She wasn't overweight when she had a persistent intestinal infection and gained weight after it was cured. She might well be eating more simply because it doesn't cause her discomfort anymore, or her body uses fewer resources because it doesn't have to fight an infection, or her colon has become better at absorbing the nutrients in her food because it's no longer infected.
Actually, according to TFA, she was overweight prior to the treatment, with a BMI of 26 (which is borderline overweight). So yeah, I think your explanation is probably the likely one.
Isn't it like extremely easy to copy passive NFC/RFID tags? You just record them and replay them.
Not if it's implemented with public/private key encryption to generate an encrypted challenge/response communication.. i.e. A private key is stored in the RFID tag, along with the public keys for any scanners it's supposed to respond to. When a scanner queries it, it sends an initial "who are you?". The RFID tag responds with its ID. The scanner then looks up the ID in its list of public keys. It then creates a data packet comprised of the RFID tag's ID, and a random block of data. Encrypts this with its private key and the tag's public key, and transmits that with the scanner ID.
The RFID tag reads the scanner ID, looks it up in its list of scanner public keys, then uses the appropriate public key and its private key to decrypt the query. This confirms that an authorized scanner did in fact send the query, and the query included the RFID tag's ID so it should respond. Then it generates a response with its ID and the original random data block. It encrypts this response with its private key and the scanner's public key, and transmits it back to the scanner.
The scanner uses its own private key and the RFID tag's public key to decrypt the response data. Since these are the right keys, the decrypted response includes the original random block of data, thus confirming that the response could have (1) only come from that RFID tag, and (2) was a response to that particular query and not a pre-recorded response.
It's contingent on the RFID tag being designed so the private key it contains is destroyed if anyone tries to tamper with it to read the private key. And you could probably beef up the RFID tag's initial response a bit more (having the RFID tag generate a random data block is problematic, since it's unpowered and would default back to a random seed any time a scanner powered it up). But this solves the problem of someone just recording responses and playing them back.
The granddaddy of science fiction was H.G. Wells, who published fiction from 1895-1941. My hunch is the primary impetus for science fiction was the industrial revolution. Prior to it, the rate of technological progress was slow enough that very little changed throughout your lifetime. Without visible advancement, there was little reason to speculate on what the future might bring. But once the rate of advancement took off, actual development began to outstrip people's imagination, which challenged their imagination to become more speculative.
I'm not sure why people keep trying to cast these stories as a failure of market capitalism, and socialism to the rescue. The cable and telecom industries in the U.S. are a classic example of a failure of government regulation. The monopolies exist because they were granted by the local governments, which prohibit competition. And many of the problems we see like net non-neutrality would in fact be solved by allowing market competition. If Comcast had had competition and they deliberately degraded Netflix service, they would've bled customers once word got around that Netflix sucked on Comcast but worked great with competing ISPs.
"Socialist" Europe has actually gotten this one right. For the most part they're not trying to control their ISPs with heavy-handed regulations. They're regulating it just enough to maximize competition. i.e. Their ISP is closer to a free market than in the U.S.
And this is exactly why the video should not be shown or viewed. Our reaction to terrorism should NOT be an emotional one, for a number of reasons:
Problem is, indifference is an emotional response too. Honestly, most of the coverage I've seen of ISIS has been indifferent - understating the threat.
At one extreme, you have totalitarianism. A group which has sufficient manpower and equipment to completely control the sociopolitics of a region.
At the other extreme, you have terrorism. A group without sufficient manpower or equipment to have any real impact on sciopolitics of a region. Consequently, they resort to extreme acts which leverage the media to elicit emotional reactions from people to obtain maximal political impact for minimal effort.
Most groups fall somewhere between these extremes. Most of the coverage I've seen of ISIS is to characterize them towards the terrorist end of the scale. Including your analysis since you openly call them terrorists.
