Yeah, I spent two weeks trying to track down an instant blue-screen bug in a 3D simulation. Running it in a debugger didn't help - it would still blue-screen, though it did allow me to narrow it down to an innocuous-looking piece of code. I went over it with a fine-toothed comb and couldn't find anything wrong with it.
After two weeks, a co-worker was assigned a task similar to mine. She asked for my code so she wouldn't have to start from scratch. I gave it to her with the warning that it was blue-screening and I couldn't figure out why. A half hour later she called to say the code worked just fine on her computer. I couldn't believe it and trotted over to her office to see for myself. It did indeed run on her computer exactly like it was supposed to. I copied her compiled executable to my computer, ran it, and it blue-screened.
Armed with that knowledge, I began testing by eliminating different parts of my computer. The breakthrough came when I disabled hardware 3D acceleration and ran it in software emulation, and it ran just fine. The culprit was a hardware bug in the nvidia 3D video card. (This was when 3dfx was king. My company had tried to save some money and bought me a discount video card made by some company nobody had ever heard of.)
Lesson: Sometimes it's not your fault. If you've looked over your code and can't figure out why it's crashing, try running it on another computer.
Apple is pushing for user privacy. This means that the voicemail would be transcribed by Siri on *your* phone. Nobody else would have access to it to store it or scrape it or learn from it. Not in "the cloud".
Erm... When you ask Siri a question, your voice gets recorded, the file gets sent over the Internet to Apple's servers, which do the voice recognition, and send the equivalent text back to your phone so it can act on it. It very much happens in "the cloud." Just like Android's voice recognition. (Which by the way predates Siri by about a year - I was using it for sending texts and doing web searches before Apple ever announced Siri. Google just didn't come up with the "brilliant" idea of anthropomorphizing it and and giving it a name.)
Anyway, this feature has been on Sprint phones since 2011, when they integrated Google Voice with your Sprint account (your Sprint phone number is your Google Voice number). They tried to sell it as a value-added feature at first, letting you try it for free for a month, charging a monthly fee if you wanted to continue to use it. But with Voice's integration into Hangouts last year, it seems to have become free. I'm getting it and I'm not paying anything for it.
I'm actually surprised at how accurate it is, though it obviously has problems with proper nouns, and when peoplespeaksofasttheirwordsslurtogether. On your computer, it's been available since 2009 with Google Voice (arguably Google made it to collect a varied sample of real-world speech to improve their speech recognition algorithms, not to showcase how good their voice recognition algorithms were.)
Solar is currently the most expensive renewable by far. I know the dream is to power everything in your house with solar panels on the roof, but the technology just isn't there yet (at least without tremendous expense).
The latest complete electrical production stats (2013) put renewables at 12.8%. 6.6% of that is hydro, 4.1% is wind, 1% is burning wood (yes it's a renewable), 0.5% is "other biomass" - mostly natural gas captured from landfills, 0.4% is geothermal, and only 0.22% is solar (thermal and photovoltaic). Solar isn't last because of some grand conspiracy. It's last because it's the most expensive.
Why would you want to put the most expensive technology on the fast track for widescale adoption? Because it taps into the wishes and dreams of those who don't know better? The whole point of being an elected official is that your sole job is to learn this stuff so you can make better decisions about it than the voters who elected you who don't have the time (or sometimes the capability) to learn this stuff. A more well-reasoned approach would be to encourage wider adoption of wind (hydro is pretty much tapped out in the U.S., and wind is just a hair's breadth more expensive than coal), while continuing subsidies into solar R&D. Encouraging wide-scale adoption of PV solar at current levels of technology and cost is wasteful and foolish when better alternatives exist.
"Furthermore, why all the hate over the credits? Tesla collects government incentives, Oil and gas companies collect government incentives, other automobile manufacturers collect government incentives."
So, your argument is that multiple wrongs make it right? Incentives are driven by special interests with inequitable influence. Let the people decide in a free market.
The amount collected in fuel taxes far, far exceeds the government incentives the oil companies receive. About $41 billion in 2012 vs about $5 billion/yr. So you can think of the oil companies subsidies as a fraction of the collected taxes apportioned to encouraging R&D into new oil production/consumption technologies which the government thinks will help in the long-term.
Income (minus expenses) is the first derivative of wealth. So while there is some correlation between income and wealth, basing your tax rates on wealth creates all sorts of unfair incongruities. Take two people who earn $40k/yr. One scrimps and saves for 10 years and amasses $200k in wealth he uses to buy a house. The other blows his paycheck on parties and booze and amasses zero wealth. If you base your tax rate on wealth, the person who saved his money so he could do something useful with it long-term gets charged a higher tax rate.
Even if you're a tax-and-spend liberal, you do not want to be making this sort of fundamental math error.
Nice assertion. I'll counter with one of my own: Battery swapping has negligible effect on the ability of EVs to compete with ICEVs for consumer travel. The only case where it's of use is in long-distance, non-stop travel, which is a miniscule percentage of road miles and which can in most cases be done with a rental vehicle.
You're thinking too rationally. People aren't rational. They buy a car and think that the miles they put on it are "free" (except for the cost of gas). I try to explain to them the required maintenance and depreciation they put on the car from a long trip means the rental may in fact be cheaper, and their eyes glaze over. I completely agree with your idea of using rental cars for long trips. But unless you can convince people that driving their own paid-for car incurs a cost beyond just the gas they use, the range on EVs is going to continue to be an impediment.
