I was opposed to recovery partitions when MS first started using them. But with Win 8 I think they've added enough options that the pros outweigh the cons. It took me a while to find all this info (or rather, learn that MS had even made this possible), so here it is as a PSA:
Finally, if you totally screw up, you can still create a Windows 8/8.1 recovery flash drive by using your Windows key and downloading a clean 8-16 GB recovery image from Microsoft.
I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality.
Similar conservative here. I never really bought into the "poor people are lazy" meme. The hardest worker I've ever met was a poor Mexican who turned out to be an illegal alien. This guy was so dedicated to doing a good job I would've endorsed him for citizenship in an instant. (Likewise I haven't found the lazy, rich fat cat meme to be true either. The vast majority of rich people I know are some of the hardest working people I've met, frequently sleeping only 4-6 hours a night because they're working the other 18-20 hours. It's like they're always firing on all cylinders and don't know how to let up. Even when on vacation, they'll try to sneak off to get some work done.)
What I have noticed though is that poor people tend to make much worse financial decisions, moreso than not-poor people. e.g. A poor friend asked me for help buying a laptop. I knew he didn't have much money, he knew I knew, so I worked my butt off finding him a great deal. I eventually found him a refurb i3 laptop for $235 (when he sold it 2 years later, it was selling on eBay for $265). I felt satisfied that I'd done a good deed to help a poor person. Then the next week I learned that he'd bought a 64GB iPad for $800 (the extra $100 was to have his name engraved on it)....
They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare
That was exactly my conclusion too after managing a hotel with a lot of low-income employees. So many of them were single parents or were in families where both parents worked, that a good chunk of their income went to babysitting or daycare. Since the hotel usually had empty rooms that could be used for babysitting, I looked into what it would take to start up daycare services for our employees.
OMG. The legal liability and insurance requirements were crippling. Apparently parents are a sue-happy bunch when it comes to the tiniest scratch on their little darlings. Later I talked about it with a friend who ran a daycare center and he pretty much confirmed what I'd found. Liability insurance was his biggest expense, and he was always one lawsuit away from being put out of business. Eventually we just made it a policy where we would comp workers an empty room for a day for emergencies. What they did with the room was their business. If they couldn't find a babysitter and wanted to dump their kids in said room in front of a TV while they worked, and they and co-workers would check in on them every 10-15 minutes, we (management) would look the other way.
It's pretty sad to hear people suggest that sole purpose of a persons time on earth is to work hard and be productive.
Economic activity = sum of (productivity)
Productivity is the fundamental measure of economic output. The more productive the average individual is, the higher the standard of living is (everything produced is also everything consumed). If you're suggesting a person not be as productive as they can, you're advocating that the standard of living be lowered. That's really what all the economic development since the industrial revolution has been about. Leveraging machines and alternate energy sources (i.e. other than human and animal muscle power) to radically increase per-person productivity, which has proportionately increased the standard of living.
If you want to take a break and relax, that's fine. But you'd better be damned sure that your productivity while working is enough to "pay" for that relaxation time. The Germans are great at this (I've worked with them). They work super-hard when they are working and so are very productive. But once they're off work or if they're on vacation, they relax more than most people I've seen. It's ok though because their high productivity while working is more than enough to pay for it.
Money is actually just a (poor) representation of productivity, one whose value in terms of productivity isn't even constant. So thinking about economics in terms of money can result in very misleading conclusions. e.g. If you double everyone's pay, everyone becomes 2x as wealthy, right? Nope. If you double everyone's pay, then prices also double (prices of goods and services are what bring in revenue used to pay people). So in terms of income, it's a wash. Productivity hasn't changed, so fudging with the value of money doesn't change income or expenses. What does change is savings. The doubling of income and prices means the value of anything saved as money is halved. So anyone holding their savings as money (like poor and middle-class people do, instead of in non-monetary assets like real estate or stocks like rich people do) will find their wealth has been halved. Precisely the opposite of what you thought would happen when you doubled wages.
No, it's not obvious. These days the video card takes care of all that. And whether the alpha channel is 0 or 255 the value is going to be read anyway. The performance hit is nil.
Clarification: Most video cards run at 32-bits (4 bytes) per pixel. Because that's a nice round 2^n number which is actually easier for computers to process than the old 24-bits (3 bytes) per pixel.
32-bpp graphics has 256 values (1 byte) for R, G, and B just like 24-bpp graphics. The extra byte in 32-bpp is used to store the alpha channel (transparency). So you're getting it for free anyway, and the video card is using it even with these new "modern" icons (it allows the background to bleed through on parts that are covered by the icon's 32x32 pixel rectangle, but aren't covered by the icon's artwork). Since it's being used anyway, you might as well use it to enhance visibility of borders, edges, and control surfaces.
Just to clarify, some of the Pentium and Celeron CPUs are based on Haswell. Some are based on Bay Trail (Atom). As someone who helps recommend low-end laptops to friends and clients trying to get the best deal for a budget, it's become a hassle having to look up every model number of Pentium or Celeron to verify which type it is.
Your math is comparing apples to oranges.
