Even simpler solution: NYC should just change the street markings and signals to reduce the number of left turns you can make. Why ask a company to change one of their apps which only influences traffic flow, when you yourself have direct control of the traffic patterns in your city?
What the EU wants instead is (1) the pipe dream of Greece paying back everything and (2) higher taxes and lower pensions now to help this repayment. In other words, for the EU the goal of any reforms is not to get Greece back on its feet but to extract money from it to pay back the loans.
You're applying reasoning which works for a country with its own currency. If a country has its own floating currency, then raising taxes and lowering pensions is not necessary to reform the economy. You can just leave those as-is and the value of your currency will decline relative to everyone else's, effectively giving all your citizens a pay cut and thus helping to reduce your expenses (measured via other currencies than your own - that's what matters when you owe money to creditors outside your country). That's what happened to Germany in the 1930s, Mexico in the 1970s when they lifted price controls on the Peso.
Greece is on the Euro though, so this is not an option. The fundamental problem is that Greek citizens are being paid too many Euros for the productivity they are generating (compared to other citizens in the Eurozone). Any long-term fix for this must involve increasing the Greek productivity-to-wages ratio to match the Eurozone norm. This is a mathematical fact - you cannot avoid it by holding an election or making political promises or complaining about fairness. Failure to correct this ratio means Greek debt will continue to increase regardless of whatever other measures you take. Even if you forgave all of Greece's debt, if you do not address this productivity-to-wages ratio imbalance between Greece and the other EU countries, Greece would just continue to accrue new debt.
That means there are three options:
(A) Boot Greece out of the Euro, forcing it to create and pay wages in its own currency. This currency can then decline in value vs the Euro until the average Greek's productivity-to-wages ratio (in Euros) matches citizens' in the Eurozone. However, neither the Eurozone nor Greece seems to want a Grexit, so you're left with the following two options:
(B) Reduce average Greek wages. That's what higher taxes and lower pensions effectively do.
(C) Increase avreage Greek productivity. That's what the privatization requirements and other reform measures in this package aim to do.
At least one of those three things needs to happen. If none of them happen, Greece will simply continue amassing more debt no matter what else you do. Any proposal which does not include at least one of these things happening is simply not a solution.
I should also add that it's disingenuous to claim Greece's problems stem from its creditors. When you borrow money, you are actually borrowing it from your future. Yes it is the creditors who gave you the money, but you pay it back to them in the future. The net effect is then that you are taking money from your future, and spending it today. The only thing the creditor gets out of it is some interest payments (which can be small or large depending on the lending terms). So aside from the interest the creditors earned, any suffering the Greeks experience today and until their debt is paid off, is the cost of them living it up during the 2000s. They did this to themselves.
Debt forgiveness means the creditors (some banks and citizens in the other Eurozone countries) suffer for the Greeks having lived it up during the 2000s. Sometimes this is necessary if the interest on the debt is so onerous that the debt is growing faster than the country can pay it off. But it is not an action to be taken lightly, especially with Spain, Portugal, and Italy waiting in the wings hopeful that Greece will set a precedent which allows them to shed their debt without paying it back.
"Google has a gun pointed at my head. They haven't promised not to pull the trigger, but they haven't pull the trigger yet. So I've got that going for me." -- AI software developer
[...]
Don't let Google point a gun at our heads.
The problem with that viewpoint is that under the current broken patent system, every unassigned AI patent is a gun sitting on a mount pointed at your head waiting for anyone willing to pay $10,000 (approx cost of a patent application) to take possession of it. It is much better to have a company which promises not to pull the trigger take possession of it, rather than leave it unattended for some sue-happy patent troll to get their hands on it.
In other words, it's not a matter of Google pointing the gun at your head. The gun is already pointed at your head, Google is just taking control of it before anyone else does. I mean yeah it'd be best if we could overhaul the patent system and get all those guns away from our heads. But if you can't do that, the next best alternative is to have someone who promises not to pull the trigger (and thus far hasn't) take possession of as many guns as they can.
Your analogy just shows that you don't understand the problem. A TV switched on is very obvious. And it's not a privacy issue.
The problem described by the OP is not obvious, and is a privacy problem.
Actually his analogy is almost spot on. A cable box switched on is not at all obvious if the TV is off. And your cable company is monitoring which channels you're watching.
That's a reasonable policy, as long as it is absolutely clear in the app that:
1. it was a system-level setting you were changing,
This one is on Google's UI team. When you select backup settings in the Photos app, it dumps you into the system-level backup and sync setting. In previous version of Android, this had the familiar dark grey to black UI theme as with all Android system settings. The settings in an app generally mirrored the app's theme, and were white or light-grey, and distinct from the system settings.
Then with Material design, they made the Android system settings theme white. And as a consequence you cannot tell anymore if you are modifying an app setting or a system setting.
I just finished explaining this to my parents (regarding life insurance). Insurance is for when you can't afford a failure. If my mom couldn't afford living expenses if my dad (the breadwinner) died, then it makes sense for him to get life insurance. But since they have adequate passive income to maintain their lifestyle even if one of them were to die, insurance isn't necessary.
In the case of the government and space launches, the government can afford to pay for failures. So it makes no sense to insure them. The cost of failures is automatically built into the cost of the launches. With a 5% failure rate, you pay for 20 launches and only 19 of them succeed. It makes no sense to pay a third party to insure all the launches - they will price it so they can make a little money to cover overhead and profits (else there is no reason for them to offer insurance), so you effectively end up paying the equivalent of 20.5 launches if you buy insurance for them. If the failures would bankrupt you, then yes the prudent thing is to get the insurance. But the government has much deeper pockets which can withstand launch failures, so it makes more sense to self-insure and eat the cost of failures.
However, the cost for insurance will simply be added on top of the contract, so the tax payer pays for it either way. In fact, with insurance, the tax payer will pay more on average than without insurance.