ISIS is not a terrorist group per se. Yes they occasionally resort to terrorist-like tactics, but that's because of the depravity of their ideology, not because it's the most effective way for them to achieve their goals. They don't have to resort to terrorist acts to achieve their goals - they have the manpower, equipment, and economic resources to achieve real military victories against their opponents in the region. They are a real geopolitical force in the region. Pretending they are "just" a terrorist organization and treating them as if they're an outlier which can be safely ignored because of its infrequency is an act of emotional indifference - you don't want there to be a problem, so you're pretending there isn't a problem.
ISIS is a real threat which stands a good chance of toppling two if not three countries in the region. People need to wake up to the scope of the threat they pose, instead of casually dismissing them as random acts of terrorism. At the risk of pulling a Godwin, the people who believed Hitler wasn't serious about conquering Europe and sought "peace for our time" badly needed a wake-up call. If posting a grotesque video is what's needed to provide the same wake-up call today about the threat ISIS poses, then so be it.
Most U.S. high schools require two years of a foreign language for you to graduate. But the U.S. is big enough that the vast majority of graduates can promptly forget it and live out their lives without ever having to use that foreign language. Quite different from, say, Europe where you can drive a couple hours in any direction and be in a different country with a completely different language.
Your SSN was never supposed to be secret. Your SSN was supposed to be used only by the SSA for collection and disbursement of social security payments. It was never intended to be used as a national ID. However, in light of there being no other ID which uniquely identifies each individual in the country, everyone glommed onto using the SSN for that purpose. Which is when it started to become important to keep it secret.
I had this discussion with a friend recently. He'd reported great success in his family using elderberry extract to get over the flu. I'm pretty open-minded to trying new things (trying it can't kill you, usually), so when I started exhibiting flu symptoms after babysitting my sister's kids while she had the flu, I gave it a shot. I grabbed a bottle of elderberry extract 16 hours after the first symptoms appeared (slight tickling in sinuses that morning, progressing to a slightly sore throat by the evening). And I took the doses as suggested. I took no other medication.
Over the next 12 hours, I developed the full-blown flu. I've had colds, and I've had the flu before, and this was the flu. I felt like I'd been run over by a truck, and could barely crawl out of bed. It was so bad I was tempted to take sleeping pills just so I could sleep through the misery, but I held off so as not to contaminate the experiment. By 36 hours the aches were gone. At 48 hours the runny nose ended and my fever broke. All I had left was a slightly sore throat.
I was quite frankly amazed at the efficacy of a so-called homeopathic remedy. I did a bit more research and found that scientific studies have shown that elderberry extract is effective against the flu. I suspect the only reason it hasn't been studied more extensively is that there's no money to be made from it. Someone pays to fund the study, proves it's effective, and anyone can make the medicine. Nobody wants to be the one stuck paying for the bill (the study), so nobody bothers funding it.
Anyway, my point is, don't be so quick to dismiss homeopathic remedies. There's a widespread misbelief that everything is false until proven true. Science operates on that premise because it assigns burden of proof in inverse proportion of difficulty of proof. e.g. You can't prove a negative, so science places no burden of proof on those who believe the negative state. But this does not mean the negative is automatically correct. Logically, things actually break down into three states - unknown/cannot be determined, true, and false; and the vast majority of things fall into the first category.
There are probably many homeopathic "remidies" as you put it which actually do work, they just haven't been as thoroughly studied as a drug from which some pharmaceutical company stands to make $billions. By all means dismiss as quackery the remedies which have been tested and fail to do better than a placebo. But it's a gross illogical leap to then conclude that all such remedies are quackery before they've even been tested. And that the PharmCo method of coming up with a new molecule, and testing it extensively in rigorous controlled studies is the only way to come up with viable treatments.
There is evidence that HFCS and the other corn products contribute to obesity much more than either fat OR cane sugar but the corn industry is so powerful that no-one of any substance has the guts to challenge them and really fight.
The most common forms of High Fructose Corn Syrup is actually 55% fructose / 42% glucose (soft drinks). Or 42% fructose / 53% glucose (other foods). For comparison, sucrose or cane sugar breaks down in the body to 50% fructose / 50% glucose.