Specifically you are comparing the cost to apprehend PLUS all the fixed costs of the agency vs the cost to apprehend with a drone.
That's actually exactly how the drone costs were calculated. They took the cost to operate the drones, then added all the fixed costs of the personnel, equipment, and miscellaneous agency overhead. That inflated the drone costs from $2,468 per hour to $12,255 per hour. It's actually your deportation cost which is missing some of the costs they attributed to the drones.
So OP's math was (inadvertently) in fact apples to apples.
That's what I was thinking. Equipping every border patrol unit with a commercial version of the ubiquitous quad-copter
For a given payload, rotary-wing aircraft consume about 2-4x as much fuel as fixed-wing aircraft. The quad-copter is actually an even bigger disadvantage since it's got 4 engines vs 1 on the Predator. (Fewer engines = more efficient. It's why airlines have been transitioning to twin-engine airliners.)
Also, if you read some of the linked docs in TFA, the $28,000 per arrest figure is the cost of the drone + personnel + equipment + overhead. The operating cost of just the drones themselves is about 1/5th that ( $2,468 per flight hour vs $12,255 per flight hour). So since the bulk of the cost is in the support personnel and equipment, changing the type of drone won't alter the cost per arrest much. The vast majority of the cost is still agents and their equipment - whether they be flying a Predator, a quad-copter, or have boots on the ground in the desert border.
You good people are about 5 years behind the times. WTF happened?
Same thing that happens to all early adopters. Earlier technology becomes entrenched, and it's more difficult for newer, better technology to displace it because the old stuff "mostly works good enough." It's why the ratio of wireless to wired phones is higher in Africa than in Europe.
Anyone herd of shrapnel? frag granades ? anti personnel mines ( which are now a days killing kids ) the most strange part is this sentence "could cause more suffering than the regular kind"
The preferred goal of a weapon of war is to wound. A dead enemy soldier just gets left there on the ground. A wounded soldier diverts combat personnel to drag/evac him back from the front lines, then ties up medical staff and incurs care and treatment costs. So a wounded enemy costs the enemy more resources, and is a much more preferable result than a dead enemy not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from a strategic perspective. That's part of the reason why NATO moved to the smaller 5.62mm bullets - being able to kill an enemy with a single shot wasn't one of the primary selection criteria.
So it becomes a balancing act between wounding enough (on average) to incapacitate the enemy to remove him from the immediate battlefield and tie up enemy resources in the short-term, but not wounding enough to severely incapacitate him for the remainder of his life. i.e. Long after the war is over and the previously-enemy combatants now fall under the jurisdiction and care of the victor in the war. Even if the victor uses the vanquished as slaves, capable slaves are preferable to crippled ones.
Exploding bullets makes it nearly impossible to remove all fragments from the body. Shrapnel and frag grenades in contrast fragment before entering in the body, and each piece that embeds in the body tends to have a clear entry wound making it easier to locate and extract. So exploding bullets have a much greater negative impact on wounded soldiers long after the war is over. Likewise, blindness lasts long after the war is over. And land mines continue to explode long after the war is over. That's what it means by "could cause more suffering than the regular kind."
Microsoft needs to grow a pair and lay down the law to any company that wants to be an OEM for their products. Apple wouldn't let the carriers pull this stunt on their phones.
I think Apple prohibiting carriers from doing this sort of stuff is more about keeping competitors under their thumb, not about protecting users. They're not above pulling this crap themselves at their users' expense. They surreptitiously slurped up users' location and wifi SSID data to build their own wifi map (the following year, they dumped the company they'd been paying to lease such a map). You know, the same thing Google got in trouble for because they went to the trouble to try to do it the right way, and had their own employees drive around doing the data gathering (not their Android users), then found out later they'd recorded a lot more than SSID.
Ah, a fellow rationalist. Wanna know a little secret? There's this whole big secret world out there not governed by strict and unbreakable laws like science. It's based on ephemeral qualities like popularity, beauty, fashion, trendiness, gossip, hearsay, social status, and celebrity. It leads to irrational things like printed cardboard skyrocketing in value because they include the magic word "Pokemon" (and actual laws being passed to prevent anyone other than the "owner" of that word from printing it on other cardboard), or shoes selling for $150 more because they're named after a famous basketball player, or a product selling out because a certain popular TV show host says she likes it, or a semi-popular cartoonist getting lots of people to pay in advance for a game they've never heard of before which doesn't sound all that fun to play. I hear this stuff can even influence whether or not you can land a job, or get a date, if you can believe that!
If you have your own currency you can print money. That gives you liquidity, at the cost of massive currency devaluation.
Oh dear. First, Greece is on the Euro - they can't print more money.
Second, money is just a representation of value/wealth. It is not value/wealth in and of itself. The true value is productivity. Anything you do to alter the money supply changes nothing if productivity is not altered. All that happens is you just add or subtract a zero to every number used in the accounting books. If your paycheck increases by 10x, but prices also increase by 10x, then nothing has changed. The economy gains no liquidity from printing money.