And that is why it makes no sense to require launch companies to guarantee their launches. Their pockets are not as deep as the government's, so if you require them to pay back the cost of the payload should a launch fail, they will simply buy insurance and raise the price they charge for a launch. And the government will again be paying the equivalent price of 20.5 launches for 20 actual launches and 19 successes (on average).
I use AFWall+, which is an update of the abandoned DroidWall, which is just a front end for Linux iptables. It lets me pick and choose which apps are allowed to transmit over cellular, wifi (LAN), and/or wifi (Internet). Most of the apps which have no business using data and are probably using it to send back tracking info, I simply prohibit from ever transmitting any data. I have an unlimited data plan so I use this for privacy reasons, not limiting data. But I typically only use about 150-300 MB/mo unless I do something like stream a video over cellular.
It requires root. I see in the similar apps section of the above link that there are other firewall apps out there which don't require root, though I have not tried them. Also, the latest version of AFWall+ is nearly a year old and has a bug with Lollipop which makes it fail to connect to wifi networks. You have to disable it (use the widget), connect to wifi (use WiFi Manager's widget), then re-enable it. Kinda annoying and digging through xda forums it seems someone already came up with a fix for it, it just hasn't been integrated into the baseline code yet.
Figure out a cheap way to make a low-density material aerogel in space. Make a large quantity of it as a single mass (doesn't have to be a cube - could be a sphere) and put it into an eccentric orbit which intersects some of the orbits with the most junk. The stuff is good at catching small high-velocity particles without fragmenting. The high surface area to mass ratio means its orbit will decay a lot quicker than regular junk. So put it into a (relatively) high orbit where it'll collect junk for a few years, before aerodynamic drag degrades its orbit and it (and the junk it's caught) burns up on re-entry.
Hell, I'm not even 40 yet and I would like to see some of the websites I regularly use to stop changing UIs for the sake of change.
The sad thing is, when Tim Berners-Lee came up with http, the idea was for the server to send the core info to the client, and for the client to display it in the format best for the client. So if you had a fancy computer and a big monitor, you could display the webpage with full graphics and high resolution fonts. If you had a low-end computer and a small monitor, you could display the webpage as text-only.
At some point, website designers got it into their heads that they knew the best format to view the information, not the person who was actually viewing the site on their own the computer and monitor. The first such sites were flash-based. Couldn't be scaled, reflowed, reformatted. Most everything has gone downhill since then, with many sites today even refusing to let you resize text and photos (the formatting gets messed up if you try).
Extensions like Stylebot for Chrome can help, but they're still pretty primitive.
Austerity is a strange word, it sounds sterile, it has strange connotations. The correct term is spending cuts.
You cut spending if you cannot afford what you are spending on and when you cannot borrow to spend either and in case of chronic offenders the sooner the creditors realize what they are dealing with the healthier for everybody. It's healthier for the spender, who has to come to terms of the impossible situation he is in and it is healthier for the creditor, who will avoid losing even more money. It is healthier for the overall economy not to have welfare State system in the first place, to have people consume based on what they produce and not based on what can be taken from somebody else without any form of repayment.
Another way to view it is that a loan time-shifts your earnings. Money that you would've made in the future is shifted in time to the present. The catch being that that money (plus some interest - payment for the time-shift) will be unavailable in the future. Basically how a cash advance works - you get your paycheck now 3 weeks after your previous pacheck, but you won't get your next one for 5 weeks instead of 4 weeks. You've time-shifted your paycheck one week earlier.
In other words, "austerity" is self-imposed the moment you take a loan. It is not the people demanding you repay the loan who are imposing austerity on you. You imposed it on yourself the moment you decided to get the loan.
I've tried to explain this to dozens of people, and only about a quarter seem to get it. The snapshot value of your bank account or your credit card balance at any point in time is not what matters. Heck, the time-average value of those two is not what matters either. What matters is their first derivative - the rate of change of those values. How much money you earn per month, how much you spend per month. Once you realize this, you understand that there's nothing to be gained by paying your bills one day before the due date (except for a negligible amount of interest). Whether you pay it the first day of the month or the last day of the month, the amount you pay per month is identical. And taking out a cash advance because you're "short of money" is actually more harmful to you in the long term (increases your expenses per month) than belt-tightening to get by until your regular paycheck arrives.
Re:Meanwhile, the US debt keeps piling up, up, up
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Greece Rejects EU Terms
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· Score: 3, Interesting
We are just as bad as the Greeks.
Greece was borrowing money to pay back formerly borrowed money. The U.S. is still borrowing money to do things with it (hopefully productive things). I'm a fiscal conservative, but in the current extremely low interest rate environment, it actually makes sense to borrow a lot of money to get more (productive) things done than you could do without borrowing.
The only thing you have to watch out for is that you don't borrow so much that you find yourself unable to pay it back when interest rates climb. That's the situation Greece found themselves in - as they got deeper into debt, their credit rating declined and it became more expensive for them to borrow money, which resulted in them being unable to pay back what they owed.
Notably, austerity tends to shut down the economy, which will only lead to further financial insolvency.
The fundamental problem here is that Greek pay (in Euros) is disproportionately high compared to their productivity vs other Eurozone nations'. "Austerity" is simply reducing wages to bring that wages-to-productivity ratio back in line with the EU norm. The reforms the EU was asking for addressed the other half of this ratio - increasing average Greek productivity. The growing Greek debt is created by this imbalance - people were being paid more Euros than they were producing via their labor. Greece was covering up this imbalance by borrowing, which is totally the wrong reason to borrow money. You borrow it to purchase things which will help increase your productivity so that you will no longer be running a deficit. You don't borrow it to continue to operate in arrears.
By rejecting austerity and failing to implement reforms, you don't leave many choices. The simplest is to boot Greece off the Euro. Then they can do whatever the hell they want with their economy, pensions, and pay, and it will automatically balance itself out via the Drachma falling in value vs. the Euro. You can either take a 30% pay cut in Euros, or you can switch to the Drachma and the Drachma declines in value 30% vs. the Euro. The end result is the same - "austerity". (Ideally Greece would increase their average productivity by 30% - then wages wouldn't have to drop. But they seem hell bent on refusing to do anything the EU suggests that could improve productivity.)