So there's really no difference. It's only called "high fructose" because it contains more fructose than regular corn syrup (which is about 90% glucose). Not because it contains more fructose than other sugars you normally ingest.
GTAT Executives were the ones who really screwed up. If you are going to have a business relationship with Apple, you better be sure that you are big enough to operate without Apple.
While they were to blame, that wasn't exactly what happened. They bound themselves to a contract which was skewed wildly in Apple's favor. Basically they bore all the risk - borrowing all of the money to gear up for production, resulting in them bearing all the losses if the product didn't live up to specs or if they weren't able to produce sufficient quantity. Normally in a situation like this, a vendor orders and pays for samples, the manufacturer produces them, then the vendor decides whether or not to pay for a full order. In this case, Apple requested samples, the GTAT execs went "OMG Apple!" and bent over backwards (or forwards depending on what analogy you want to use), borrowing huge amounts of money and investing it in massive production facilities when they didn't even have a firm order from Apple yet.
Apple bears some of the responsibility for using their huge size to coerce behavior out of a supplier, like how Walmart coerces suppliers to give them ruinous pricing. But the bulk of the responsibility lies squarely with GTAT for agreeing to those terms. Companies like GTAT or Walmart suppliers (or even employees who meekly accept whatever terms their employer sets) put themselves into these situations through their unwillingness to stand up for themselves just to hold onto a contract (or a job).
It's like the saying goes, before you can respect someone else, you have to respect yourself. These companies (or employees) didn't respect themselves, and it's only a natural consequence that they get walked all over. Show some pride in your work. If you truly believe you have the best thing since sliced bread, then it's Apple which should come to you on their knees begging if they want their products to have the best components. If they don't, it's their loss and their competitors' gain.
I believe GP is proposing that you use a swamp cooler to chill one channel of outside air. Then run it past another channel of outside air via a heat exchanger. The net result would be outside air chilled by the same amount as the swamp cooler, but without the added humidity. In fact you could do this multiple times for extremely hot air (a swamp cooler will only lower the air temp by about 15-20 F, which if the outside temperature is 100+ F leaves the air at a still-uncomfortable 80+ F).
its to be expected. Sitting through 20 minutes of mandatory trailer before my bluray starts actually playing the movie i paid for is nothing short of a war crime.
It's gotten to the point where I buy the blu-ray, then download the movie off TPB and toss it on my media server. I initially ripped the blu-ray myself, but after the LotR series (where each movie is on two discs) I decided it wasn't worth wasting my time doing that when someone else already had.
Unfortunately, the tax treaties for the most part only cover earned income. When I worked in Canada, I had to be careful not to spend more than 50% of my time in Canada (i.e. I had to live in the U.S. and commute). Canada bases their taxation on residency - if you've spent more than 50% of the year in Canada, you're a resident and have to pay Canadian taxes on all income. If I did that, my unearned income (e.g. bank interest, stock gains) would've been subject to double-taxation. U.S. taxes it because I'm a U.S. citizen, Canadian taxes it because they'd have considered me a resident.
I wouldn't really mind the taxation based on citizenship if it were applied in a fair and uniform manner as you're proposing - e.g. I pay the greater of U.S. and/or foreign taxes. But the IRS seems to apply it in whatever manner maximizes its income. Even if it would hypothetically mean you could owe more in taxes than you made (e.g. foreign country and U.S. both charge more than 50% in taxes).
It's insanity because it's based on the misconception that taxing companies is somehow different from taxing people. What do you think those companies will do if you increase their taxes? Roll over and just fork it over even if it puts them in the red? No. They're going to raise their prices, and/or cut their costs to compensate.
Ultimately, all taxes are paid for by taxpayers. Whether it's directly through income and sales taxes, or indirectly through corporate taxes which get passed on to customers as price increases and employees as pay cuts (or smaller pay raises). The end result is the same - less money for taxpayers, more money for the government.
You can argue that we need more taxation. But never make the mistake of thinking that taxing corporations has zero impact on taxpayers. It has exactly the same economic effect as directly raising taxes on taxpayers. The only thing that gets changed is who gets blamed (people curse the companies for raising their prices, instead of the government for collecting so many taxes).