As long as the people in the car need to refuel every few hours, all you need is enough range to go as far as the people can, and a sufficiently-fast recharge time that by the time the people eat the car is ready to go again.
What's needed for EVs to compete isn't battery swapping, it's lower prices for vehicles with adequate range. The Model S has the range required, now.
No it doesn't. A 30 min supercharge only gives you a 50% charge, which is about 140 miles, which is a bit over 2 hours at highway speeds. Nobody I know stops to eat every 2.5 hours while on a long trip. (And no, solar won't help. People vastly overestimate the energy density of solar. Even if you covered the car with PV cells and drove under the mid-day sun, the solar energy you harvest would only extend the range about 5-8 minutes further for each supercharge. On average, the solar would only push the car about an extra mile between supercharges.)
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product.
That's probably the best way to summarize it. Aside from shoving it down the throats of Youtubers and Gmailers who didn't want it, my biggest problem with it was that they dumbed it down to Facebook-levels. There's a Picasa plugin for Lightroom which makes it (relatively) easy to sync my DSLR photo database with my online photos on Picasaweb (Google gives you free storage for photos up to 2048x2048 resolution, so I just downsample my web photos to fit on a 1080p monitor).
When I first tried G+ and learned about circles, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not only would I be able to mirror my photos online, I'd able to selectively choose who got to view them via what circle I put them in. When I actually tried using it though, all the album management tools and a lot of other options which were on Picasaweb were gone. G+ Photos was basically Picasa stripped of nearly all the features except those those for using it to view pictures in a web browser - they dumbed it down to Facebook levels.
Eventually I learned I could still access the old Picasa tools (and my albums) by going directly to picasaweb.google.com, but none of the half dozen people I met who also used to manage their online photos with Picasa but had gotten slurped into G+ knew the site was still available. They'd just been living with the limited options in Google Photos or had switched to something else. So Google tried to put together different products to make G+, but to make it "competitive" with Facebook they stripped many of the features which made people use those products in the first place.
We have an existing and quite inexpensive container ship network. Is this rail project going to be cheaper than that?
Container ships are cheaper than rail. Their disadvantage is the labor-intensive step of loading and unloading the containers to/from the ship. For a couple hour trip across the English Channel, the loading/unloading cost is disproportionately large compared to the transport cost of the ship, so it makes economic sense to replace it with a tunnel or bridge.
But for cargo across the Pacific, the loading/unloading cost is roughly on par with the fuel cost. So based on the link, even if you doubled the cost per mile, container ships would still be price-competitive with rail. So there's no economic benefit to be gained by shipping goods from China to the U.S. by rail over a Russia-Alaska bridge. Add in the cost to build the bridge and it'll actually be more expensive than container ship. The only advantages you'll get are reduced transport time (from about a month to a week), and the ability to send containers directly by rail to more destinations than just port cities.
Yes, that's the double-edged sword here. If they're a common carrier, they fall under net neutrality but are shielded from liability for the content they carry. If they're an information service, then they are not subject to net neutrality, but are liable for the information they claim they are disseminating.
The ISPs are trying to have their cake and eat it too - be classified as an information service so they are not subject to net neutrality, but not be liable for for the information they're transmitting. You can't have it both ways - pick one or the other. At some point the light bulb will go off in their heads and they'll realize one way means possibly billions of dollars in new liability every year, while the other just means a slightly weaker business model that really isn't a weakness at all if every ISP has to abide by it. (What would be fun would be to classify just the ISPs claiming to be an "information service" as an information service, and make them liable for everything they're transmitting, while competing ISPs who abide by net neutrality are not liable.
Me, I want Android to return the ability to selectively turn off stuff that apps can do. If your app keels over because I won't let it access my contacts, I don't want your fucking app.
If your phone is rooted, you want xprivacy (requires xposed). It lets you selectively control what info apps can access, plus it'll feed fake info to the app which refuses to run if you don't let it view your contacts or location or whatever. Works with Android 4.x, requires the alpha version of xposed for Lollipop.
If I have to spend even 5 minutes looking up gas prices and driving out of my way to go to a cheaper gas station, it's not worth saving 30 cents a gallon on gas. [...] Maybe my 11 gallon gas tank just isn't big enough for significant savings, but I really wonder whether these gas price apps are worth it.
If you get 30 MPG and drive 12000 miles/yr, a 30 cents/gallon savings works out to $120 over a year.
But it's pretty pointless to find a new station every fill-up or to drive too far out of the way to get a lower price - the time you waste is usually not worth it. What it's good for is to get an idea what the average gas prices are so you know if a station is regularly priced high or low, and to find a station that's consistently low-priced in the area you normally drive around. That way you can just go to that station most of the time instead of having to constantly check prices. But you can do all that via their website. I downloaded the app for my phone, and immediately uninstalled it when it demanded I create an account before I could use it.
My local Costco regularly has 20 minute lines of drivers waiting to buy cheaper gas (though it's possible that one family member is shopping and the other is waiting for gas). If I see a line at my preferred gas station, I'll use the one down the street that I know is 15 cents more expensive.
You should only wait in the Costco line if you're waiting while a family member shops, or if it's nearby and you need gas that day and have time to waste. Most Costco gas stations are open a few hours after the store closes. If you go there an hour or a half hour before they close gas service (usually around 9-11pm), there's no line.
