a defunct mail server to download new mail. This may have been fixed - I've only had to look up 3 or 4 archived emails in the past 5 years, so I haven't bothered upgrading Thunderbird in a long time.
The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled
Um, by definition, half the infants and children have above-average levels of lead in their blood. Normally there's some ambiguity due to "average" possibly meaning the mean. But by stating the number is for a proportion of a group, you're defining "average" to mean median. And by definition the median is the 50th percentile, with half of the population being above the median. Once again, we have a non-technical reporter trying to report on a technical subject, and failing badly.
Reading the study itself, the percentage of children with elevated blood lead (more than 5 g/dL of lead) increased from 2.1% to 4.0%. In the worst-affected areas, it increased from 2.5% to 6.3%. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's 5 micrograms/dL, since 5 grams of lead would be a ball about 1 cm in diameter if I did my math right. The CDC limit for lead blood levels in children sets 10 ug/dL as the threshold when action should be taken. So while the increase in lead levels is notable, most kids should still be within the limits of what's considered safe. The authors of the study are contending that no amount of lead in the blood is safe, and their study is written under that premise.
When your HDD fails under warranty, most manufacturers just have you send it in and they send you a refurbished drive. Then they go about fixing your drive, and will send that out as a refurbished drive to replace someone else's failed HDD.
I've always wondered - what about the data that was on your failed drive? Do they just do a quick format? A full format? Or do they do a secure erase on the drive (overwrite every sector with zeros) before sending it back out? If the person who receives your old drive manages to recover your data from it, can you sue the HDD manufacturer? If you were selling the HDD, you'd secure erase it yourself before shipping it. But when the drive fails, that usually makes it impossible to do a secure erase on it.
If you have sensitive data on the drive, your only choices seem to be to send it in under warranty and hope the HDD manufacturer acts responsibly and secure erases it. Or to play it safe and destroy the drive, giving up the warranty. It seems like there should be some middle ground between those two extremes.
Shipping stuff out of the U.S. by cargo container is dirt cheap, especially in a country like the U.S. which has a trade deficit. More containers of stuff come into the country than go out, so many of those containers have to shipped out empty at the expense of the shipping company. They are desperate to put anything into those containers to recoup at least some of their expenses. Consequently, the cost to ship something overseas out of the U.S. is about the same as what it costs to ship it from the middle of the U.S. to the coast.
This reminds me of the Sony PS3 case, where you could originally install Linux on it (in fact the USAF did just that to create a cheap computational cluster using over a thousand PS3s), but then Sony changed the firmware to prevent it.
In cases like these, are there any laws allowing you to return the product for a full refund? After all you may have bought it under the premise that it could do something. Then the manufacturer altered the product post-purchase to prevent it from doing those things.
If there isn't such a law, it's high time we passed one. I don't own any Phillips Hue lights, but it was on my short list (not anymore). I would imagine anyone who's bought them to use with non-Phillips bulbs will be pissed. This defeats the whole purpose of using a standardized light socket.
The causality itself is also quite uncontroversial: It is known that exposure to lead means lower average IQ, and lower average IQ means more violence.
That would seem pretty simple to test. All you have to do is look at the IQ scores over time (controlling for changing difficulty of the tests). If your hypothesis is correct, then the rate at which IQ scores were increasing should have increased after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out.
A quick Google search turns out that the rate at which IQ has been increasing has been pretty constant. There is no characteristic jump in scores in the Americas after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out. Indicating your hypothesis is false. In fact, aside from Africa, the rate at which IQ scores have been increasing has slowed down slightly since the 1970s. This is actually a negative correlation with your hypothesis, meaning if we are to assume the mechanism you describe is correct, leaded gas was actually helping to increase IQ scores, not depressing them.
Sigh. Yes, and all space exploration isn't about discovering what's out there, it's about keeping the defense contractors fat. If you take anything and cherry-pick one reason for doing it, of course you can make it sound like it's for nefarious purposes.
I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.
As someone who's actually worked with AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles), I can tell you that our technology when we're deprived of electromagnetic waves as a means of communication and sensing is pitifully primitive. When Challenger exploded and fell into the sea, some friends asked me why it was taking so long to recover the pieces off the ocean floor. I had to explain to them that comparing radar with modern sonar, it was easier to locate stuff on the moon than it was to find stuff on the ocean floor. Sometimes the thermal profile of the ocean even form a refractive layer which makes it impossible for sound from the surface to reach beyond a certain depth, and you're effectively blind unless you can get down below that thermocline.
Advancing technology on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge about is precisely what's needed in the fields of underwater acoustic sensing, underwater acoustic communication, and underwater operations (imagine how difficult designing equipment would be if air conducted electricity - that's basically what you're dealing with in the ocean). Honestly, the biggest advance I've seen in the last four decades is computer tomography of sonar signal returns to recreate an image field, a process which borrows heavily from x-ray CAT scans (except the source and sensor are in the same location). And we're still not very good at doing it in an open environment like the ocean - a process dolphins, toothed whales, and bats seem to have perfected. Imagine if this was the best image a camera could produce of a bicycle. That's pretty much the technological state where sonar is currently at.