The one thing printing more currency does is shift wealth away from people who have been saving up (i.e. your savings account at the bank) to the entity printing the money. This is why investors flee to gold in bad economic times - the government cannot print more gold, so its value cannot decline due to this type of wrong-headed fiscal policy. (Note: It could actually be the proper course of action if huge amounts of the country's wealth is being held by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. But I don't believe that's the case in Greece.)
Same thing happens with debts (which are just a form of deferred savings). Debt repayments don't scale with currency fluctuations, so if you print enough money that your need 10x as much currency to do the same thing as before, then suddenly your debt is 1/10th what it was before in terms of real productivity.
But that's exactly the same thing as defaulting on your debt. Except instead of defaulting on 100% of it, you've defaulted on 90% of it. And that loss of economic credibility (i.e. credit) will make it that much harder for you to convince someone to lend you money in the future, worsening your liquidity crisis.
A surplus built on the back of borrowed money is not a surplus if you decide not to pay that money back. There's a reason accountants use amortization schedules and depreciate long-term assets. If you want to artificially restrict your analysis to just what the government spends (minus debt repayments) and collects, then you also need to subtract any economic activity generated by purchases made with that money which led to the debt.
In other words, you cannot buy a car with a car loan, get a job which requires the use of the car, then claim you shouldn't have to pay back the loan because you'd be making money if it weren't for those pesky car loan payments. Eliminating the car loan from your calculation also necessitates eliminating the car.
this type of nearly parasitic marketplace is the direct result of 40 years of unsuccessful economic sanctions and trade embargoes by the west.
This is the same bullshit spouted by the Castro government in Cuba. You do not have an inherent right to force other people to trade with you. If they don't want to trade with you, it is their right not to trade with you. If your socio-economic system is robust, it will continue along just fine. Perhaps not as well as if you had had more trade opportunities, but it will continue to function and grow. Just like in old days when transportation was by ox and cart so your selection of trade partners was extremely limited - the economy still grew back then. If your economy doesn't, then the problem is your socio-economic system, not foreign trade sanctions. And the line you give is being trotted out by the people in power in your country to deflect criticism away from themselves (who are the ones truly responsible).
When Iran says, for example, its nuclear program is peaceful its quite easy to see why: imports of X-Ray and medical isotopes from nato countries are severely restricted if not outright banned. Iran is entirely dependent upon Russia for the nuclear material they receive
A nuclear program can be both peaceful and military. Proving that it has peaceful uses does not prove that it doesn't have military uses.
And actually, if you project Iran's population and energy consumption out into the future, sometime around 2030 they cease being a net energy exporter and become a net energy importer. i.e. The oil they produce domestically will not be enough to supply their domestic energy needs, though they may be able to stave that off for a decade or two by increasing oil production. I dropped my opposition to their nuclear program when I figured that out.
On a meta level, due to the inexorable march of technological progress, it is inevitable that rogue nations and eventually terrorist organizations will get nukes. We've been trying to keep the genie in the bottle all this time - that's what all these sanctions and inspections of the nuclear plants in Iran and North Korea are about. But eventually it's going to get out. We need to come up with plans for how to deal with that genie once it gets out of the bottle if we want to survive as a species. Otherwise every petty disagreement we have is going to escalate into a city being nuked.
It's a spec. Designed by intel's marketing group. Which is constantly in flux. Their long term goal is to push affordable yet quality laptop design, but at the same time I wouldn't all $700 "palatable" for an Ultrabook. $570-$640 is palatable for an ultrabook. $700 is just a regular laptop price.
Intel came up with the Ultrabook marketing campaign to convince manufacturers to make more expensive laptops with better features (higher resolution, SSD storage, better battery life, thinner, lighter). It makes no sense to expect Ultrabooks to be cheaper than regular laptops.
Intel didn't start the Ultrabook campaign because they were fed up like those of us who want better-than-low-end specs on our laptops. Intel was in very real danger of being priced out of the market. Netbooks died because the low-end of the regular laptop market dipped below the $400 mark, and in some cases even the $300 mark about 3 years ago. It's extraordinarily difficult to sell a $150 CPU for $299 laptop. Intel needed to raise the average laptop price, or cede increasing market share to cheaper CPUs by AMD and ARM. And the Ultrabook campaign was how they chose to do it.
I've been buying notebooks for over 2 decades now, with a bias towards lightweight models (I've owned a Thinkpad 701c, Thinkpad 560E, Portege 3440CT, Sony Z122). Prices on ultraportables have steadily dropped from over $3000 (the 701C retailed for nearly $4000), to $1800 by the time I got the Sony Z1 in 2010. Ultrabooks were well over $1000 when they first debuted a few years ago. $700 is more than palatable for an ultrabook - it's fantastic. I've been helping several friends buy laptops since this past November, and aside from some brief sales which ended literally within hours, the cheapest 1080p laptop (non-refurb) has been about $600. For $100 more you get 8GB of RAM and a SSD (and a 256GB one at that, not a lame 128GB one). It'd be a fantastic price even if it weren't ultralight and thin like an ultrabook.