The amount of land isn't as important as the location. The land gives the country an exclusive economic zone which extends 200 nm out from the land. When claims by neighboring land conflicts, if the countries can't come to a mutual agreement the line is usually drawn equidistant from the nearest land . That's whay the line for the territorial waters between the U.S. and Mexico angles slightly north of the U.S.-Mexico border (the nearby Coronado Islands just offshore belong to Mexico), before angling sharply south (San Clemente Island further offshore belongs to the U.S.).
Countries cannot restrict passage through the exclusive economic zone, but they can regulate economic activity that occurs there - mainly fishing and mining (oil drilling). So islands in the right location are a big deal. The Japanese spent millions setting up a breakwater around a couple rocks because they were Japanese land and gave them exclusive fishing rights to over a hundred thousand square miles of ocean. The rocks were in danger of collapsing into the sea from wave erosion.
To qualify as land, it has to remain above sea level at high tide. Dumping sand atop underwater corals to create islands isn't generally recognized as legitimate land despite China's claims to the contrary, and would establish a very bad precedent if it were allowed. If that's the way China wants to play, the U.S. could in theory build a new island just off of mainland China and take away a huge swath of ocean territory from China. That's a can of worms you don't want to open. That's why the U.S. has been very clear in stressing that it doesn't recognize this as a legitimate "island," to the point of flying navy aircraft right over it.
The Apple Menu inverts the Windows paradigm. Your Mac's desktop lists the apps installed in the filesystem (in fact the desktop is pretty much the root of the filesystem), the Apple Menu has your shortcuts. Whereas in Windows your desktop has your shortcuts, and the Start menu lists the apps installed in the filesystem.
This is a consequence of how the two OSes started out. MacOS was coded from the start as a GUI, so logically the desktop is the root of your filesystem. Windows was originally a shell running on DOS. So all your files were stored in the DOS filesystem, and originally the desktop just had shortcuts to your program and data files. (OS X complicated this somewhat since it is now a GUI running on top of a modified version of BSD Unix.)
Anti-Microsoft, pro-Google, and no stated reason for faith in one "doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data" while the other, apparently, will not.
I own my own domain and I give each service I sign up for a unique contact email alias, which forwards to my real email address (currently I have just shy of 500 aliases). I have never received spam at google@mydomain.com. In fact the vast majority of my email aliases receive no spam, indicating the vast majority of online companies are in fact keeping your private info private (at least not without anonymizing it). Contrary to what seems to be the general belief here.
The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.
The penchant is to pee into corners, since that provides some privacy and reduces your likelihood of being seen. If you can make the walls bounce a urine stream, those two walls at 90 degrees work like a partial retroreflector. Regardless of what angle you hit the first surface, any urine sprayed at them is directed back towards the source (just not vertically, which wouldn't happen anyway due to gravity), .
The key isn't the batteries. The Tesla battery pack is over a thousand pounds, making the Tesla S weigh as much as a SUV. That hasn't hindered it. The key is recharging the battery. The current 30-minute minimum charge time is the primary hindrance to wide-scale adoption (purchase price is too, but I'm pretty sure the government would offer incentives to get us off of oil imports). If you can get the recharge time down to 5 minutes (whether by better charging technology or simply swapping battery packs), then most people's apprehension over having an electric as their only car disappears. Right now, unless you drive very little or are incredibly conscientious about the environment, only people who can afford 2+ cars are getting EVs.
The other problem is going to be operating cost. EV advocates are doing rosy predictions based on current electricity prices, or even current overnight electricity prices. If EVs become mass-market, the huge number of them being charged overnight will flatten out the electrical consumption curve and the overnight prices will no longer be much lower than daytime prices. And if it leaks over into higher consumption during the day, overall electricity prices are going to increase as well. This is going to impact the price of everything that uses electricity, not just operating EVs. Normally the market would simply build more power plants in response, but the same people advocating EVs are blocking the most effective ways to generate power. They insist that new power generation be wind whose inconsistency would require a massive overhaul of our electrical system, or solar whose price would make the EV about the same cost to operate as a gas vehicle.
This. This needs to be made illegal. Patent licensing fees should be returned (minus reasonable administrative fees) if the patent is overturned. Force the burden of proving the patent is indeed valid back upon the patent holder. Don't force the purported violator to prove the patent is invalid.
If the USPTO could control the patents it gives out so the rate they're overturned upon challenge is low, then it makes sense to force violators to prove the patent is invalid. But because they're seemingly willing to give out patents for anything and the rate they're overturned, it makes more sense to shift the burden onto the patent applicant to take reasonable steps to make sure his patent is ironclad and will not be overturned. If the patent applicant's confidence in his own patent is so low he isn't sure it won't be overturned upon a detailed review, then that's a pretty good indication the idea isn't really worthy of a patent in the first place.
This also has the effect of making pure IP companies a high-risk business. If all you do is license patents and one of your main patents gets overturned, it could bankrupt you. But if you're actually using the patent to make stuff, then you'll have an alternate revenue stream which will allow you to survive having to pay back the licensing fees.