* Numerical example for people who still don't get it. Say you make $50k/yr and pay $10k/yr in taxes, thus leaving you with $40k/yr to spend on yourself. The country changes law eliminating income tax, and getting all funding from corporate taxes instead. Do you think you'll now get $50k/yr to spend? No. Companies now have to pay an extra $10k/yr per citizen in taxes. So either your pay gets cut to $40k/yr, or prices increase 20% which after adjusting for inflation leaves you with $40k/yr just like before. You see, average real income is purely a function of productivity. And changing how taxes are collected doesn't change average productivity per capita. So where from the economy you extract taxes can't change the amount of real take-home pay. It's all just shell game.
There is no competition because the local governments in most of the areas Comcast services has given them a government-approved monopoly. The market has nothing to do with this because the government has deliberately eliminated market forces.
if you ever are the victim of a newsworthy accident/ crime, you will get cold called by a number of lawyers, who want to represent you pro bono
because such cases gild their CV, get their name out there. free advertising
They represent you pro bono because they think you have a good chance of winning, and standard lawyer's fee is 33% of any award or settlement. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The dozen or so lawyers in the $200 billion tobacco company master settlement became instant billionaires.
Close, but you're not thinking big enough. Microsoft committed the same blunder as the Maginot line. They built their empire on PC (x86+x64) dominance - making sure Windows dominated the architecture, and making sure their software dominated Windows. Their defenses were built around x86, and their warning tripwires were set up to detect anyone encroaching on their x86 territory.
They were blindsided when iOS and Android sprang up outside of x86, essentially creating their own Microsoft-free playing fields. They actually had a mobile OS long before iOS and Android (Windows CE, which eventually became Windows Phone after about 5 different renamings), but they were so focused on bringing it into the x86 fold (some of the WinCE PDAs look like Win XP clones) that they completely missed the opportunity for a new mobile sector.
I'm kinda like you. I jumped aboard Sprint's "unlimited data" plan way back around 2000(?) when they first implemented it. I've been tethering ever since (I got aboard before they changed their ToS to say you can't tether). Had to plug in with a cable at first, but on my rooted Nexus 5 I just use the built-in hotspot.
If you want my (biased) opinion, we're getting to the point where we're trying to jam too much functionality into our phones. Smartphones are great (I've had a PDA since 1998), but there are certain things which pretty much require a bigger screen. The way cellular data should be working is that you pay for it on your phone, and it shares it with your tablet and laptop via a hotspot. Instead, the cellular companies are so hell-bent on milking people for as much money as they can they're forcing the adoption of the more complicated and expensive solution of putting a cellular radio in your tablet and laptop, and getting a new service accounts for them.
Now everything's been clones of the iPhone since. Inertial scrolling, multitouch, practically identical user interfaces out of the box down to even the colors of the icons, etc -- they all use these things basically identically. Before the iPhone they had plastic buttons and you would try to scrolled around by jabbing little arrows on side of screen.
You're confusing inevitable industry evolution for copying Apple. The LG Prada did those things before the iPhone, because that's the way the industry was headed whether Apple ever released an iPhone or not. Apple won their case against Samsung only because the judge disallowed evidence Samsung had prepared showing phones they had in the design phase before the iPhone was announced, because they missed a filing deadline. Like I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean Apple invented it. And likewise just because other companies started doing it after Apple, doesn't mean they copied Apple.
Sadly, it all ended in 2011. Look at phones. They're all the same as 2011 iPhone was just with 2015 cpu/graphic, 2015 screen brightness/contrast, 2015 CMOS camera sensors. Same with computers. Everything's just the same as an iPad or Macbook Air from 2011.