I thought it was Maxtor which kicked off the "1 MB = 1 million bytes" thing? I vaguely recall Seagate being one of the stubborn holdouts for 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. I do know IBM was the last one to switch. (Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006, so it's somewhat a moot point.)
If you do nothing but add red light cameras, the intersection tends to become safer.
But inevitably, the government agency which authorized the cameras suddenly realizes it's getting more revenue from traffic violations. And it starts shortening the duration of the yellow lights at the intersections to artificially increase the number of violations, and thus increase its revenue even more. This makes the intersection more dangerous, moreso than the cameras initially made them safer.
I've thought about these types of situations a bit. The best idea I could come up with is that fines for breaking the law should not go to the government. They should go into an escrow account held by the government, which gets equally redistributed to taxpayers when they get their tax refund (or converted to a tax credit if the person owes taxes). The idea behind these fines is that the offender needs to be penalized for the bad behavior. As the public was the party which was harmed by the behavior, and ostensibly the government is acting on behalf of the public, the fine goes to the government. But that leads to a conflict of interest on the part of the government in situations like this. So the best solution is to remove the conflict of interest - if the government makes no money from traffic violations, then its only motive for enacting traffic control is to improve traffic flow and safety.
This may have been true at one time, but I don't think it is the case any longer. I think that the ubiquity of cheap components and the falling price of Windows for OEMs, the profit margins have been steadily increasing over the years.
You haven't been buying laptops for very long, have you? I've bought:
A Thinkpad 700 (monochrome, not color) in 1994 for about $2100.
A Thinkpad 701c in 1996 for about $2800 (original retail in 1995 was about $3800)
A Thinkpad 560E in 1999 (2 years after release) on sale for about $2600 (nearly $4000 in 1997)
A Toshiba Portege 3440CT in 2001 on a killer sale for $1750 (was $2500 when new)
A Thinkpad T40 in 2004 for $1800
A Sony S360 in 2006 for $600 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).
A Sony Z122 - their top of the line model - in 2010 for $800 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).
The ubiquity of cheap components has been translating into much cheaper laptops over time. If you look at the profit margins of these companies, they've been pretty stable at 5%-10%. Apple is the only one who's figured out a way to sell cheap components at a huge markup.
This is for a head mounted apparatus that a separate display inserts into.
Unless you're somehow manufacturing the head mount and display together, every display used in a head mounted apparatus was initially separate, and was inserted into it. What exactly is the invention here? The idea of assembling pieces together?
Yeah, I have to give the lawyer who dreamed this one up some kudos for creativity and the audacity to actually file it. (Blame for actually granting it goes to the USPTO as usual.) First we had "on a" troll patents, where you patented something that already existed but was now being done on a different platform. e.g. A shopping cart on a website. Email on a cellular network.
Now with this patent they've created a new "with a" class of troll patent. VR headsets and smartphones already existed long before 2008. What they've patented is a VR headset with a phone as the screen. Now we're going to get all sorts of stupid patents for things like a projector with a white wall as a screen, a table leveler with a folded up piece of paper to prop up the short leg.
Do you have the same complaint about car top speeds in mph or km/h rather than min/km or min/mi?
Try measuring your trip times. For a 20 mile trip:
20 mph = 60 min
40 mph = 30 min (30 min saved)
60 mph = 20 min (10 min saved)
80 mph = 15 min (5 min saved)
100 mph = 12 min (3 min saved)
That's why all your drivers ed classes advised you not to speed. It's not just about being safer and saving fuel. It's a terrible tradeoff in terms of time saved for risk incurred.
This needed to happen to a major vendor. Just so all the other computer makers can see how monumentally stupid an idea it is to let their Marketing division talk them into bypassing security for the sake of some ad revenue.
If they're looking to save costs and they're currently spending $1/mile on their trucks, I think there are some low hanging fruit they could tackle before jumping to drones.
The problem with the $1/mile figure, even if it's correct, is that that's the cost of the truck per mile. The UPS trucks I've seen carry hundreds of packages. So on a per package basis, the cost is on the order of 1 cent/mile.
That's not going to be the case for drones. Because of weight limitations, each package will need its own dedicated drone. So the cost per mile to operate the drone will be the cost per mile to deliver the package.
Many remotes these days use some kind of wireless connection - so if I had a sniffer listening to network traffic from the house I could remotely trigger the remote's microphone key even from outside fire up listen mode...
Nearly all TV remotes use infrared, which doesn't pass through walls nor typical glass (remember the greenhouse effect?). The reason you cite is actually the converse of why they don't use radio. The FCC regulates radio broadcasts so any radio remote must fall within the open frequencies (900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz). Unfortunately that means every small radio device out there also uses those frequencies and there's a ton of interference.
Those clever TV manufacturers figured out pretty early on that they have an advantage over other remote communications devices. For you to watch TV, you have to have line of sight to the TV. If you have line of sight to the TV, then the TV has line of sight to you. So you can use an optical (infrared) link to control the TV remotely, and avoid the entire radio frequency mess.