The primary problem is multipath due to density changes in the water caused by uneven temperature and salinity. It's like shooting video through the heat waves rising off a long asphalt road baking in sunlight. Due to a lot of the equations being the same, advances in the mathematics governing sonar and sound transmission are mostly interchangeable with the math governing radar and radio transmission. If you can lick the harder problem (sound), you will dramatically advance the easier problem (radio). WiFi connections from your home router could maintain high speed out to longer range despite having to travel through several walls or moving tree branches and leaves.
Or who knows, maybe there's some as-yet uninvented means of sensing objects using something other than EM waves or sonar. And we just haven't thought of it yet because EM is so easy to use in the air and in space that it hasn't needed inventing yet.
ISIS and Trump at least deserved some sort of mass attack.
ISIS deserves to be hacked because they are out there killing innocent people.
Trump, for all the stupid things he's said, has not committed a crime. The moment you start dehumanizing people who haven't committed a crime, deciding that it's OK to do bad things to them just because you disagree with them, and they're not worthy of the same rights and protections you give to people you agree with, you've started using the same reasoning ISIS uses to justify what they do.
The acid test for supporting the First Amendment isn't whether you'll stand up to defend the right of people you agree with to speak their opinion. It's whether you'll stand up to defend the right of people saying things you find reprehensible to speak their opinion. When I was growing up, the concept behind the First Amendment was often summarized as, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." At some point this has morphed into, "I disagree with what I say, and I will do everything I can to stop you from saying it as long as I don't get in trouble for it." That's a very dangerous slippery slope to start sliding down.
I can give you my observation: the American people got bored with space. Seriously. No one (outside of a small group of space enthusiasts, such as myself) was clamoring for yet more Apollo missions.
I'd say the American people were never interested in space. They got all interested in it during Mercury/Gemini/Apollo not because they were actually interested in space, but because they wanted to beat the Soviets. Apollo was particularly interesting because going to the moon was a new shiny. Once newness wore off, people reverted to their normal state - disinterest.
and the horribly expensive, horribly fragile kludge that was the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle program was created under the assumption we'd be having weekly Shuttle launches. The economics of the program make sense if you can hit that launch frequency. Unfortunately, due to problems with turnaround time, life expectancy of parts, and budget cuts, the launch rate got decreased to about one every 6 weeks. When you did that, the fixed costs (like maintenance facilities and staff payroll) which were supposed to be amortized over 6 launches got lumped into a single launch. And you ended up with a tremendously overpriced boondoggle. Same thing happened to the B-2 bomber. Originally the Air Force wanted several hundred, but it got reduced to just 21. And when you had to amortize the fixed design and construction costs over such a small number, each plane ended up costing almost as much as an aircraft carrier.
I, too, wonder where we would be today if we'd stuck with the hypersonic trans-atmospheric aircraft approach and hadn't gotten sidetracked with using rockets as a quick and dirty way to beat the Soviets to the moon. Basically all research on that approach got put on hold for four decades, and only recently have we restarted.
Most of the recent advances in metallurgy are coming from amorphous solids. Normally metals form crystalline grains. I know, it's weird to think of metals as crystals, but if you slice them and look at them under a microscope, they're grains of metal crystals of uniform atomic arrangement. These grains give metals a lot of their characteristics. For instance, work tempering (metal getting harder and more brittle the more you bend it) comes from these grains sliding against each other with each bend, until the edges and corners of the grains catch against each other and won't slide anymore. The size, shape, arrangement, and atomic composition of these crystals is what gives each metal and its heat treatment its unique characteristics.
An amorphous solid is cooled from a liquid to a solid so quickly it doesn't have time to form crystalline structures. This gives the material different characteristics from its crystalline form, some better, some worse. From the name, "Flash Bainite," I'm guessing forming this stuff involves rapid cooling of the steel in a controlled manner to produce just the right combination of crystalline structure mixed with amorphous steel to yield the higher strength associated with amorphous solids, without the extreme flexibility and lack of ductility (won't stay in the new shape). This ability to rapidly cool materials in a precise and controlled manner has been a recent development due to advances in computer control. In the theoretical sense, it is easy. But actually doing it in practice on an industrial scale has been very difficult until recently.
The problem with actors is that after they become famous, they start demanding huge salaries. But if your "actor" is just a product that you hold all the IP rights to, suddenly you can get all the fan obsession (and the money it brings in) without the pesky salary demands. We still have a ways to go - synthetic voice acting (Hatsune Miku's songs are vocaloids) is woefully behind in technology compared to 3D graphics recreating human faces. And movements are still almost always motion-captured. But this is the direction all of this is heading - performers completely produced and controlled by a studio with no real lives of their own.
You may need a license if you want to publish photographs of someone else's intellectual property.
You can already have your video pulled from YouTube because someone drove by with the radio blaring some copyrighted song. This law will allow you to be sued over photos of your vacation because some copyrighted object happened to be in the background."Publishing" was a lot more distinct back in the days when you had to sell a photo to a newspaper or magazine. Now you can post it on Facebook or YouTube and that can constitute "publishing". The line between "show your friends" and "publish" has become very blurred.