Ultimately, any moral structure you choose to enforce is a choice. Including the one you've apparently chosen where inherent properties are given higher standing than chosen properties. Strictly from a physical (inherent) standpoint, there was nothing wrong with Hitler's belief that certain members of the human race needed to be exterminated. Evolution is after all about survival of the fittest, and if those peoples could not survive his extermination attempt, then obviously they were not fit enough for their environment. Others chose to believe differently - that those people had an inherent right to exist regardless of the circumstances they were born into. And they believed in that choice strongly enough to go to war over it even though it resulted in over 50 million deaths
So it's self-contradictory to argue that things based on a choice deserve less protection than things that are inherent. Such a moral position is in itself a choice, and by your definition cannot be defended if e.g. someone inherently physically stronger than everyone else decides to go around smashing in the heads of people who believe as you do (regardless of your race or gender).
Religious intolerance is included because historically it has been one of the main reasons people have been persecuted and discriminated against. Heck, people are being executed for it right now in Syria and Iraq. Probably a lot more than because of their race or gender. Even atheism is a choice (essentially, a religion). The scientific method cannot prove a negative, so it cannot prove that a god does not exist. So to go from agnosticism (uncertainty about whether a diety exists) to atheism (certainty that no deity exists) requires a leap of faith - a choice.
If you boil it down, I think you'll agree that the key principle worth defending is the right to self determination - the freedom to make the choices you want to make. Such choices are worth protecting up to the point where they begin to interfere with other people's freedom to make their own choices. It's all about choices.
3) There is nothing wrong with hinting you are willing to sell. I'm willing to sell my home for enough money and I still live here. If someone wants to pay me 130% or market (not even an insane amount) I'm out tomorrow. The fact that I would sell for over market doesn't indicate bad faith which is the other thing that needs to be proven.
Hold your horses. Hinting that you're willing to sell is probably the worst possible thing you can do if a trademark owner is trying to take your domain away from you. From ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, the first example of a bad faith registration is: " circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name."
Never signal that you're willing to sell, even as a joke. The domain is your baby, and you want it forever. If they offer an amount you're willing to sell for, then take it. But never admit before then that a certain amount would get you to change your mind. When Nissan (the car company) tried to take nissan.com from Uzi Nissan (the computer store owner) who had registered the domain long before Datsun ever began using their Nissan trademark in the U.S., they asked him how much it would take for him to sell. He replied, "A million dollars. Why can't you understand I'm not going to sell." Basically he pulled a Dr. Evil. Back when the phrase "a million dollars" was first coined and the average person made a few dollars a week, it meant a ridiculously huge sum of money. But today it's not that much money.
Nissan's lawyers immediately took the first half of his statement, snipped out the context in the second half, and presented it to ICANN as evidence he was squatting the domain to extort money from the trademark owner. ICANN then decided to take the domain away from him and put it in escrow until the dispute was resolved (eventually in Uzi Nissan's favor years later, though he lost millions because he wasn't awarded legal fees). If he hadn't used that particular phrase, he might have been able to continue using the domain throughout the legal proceedings.
I can't even start to wonder why a critical, money-bound company would even think of facial recognition for secure payments...
Pass a law making banks and credit card companies financially responsible for fraud in the use of their products, rather than being able to pass the cost off entirely onto merchants like they currently do. Then you'll see money-bound companies take security seriously. (Those absurdly high credit card interest rates pay for people who default on their credit card bills, not for fraud.)
And all those little taxes, from city, state, and country, all add up to between 40% and 60% of most US citizens' income. How much is enough?
Actually it's about 33% (dipped below 30% during the recession, but has moved back up). But I agree with you. People need to understand that only the sum total of all taxes matter. Even corporate taxes are eventually paid for by individuals - via higher prices for goods and services, or lower wages for employees. In that respect, taxes could be vastly simplified if they were collected from a single point in our economy. If you want a graduated tax (richer people pay more), then the logical choice is the income tax. Nearly all other taxes could be eliminated and rolled into just income taxes. (Exceptions would be excise and regulatory taxes which fund directly-related government services, and property taxes which discourage "sitting" on property waiting for it to appreciate instead of developing it immediately to maximize public utilization.)
In this particular case, the Constitutional prohibition on interstate taxation would've applied. Except the states have been busy whittling away at that and Congress seems unwilling to challenge this usurpation of a power clearly reserved to them. I don't mind if you think the Commerce Clause is wrong, but express your disagreement the way the architects of our country intended - modify the Constitution. Don't try to justify it with painfully convoluted arguments for why the clause doesn't mean what it clearly says it means, just because you can't muster enough votes to amend the Constitution.
Adding new taxes like this also increases the regulatory burden for its citizens and the city itself, which indirectly reduces the taxes effectiveness by increasing the overhead of compliance
I've done business in Chicago. The purpose isn't compliance. The purpose is graft - money paid to government officials and politicians under the table if you "need more time" to come into compliance. I expect certain ISPs and data centers will come to "arrangements" with Chicago where their customers won't have to pay this tax.
Plugging in a USB flash drive, backup drive, using a NAS, or using a Time Capsule works against disasters like HDD failure or accidental microwaving of a laptop... but all ransomware has to do is zero out the backup drive... or just punch random holes in stored files so they are worthless. A lot of newer machines don't have optical drives, much less decent backup software to get the user to back up to them.
This is something I've never understood. External hard drives should have a read-only toggle switch. It will help protect the drive against malware infections. And I know I'm not the only one who's made the bone-headed mistake of copying the corrupted file over the good backup, instead of the other way around.