Of course the other way to look at this is as one of linked services - Ford can't sell a car that mandates Ford tyres or Ford petrol, so maybe Google can't sell an OS that mandates Google search.
1) Google doesn't sell Android. They give it away for free. They make their money from the search and other services they've embedded into their version of it. So telling them they can't do that is tantamount to telling them they can't give it away for free and must sell licenses for it.
2) They don't mandate that Android has to have Google search. They only mandate that if you want to use the other suite of Google Apps. That's why AOSP makes you install Android and Google Apps separately - they have different licenses. And if you want to take AOSP and make your own version without Google Search like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and lots of other companies have done, you can.
If you insist on a car analogy, it'd be that Ford gives cars away for free so long as you use Ford tires and Ford fuel. They even give the designs of their cars away for free if you want to manufacture your own car which uses your own tires and own fuel. What's being proposed here is that Ford be prohibited from requiring the use of Ford tires and fuel, under the assumption that Ford would continue to give their cars away for free even after that prohibition. Obviously you'd have to be brain-damaged to believe that, and the only alternative is that Ford would force you to pay for your car.
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I was opposed to recovery partitions when MS first started using them. But with Win 8 I think they've added enough options that the pros outweigh the cons. It took me a while to find all this info (or rather, learn that MS had even made this possible), so here it is as a PSA:
All Windows 8/8.1 computers come with a restore partition. I highly recommend you buy a 16GB or 32GB USB flash drive and convert that restore partition into a reinstall flash drive.
If you don't like the default recovery partition state (maybe too much crapware installed), you can create a custom recovery partition after you've uninstalled the crapware and installed your programs.
Finally, if you totally screw up, you can still create a Windows 8/8.1 recovery flash drive by using your Windows key and downloading a clean 8-16 GB recovery image from Microsoft.
Microsoft site for creating recovery image.
Instructions for finding your key
Similar conservative here. I never really bought into the "poor people are lazy" meme. The hardest worker I've ever met was a poor Mexican who turned out to be an illegal alien. This guy was so dedicated to doing a good job I would've endorsed him for citizenship in an instant. (Likewise I haven't found the lazy, rich fat cat meme to be true either. The vast majority of rich people I know are some of the hardest working people I've met, frequently sleeping only 4-6 hours a night because they're working the other 18-20 hours. It's like they're always firing on all cylinders and don't know how to let up. Even when on vacation, they'll try to sneak off to get some work done.)
...
What I have noticed though is that poor people tend to make much worse financial decisions, moreso than not-poor people. e.g. A poor friend asked me for help buying a laptop. I knew he didn't have much money, he knew I knew, so I worked my butt off finding him a great deal. I eventually found him a refurb i3 laptop for $235 (when he sold it 2 years later, it was selling on eBay for $265). I felt satisfied that I'd done a good deed to help a poor person. Then the next week I learned that he'd bought a 64GB iPad for $800 (the extra $100 was to have his name engraved on it).
That was exactly my conclusion too after managing a hotel with a lot of low-income employees. So many of them were single parents or were in families where both parents worked, that a good chunk of their income went to babysitting or daycare. Since the hotel usually had empty rooms that could be used for babysitting, I looked into what it would take to start up daycare services for our employees.
OMG. The legal liability and insurance requirements were crippling. Apparently parents are a sue-happy bunch when it comes to the tiniest scratch on their little darlings. Later I talked about it with a friend who ran a daycare center and he pretty much confirmed what I'd found. Liability insurance was his biggest expense, and he was always one lawsuit away from being put out of business. Eventually we just made it a policy where we would comp workers an empty room for a day for emergencies. What they did with the room was their business. If they couldn't find a babysitter and wanted to dump their kids in said room in front of a TV while they worked, and they and co-workers would check in on them every 10-15 minutes, we (management) would look the other way.
Economic activity = sum of (productivity)
Productivity is the fundamental measure of economic output. The more productive the average individual is, the higher the standard of living is (everything produced is also everything consumed). If you're suggesting a person not be as productive as they can, you're advocating that the standard of living be lowered. That's really what all the economic development since the industrial revolution has been about. Leveraging machines and alternate energy sources (i.e. other than human and animal muscle power) to radically increase per-person productivity, which has proportionately increased the standard of living.
If you want to take a break and relax, that's fine. But you'd better be damned sure that your productivity while working is enough to "pay" for that relaxation time. The Germans are great at this (I've worked with them). They work super-hard when they are working and so are very productive. But once they're off work or if they're on vacation, they relax more than most people I've seen. It's ok though because their high productivity while working is more than enough to pay for it.
Money is actually just a (poor) representation of productivity, one whose value in terms of productivity isn't even constant. So thinking about economics in terms of money can result in very misleading conclusions. e.g. If you double everyone's pay, everyone becomes 2x as wealthy, right? Nope. If you double everyone's pay, then prices also double (prices of goods and services are what bring in revenue used to pay people). So in terms of income, it's a wash. Productivity hasn't changed, so fudging with the value of money doesn't change income or expenses. What does change is savings. The doubling of income and prices means the value of anything saved as money is halved. So anyone holding their savings as money (like poor and middle-class people do, instead of in non-monetary assets like real estate or stocks like rich people do) will find their wealth has been halved. Precisely the opposite of what you thought would happen when you doubled wages.