Copyright needs to be adjusted to borrow from trademark law. Two people or companies can have the exact same trademark, just in different fields of business. So Apple Records and Apple Computer could coexist (until Apple started selling iPods with music available via iTunes, at which point they had to negotiate a licensing agreement). If your YouTube video is not a music video or does not have a song as a soundtrack, then the song's copyright shouldn't apply. Likewise if your photos are for some purpose other than commercially exploiting the object in question, then its copyright shouldn't apply. I can (sorta) understand designer objects wanting to protect rights to use photos of those objects commercially. But unless the entire purpose of the photo is to exploit that object in particular, the copyright shouldn't matter. Unless you're running a competing theme park, Disney should not be able to prevent you from posting photos of your trip to Disneyland.
Streaming music platforms like Spotify are extremely popular, but they also pay next to nothing to creators and even the labels are not getting nearly as much as they wanted.
As best as I can tell, it's the other way around. The base royalty rate for purchased music is 9.1 cents per song. Spotify pays 0.6 to 0.84 cents per play. In other words, if a Spotify user hears a song more than 11-15 times (irrespective of time period), the creators have gotten more royalties from Spotify than if the listener had purchased the song directly.
Wikipedia has it listed per vehicle mile (sort the middle column). As you suspect, it levels the death rate out substantially (indicating Americans drive a lot more), with the U.S. clustered with Japan, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, and Austria. France and Canada very close.
I would also hypothesize that the poor long-distance rail system in the U.S. also contributes. Most long-haul freight transport in the U.S. is by large trucks. The trucks I saw while driving in Europe were much smaller (and fewer). The severity of a collision depends partly on the difference in mass between the two vehicles. If one vehicle is significantly heavier, the lighter vehicle effectively bounces off the heavier vehicle, and the occupants experience up to 2x the force.
Yup. This is long overdue, not all the hand-wringing we're doing over silly code red terrorist crap. After disease, the most likely ways an American will die are:
1 in 100 = suicide
1 in 109 = unintentional poisoning
1 in 112 = motor vehicle accident
1 in 144 = falls (mostly elderly)
1 in 358 = assault by firearm ...
1 in 164,968 = struck by lightning
1 in 598,009 = terrorist attack (though the latest attack probably dropped this significantly because it's so rare)
Those annoying commercials telling you not to text while driving are thousands of times more important than our response to terrorism.
There's a cost trade-off between the expense of a launch, and the expense of building a bigger mirror. That is, for the same price, you can have a really big telescope on land, or a small telescope in space.
Adaptive optics have advanced enough that ground-based telescopes have surpassed Hubble in resolution. The drawbacks of AO are that it's limited in wavelength (different wavelengths get refracted by different amounts by the atmosphere, so you can't simultaneously correct for all of them), it only works for a narrow field of view (so you can't take majestic shots of the entire Orion nebula), and the atmosphere completely blocks certain wavelengths from even reaching the ground making space the ideal place for far infrared or ultraviolet astronomy. If those constraints don't affect the type of astronomy you plan to do with the telescope, then there's little point paying a lot more to launch it into space.
The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth. A friend made a fortune importing Pokemon cards for sale to retailers even though he (and I) thought they were the stupidest things. They are just a few cents of cardboard with ink printed on them. But arrange that ink in a certain way so a bunch of people (rightly or wrongly) think it's valuable, and suddenly they're worth several dollars.
So even if you think bitcoins are stupid (I do), that doesn't mean they're worthless. They're worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, which is quite a lot.
On a more abstract level, that enough people value bitcoins enough to raise it to its current price does indicate substantial discontent with traditional financial systems. That's a real problem irrespective of whether or not bitcoins make sense.
There was a separate admission by VW that their CO2 emissions figures may have been inaccurate. This applied to their gasoline vehicles as well, not just diesel. The NOx emissions were specific to just their diesels.
It's not tax avoidance per se. The IRS issues a huge number of "written determinations" each year to clarify ambiguities in the tax code. Unfortunately, its vastness makes it difficult to search (while providing a steady income for tax attorneys), and many of the clarifications are so specific that you can't be certain if it'll apply to your case because a variable or two are different.
This isn't like math or physics, where there's an immutable grand order and self-consistency which allows perfect predictability. It is pure, unadulterated case law - constantly changing, frequently inconsistent, and sometimes even self-contradictory. If you can find several similar cases in the IRS determinations which say what you're planning to do is OK in the IRS' eyes, then you can be reasonably sure that they won't audit you over it and say you violated tax law. But you can't be certain.* The only way to be certain is to find a case which exactly matches what you're planning to do - no different variables.
If you can find an exact match, of course you're going to do that instead. Not because it lets you avoid taxes, but because it removes any uncertainty about the tax implications, and thus eliminates any chance of the expense of a future audit and possibly having the IRS make you pay back taxes or even force you to reverse what you did, potentially undoing years of work you've done restructuring in the interim. It sounds like Yahoo wanted to spin off the foreign asset into a different holding company, and found IRS determinations saying spinning off domestic assets weren't taxable, but couldn't find one saying spinning off a foreign assets weren't taxable (the one different variable). So they went the route which had the most certainty - spun off all the domestic assets.
* I've run across this too. My father and a business partner constructed a pair of strip malls, and operated them as 50%/50% partners. Two decades later, the partner wanted to part ways, with my father getting one building and him getting another. But if they sold their share of each building to each other, that would be a taxable event. They would have to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated value of their 50% of the buildings as if they were selling them for cash, even though they weren't actually keeping any of the cash - the "money" was immediately being reinvested into buying the partner's 50% share.