I've always wondered why wifi networks only allow a single password. Why can't they allow multiple passwords? That way you can create a temporary one when a guest needs to access something on your LAN but you don't want to give them permanent access. Right now the only way to do that is an ethernet cable, or change your password to something else, give him access, then change it back when he leaves.
Multiple passwords would also give you the ability to revoke passwords you consider to be compromised, without affecting the ability of others with "good" passwords to continue connecting. I used to give my parents and my sister my wifi password so they could connect when visiting. Then I learned my dad had given the password to a friend who came to visit with him once. I had to change the password, which meant entering the new password on all my devices plus all my sister's devices.
You could even give different privileges based on password. Internet-only. Internet-only at reduced bandwidth. Internet + LAN. LAN-only. Only one other device on the LAN. etc. Kinda like the guest network thing showing up on newer routers, except a lot more flexible.
I hope I won't be disillusioned by someone who has done research into Woz, but what I have heard of Woz has pretty much been all good. Seemingly kind hearted, personal integrity, not all about the money.
If you've ever run your own company, you'll realize there's a special combination of goodness mixed with hard-assedness which is needed for success. Someone who's all kind-hearted can't bear to lay off people when the chips are down, and ends up sinking the entire company instead of casting off a few employees. You need to be a bit of a dick to make the tough calls, do the hard negotiations, and still be able to sleep at night. At the same time you have to respect and nurture your employees, get them to want to work for you.
If Woz hadn't paired up with Jobs (or someone like Jobs), he would've ended up as a reasonably successful nobody working an upscale programming/engineering job. Likewise of Jobs hadn't met Woz he likely would've ended up a car or vacuum cleaner salesman. The two of them together had that magic combination of technical skill, altruism, and willingness to go with the flow; mixed with selfish drive, ego, and ass-hattery which make a very successful company. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
In the early stages when there's uncertainty about what the best solution is, you want competition. People weren't sure whether AC or DC was the best way to transmit electricity over long distances. So Edison and Westinghouse were both allowed to build their power grids and let economic reality decide which was the more effective solution. Same with the cable companies - what's the best way to wire up, subdivide, and subnet a bunch of residential customers? Nobody really knew, so you want lots of different companies trying lots of different solutions. The ones with bad solutions slowly go insolvent and get bought out by those with good solutions. The government should only provide access to easements so the process doesn't get bogged down negotiating access rights with every customer.
All that changes once you're certain you've arrived at an optimal solution. Westinghouse's AC power transmission lines turned out to be best. And now electrical distribution is operated as a public utility Arguably, cable Internet has reached the same stage. Pretty much all the cable companies have standardized on the same tech (DOCSIS modems), indicating it's an optimal or near-optimal solution. And the apparent end-game is fiber to the home. So it probably is time to start treating cable/fiber Internet as a public utility. Give one company a contract to lay down and maintain the lines, but prohibit it from providing service over those lines. Any company is allowed to offer service over those lines, and the maintenance company has to offer all of them access at the same price per GB/mo of bandwidth.
It was a poorly designed test with respect to driving. From TFA:
To ascertain the effects of extraneous information in a driverâ(TM)s line of sight, professor Spence and his team of students created two tests to measure the outcome. The first involved volunteers completing a number of computer-based tests in which they were required to say how many of a number of randomly organized spots were shown on a screen as quickly and accurately as they could.
Added to this, in some tests a black-outlined square arbitrarily appeared and the subjects were told to report whenever they saw this too. This secondary stimulus was shown at the same time as the spots, but did not appear in all of the trials.
Basically, if you apply this to driving, you're comparing driving by constantly watching the road and never glancing at your instruments and mirrors, to having information displayed on a HUD. Well duh you're going to be more attentive to things that happen on the road if you never take your eyes off the road. But you're going to be a massive danger to everyone else because you'll be going the wrong speed, and you'll be making lane changes oblivious to anyone else who might be in the way.
If they wanted to test the efficacy of a HUD, they should've run a third test case where participants were given the same task, but also required to monitor information being displayed below the computer screen showing the spots. (At a minimum. Information also probably should be displayed on either side as well to simulate monitoring your mirrors.) The question isn't is a HUD distracting from a single task. It's is a HUD less distracting than having to glance away from the road to see your instruments and mirrors.
After having driven a car with blind spot detection (a car in your blind spot causes an orange light on that side's mirror to light up), I'd say the simplified notification is much easier to perceive and comprehend. Before, I had to take my eyes off the road to glance at the mirror frequently, figure out exactly what it was I saw, put it together with what I saw before, and cogitate that the car that was there before is not there anymore, and therefore it is now probably in my blind spot. Now I can actually pay more attention to what's going on in the road ahead of me, and little lights in my peripheral vision automatically tell me when there's a car beside me that I can't see in my mirrors. I still check by turning my head before lane changes, but it's reduced the workload of driving enough that I feel my driving has improved.
Eh. Don't oversell the old gold standard. For starters, a gold standard was typically a steady and persistent malaise of deflation, as economic output increased more steadily than the money supply.
Yeah, anyone advocating returning to the gold standard needs to read some economic history to really see what things were like when we were on the gold standard. 1800-1933 saw 33 recessions/depressions - every 4 years on average - with declines in business activity or GDP of 10%, 20%, and even 30% common.
Since going off the gold standard, we've had 13 recessions in 82 years, or every 6.3 years on average. And aside from the recessions following the Great Depression and WWII, none of them has seen GDP shrink by more than 5%.
Zero inflation/deflation in a currency happens when the amount of currency floating around exactly matches economic productivity. With a fiat currency, a legit government tries its best to expand the money supply to maintain that balance. With a gold standard, whether you get inflation or deflation depends entirely on the ratio of economic productivity to how much new gold is mined. And don't even get me started on how disastrous it is to set a finite limit on the amount of currency you can mine, like Bitcoin does.
Being on the gold standard doesn't mean you have solid monetary policy based on a physical good. It means your "policy" is effectively determined by how much gold people are finding and mining at any given time - its based on luck and good/bad fortune. Yes it prevents abuse by the government printing too much currency. But it avoids that potential abuse by completely removing the economy's rudder, leaving you adrift and completely at the mercy of how lucky gold miners are that year.