There is a drawback in that companies may be more willing to license specious patents, in hopes that someone else will go through the expense of fighting it. If someone else fights it and wins, you get your money back, so why should you fight it? On the patent's holder's side, this creates a multi-year potential liability in the accounting books even if you have a valid patent. A sunset period of a few years after which you can't recover licensing fees (or a graduated return period, so after say 3 years you have to pay back 50%, after 5 years 25%, after 7 years you can keep it all) would address both problems.
You're making assumptions. Rather than run a desktop OS like Windows XP Professional, it's more likely running Windows XP Embedded, which is intended for this type of use.
It may be intended for this type of use, but is highly inappropriate. The reason companies use XP Embedded (arguably the only reason XP Embedded ever managed to gain any market share in embedded systems) is because you can write software for it using the Windows API. In other words, you can tap into the millions of software developers out there who know how to write Windows programs, instead of the few tens of thousands proficient in more robust embedded OSes like VxWorks. Larger supply = lower prices, so you can hire your programmers for cheaper.
The problem of course is that you're highly likely to hire a programmer who doesn't know squat about writing software for an embedded system. i.e. Something which will never get system updates or bug fixes. Their coding will be sloppier, they won't think about all the possible issues and corner cases like a skilled embedded software developer will, and the emphasis will be on getting the job done quickly and cheaply. So while it's not a desktop OS, its use allows (and in fact encourages) management to cut costs by hiring pimple-faced programmers whose only experience is in writing desktop software. Which appears to be the case here (the vulnerability is in the software running atop the OS).
Skylake has same CPU performance, and slower GPU (no eDRAM). And version 1.0 motherboards.
Your advice is sound, but mostly if you don't need/care about the GPU
Why would you care about the GPU on a desktop? If you don't want to bother with a graphics card and want to use integrated graphics, use a regular Broadwell or Skylake i7. If you need a GPU, add a graphics card.
Iris Pro sorta kinda makes sense on laptops - slightly better than integrated performance for slightly more power consumption, without having to jump up to the power draw of a discrete GPU and messing around with switchable graphics. But I haven't seen a use case for Iris Pro on the desktop.
While cataract surgery isn't a big deal, it still is surgery, requiring cutting of the eye, replacing the lens, etc.
Part of the aging process of the eye also makes it stiffer, producing presbyopia (Far sightedness). I wonder if these drops will also affect that as well.
Part of the problem with cataract surgery is that a fixed lens is inserted in place of your natural, flexible lens. This means your focus is fixed after the surgery, usually on far objects, and you are totally dependent on glasses for near vision.
This isn't a big deal for elderly people who are already badly farsighted (who also get most cataracts). But drops which dissolve cataracts would be a substantial boon for younger people who still have flexible lenses but are afflicted with cataracts. (I've heard of newer replacement lenses which are affixed to the muscles in your iris and can focus just like your natural lenses can. But I've been unable to find any follow-up info on them.)
The content is already produced. Limiting its distribution doesn't benefit the people who paid for it it any way.
Information is a strange beast in that way. Distributing it costs next to nothing. Limiting the distribution takes away a lot of value from a lot of people.
The argument for copyright is that content wouldn't be produced if it wasn't possible to capitalize on it, but here we have content being produced despite it not being capitalized on.
It's more nuanced than that. The state-funded model is that the content is pre-paid. The staff at the BBC is effectively being hired by the State to produce the content. They get paid for it ahead of time at a price they've agreed to (usually their salaries, and various equipment and travel costs at market prices). Once it's produced it's already been paid for, so there is nothing lost by freely distributing it.
The copyright model is that content is post-paid. The individual or independent studio puts up their own money (or borrows it from investors whom they can convince this is a worthwhile project) to produce the project. They are then relying on sales post-production to recoup the production costs and hopefully some profit.
The difference is (1) the decision of what should be produced, and (2) risk in case the production is a flop. In the State-run case, the State decides what gets produced, and the State absorbs the losses if the production is a flop. In the copyright model, the individual (person or organization) decides what gets produced, and they absorb the losses if the production is a flop. Now, I probably agree with most people here that copyright terms have gotten extended to outrageous durations. But that doesn't mean the idea is not in itself sound. If you take away the ability for people to get paid post-production (by eliminating copyright), then the amount of creative production will decrease unless some sort of insurance industry springs up which which absorbs the risk of a failure in exchange for decision power for what gets produced (i.e. they screen your proposed movie before deciding to insure your production). The only time there's a real problem is when (1) and (2) get allocated to different entities. Like what the RIAA does - they decide what gets produced, but their contracts place the financial burden of a failure almost entirely upon the artists. In fact most things that Go Wrong with the world can be traced back to people separating the risk associated with decisions from the power to make those decisions.
Note that this is not necessarily a State vs individual thing. Ever since scanners and photo printers pretty much destroyed the model of shooting the wedding for free and selling the prints, wedding photographers have pretty much shifted to a for-hire business model. You hire the photographer for a fixed amount to shoot the wedding, and they give you the pictures. It's pre-paid endeavor, but being done at the individual level rather than State level.
In other states annotations are published and sold by a third party, like WestLaw. The difference here is Georgia owns the annotations itself and sells them to lawyers. If it's no longer worthwhile to do so, what will happen is Georgia will stop commissioning LexisNexis to produce the annotated code, LexisNexis will do it itself and sell copies to both lawyers and the state of Georgia, which will purchase them for judges and prosecutors. Malamud will definitely not win publishing annotations copyrighted by LexisNexis, and now instead of the annotations being revenue neutral (or profitable), the profits will all go to LexisNexis. So, meh.