Fortunately, there's a tax vehicle which covers exactly this situation - the 1031 exchange which allows swaps of like-for-like property without being a taxable event. Unfortunately, in the case of 1031 real estate swaps, all the IRS determinations they could find applied to real (owned) property. My father and his partner owned the buildings, but leased the land. Because of that one different variable, they had to do the 1031 exchange, then wait several years to see if there would be an IRS audit which might force them to reverse the swap. During the wait, they had to avoid any work or corporate restructuring which might be difficult to reverse should the IRS decide their 1031 exchange was invalid.
The ONLY thing that will ultimately defeat groups like ISIS is with speech and ideas. Firearms can only suppress them for a time at best. You don't win hearts and minds at the point of a gun.
No, free speech and free exchange of ideas by itself actually augmented the rise of ISIS. When Saddam Hussein had an iron grip on the country, something like ISIS could never have gathered momentum. The (relative) freedom generated when the U.S. deposed Hussein is what allowed ISIS to fester. If you think just giving the people free speech and free exchange of ideas will solve everything, then you're as naive as Bush was when he invaded.
The only thing that will ultimately defeat groups like ISIS is economic development and widespread distribution of wealth (i.e. rise of a middle class) giving most of the people in the region a decent standard of living. Decent enough that they won't give a shit when some guys in funny turbans tell them their life would be better if it weren't for those Westerners meddling in their affairs. If your life is already pretty good, you won't want to risk losing it by rocking the boat. Stuff like ISIS happens when there's a marked and obvious disparity between the haves and have-nots, to the point that the have-nots feel they're in the latter category not through any fault of their own, but because someone else is keeping them there. And that they have no other choice than violent revolution to make their lives better.
Iran is a pretty good example. The Shah, for all his faults, did a remarkable job modernizing the country. It's still one of the most modern countries in the Middle East. But he was busy amassing wealth by looting the country's coffers. The common people suffered while he flaunted his wealth, which is why the Islamic Revolution was able to gain traction and eventually depose him.
That's where I think we really blew it in Iraq. We concentrated too much on securing the country and prepping a native government to take over so we could get out ASAP. We should have been building infrastructure like water and power distribution, fixing up the roads and bridges that were all bombed, setting up a primary education system so the kids growing up there could learn basic math and practical skills which would be useful in a multitude of future productive occupations, providing economic and logistic assistance to help get local businesses up and running. (Afghanistan is much tougher nut to crack in that respect because they lack natural resources and their main economic export is opium.)
It kinda reminds me of the CSS Virginia (nee Merrimac). On the Virginia, the angled sides were to deflect cannonballs rather than try to outright resist them. On the Zumwalt the angled sides are deflect radar rather than bounce it right back and provide a signal for the originating radar to lock onto.
For those who don't know, Samsung marketed this digital picture frame in 2006, long before the iPad was even a rumor, and even pre-dating the iPhone. Notice how the front looks identical to the later Samsung tablets, just with bigger bezels and no button. And it contains all of the distinctive elements of the original iPad that Apple sued over except the home button - flat, rounded corners, black bezels with white/silver edges. As if Apple simply ripped off Samsung's design, then turned around and sued Samsung for ripping them off.
The argument against that version of history has always been that the back of the picture frame looks nothing like the back of the iPad. Well, now we have this image of the back of an early iPad prototype, lending support to the theory that Apple used Samsung's picture frame as a starting point for their iPad design.
There's no way the OS will install itself automatically. It'll merely be downloaded to your machine (or machines).
That is still unacceptable behavior. My workplace is in an area where Verizon has refused to upgrade the phone lines and Time Warner doesn't cover large chunks of each block. So most businesses are on crappy 1.0-1.5 Mbps DSL connections, with the fastest possible being just 3 Mbps. Combine that with each business having 3-10 computers and this automatic multi-gigabyte download behavior is completely unacceptable. Especially for the couple businesses who've resorted to cellular LTE Internet with extremely low data caps to try to get decent speed.
You and the post below asking why this should be illegal are misunderstanding the problem. From TFA:
This past August, tickets with a face price of $129 to a Billy Joel concert at the Nassau Coliseum sold out in five minutes, and then reappeared on resale sites where they were priced from $400 to as much as $8,000.
The problem is the performer is deliberately under-pricing the tickets below market value, so that ordinary fans can afford them. When you do that, demand far outstrips supply and the tickets sell out almost immediately. The fans might only be able to get a ticket if they get lucky, but those who are lucky get to attend the concert they've always dreamed of at a reasonable price.
The scalpers are using bots to scoop up all the tickets, then reselling them at market price, putting them far out of reach of ordinary fans. They performer is trying to be altruistic as a favor to fans, and scalpers are taking advantage of that to profit off the differential between the altruistic price and the market price. The ticket purchase agreement already says you can't resell them, it's just an incredibly difficult provision to enforce without seriously inconveniencing the buyer (see below).
Legislation like this is an attempt to solve the problem in a non-intrusive manner. If it fails, the performers and venues can still pull the nuclear option - require you to show your ID at the event, and the ID has to match the person who bought the ticket. Just like when you buy airline tickets. The drawback being that people who legitimately can't attend (because of illness or emergencies) can't salvage their purchase price by giving the tickets to friends or relatives.