The true fundamental currency is productivity. Whether you use dollars, euros, gold, or bitcoin, avoiding inflation/deflation means increasing the supply of physical/virtual currency to exactly match increases in productivity.
And believe me, on a long trip that difference is critical. He's done several trips (and I've been on one with him) where a 200 mile range just wouldn't have cut it.
I've been saying for years now that unless there's an order of magnitude breakthrough in battery charging technology, using an electric car on a long trip is going to remain stupid. It's telling that the solution closest to working thus far (that doesn't involve stopping for 30+ minutes every 2.5 hours) is swapping the battery pack (all 1200 pounds of it on the Tesla S).
That's a large part of the reason I don't think electric cars will catch on. Not that they couldn't. They could catch on right now if we can break free of environmentalists' pipe dream of all cars being electric. If you can convince people to use an electric car for their daily driving, and rent a gas/diesel car for their few times a year long trips, then EVs become completely viable today. Those long trips probably only represent about 10% of your annual drives, so we could potentially reduce our gasoline consumption by 90% right now.
But environmentalists' penchant for insisting that anything short of a 100% green solution is unacceptable is going to be their undoing. Just like with hybrids when they were first introduced - environmentalists initially hated hybrids because they generate all their energy from burning gasoline. They tried to block approval for hybrids as a way to meet California's LEV and ZEV standards, in hopes of forcing automakers to develop EVs.
I'm not sure if Force Touch enough to convince an Android user like myself to switch, but there are definitely some interesting possibilities for app developers.
Why would it make you want to switch? Android apps have been doing it since at least 2011. Android's touch API communicates sufficient information to implement this if you wish.
But this being Apple, they will give it a fancy name, everyone will think they invented it, and they will pretend like they invented it. Just like Siri, which came out after I'd been doing searches, sending texts, and starting apps by voice on Android for at least a year.
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Even simpler solution: NYC should just change the street markings and signals to reduce the number of left turns you can make. Why ask a company to change one of their apps which only influences traffic flow, when you yourself have direct control of the traffic patterns in your city?
You're applying reasoning which works for a country with its own currency. If a country has its own floating currency, then raising taxes and lowering pensions is not necessary to reform the economy. You can just leave those as-is and the value of your currency will decline relative to everyone else's, effectively giving all your citizens a pay cut and thus helping to reduce your expenses (measured via other currencies than your own - that's what matters when you owe money to creditors outside your country). That's what happened to Germany in the 1930s, Mexico in the 1970s when they lifted price controls on the Peso.
Greece is on the Euro though, so this is not an option. The fundamental problem is that Greek citizens are being paid too many Euros for the productivity they are generating (compared to other citizens in the Eurozone). Any long-term fix for this must involve increasing the Greek productivity-to-wages ratio to match the Eurozone norm. This is a mathematical fact - you cannot avoid it by holding an election or making political promises or complaining about fairness. Failure to correct this ratio means Greek debt will continue to increase regardless of whatever other measures you take. Even if you forgave all of Greece's debt, if you do not address this productivity-to-wages ratio imbalance between Greece and the other EU countries, Greece would just continue to accrue new debt.
That means there are three options:
(A) Boot Greece out of the Euro, forcing it to create and pay wages in its own currency. This currency can then decline in value vs the Euro until the average Greek's productivity-to-wages ratio (in Euros) matches citizens' in the Eurozone. However, neither the Eurozone nor Greece seems to want a Grexit, so you're left with the following two options:
(B) Reduce average Greek wages. That's what higher taxes and lower pensions effectively do.
(C) Increase avreage Greek productivity. That's what the privatization requirements and other reform measures in this package aim to do.
At least one of those three things needs to happen. If none of them happen, Greece will simply continue amassing more debt no matter what else you do. Any proposal which does not include at least one of these things happening is simply not a solution.
I should also add that it's disingenuous to claim Greece's problems stem from its creditors. When you borrow money, you are actually borrowing it from your future. Yes it is the creditors who gave you the money, but you pay it back to them in the future. The net effect is then that you are taking money from your future, and spending it today. The only thing the creditor gets out of it is some interest payments (which can be small or large depending on the lending terms). So aside from the interest the creditors earned, any suffering the Greeks experience today and until their debt is paid off, is the cost of them living it up during the 2000s. They did this to themselves.
Debt forgiveness means the creditors (some banks and citizens in the other Eurozone countries) suffer for the Greeks having lived it up during the 2000s. Sometimes this is necessary if the interest on the debt is so onerous that the debt is growing faster than the country can pay it off. But it is not an action to be taken lightly, especially with Spain, Portugal, and Italy waiting in the wings hopeful that Greece will set a precedent which allows them to shed their debt without paying it back.
The problem with that viewpoint is that under the current broken patent system, every unassigned AI patent is a gun sitting on a mount pointed at your head waiting for anyone willing to pay $10,000 (approx cost of a patent application) to take possession of it. It is much better to have a company which promises not to pull the trigger take possession of it, rather than leave it unattended for some sue-happy patent troll to get their hands on it.
In other words, it's not a matter of Google pointing the gun at your head. The gun is already pointed at your head, Google is just taking control of it before anyone else does. I mean yeah it'd be best if we could overhaul the patent system and get all those guns away from our heads. But if you can't do that, the next best alternative is to have someone who promises not to pull the trigger (and thus far hasn't) take possession of as many guns as they can.
Actually his analogy is almost spot on. A cable box switched on is not at all obvious if the TV is off. And your cable company is monitoring which channels you're watching.
This one is on Google's UI team. When you select backup settings in the Photos app, it dumps you into the system-level backup and sync setting. In previous version of Android, this had the familiar dark grey to black UI theme as with all Android system settings. The settings in an app generally mirrored the app's theme, and were white or light-grey, and distinct from the system settings.