Clarification: Most video cards run at 32-bits (4 bytes) per pixel. Because that's a nice round 2^n number which is actually easier for computers to process than the old 24-bits (3 bytes) per pixel.
32-bpp graphics has 256 values (1 byte) for R, G, and B just like 24-bpp graphics. The extra byte in 32-bpp is used to store the alpha channel (transparency). So you're getting it for free anyway, and the video card is using it even with these new "modern" icons (it allows the background to bleed through on parts that are covered by the icon's 32x32 pixel rectangle, but aren't covered by the icon's artwork). Since it's being used anyway, you might as well use it to enhance visibility of borders, edges, and control surfaces.
Just to clarify, some of the Pentium and Celeron CPUs are based on Haswell. Some are based on Bay Trail (Atom). As someone who helps recommend low-end laptops to friends and clients trying to get the best deal for a budget, it's become a hassle having to look up every model number of Pentium or Celeron to verify which type it is.
That's actually exactly how the drone costs were calculated. They took the cost to operate the drones, then added all the fixed costs of the personnel, equipment, and miscellaneous agency overhead. That inflated the drone costs from $2,468 per hour to $12,255 per hour. It's actually your deportation cost which is missing some of the costs they attributed to the drones.
So OP's math was (inadvertently) in fact apples to apples.
For a given payload, rotary-wing aircraft consume about 2-4x as much fuel as fixed-wing aircraft. The quad-copter is actually an even bigger disadvantage since it's got 4 engines vs 1 on the Predator. (Fewer engines = more efficient. It's why airlines have been transitioning to twin-engine airliners.)
Also, if you read some of the linked docs in TFA, the $28,000 per arrest figure is the cost of the drone + personnel + equipment + overhead. The operating cost of just the drones themselves is about 1/5th that ( $2,468 per flight hour vs $12,255 per flight hour). So since the bulk of the cost is in the support personnel and equipment, changing the type of drone won't alter the cost per arrest much. The vast majority of the cost is still agents and their equipment - whether they be flying a Predator, a quad-copter, or have boots on the ground in the desert border.
Same thing that happens to all early adopters. Earlier technology becomes entrenched, and it's more difficult for newer, better technology to displace it because the old stuff "mostly works good enough." It's why the ratio of wireless to wired phones is higher in Africa than in Europe.
The preferred goal of a weapon of war is to wound. A dead enemy soldier just gets left there on the ground. A wounded soldier diverts combat personnel to drag/evac him back from the front lines, then ties up medical staff and incurs care and treatment costs. So a wounded enemy costs the enemy more resources, and is a much more preferable result than a dead enemy not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from a strategic perspective. That's part of the reason why NATO moved to the smaller 5.62mm bullets - being able to kill an enemy with a single shot wasn't one of the primary selection criteria.
So it becomes a balancing act between wounding enough (on average) to incapacitate the enemy to remove him from the immediate battlefield and tie up enemy resources in the short-term, but not wounding enough to severely incapacitate him for the remainder of his life. i.e. Long after the war is over and the previously-enemy combatants now fall under the jurisdiction and care of the victor in the war. Even if the victor uses the vanquished as slaves, capable slaves are preferable to crippled ones.
Exploding bullets makes it nearly impossible to remove all fragments from the body. Shrapnel and frag grenades in contrast fragment before entering in the body, and each piece that embeds in the body tends to have a clear entry wound making it easier to locate and extract. So exploding bullets have a much greater negative impact on wounded soldiers long after the war is over. Likewise, blindness lasts long after the war is over. And land mines continue to explode long after the war is over. That's what it means by "could cause more suffering than the regular kind."
I think Apple prohibiting carriers from doing this sort of stuff is more about keeping competitors under their thumb, not about protecting users. They're not above pulling this crap themselves at their users' expense. They surreptitiously slurped up users' location and wifi SSID data to build their own wifi map (the following year, they dumped the company they'd been paying to lease such a map). You know, the same thing Google got in trouble for because they went to the trouble to try to do it the right way, and had their own employees drive around doing the data gathering (not their Android users), then found out later they'd recorded a lot more than SSID.
Ah, a fellow rationalist. Wanna know a little secret? There's this whole big secret world out there not governed by strict and unbreakable laws like science. It's based on ephemeral qualities like popularity, beauty, fashion, trendiness, gossip, hearsay, social status, and celebrity. It leads to irrational things like printed cardboard skyrocketing in value because they include the magic word "Pokemon" (and actual laws being passed to prevent anyone other than the "owner" of that word from printing it on other cardboard), or shoes selling for $150 more because they're named after a famous basketball player, or a product selling out because a certain popular TV show host says she likes it, or a semi-popular cartoonist getting lots of people to pay in advance for a game they've never heard of before which doesn't sound all that fun to play. I hear this stuff can even influence whether or not you can land a job, or get a date, if you can believe that!
Oh dear. First, Greece is on the Euro - they can't print more money.