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Agreed Thunderbird works well for an archive. There are just two gotchas I've encountered.
1. The MBOX format gloms all your mail into one continuous text file. It does not have a special string to denote the beginning of a new mail message. It uses "From " (F r o m + a space) to figure out where the beginning of a mail message is. Consequently, if an email has a line in the body where someone has actually typed "From " as the beginning of a sentence, Thunderbird can mistake that as the beginning of a new email (there are a couple other checks it does - read the link if you want the details).
2. If you used Thunderbird as an actual email client in the past, getting it to stop trying to login to check for new emails can be problematic. My Thunderbird setup was extensively customized with mail sorted into different folders by subject. I don't want to lose that sorting so I can't simply dump it into a new Thunderbird install (at least not with a lot of work setting it up again). So I just put up with the program occasionally hanging for 10-15 seconds while it tries to connect to a defunct mail server to download new mail. This may have been fixed - I've only had to look up 3 or 4 archived emails in the past 5 years, so I haven't bothered upgrading Thunderbird in a long time.
Um, by definition, half the infants and children have above-average levels of lead in their blood. Normally there's some ambiguity due to "average" possibly meaning the mean. But by stating the number is for a proportion of a group, you're defining "average" to mean median. And by definition the median is the 50th percentile, with half of the population being above the median. Once again, we have a non-technical reporter trying to report on a technical subject, and failing badly.
Reading the study itself, the percentage of children with elevated blood lead (more than 5 g/dL of lead) increased from 2.1% to 4.0%. In the worst-affected areas, it increased from 2.5% to 6.3%. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's 5 micrograms/dL, since 5 grams of lead would be a ball about 1 cm in diameter if I did my math right. The CDC limit for lead blood levels in children sets 10 ug/dL as the threshold when action should be taken. So while the increase in lead levels is notable, most kids should still be within the limits of what's considered safe. The authors of the study are contending that no amount of lead in the blood is safe, and their study is written under that premise.
When your HDD fails under warranty, most manufacturers just have you send it in and they send you a refurbished drive. Then they go about fixing your drive, and will send that out as a refurbished drive to replace someone else's failed HDD.
I've always wondered - what about the data that was on your failed drive? Do they just do a quick format? A full format? Or do they do a secure erase on the drive (overwrite every sector with zeros) before sending it back out? If the person who receives your old drive manages to recover your data from it, can you sue the HDD manufacturer? If you were selling the HDD, you'd secure erase it yourself before shipping it. But when the drive fails, that usually makes it impossible to do a secure erase on it.
If you have sensitive data on the drive, your only choices seem to be to send it in under warranty and hope the HDD manufacturer acts responsibly and secure erases it. Or to play it safe and destroy the drive, giving up the warranty. It seems like there should be some middle ground between those two extremes.
Shipping stuff out of the U.S. by cargo container is dirt cheap, especially in a country like the U.S. which has a trade deficit. More containers of stuff come into the country than go out, so many of those containers have to shipped out empty at the expense of the shipping company. They are desperate to put anything into those containers to recoup at least some of their expenses. Consequently, the cost to ship something overseas out of the U.S. is about the same as what it costs to ship it from the middle of the U.S. to the coast.
This reminds me of the Sony PS3 case, where you could originally install Linux on it (in fact the USAF did just that to create a cheap computational cluster using over a thousand PS3s), but then Sony changed the firmware to prevent it.
In cases like these, are there any laws allowing you to return the product for a full refund? After all you may have bought it under the premise that it could do something. Then the manufacturer altered the product post-purchase to prevent it from doing those things.
If there isn't such a law, it's high time we passed one. I don't own any Phillips Hue lights, but it was on my short list (not anymore). I would imagine anyone who's bought them to use with non-Phillips bulbs will be pissed. This defeats the whole purpose of using a standardized light socket.
That would seem pretty simple to test. All you have to do is look at the IQ scores over time (controlling for changing difficulty of the tests). If your hypothesis is correct, then the rate at which IQ scores were increasing should have increased after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out.
A quick Google search turns out that the rate at which IQ has been increasing has been pretty constant. There is no characteristic jump in scores in the Americas after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out. Indicating your hypothesis is false. In fact, aside from Africa, the rate at which IQ scores have been increasing has slowed down slightly since the 1970s. This is actually a negative correlation with your hypothesis, meaning if we are to assume the mechanism you describe is correct, leaded gas was actually helping to increase IQ scores, not depressing them.
As someone who's actually worked with AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles), I can tell you that our technology when we're deprived of electromagnetic waves as a means of communication and sensing is pitifully primitive. When Challenger exploded and fell into the sea, some friends asked me why it was taking so long to recover the pieces off the ocean floor. I had to explain to them that comparing radar with modern sonar, it was easier to locate stuff on the moon than it was to find stuff on the ocean floor. Sometimes the thermal profile of the ocean even form a refractive layer which makes it impossible for sound from the surface to reach beyond a certain depth, and you're effectively blind unless you can get down below that thermocline.