Then with Material design, they made the Android system settings theme white. And as a consequence you cannot tell anymore if you are modifying an app setting or a system setting.
In the case of the government and space launches, the government can afford to pay for failures. So it makes no sense to insure them. The cost of failures is automatically built into the cost of the launches. With a 5% failure rate, you pay for 20 launches and only 19 of them succeed. It makes no sense to pay a third party to insure all the launches - they will price it so they can make a little money to cover overhead and profits (else there is no reason for them to offer insurance), so you effectively end up paying the equivalent of 20.5 launches if you buy insurance for them. If the failures would bankrupt you, then yes the prudent thing is to get the insurance. But the government has much deeper pockets which can withstand launch failures, so it makes more sense to self-insure and eat the cost of failures.
And that is why it makes no sense to require launch companies to guarantee their launches. Their pockets are not as deep as the government's, so if you require them to pay back the cost of the payload should a launch fail, they will simply buy insurance and raise the price they charge for a launch. And the government will again be paying the equivalent price of 20.5 launches for 20 actual launches and 19 successes (on average).
I use AFWall+, which is an update of the abandoned DroidWall, which is just a front end for Linux iptables. It lets me pick and choose which apps are allowed to transmit over cellular, wifi (LAN), and/or wifi (Internet). Most of the apps which have no business using data and are probably using it to send back tracking info, I simply prohibit from ever transmitting any data. I have an unlimited data plan so I use this for privacy reasons, not limiting data. But I typically only use about 150-300 MB/mo unless I do something like stream a video over cellular.
It requires root. I see in the similar apps section of the above link that there are other firewall apps out there which don't require root, though I have not tried them. Also, the latest version of AFWall+ is nearly a year old and has a bug with Lollipop which makes it fail to connect to wifi networks. You have to disable it (use the widget), connect to wifi (use WiFi Manager's widget), then re-enable it. Kinda annoying and digging through xda forums it seems someone already came up with a fix for it, it just hasn't been integrated into the baseline code yet.
Figure out a cheap way to make a low-density material aerogel in space. Make a large quantity of it as a single mass (doesn't have to be a cube - could be a sphere) and put it into an eccentric orbit which intersects some of the orbits with the most junk. The stuff is good at catching small high-velocity particles without fragmenting. The high surface area to mass ratio means its orbit will decay a lot quicker than regular junk. So put it into a (relatively) high orbit where it'll collect junk for a few years, before aerodynamic drag degrades its orbit and it (and the junk it's caught) burns up on re-entry.
And you get Machine with Concrete by Arthur Ganson.
The sad thing is, when Tim Berners-Lee came up with http, the idea was for the server to send the core info to the client, and for the client to display it in the format best for the client. So if you had a fancy computer and a big monitor, you could display the webpage with full graphics and high resolution fonts. If you had a low-end computer and a small monitor, you could display the webpage as text-only.
At some point, website designers got it into their heads that they knew the best format to view the information, not the person who was actually viewing the site on their own the computer and monitor. The first such sites were flash-based. Couldn't be scaled, reflowed, reformatted. Most everything has gone downhill since then, with many sites today even refusing to let you resize text and photos (the formatting gets messed up if you try).
Extensions like Stylebot for Chrome can help, but they're still pretty primitive.
Another way to view it is that a loan time-shifts your earnings. Money that you would've made in the future is shifted in time to the present. The catch being that that money (plus some interest - payment for the time-shift) will be unavailable in the future. Basically how a cash advance works - you get your paycheck now 3 weeks after your previous pacheck, but you won't get your next one for 5 weeks instead of 4 weeks. You've time-shifted your paycheck one week earlier.
In other words, "austerity" is self-imposed the moment you take a loan. It is not the people demanding you repay the loan who are imposing austerity on you. You imposed it on yourself the moment you decided to get the loan.
I've tried to explain this to dozens of people, and only about a quarter seem to get it. The snapshot value of your bank account or your credit card balance at any point in time is not what matters. Heck, the time-average value of those two is not what matters either. What matters is their first derivative - the rate of change of those values. How much money you earn per month, how much you spend per month. Once you realize this, you understand that there's nothing to be gained by paying your bills one day before the due date (except for a negligible amount of interest). Whether you pay it the first day of the month or the last day of the month, the amount you pay per month is identical. And taking out a cash advance because you're "short of money" is actually more harmful to you in the long term (increases your expenses per month) than belt-tightening to get by until your regular paycheck arrives.
Greece was borrowing money to pay back formerly borrowed money. The U.S. is still borrowing money to do things with it (hopefully productive things). I'm a fiscal conservative, but in the current extremely low interest rate environment, it actually makes sense to borrow a lot of money to get more (productive) things done than you could do without borrowing.
The only thing you have to watch out for is that you don't borrow so much that you find yourself unable to pay it back when interest rates climb. That's the situation Greece found themselves in - as they got deeper into debt, their credit rating declined and it became more expensive for them to borrow money, which resulted in them being unable to pay back what they owed.
The fundamental problem here is that Greek pay (in Euros) is disproportionately high compared to their productivity vs other Eurozone nations'. "Austerity" is simply reducing wages to bring that wages-to-productivity ratio back in line with the EU norm. The reforms the EU was asking for addressed the other half of this ratio - increasing average Greek productivity. The growing Greek debt is created by this imbalance - people were being paid more Euros than they were producing via their labor. Greece was covering up this imbalance by borrowing, which is totally the wrong reason to borrow money. You borrow it to purchase things which will help increase your productivity so that you will no longer be running a deficit. You don't borrow it to continue to operate in arrears.
By rejecting austerity and failing to implement reforms, you don't leave many choices. The simplest is to boot Greece off the Euro. Then they can do whatever the hell they want with their economy, pensions, and pay, and it will automatically balance itself out via the Drachma falling in value vs. the Euro. You can either take a 30% pay cut in Euros, or you can switch to the Drachma and the Drachma declines in value 30% vs. the Euro. The end result is the same - "austerity". (Ideally Greece would increase their average productivity by 30% - then wages wouldn't have to drop. But they seem hell bent on refusing to do anything the EU suggests that could improve productivity.)