Second, money is just a representation of value/wealth. It is not value/wealth in and of itself. The true value is productivity. Anything you do to alter the money supply changes nothing if productivity is not altered. All that happens is you just add or subtract a zero to every number used in the accounting books. If your paycheck increases by 10x, but prices also increase by 10x, then nothing has changed. The economy gains no liquidity from printing money.
The one thing printing more currency does is shift wealth away from people who have been saving up (i.e. your savings account at the bank) to the entity printing the money. This is why investors flee to gold in bad economic times - the government cannot print more gold, so its value cannot decline due to this type of wrong-headed fiscal policy. (Note: It could actually be the proper course of action if huge amounts of the country's wealth is being held by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. But I don't believe that's the case in Greece.)
Same thing happens with debts (which are just a form of deferred savings). Debt repayments don't scale with currency fluctuations, so if you print enough money that your need 10x as much currency to do the same thing as before, then suddenly your debt is 1/10th what it was before in terms of real productivity.
But that's exactly the same thing as defaulting on your debt. Except instead of defaulting on 100% of it, you've defaulted on 90% of it. And that loss of economic credibility (i.e. credit) will make it that much harder for you to convince someone to lend you money in the future, worsening your liquidity crisis.
A surplus built on the back of borrowed money is not a surplus if you decide not to pay that money back. There's a reason accountants use amortization schedules and depreciate long-term assets. If you want to artificially restrict your analysis to just what the government spends (minus debt repayments) and collects, then you also need to subtract any economic activity generated by purchases made with that money which led to the debt.
In other words, you cannot buy a car with a car loan, get a job which requires the use of the car, then claim you shouldn't have to pay back the loan because you'd be making money if it weren't for those pesky car loan payments. Eliminating the car loan from your calculation also necessitates eliminating the car.
This is the same bullshit spouted by the Castro government in Cuba. You do not have an inherent right to force other people to trade with you. If they don't want to trade with you, it is their right not to trade with you. If your socio-economic system is robust, it will continue along just fine. Perhaps not as well as if you had had more trade opportunities, but it will continue to function and grow. Just like in old days when transportation was by ox and cart so your selection of trade partners was extremely limited - the economy still grew back then. If your economy doesn't, then the problem is your socio-economic system, not foreign trade sanctions. And the line you give is being trotted out by the people in power in your country to deflect criticism away from themselves (who are the ones truly responsible).
A nuclear program can be both peaceful and military. Proving that it has peaceful uses does not prove that it doesn't have military uses.
And actually, if you project Iran's population and energy consumption out into the future, sometime around 2030 they cease being a net energy exporter and become a net energy importer. i.e. The oil they produce domestically will not be enough to supply their domestic energy needs, though they may be able to stave that off for a decade or two by increasing oil production. I dropped my opposition to their nuclear program when I figured that out.
On a meta level, due to the inexorable march of technological progress, it is inevitable that rogue nations and eventually terrorist organizations will get nukes. We've been trying to keep the genie in the bottle all this time - that's what all these sanctions and inspections of the nuclear plants in Iran and North Korea are about. But eventually it's going to get out. We need to come up with plans for how to deal with that genie once it gets out of the bottle if we want to survive as a species. Otherwise every petty disagreement we have is going to escalate into a city being nuked.
Intel came up with the Ultrabook marketing campaign to convince manufacturers to make more expensive laptops with better features (higher resolution, SSD storage, better battery life, thinner, lighter). It makes no sense to expect Ultrabooks to be cheaper than regular laptops.
Intel didn't start the Ultrabook campaign because they were fed up like those of us who want better-than-low-end specs on our laptops. Intel was in very real danger of being priced out of the market. Netbooks died because the low-end of the regular laptop market dipped below the $400 mark, and in some cases even the $300 mark about 3 years ago. It's extraordinarily difficult to sell a $150 CPU for $299 laptop. Intel needed to raise the average laptop price, or cede increasing market share to cheaper CPUs by AMD and ARM. And the Ultrabook campaign was how they chose to do it.
I've been buying notebooks for over 2 decades now, with a bias towards lightweight models (I've owned a Thinkpad 701c, Thinkpad 560E, Portege 3440CT, Sony Z122). Prices on ultraportables have steadily dropped from over $3000 (the 701C retailed for nearly $4000), to $1800 by the time I got the Sony Z1 in 2010. Ultrabooks were well over $1000 when they first debuted a few years ago. $700 is more than palatable for an ultrabook - it's fantastic. I've been helping several friends buy laptops since this past November, and aside from some brief sales which ended literally within hours, the cheapest 1080p laptop (non-refurb) has been about $600. For $100 more you get 8GB of RAM and a SSD (and a 256GB one at that, not a lame 128GB one). It'd be a fantastic price even if it weren't ultralight and thin like an ultrabook.
I thought it was Maxtor which kicked off the "1 MB = 1 million bytes" thing? I vaguely recall Seagate being one of the stubborn holdouts for 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. I do know IBM was the last one to switch. (Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006, so it's somewhat a moot point.)