I believe the issue here is that some people (probably Malamud included) believe court cases are a matter of public record, and as such the annotations themselves should not be copyrightable (they should be public domain).* i.e. If the government is "owns the annotations itself", then as a public entity the annotations are public domain and not copyrightable, and thus freely redistributable. That this activity should be funded out of the State's general budget, and not used as a source of revenue (except perhaps to recoup publishing costs if lawyers order a big stack of papers).
Note that this approach also "solves" the problem of hiring a company to write the law. e.g. The building code in many jurisdictions is written by a civil engineering company expert in the trade. It is then copyrighted, and anyone who wishes to build something in compliance with the law then has to buy a copy of the building code from the engineering company - they can't get it for free even though it's the law. Leading to the perverse possibility of violating a law you could not know about because you couldn't afford to buy a copy. If as a matter of course, if States paid a lump sum to the engineering company to write that law (basically a work for hire), then they could release it into the public domain so citizens wouldn't have to buy a copy of the law to obey it.
* (I'm not even sure a list of links is copyrightable in the first place. It seems to fail the "collection of facts" threshold used in the U.S. for copyrightable lists.)
You used to be able to buy a spare battery if your usage dictated you frequently may be away from an outlet (recharge) for an indeterminate period of time. But then people who cared more about form over function dictated that such usage patterns were unimportant, and the swappable battery was sacrificed to make these devices one or two mm thinner.
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1. Critical failure. Uwe Boll hits you for double damage.
Yeah, I spent two weeks trying to track down an instant blue-screen bug in a 3D simulation. Running it in a debugger didn't help - it would still blue-screen, though it did allow me to narrow it down to an innocuous-looking piece of code. I went over it with a fine-toothed comb and couldn't find anything wrong with it.
After two weeks, a co-worker was assigned a task similar to mine. She asked for my code so she wouldn't have to start from scratch. I gave it to her with the warning that it was blue-screening and I couldn't figure out why. A half hour later she called to say the code worked just fine on her computer. I couldn't believe it and trotted over to her office to see for myself. It did indeed run on her computer exactly like it was supposed to. I copied her compiled executable to my computer, ran it, and it blue-screened.
Armed with that knowledge, I began testing by eliminating different parts of my computer. The breakthrough came when I disabled hardware 3D acceleration and ran it in software emulation, and it ran just fine. The culprit was a hardware bug in the nvidia 3D video card. (This was when 3dfx was king. My company had tried to save some money and bought me a discount video card made by some company nobody had ever heard of.)
Lesson: Sometimes it's not your fault. If you've looked over your code and can't figure out why it's crashing, try running it on another computer.
Erm... When you ask Siri a question, your voice gets recorded, the file gets sent over the Internet to Apple's servers, which do the voice recognition, and send the equivalent text back to your phone so it can act on it. It very much happens in "the cloud." Just like Android's voice recognition. (Which by the way predates Siri by about a year - I was using it for sending texts and doing web searches before Apple ever announced Siri. Google just didn't come up with the "brilliant" idea of anthropomorphizing it and and giving it a name.)
Anyway, this feature has been on Sprint phones since 2011, when they integrated Google Voice with your Sprint account (your Sprint phone number is your Google Voice number). They tried to sell it as a value-added feature at first, letting you try it for free for a month, charging a monthly fee if you wanted to continue to use it. But with Voice's integration into Hangouts last year, it seems to have become free. I'm getting it and I'm not paying anything for it.
I'm actually surprised at how accurate it is, though it obviously has problems with proper nouns, and when peoplespeaksofasttheirwordsslurtogether. On your computer, it's been available since 2009 with Google Voice (arguably Google made it to collect a varied sample of real-world speech to improve their speech recognition algorithms, not to showcase how good their voice recognition algorithms were.)
Solar is currently the most expensive renewable by far. I know the dream is to power everything in your house with solar panels on the roof, but the technology just isn't there yet (at least without tremendous expense).
The latest complete electrical production stats (2013) put renewables at 12.8%. 6.6% of that is hydro, 4.1% is wind, 1% is burning wood (yes it's a renewable), 0.5% is "other biomass" - mostly natural gas captured from landfills, 0.4% is geothermal, and only 0.22% is solar (thermal and photovoltaic). Solar isn't last because of some grand conspiracy. It's last because it's the most expensive.
Why would you want to put the most expensive technology on the fast track for widescale adoption? Because it taps into the wishes and dreams of those who don't know better? The whole point of being an elected official is that your sole job is to learn this stuff so you can make better decisions about it than the voters who elected you who don't have the time (or sometimes the capability) to learn this stuff. A more well-reasoned approach would be to encourage wider adoption of wind (hydro is pretty much tapped out in the U.S., and wind is just a hair's breadth more expensive than coal), while continuing subsidies into solar R&D. Encouraging wide-scale adoption of PV solar at current levels of technology and cost is wasteful and foolish when better alternatives exist.
The amount collected in fuel taxes far, far exceeds the government incentives the oil companies receive. About $41 billion in 2012 vs about $5 billion/yr. So you can think of the oil companies subsidies as a fraction of the collected taxes apportioned to encouraging R&D into new oil production/consumption technologies which the government thinks will help in the long-term.