Ultimately, any moral structure you choose to enforce is a choice. Including the one you've apparently chosen where inherent properties are given higher standing than chosen properties. Strictly from a physical (inherent) standpoint, there was nothing wrong with Hitler's belief that certain members of the human race needed to be exterminated. Evolution is after all about survival of the fittest, and if those peoples could not survive his extermination attempt, then obviously they were not fit enough for their environment. Others chose to believe differently - that those people had an inherent right to exist regardless of the circumstances they were born into. And they believed in that choice strongly enough to go to war over it even though it resulted in over 50 million deaths
So it's self-contradictory to argue that things based on a choice deserve less protection than things that are inherent. Such a moral position is in itself a choice, and by your definition cannot be defended if e.g. someone inherently physically stronger than everyone else decides to go around smashing in the heads of people who believe as you do (regardless of your race or gender).
Religious intolerance is included because historically it has been one of the main reasons people have been persecuted and discriminated against. Heck, people are being executed for it right now in Syria and Iraq. Probably a lot more than because of their race or gender. Even atheism is a choice (essentially, a religion). The scientific method cannot prove a negative, so it cannot prove that a god does not exist. So to go from agnosticism (uncertainty about whether a diety exists) to atheism (certainty that no deity exists) requires a leap of faith - a choice.
If you boil it down, I think you'll agree that the key principle worth defending is the right to self determination - the freedom to make the choices you want to make. Such choices are worth protecting up to the point where they begin to interfere with other people's freedom to make their own choices. It's all about choices.
Hold your horses. Hinting that you're willing to sell is probably the worst possible thing you can do if a trademark owner is trying to take your domain away from you. From ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, the first example of a bad faith registration is: " circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name."
Never signal that you're willing to sell, even as a joke. The domain is your baby, and you want it forever. If they offer an amount you're willing to sell for, then take it. But never admit before then that a certain amount would get you to change your mind. When Nissan (the car company) tried to take nissan.com from Uzi Nissan (the computer store owner) who had registered the domain long before Datsun ever began using their Nissan trademark in the U.S., they asked him how much it would take for him to sell. He replied, "A million dollars. Why can't you understand I'm not going to sell." Basically he pulled a Dr. Evil. Back when the phrase "a million dollars" was first coined and the average person made a few dollars a week, it meant a ridiculously huge sum of money. But today it's not that much money.
Nissan's lawyers immediately took the first half of his statement, snipped out the context in the second half, and presented it to ICANN as evidence he was squatting the domain to extort money from the trademark owner. ICANN then decided to take the domain away from him and put it in escrow until the dispute was resolved (eventually in Uzi Nissan's favor years later, though he lost millions because he wasn't awarded legal fees). If he hadn't used that particular phrase, he might have been able to continue using the domain throughout the legal proceedings.
Read up on the UNDRP if this is something you're really worried about.
Pass a law making banks and credit card companies financially responsible for fraud in the use of their products, rather than being able to pass the cost off entirely onto merchants like they currently do. Then you'll see money-bound companies take security seriously. (Those absurdly high credit card interest rates pay for people who default on their credit card bills, not for fraud.)
Actually it's about 33% (dipped below 30% during the recession, but has moved back up). But I agree with you. People need to understand that only the sum total of all taxes matter. Even corporate taxes are eventually paid for by individuals - via higher prices for goods and services, or lower wages for employees. In that respect, taxes could be vastly simplified if they were collected from a single point in our economy. If you want a graduated tax (richer people pay more), then the logical choice is the income tax. Nearly all other taxes could be eliminated and rolled into just income taxes. (Exceptions would be excise and regulatory taxes which fund directly-related government services, and property taxes which discourage "sitting" on property waiting for it to appreciate instead of developing it immediately to maximize public utilization.)
In this particular case, the Constitutional prohibition on interstate taxation would've applied. Except the states have been busy whittling away at that and Congress seems unwilling to challenge this usurpation of a power clearly reserved to them. I don't mind if you think the Commerce Clause is wrong, but express your disagreement the way the architects of our country intended - modify the Constitution. Don't try to justify it with painfully convoluted arguments for why the clause doesn't mean what it clearly says it means, just because you can't muster enough votes to amend the Constitution.
I've done business in Chicago. The purpose isn't compliance. The purpose is graft - money paid to government officials and politicians under the table if you "need more time" to come into compliance. I expect certain ISPs and data centers will come to "arrangements" with Chicago where their customers won't have to pay this tax.
This is something I've never understood. External hard drives should have a read-only toggle switch. It will help protect the drive against malware infections. And I know I'm not the only one who's made the bone-headed mistake of copying the corrupted file over the good backup, instead of the other way around.
I've always wondered why wifi networks only allow a single password. Why can't they allow multiple passwords? That way you can create a temporary one when a guest needs to access something on your LAN but you don't want to give them permanent access. Right now the only way to do that is an ethernet cable, or change your password to something else, give him access, then change it back when he leaves.
Multiple passwords would also give you the ability to revoke passwords you consider to be compromised, without affecting the ability of others with "good" passwords to continue connecting. I used to give my parents and my sister my wifi password so they could connect when visiting. Then I learned my dad had given the password to a friend who came to visit with him once. I had to change the password, which meant entering the new password on all my devices plus all my sister's devices.
You could even give different privileges based on password. Internet-only. Internet-only at reduced bandwidth. Internet + LAN. LAN-only. Only one other device on the LAN. etc. Kinda like the guest network thing showing up on newer routers, except a lot more flexible.