Wow, talk about Reality Distortion Field. Apple just had the biggest quarter in history. It came after they abandoned Steve "no one is going to buy a big phone" Jobs' arbitrary and damaging restrictions on what products the company could make. His ego was so inflated, he thought everyone should use the same product that best fit his needs. Since his death you've gotten an iPhone with a wider aspect ratio (something Jobs opposed), a smaller iPad (something Jobs opposed), giving buyers a choice of two different iPhones and iPads (something Jobs opposed - he thought you were so stupid you'd be confused by two choices), and a phablet iPhone (something Jobs opposed). And that's just on Apple's product lineup. If you don't see other changes and improvements in the market, it's because you're willfully ignoring them. (BTW, the MBA has one of the worst screens on any laptop above $500 - not sure why you're holding it up as your champion. The MBPs are much better.)
Most of us who don't like Apple dislike them not because they're Apple, but because they artificially restrict market choice. But Cook has been doing a good job giving users back the choice that Jobs took away. And as long as they continue down that path, there's little reason to continue to hate Apple. You folks who love Apple so much that you hate everything else OTOH...
The same logic saying biofuel is inefficient (requires a lot of land for low energy yield) is the same logic saying meat is inefficient (which is true, meat is energy inefficient) because it requires a large amount of crops for the livestock.
It's worse than that. A comparison purely on efficiency ignores another vital factor - cost. Yes solar panels might be 50x more efficient than plants at capturing solar energy. But they're infinitely more expensive. You have to manufacture the solar panels. Plants manufacture themselves. Why build shiny 50-story high rises at the cost of billions, if "magical" one-story houses which build themselves and self-replicate are widespread?
That's what biofuel is. Its reputation has been tarnished badly in the U.S. by the corn lobby using it to put themselves on the public dole.* But their fundamental basis is sound. The cheapest and most prolific solar collectors in the world are plants. Not only do they cost nothing, they will spread by and maintain/repair themselves. Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years working and plants are the most efficient solution it came up with for harvesting solar energy. They are so successful that all life on earth (except at hydrothermal vents deep underwater) get their energy from plants. Heck, all oil and coal originally came from plants.
All biofuels are is taking the energy in plants and converting it into alcohol fuel, instead of an alcohol drink or ATP. The only impediment I can think of is that plants are such an attractive energy source, they've had to evolve defenses against being consumed for hundreds of millions of years. Consequently, modern plants store that energy in a form where it's exceedingly difficult to extract (cellulose). But there should be workarounds: Certain animals like termites have cultivated bacteria which breaks down cellulose into its component sugar molecules. Or we might be able to genetically engineer a plant which keeps more of its energy in the form of sugar than cellulose. Or we can take a plant which already does that (e.g. sugar cane) and engineer it to grow in a wider variety of climates.
* Corn ethanol began because of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Food shortages led to price increases and starvation. To prevent a recurrence, the government began subsidizing farming (mainly corn) to insure there was always overproduction. This crashed the price of corn, so the government set it up so it buys all the corn from farmers at a price which can keep the farms in business, then resells it. Since there is more supply than demand, there is always corn left over. This excess corn would otherwise rot in silos, so a variety of uses for it have been found - feed for cattle, HFCS, foreign aid. And during the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, someone came up with the bright idea - why don't we convert it into alcohol for fuel?
It's a fine idea for excess corn. The cost of growing and harvesting that corn is a sunk cost. You're never gonna recover that cost, so it's better to do something with it than nothing. So turning it into ethanol makes sense. But the moment you start growing corn for the sole purpose of turning it into ethanol, the economics of it completely breaks down because now it's no longer a sunk cost. Not only has the corn lobby been looting our country's treasury for decades, it's been impeding the growth of other legitimate and more efficient ethanol crops by distorting market prices with their subsidy.
They're part of the fragile balance of our precious, vulnerable ecosystem
That's a myth dreamt up by people wanting to protect the environment, but who had never taken any higher-level math or engineering courses and had no clue how dynamic systems function. Fragile balances are almost impossible to find in nature, for the simple reason that if something is fragile enough that any perturbation would upset it enough to destroy it, it would've self-destructed long ago before man ever showed up.