Advancing technology on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge about is precisely what's needed in the fields of underwater acoustic sensing, underwater acoustic communication, and underwater operations (imagine how difficult designing equipment would be if air conducted electricity - that's basically what you're dealing with in the ocean). Honestly, the biggest advance I've seen in the last four decades is computer tomography of sonar signal returns to recreate an image field, a process which borrows heavily from x-ray CAT scans (except the source and sensor are in the same location). And we're still not very good at doing it in an open environment like the ocean - a process dolphins, toothed whales, and bats seem to have perfected. Imagine if this was the best image a camera could produce of a bicycle. That's pretty much the technological state where sonar is currently at.
The primary problem is multipath due to density changes in the water caused by uneven temperature and salinity. It's like shooting video through the heat waves rising off a long asphalt road baking in sunlight. Due to a lot of the equations being the same, advances in the mathematics governing sonar and sound transmission are mostly interchangeable with the math governing radar and radio transmission. If you can lick the harder problem (sound), you will dramatically advance the easier problem (radio). WiFi connections from your home router could maintain high speed out to longer range despite having to travel through several walls or moving tree branches and leaves.
Or who knows, maybe there's some as-yet uninvented means of sensing objects using something other than EM waves or sonar. And we just haven't thought of it yet because EM is so easy to use in the air and in space that it hasn't needed inventing yet.
ISIS deserves to be hacked because they are out there killing innocent people.
Trump, for all the stupid things he's said, has not committed a crime. The moment you start dehumanizing people who haven't committed a crime, deciding that it's OK to do bad things to them just because you disagree with them, and they're not worthy of the same rights and protections you give to people you agree with, you've started using the same reasoning ISIS uses to justify what they do.
The acid test for supporting the First Amendment isn't whether you'll stand up to defend the right of people you agree with to speak their opinion. It's whether you'll stand up to defend the right of people saying things you find reprehensible to speak their opinion. When I was growing up, the concept behind the First Amendment was often summarized as, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." At some point this has morphed into, "I disagree with what I say, and I will do everything I can to stop you from saying it as long as I don't get in trouble for it." That's a very dangerous slippery slope to start sliding down.
I'd say the American people were never interested in space. They got all interested in it during Mercury/Gemini/Apollo not because they were actually interested in space, but because they wanted to beat the Soviets. Apollo was particularly interesting because going to the moon was a new shiny. Once newness wore off, people reverted to their normal state - disinterest.
The Space Shuttle program was created under the assumption we'd be having weekly Shuttle launches. The economics of the program make sense if you can hit that launch frequency. Unfortunately, due to problems with turnaround time, life expectancy of parts, and budget cuts, the launch rate got decreased to about one every 6 weeks. When you did that, the fixed costs (like maintenance facilities and staff payroll) which were supposed to be amortized over 6 launches got lumped into a single launch. And you ended up with a tremendously overpriced boondoggle. Same thing happened to the B-2 bomber. Originally the Air Force wanted several hundred, but it got reduced to just 21. And when you had to amortize the fixed design and construction costs over such a small number, each plane ended up costing almost as much as an aircraft carrier.
I, too, wonder where we would be today if we'd stuck with the hypersonic trans-atmospheric aircraft approach and hadn't gotten sidetracked with using rockets as a quick and dirty way to beat the Soviets to the moon. Basically all research on that approach got put on hold for four decades, and only recently have we restarted.
Most of the recent advances in metallurgy are coming from amorphous solids. Normally metals form crystalline grains. I know, it's weird to think of metals as crystals, but if you slice them and look at them under a microscope, they're grains of metal crystals of uniform atomic arrangement. These grains give metals a lot of their characteristics. For instance, work tempering (metal getting harder and more brittle the more you bend it) comes from these grains sliding against each other with each bend, until the edges and corners of the grains catch against each other and won't slide anymore. The size, shape, arrangement, and atomic composition of these crystals is what gives each metal and its heat treatment its unique characteristics.
An amorphous solid is cooled from a liquid to a solid so quickly it doesn't have time to form crystalline structures. This gives the material different characteristics from its crystalline form, some better, some worse. From the name, "Flash Bainite," I'm guessing forming this stuff involves rapid cooling of the steel in a controlled manner to produce just the right combination of crystalline structure mixed with amorphous steel to yield the higher strength associated with amorphous solids, without the extreme flexibility and lack of ductility (won't stay in the new shape). This ability to rapidly cool materials in a precise and controlled manner has been a recent development due to advances in computer control. In the theoretical sense, it is easy. But actually doing it in practice on an industrial scale has been very difficult until recently.
The problem with actors is that after they become famous, they start demanding huge salaries. But if your "actor" is just a product that you hold all the IP rights to, suddenly you can get all the fan obsession (and the money it brings in) without the pesky salary demands. We still have a ways to go - synthetic voice acting (Hatsune Miku's songs are vocaloids) is woefully behind in technology compared to 3D graphics recreating human faces. And movements are still almost always motion-captured. But this is the direction all of this is heading - performers completely produced and controlled by a studio with no real lives of their own.
You can already have your video pulled from YouTube because someone drove by with the radio blaring some copyrighted song. This law will allow you to be sued over photos of your vacation because some copyrighted object happened to be in the background."Publishing" was a lot more distinct back in the days when you had to sell a photo to a newspaper or magazine. Now you can post it on Facebook or YouTube and that can constitute "publishing". The line between "show your friends" and "publish" has become very blurred.