If you've ever run your own company, you'll realize there's a special combination of goodness mixed with hard-assedness which is needed for success. Someone who's all kind-hearted can't bear to lay off people when the chips are down, and ends up sinking the entire company instead of casting off a few employees. You need to be a bit of a dick to make the tough calls, do the hard negotiations, and still be able to sleep at night. At the same time you have to respect and nurture your employees, get them to want to work for you.
If Woz hadn't paired up with Jobs (or someone like Jobs), he would've ended up as a reasonably successful nobody working an upscale programming/engineering job. Likewise of Jobs hadn't met Woz he likely would've ended up a car or vacuum cleaner salesman. The two of them together had that magic combination of technical skill, altruism, and willingness to go with the flow; mixed with selfish drive, ego, and ass-hattery which make a very successful company. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
In the early stages when there's uncertainty about what the best solution is, you want competition. People weren't sure whether AC or DC was the best way to transmit electricity over long distances. So Edison and Westinghouse were both allowed to build their power grids and let economic reality decide which was the more effective solution. Same with the cable companies - what's the best way to wire up, subdivide, and subnet a bunch of residential customers? Nobody really knew, so you want lots of different companies trying lots of different solutions. The ones with bad solutions slowly go insolvent and get bought out by those with good solutions. The government should only provide access to easements so the process doesn't get bogged down negotiating access rights with every customer.
All that changes once you're certain you've arrived at an optimal solution. Westinghouse's AC power transmission lines turned out to be best. And now electrical distribution is operated as a public utility Arguably, cable Internet has reached the same stage. Pretty much all the cable companies have standardized on the same tech (DOCSIS modems), indicating it's an optimal or near-optimal solution. And the apparent end-game is fiber to the home. So it probably is time to start treating cable/fiber Internet as a public utility. Give one company a contract to lay down and maintain the lines, but prohibit it from providing service over those lines. Any company is allowed to offer service over those lines, and the maintenance company has to offer all of them access at the same price per GB/mo of bandwidth.
Basically, if you apply this to driving, you're comparing driving by constantly watching the road and never glancing at your instruments and mirrors, to having information displayed on a HUD. Well duh you're going to be more attentive to things that happen on the road if you never take your eyes off the road. But you're going to be a massive danger to everyone else because you'll be going the wrong speed, and you'll be making lane changes oblivious to anyone else who might be in the way.
If they wanted to test the efficacy of a HUD, they should've run a third test case where participants were given the same task, but also required to monitor information being displayed below the computer screen showing the spots. (At a minimum. Information also probably should be displayed on either side as well to simulate monitoring your mirrors.) The question isn't is a HUD distracting from a single task. It's is a HUD less distracting than having to glance away from the road to see your instruments and mirrors.
After having driven a car with blind spot detection (a car in your blind spot causes an orange light on that side's mirror to light up), I'd say the simplified notification is much easier to perceive and comprehend. Before, I had to take my eyes off the road to glance at the mirror frequently, figure out exactly what it was I saw, put it together with what I saw before, and cogitate that the car that was there before is not there anymore, and therefore it is now probably in my blind spot. Now I can actually pay more attention to what's going on in the road ahead of me, and little lights in my peripheral vision automatically tell me when there's a car beside me that I can't see in my mirrors. I still check by turning my head before lane changes, but it's reduced the workload of driving enough that I feel my driving has improved.
Yeah, anyone advocating returning to the gold standard needs to read some economic history to really see what things were like when we were on the gold standard. 1800-1933 saw 33 recessions/depressions - every 4 years on average - with declines in business activity or GDP of 10%, 20%, and even 30% common.
Since going off the gold standard, we've had 13 recessions in 82 years, or every 6.3 years on average. And aside from the recessions following the Great Depression and WWII, none of them has seen GDP shrink by more than 5%.
Zero inflation/deflation in a currency happens when the amount of currency floating around exactly matches economic productivity. With a fiat currency, a legit government tries its best to expand the money supply to maintain that balance. With a gold standard, whether you get inflation or deflation depends entirely on the ratio of economic productivity to how much new gold is mined. And don't even get me started on how disastrous it is to set a finite limit on the amount of currency you can mine, like Bitcoin does.
Being on the gold standard doesn't mean you have solid monetary policy based on a physical good. It means your "policy" is effectively determined by how much gold people are finding and mining at any given time - its based on luck and good/bad fortune. Yes it prevents abuse by the government printing too much currency. But it avoids that potential abuse by completely removing the economy's rudder, leaving you adrift and completely at the mercy of how lucky gold miners are that year.
The true fundamental currency is productivity. Whether you use dollars, euros, gold, or bitcoin, avoiding inflation/deflation means increasing the supply of physical/virtual currency to exactly match increases in productivity.
I've been saying for years now that unless there's an order of magnitude breakthrough in battery charging technology, using an electric car on a long trip is going to remain stupid. It's telling that the solution closest to working thus far (that doesn't involve stopping for 30+ minutes every 2.5 hours) is swapping the battery pack (all 1200 pounds of it on the Tesla S).
That's a large part of the reason I don't think electric cars will catch on. Not that they couldn't. They could catch on right now if we can break free of environmentalists' pipe dream of all cars being electric. If you can convince people to use an electric car for their daily driving, and rent a gas/diesel car for their few times a year long trips, then EVs become completely viable today. Those long trips probably only represent about 10% of your annual drives, so we could potentially reduce our gasoline consumption by 90% right now.
But environmentalists' penchant for insisting that anything short of a 100% green solution is unacceptable is going to be their undoing. Just like with hybrids when they were first introduced - environmentalists initially hated hybrids because they generate all their energy from burning gasoline. They tried to block approval for hybrids as a way to meet California's LEV and ZEV standards, in hopes of forcing automakers to develop EVs.
Why would it make you want to switch? Android apps have been doing it since at least 2011. Android's touch API communicates sufficient information to implement this if you wish.
But this being Apple, they will give it a fancy name, everyone will think they invented it, and they will pretend like they invented it. Just like Siri, which came out after I'd been doing searches, sending texts, and starting apps by voice on Android for at least a year.