If you do nothing but add red light cameras, the intersection tends to become safer.
But inevitably, the government agency which authorized the cameras suddenly realizes it's getting more revenue from traffic violations. And it starts shortening the duration of the yellow lights at the intersections to artificially increase the number of violations, and thus increase its revenue even more. This makes the intersection more dangerous, moreso than the cameras initially made them safer.
I've thought about these types of situations a bit. The best idea I could come up with is that fines for breaking the law should not go to the government. They should go into an escrow account held by the government, which gets equally redistributed to taxpayers when they get their tax refund (or converted to a tax credit if the person owes taxes). The idea behind these fines is that the offender needs to be penalized for the bad behavior. As the public was the party which was harmed by the behavior, and ostensibly the government is acting on behalf of the public, the fine goes to the government. But that leads to a conflict of interest on the part of the government in situations like this. So the best solution is to remove the conflict of interest - if the government makes no money from traffic violations, then its only motive for enacting traffic control is to improve traffic flow and safety.
You haven't been buying laptops for very long, have you? I've bought:
A Thinkpad 700 (monochrome, not color) in 1994 for about $2100.
A Thinkpad 701c in 1996 for about $2800 (original retail in 1995 was about $3800)
A Thinkpad 560E in 1999 (2 years after release) on sale for about $2600 (nearly $4000 in 1997)
A Toshiba Portege 3440CT in 2001 on a killer sale for $1750 (was $2500 when new)
A Thinkpad T40 in 2004 for $1800
A Sony S360 in 2006 for $600 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).
A Sony Z122 - their top of the line model - in 2010 for $800 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).
The ubiquity of cheap components has been translating into much cheaper laptops over time. If you look at the profit margins of these companies, they've been pretty stable at 5%-10%. Apple is the only one who's figured out a way to sell cheap components at a huge markup.
Unless you're somehow manufacturing the head mount and display together, every display used in a head mounted apparatus was initially separate, and was inserted into it. What exactly is the invention here? The idea of assembling pieces together?
Yeah, I have to give the lawyer who dreamed this one up some kudos for creativity and the audacity to actually file it. (Blame for actually granting it goes to the USPTO as usual.) First we had "on a" troll patents, where you patented something that already existed but was now being done on a different platform. e.g. A shopping cart on a website. Email on a cellular network.
Now with this patent they've created a new "with a" class of troll patent. VR headsets and smartphones already existed long before 2008. What they've patented is a VR headset with a phone as the screen. Now we're going to get all sorts of stupid patents for things like a projector with a white wall as a screen, a table leveler with a folded up piece of paper to prop up the short leg.
Try measuring your trip times. For a 20 mile trip:
20 mph = 60 min
40 mph = 30 min (30 min saved)
60 mph = 20 min (10 min saved)
80 mph = 15 min (5 min saved)
100 mph = 12 min (3 min saved)
That's why all your drivers ed classes advised you not to speed. It's not just about being safer and saving fuel. It's a terrible tradeoff in terms of time saved for risk incurred.
This needed to happen to a major vendor. Just so all the other computer makers can see how monumentally stupid an idea it is to let their Marketing division talk them into bypassing security for the sake of some ad revenue.
The problem with the $1/mile figure, even if it's correct, is that that's the cost of the truck per mile. The UPS trucks I've seen carry hundreds of packages. So on a per package basis, the cost is on the order of 1 cent/mile.
That's not going to be the case for drones. Because of weight limitations, each package will need its own dedicated drone. So the cost per mile to operate the drone will be the cost per mile to deliver the package.
Nearly all TV remotes use infrared, which doesn't pass through walls nor typical glass (remember the greenhouse effect?). The reason you cite is actually the converse of why they don't use radio. The FCC regulates radio broadcasts so any radio remote must fall within the open frequencies (900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz). Unfortunately that means every small radio device out there also uses those frequencies and there's a ton of interference.
Those clever TV manufacturers figured out pretty early on that they have an advantage over other remote communications devices. For you to watch TV, you have to have line of sight to the TV. If you have line of sight to the TV, then the TV has line of sight to you. So you can use an optical (infrared) link to control the TV remotely, and avoid the entire radio frequency mess.
1) Google doesn't sell Android. They give it away for free. They make their money from the search and other services they've embedded into their version of it. So telling them they can't do that is tantamount to telling them they can't give it away for free and must sell licenses for it.
2) They don't mandate that Android has to have Google search. They only mandate that if you want to use the other suite of Google Apps. That's why AOSP makes you install Android and Google Apps separately - they have different licenses. And if you want to take AOSP and make your own version without Google Search like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and lots of other companies have done, you can.
If you insist on a car analogy, it'd be that Ford gives cars away for free so long as you use Ford tires and Ford fuel. They even give the designs of their cars away for free if you want to manufacture your own car which uses your own tires and own fuel. What's being proposed here is that Ford be prohibited from requiring the use of Ford tires and fuel, under the assumption that Ford would continue to give their cars away for free even after that prohibition. Obviously you'd have to be brain-damaged to believe that, and the only alternative is that Ford would force you to pay for your car.