Copyright needs to be adjusted to borrow from trademark law. Two people or companies can have the exact same trademark, just in different fields of business. So Apple Records and Apple Computer could coexist (until Apple started selling iPods with music available via iTunes, at which point they had to negotiate a licensing agreement). If your YouTube video is not a music video or does not have a song as a soundtrack, then the song's copyright shouldn't apply. Likewise if your photos are for some purpose other than commercially exploiting the object in question, then its copyright shouldn't apply. I can (sorta) understand designer objects wanting to protect rights to use photos of those objects commercially. But unless the entire purpose of the photo is to exploit that object in particular, the copyright shouldn't matter. Unless you're running a competing theme park, Disney should not be able to prevent you from posting photos of your trip to Disneyland.
As best as I can tell, it's the other way around. The base royalty rate for purchased music is 9.1 cents per song. Spotify pays 0.6 to 0.84 cents per play. In other words, if a Spotify user hears a song more than 11-15 times (irrespective of time period), the creators have gotten more royalties from Spotify than if the listener had purchased the song directly.
Wikipedia has it listed per vehicle mile (sort the middle column). As you suspect, it levels the death rate out substantially (indicating Americans drive a lot more), with the U.S. clustered with Japan, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, and Austria. France and Canada very close.
I would also hypothesize that the poor long-distance rail system in the U.S. also contributes. Most long-haul freight transport in the U.S. is by large trucks. The trucks I saw while driving in Europe were much smaller (and fewer). The severity of a collision depends partly on the difference in mass between the two vehicles. If one vehicle is significantly heavier, the lighter vehicle effectively bounces off the heavier vehicle, and the occupants experience up to 2x the force.
Yup. This is long overdue, not all the hand-wringing we're doing over silly code red terrorist crap. After disease, the most likely ways an American will die are:
...
1 in 100 = suicide
1 in 109 = unintentional poisoning
1 in 112 = motor vehicle accident
1 in 144 = falls (mostly elderly)
1 in 358 = assault by firearm
1 in 164,968 = struck by lightning
1 in 598,009 = terrorist attack (though the latest attack probably dropped this significantly because it's so rare)
Those annoying commercials telling you not to text while driving are thousands of times more important than our response to terrorism.
There's a cost trade-off between the expense of a launch, and the expense of building a bigger mirror. That is, for the same price, you can have a really big telescope on land, or a small telescope in space.
Adaptive optics have advanced enough that ground-based telescopes have surpassed Hubble in resolution. The drawbacks of AO are that it's limited in wavelength (different wavelengths get refracted by different amounts by the atmosphere, so you can't simultaneously correct for all of them), it only works for a narrow field of view (so you can't take majestic shots of the entire Orion nebula), and the atmosphere completely blocks certain wavelengths from even reaching the ground making space the ideal place for far infrared or ultraviolet astronomy. If those constraints don't affect the type of astronomy you plan to do with the telescope, then there's little point paying a lot more to launch it into space.
The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth. A friend made a fortune importing Pokemon cards for sale to retailers even though he (and I) thought they were the stupidest things. They are just a few cents of cardboard with ink printed on them. But arrange that ink in a certain way so a bunch of people (rightly or wrongly) think it's valuable, and suddenly they're worth several dollars.
So even if you think bitcoins are stupid (I do), that doesn't mean they're worthless. They're worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, which is quite a lot.
On a more abstract level, that enough people value bitcoins enough to raise it to its current price does indicate substantial discontent with traditional financial systems. That's a real problem irrespective of whether or not bitcoins make sense.
There was a separate admission by VW that their CO2 emissions figures may have been inaccurate. This applied to their gasoline vehicles as well, not just diesel. The NOx emissions were specific to just their diesels.
It's not tax avoidance per se. The IRS issues a huge number of "written determinations" each year to clarify ambiguities in the tax code. Unfortunately, its vastness makes it difficult to search (while providing a steady income for tax attorneys), and many of the clarifications are so specific that you can't be certain if it'll apply to your case because a variable or two are different.
This isn't like math or physics, where there's an immutable grand order and self-consistency which allows perfect predictability. It is pure, unadulterated case law - constantly changing, frequently inconsistent, and sometimes even self-contradictory. If you can find several similar cases in the IRS determinations which say what you're planning to do is OK in the IRS' eyes, then you can be reasonably sure that they won't audit you over it and say you violated tax law. But you can't be certain.* The only way to be certain is to find a case which exactly matches what you're planning to do - no different variables.
If you can find an exact match, of course you're going to do that instead. Not because it lets you avoid taxes, but because it removes any uncertainty about the tax implications, and thus eliminates any chance of the expense of a future audit and possibly having the IRS make you pay back taxes or even force you to reverse what you did, potentially undoing years of work you've done restructuring in the interim. It sounds like Yahoo wanted to spin off the foreign asset into a different holding company, and found IRS determinations saying spinning off domestic assets weren't taxable, but couldn't find one saying spinning off a foreign assets weren't taxable (the one different variable). So they went the route which had the most certainty - spun off all the domestic assets.