Income (minus expenses) is the first derivative of wealth. So while there is some correlation between income and wealth, basing your tax rates on wealth creates all sorts of unfair incongruities. Take two people who earn $40k/yr. One scrimps and saves for 10 years and amasses $200k in wealth he uses to buy a house. The other blows his paycheck on parties and booze and amasses zero wealth. If you base your tax rate on wealth, the person who saved his money so he could do something useful with it long-term gets charged a higher tax rate.
Even if you're a tax-and-spend liberal, you do not want to be making this sort of fundamental math error.
You're thinking too rationally. People aren't rational. They buy a car and think that the miles they put on it are "free" (except for the cost of gas). I try to explain to them the required maintenance and depreciation they put on the car from a long trip means the rental may in fact be cheaper, and their eyes glaze over. I completely agree with your idea of using rental cars for long trips. But unless you can convince people that driving their own paid-for car incurs a cost beyond just the gas they use, the range on EVs is going to continue to be an impediment.
No it doesn't. A 30 min supercharge only gives you a 50% charge, which is about 140 miles, which is a bit over 2 hours at highway speeds. Nobody I know stops to eat every 2.5 hours while on a long trip. (And no, solar won't help. People vastly overestimate the energy density of solar. Even if you covered the car with PV cells and drove under the mid-day sun, the solar energy you harvest would only extend the range about 5-8 minutes further for each supercharge. On average, the solar would only push the car about an extra mile between supercharges.)
That's probably the best way to summarize it. Aside from shoving it down the throats of Youtubers and Gmailers who didn't want it, my biggest problem with it was that they dumbed it down to Facebook-levels. There's a Picasa plugin for Lightroom which makes it (relatively) easy to sync my DSLR photo database with my online photos on Picasaweb (Google gives you free storage for photos up to 2048x2048 resolution, so I just downsample my web photos to fit on a 1080p monitor).
When I first tried G+ and learned about circles, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not only would I be able to mirror my photos online, I'd able to selectively choose who got to view them via what circle I put them in. When I actually tried using it though, all the album management tools and a lot of other options which were on Picasaweb were gone. G+ Photos was basically Picasa stripped of nearly all the features except those those for using it to view pictures in a web browser - they dumbed it down to Facebook levels.
Eventually I learned I could still access the old Picasa tools (and my albums) by going directly to picasaweb.google.com, but none of the half dozen people I met who also used to manage their online photos with Picasa but had gotten slurped into G+ knew the site was still available. They'd just been living with the limited options in Google Photos or had switched to something else. So Google tried to put together different products to make G+, but to make it "competitive" with Facebook they stripped many of the features which made people use those products in the first place.
Container ships are cheaper than rail. Their disadvantage is the labor-intensive step of loading and unloading the containers to/from the ship. For a couple hour trip across the English Channel, the loading/unloading cost is disproportionately large compared to the transport cost of the ship, so it makes economic sense to replace it with a tunnel or bridge.
But for cargo across the Pacific, the loading/unloading cost is roughly on par with the fuel cost. So based on the link, even if you doubled the cost per mile, container ships would still be price-competitive with rail. So there's no economic benefit to be gained by shipping goods from China to the U.S. by rail over a Russia-Alaska bridge. Add in the cost to build the bridge and it'll actually be more expensive than container ship. The only advantages you'll get are reduced transport time (from about a month to a week), and the ability to send containers directly by rail to more destinations than just port cities.
Yes, that's the double-edged sword here. If they're a common carrier, they fall under net neutrality but are shielded from liability for the content they carry. If they're an information service, then they are not subject to net neutrality, but are liable for the information they claim they are disseminating.
The ISPs are trying to have their cake and eat it too - be classified as an information service so they are not subject to net neutrality, but not be liable for for the information they're transmitting. You can't have it both ways - pick one or the other. At some point the light bulb will go off in their heads and they'll realize one way means possibly billions of dollars in new liability every year, while the other just means a slightly weaker business model that really isn't a weakness at all if every ISP has to abide by it. (What would be fun would be to classify just the ISPs claiming to be an "information service" as an information service, and make them liable for everything they're transmitting, while competing ISPs who abide by net neutrality are not liable.
If your phone is rooted, you want xprivacy (requires xposed). It lets you selectively control what info apps can access, plus it'll feed fake info to the app which refuses to run if you don't let it view your contacts or location or whatever. Works with Android 4.x, requires the alpha version of xposed for Lollipop.
If you get 30 MPG and drive 12000 miles/yr, a 30 cents/gallon savings works out to $120 over a year.
But it's pretty pointless to find a new station every fill-up or to drive too far out of the way to get a lower price - the time you waste is usually not worth it. What it's good for is to get an idea what the average gas prices are so you know if a station is regularly priced high or low, and to find a station that's consistently low-priced in the area you normally drive around. That way you can just go to that station most of the time instead of having to constantly check prices. But you can do all that via their website. I downloaded the app for my phone, and immediately uninstalled it when it demanded I create an account before I could use it.
You should only wait in the Costco line if you're waiting while a family member shops, or if it's nearby and you need gas that day and have time to waste. Most Costco gas stations are open a few hours after the store closes. If you go there an hour or a half hour before they close gas service (usually around 9-11pm), there's no line.