* I've run across this too. My father and a business partner constructed a pair of strip malls, and operated them as 50%/50% partners. Two decades later, the partner wanted to part ways, with my father getting one building and him getting another. But if they sold their share of each building to each other, that would be a taxable event. They would have to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated value of their 50% of the buildings as if they were selling them for cash, even though they weren't actually keeping any of the cash - the "money" was immediately being reinvested into buying the partner's 50% share.
Fortunately, there's a tax vehicle which covers exactly this situation - the 1031 exchange which allows swaps of like-for-like property without being a taxable event. Unfortunately, in the case of 1031 real estate swaps, all the IRS determinations they could find applied to real (owned) property. My father and his partner owned the buildings, but leased the land. Because of that one different variable, they had to do the 1031 exchange, then wait several years to see if there would be an IRS audit which might force them to reverse the swap. During the wait, they had to avoid any work or corporate restructuring which might be difficult to reverse should the IRS decide their 1031 exchange was invalid.
No, free speech and free exchange of ideas by itself actually augmented the rise of ISIS. When Saddam Hussein had an iron grip on the country, something like ISIS could never have gathered momentum. The (relative) freedom generated when the U.S. deposed Hussein is what allowed ISIS to fester. If you think just giving the people free speech and free exchange of ideas will solve everything, then you're as naive as Bush was when he invaded.
The only thing that will ultimately defeat groups like ISIS is economic development and widespread distribution of wealth (i.e. rise of a middle class) giving most of the people in the region a decent standard of living. Decent enough that they won't give a shit when some guys in funny turbans tell them their life would be better if it weren't for those Westerners meddling in their affairs. If your life is already pretty good, you won't want to risk losing it by rocking the boat. Stuff like ISIS happens when there's a marked and obvious disparity between the haves and have-nots, to the point that the have-nots feel they're in the latter category not through any fault of their own, but because someone else is keeping them there. And that they have no other choice than violent revolution to make their lives better.
Iran is a pretty good example. The Shah, for all his faults, did a remarkable job modernizing the country. It's still one of the most modern countries in the Middle East. But he was busy amassing wealth by looting the country's coffers. The common people suffered while he flaunted his wealth, which is why the Islamic Revolution was able to gain traction and eventually depose him.
That's where I think we really blew it in Iraq. We concentrated too much on securing the country and prepping a native government to take over so we could get out ASAP. We should have been building infrastructure like water and power distribution, fixing up the roads and bridges that were all bombed, setting up a primary education system so the kids growing up there could learn basic math and practical skills which would be useful in a multitude of future productive occupations, providing economic and logistic assistance to help get local businesses up and running. (Afghanistan is much tougher nut to crack in that respect because they lack natural resources and their main economic export is opium.)
It kinda reminds me of the CSS Virginia (nee Merrimac). On the Virginia, the angled sides were to deflect cannonballs rather than try to outright resist them. On the Zumwalt the angled sides are deflect radar rather than bounce it right back and provide a signal for the originating radar to lock onto.
For those who don't know, Samsung marketed this digital picture frame in 2006, long before the iPad was even a rumor, and even pre-dating the iPhone. Notice how the front looks identical to the later Samsung tablets, just with bigger bezels and no button. And it contains all of the distinctive elements of the original iPad that Apple sued over except the home button - flat, rounded corners, black bezels with white/silver edges. As if Apple simply ripped off Samsung's design, then turned around and sued Samsung for ripping them off.
The argument against that version of history has always been that the back of the picture frame looks nothing like the back of the iPad. Well, now we have this image of the back of an early iPad prototype, lending support to the theory that Apple used Samsung's picture frame as a starting point for their iPad design.
That is still unacceptable behavior. My workplace is in an area where Verizon has refused to upgrade the phone lines and Time Warner doesn't cover large chunks of each block. So most businesses are on crappy 1.0-1.5 Mbps DSL connections, with the fastest possible being just 3 Mbps. Combine that with each business having 3-10 computers and this automatic multi-gigabyte download behavior is completely unacceptable. Especially for the couple businesses who've resorted to cellular LTE Internet with extremely low data caps to try to get decent speed.
The problem is the performer is deliberately under-pricing the tickets below market value, so that ordinary fans can afford them. When you do that, demand far outstrips supply and the tickets sell out almost immediately. The fans might only be able to get a ticket if they get lucky, but those who are lucky get to attend the concert they've always dreamed of at a reasonable price.
The scalpers are using bots to scoop up all the tickets, then reselling them at market price, putting them far out of reach of ordinary fans. They performer is trying to be altruistic as a favor to fans, and scalpers are taking advantage of that to profit off the differential between the altruistic price and the market price. The ticket purchase agreement already says you can't resell them, it's just an incredibly difficult provision to enforce without seriously inconveniencing the buyer (see below).
Legislation like this is an attempt to solve the problem in a non-intrusive manner. If it fails, the performers and venues can still pull the nuclear option - require you to show your ID at the event, and the ID has to match the person who bought the ticket. Just like when you buy airline tickets. The drawback being that people who legitimately can't attend (because of illness or emergencies) can't salvage their purchase price by giving the tickets to friends or relatives.
More like a giant chasm. Stocks are meant to be resold and traded. Tickets are usually sold with the explicit condition that they cannot be resold.