The amount of land isn't as important as the location. The land gives the country an exclusive economic zone which extends 200 nm out from the land. When claims by neighboring land conflicts, if the countries can't come to a mutual agreement the line is usually drawn equidistant from the nearest land . That's whay the line for the territorial waters between the U.S. and Mexico angles slightly north of the U.S.-Mexico border (the nearby Coronado Islands just offshore belong to Mexico), before angling sharply south (San Clemente Island further offshore belongs to the U.S.).
Countries cannot restrict passage through the exclusive economic zone, but they can regulate economic activity that occurs there - mainly fishing and mining (oil drilling). So islands in the right location are a big deal. The Japanese spent millions setting up a breakwater around a couple rocks because they were Japanese land and gave them exclusive fishing rights to over a hundred thousand square miles of ocean. The rocks were in danger of collapsing into the sea from wave erosion.
To qualify as land, it has to remain above sea level at high tide. Dumping sand atop underwater corals to create islands isn't generally recognized as legitimate land despite China's claims to the contrary, and would establish a very bad precedent if it were allowed. If that's the way China wants to play, the U.S. could in theory build a new island just off of mainland China and take away a huge swath of ocean territory from China. That's a can of worms you don't want to open. That's why the U.S. has been very clear in stressing that it doesn't recognize this as a legitimate "island," to the point of flying navy aircraft right over it.
The Apple Menu inverts the Windows paradigm. Your Mac's desktop lists the apps installed in the filesystem (in fact the desktop is pretty much the root of the filesystem), the Apple Menu has your shortcuts. Whereas in Windows your desktop has your shortcuts, and the Start menu lists the apps installed in the filesystem.
This is a consequence of how the two OSes started out. MacOS was coded from the start as a GUI, so logically the desktop is the root of your filesystem. Windows was originally a shell running on DOS. So all your files were stored in the DOS filesystem, and originally the desktop just had shortcuts to your program and data files. (OS X complicated this somewhat since it is now a GUI running on top of a modified version of BSD Unix.)
I own my own domain and I give each service I sign up for a unique contact email alias, which forwards to my real email address (currently I have just shy of 500 aliases). I have never received spam at google@mydomain.com. In fact the vast majority of my email aliases receive no spam, indicating the vast majority of online companies are in fact keeping your private info private (at least not without anonymizing it). Contrary to what seems to be the general belief here.
The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.
If you look at the currents in the Indian Ocean, and trace backwards from Reunion (it and Mauritius are the two dots east of Madagascar), you pass right through the area they've been searching off of Australia.
The penchant is to pee into corners, since that provides some privacy and reduces your likelihood of being seen. If you can make the walls bounce a urine stream, those two walls at 90 degrees work like a partial retroreflector. Regardless of what angle you hit the first surface, any urine sprayed at them is directed back towards the source (just not vertically, which wouldn't happen anyway due to gravity), .
The key isn't the batteries. The Tesla battery pack is over a thousand pounds, making the Tesla S weigh as much as a SUV. That hasn't hindered it. The key is recharging the battery. The current 30-minute minimum charge time is the primary hindrance to wide-scale adoption (purchase price is too, but I'm pretty sure the government would offer incentives to get us off of oil imports). If you can get the recharge time down to 5 minutes (whether by better charging technology or simply swapping battery packs), then most people's apprehension over having an electric as their only car disappears. Right now, unless you drive very little or are incredibly conscientious about the environment, only people who can afford 2+ cars are getting EVs.
The other problem is going to be operating cost. EV advocates are doing rosy predictions based on current electricity prices, or even current overnight electricity prices. If EVs become mass-market, the huge number of them being charged overnight will flatten out the electrical consumption curve and the overnight prices will no longer be much lower than daytime prices. And if it leaks over into higher consumption during the day, overall electricity prices are going to increase as well. This is going to impact the price of everything that uses electricity, not just operating EVs. Normally the market would simply build more power plants in response, but the same people advocating EVs are blocking the most effective ways to generate power. They insist that new power generation be wind whose inconsistency would require a massive overhaul of our electrical system, or solar whose price would make the EV about the same cost to operate as a gas vehicle.
This. This needs to be made illegal. Patent licensing fees should be returned (minus reasonable administrative fees) if the patent is overturned. Force the burden of proving the patent is indeed valid back upon the patent holder. Don't force the purported violator to prove the patent is invalid.
If the USPTO could control the patents it gives out so the rate they're overturned upon challenge is low, then it makes sense to force violators to prove the patent is invalid. But because they're seemingly willing to give out patents for anything and the rate they're overturned, it makes more sense to shift the burden onto the patent applicant to take reasonable steps to make sure his patent is ironclad and will not be overturned. If the patent applicant's confidence in his own patent is so low he isn't sure it won't be overturned upon a detailed review, then that's a pretty good indication the idea isn't really worthy of a patent in the first place.
This also has the effect of making pure IP companies a high-risk business. If all you do is license patents and one of your main patents gets overturned, it could bankrupt you. But if you're actually using the patent to make stuff, then you'll have an alternate revenue stream which will allow you to survive having to pay back the licensing fees.
There is a drawback in that companies may be more willing to license specious patents, in hopes that someone else will go through the expense of fighting it. If someone else fights it and wins, you get your money back, so why should you fight it? On the patent's holder's side, this creates a multi-year potential liability in the accounting books even if you have a valid patent. A sunset period of a few years after which you can't recover licensing fees (or a graduated return period, so after say 3 years you have to pay back 50%, after 5 years 25%, after 7 years you can keep it all) would address both problems.
It may be intended for this type of use, but is highly inappropriate. The reason companies use XP Embedded (arguably the only reason XP Embedded ever managed to gain any market share in embedded systems) is because you can write software for it using the Windows API. In other words, you can tap into the millions of software developers out there who know how to write Windows programs, instead of the few tens of thousands proficient in more robust embedded OSes like VxWorks. Larger supply = lower prices, so you can hire your programmers for cheaper.
The problem of course is that you're highly likely to hire a programmer who doesn't know squat about writing software for an embedded system. i.e. Something which will never get system updates or bug fixes. Their coding will be sloppier, they won't think about all the possible issues and corner cases like a skilled embedded software developer will, and the emphasis will be on getting the job done quickly and cheaply. So while it's not a desktop OS, its use allows (and in fact encourages) management to cut costs by hiring pimple-faced programmers whose only experience is in writing desktop software. Which appears to be the case here (the vulnerability is in the software running atop the OS).
Why would you care about the GPU on a desktop? If you don't want to bother with a graphics card and want to use integrated graphics, use a regular Broadwell or Skylake i7. If you need a GPU, add a graphics card.
Iris Pro sorta kinda makes sense on laptops - slightly better than integrated performance for slightly more power consumption, without having to jump up to the power draw of a discrete GPU and messing around with switchable graphics. But I haven't seen a use case for Iris Pro on the desktop.
Part of the problem with cataract surgery is that a fixed lens is inserted in place of your natural, flexible lens. This means your focus is fixed after the surgery, usually on far objects, and you are totally dependent on glasses for near vision.
This isn't a big deal for elderly people who are already badly farsighted (who also get most cataracts). But drops which dissolve cataracts would be a substantial boon for younger people who still have flexible lenses but are afflicted with cataracts. (I've heard of newer replacement lenses which are affixed to the muscles in your iris and can focus just like your natural lenses can. But I've been unable to find any follow-up info on them.)
It's more nuanced than that. The state-funded model is that the content is pre-paid. The staff at the BBC is effectively being hired by the State to produce the content. They get paid for it ahead of time at a price they've agreed to (usually their salaries, and various equipment and travel costs at market prices). Once it's produced it's already been paid for, so there is nothing lost by freely distributing it.
The copyright model is that content is post-paid. The individual or independent studio puts up their own money (or borrows it from investors whom they can convince this is a worthwhile project) to produce the project. They are then relying on sales post-production to recoup the production costs and hopefully some profit.
The difference is (1) the decision of what should be produced, and (2) risk in case the production is a flop. In the State-run case, the State decides what gets produced, and the State absorbs the losses if the production is a flop. In the copyright model, the individual (person or organization) decides what gets produced, and they absorb the losses if the production is a flop. Now, I probably agree with most people here that copyright terms have gotten extended to outrageous durations. But that doesn't mean the idea is not in itself sound. If you take away the ability for people to get paid post-production (by eliminating copyright), then the amount of creative production will decrease unless some sort of insurance industry springs up which which absorbs the risk of a failure in exchange for decision power for what gets produced (i.e. they screen your proposed movie before deciding to insure your production). The only time there's a real problem is when (1) and (2) get allocated to different entities. Like what the RIAA does - they decide what gets produced, but their contracts place the financial burden of a failure almost entirely upon the artists. In fact most things that Go Wrong with the world can be traced back to people separating the risk associated with decisions from the power to make those decisions.
Note that this is not necessarily a State vs individual thing. Ever since scanners and photo printers pretty much destroyed the model of shooting the wedding for free and selling the prints, wedding photographers have pretty much shifted to a for-hire business model. You hire the photographer for a fixed amount to shoot the wedding, and they give you the pictures. It's pre-paid endeavor, but being done at the individual level rather than State level.
I believe the issue here is that some people (probably Malamud included) believe court cases are a matter of public record, and as such the annotations themselves should not be copyrightable (they should be public domain).* i.e. If the government is "owns the annotations itself", then as a public entity the annotations are public domain and not copyrightable, and thus freely redistributable. That this activity should be funded out of the State's general budget, and not used as a source of revenue (except perhaps to recoup publishing costs if lawyers order a big stack of papers).
Note that this approach also "solves" the problem of hiring a company to write the law. e.g. The building code in many jurisdictions is written by a civil engineering company expert in the trade. It is then copyrighted, and anyone who wishes to build something in compliance with the law then has to buy a copy of the building code from the engineering company - they can't get it for free even though it's the law. Leading to the perverse possibility of violating a law you could not know about because you couldn't afford to buy a copy. If as a matter of course, if States paid a lump sum to the engineering company to write that law (basically a work for hire), then they could release it into the public domain so citizens wouldn't have to buy a copy of the law to obey it.
* (I'm not even sure a list of links is copyrightable in the first place. It seems to fail the "collection of facts" threshold used in the U.S. for copyrightable lists.)
You used to be able to buy a spare battery if your usage dictated you frequently may be away from an outlet (recharge) for an indeterminate period of time. But then people who cared more about form over function dictated that such usage patterns were unimportant, and the swappable battery was sacrificed to make these devices one or two mm thinner.