Nearly all surviving balances in nature are stable equilibria. They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point. e.g. If you tilt the bowl in the wiki picture, the ball doesn't fall off the top of the bowl like in the first picture or roll away like in the third picture.. It just settles in at a different spot on the bottom of the bowl in the second picture, now-tilted slightly.
If the two-engine planes are such a risk, how the hell have they got air safety certificates?
Because the certification for twin-engine planes only looks at engine reliability and environmental factors like rain and hail. It doesn't consider being shot at with missiles and small arms fire, which is a required safety criteria for Air Force One.
Even if Boeing stopped building 747 variants tomorrow, they'd be around for ages. They're the mainstay for long-haul travel, and dwindling sales probably are more related to market saturation - as in, there are enough in the air now to meet current demand - than any inherent shortcoming in the design.
An individual airframe is typically retired before 100,000 pressurization cycles. This is a limitation of the aluminum used to make the skin, which unlike other ferrous metals does not have a fatigue limit. In other words, aluminum always grows weaker with use. As you get closer to 100,000 cycles, you increase the odds of a catastrophic fatigue failure where the aluminum literally unzips like plastic shrinkwrap after you've cut a notch in it. (Aloha 243 had nearly 90,000 cycles due to its short-duration island-hopping history.)
The 747 is typically used on long-haul overseas flights lasting 10+ hours. This drastically reduces the rate at which airlines can rack up pressurization cycles. Even if one were flown 2x a day every day, it would take over 130 years to reach 100,000 cycles. By comparison, a 737 used for the 40-minute LAX to Las Vegas route may fly 10x a day and reach 100,000 cycles in a little over 25 years. This is why 747s are hanging around - their skins simply have less wear and tear on them despite being in service for more years and logging more flight hours than other planes.
The 747-8 was always a bit dodgy. When Boeing made the original 747, they weren't planning to make it with a partial second deck. It was supposed to be a stepping stone to future models with a full second deck (designing the 747 nearly bankrupted the company). Boeing pitched the full two-decker model to the airlines for decades but could never get enough interest to justify actually building it. Then Airbus came with its "who cares if we'll sell enough to make money, our governments will pay for it if it doesn't so let's build it" A380, and Boeing threw together the 747-8 as a possible alternative.
The slow rate of A380 sales (nearly 10 years old, 318 orders, 147 deliveries) seems to substantiate Boeing's marketing research that there just wasn't sufficient demand (yet) for such a large plane. By comparison, the 747-400 had 465 deliveries in its first 10 years. The 747-8 has 119 orders, 83 deliveries in the same timeframe as the A380. As you state, in the 400-525 passenger category, the market is pretty well-saturated by older 747s which are still airworthy.
I suspect that there are more refinements to come - it's just too useful an airframe to discard. It may take Boeing a bit to roll in some of the working dreamliner tech but it seems reasonable that they'd try to do that when time and demand permit.
In terms of airline operating economics, the number of passenger per flight nearly always has a larger magnitude of effect than efficiency gains for new technology. For an airline you are almost always nearly best-off flying a plane with slightly more capacity than the number of passengers. Airbus tried to claim the A380 would be so efficient this wouldn't matter, and you could fly a 747-sized number of passengers on a A380 for cheaper than a 747. I was very skeptical, and the fact that airlines aren't tripping over themselves to replace their old 747s with A380s is a pretty good indication that it's still cheaper to fly a 747 for 747-sized passenger capacities.
The next place to watch is to see if Airbus will roll out a twin-engine competitor to the 777 (maybe a longer A350-1000?). Airbus' competitor to the 777 had been the A340 (both are in the 300-450 passenger range). But the A340 is a 4-engine plane which uses much more fuel. Consequently, the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market. The 777 has had 1827 orders in 20 years, vs 379 orders
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Actually, according to TFA, she was overweight prior to the treatment, with a BMI of 26 (which is borderline overweight). So yeah, I think your explanation is probably the likely one.
Not if it's implemented with public/private key encryption to generate an encrypted challenge/response communication.. i.e. A private key is stored in the RFID tag, along with the public keys for any scanners it's supposed to respond to. When a scanner queries it, it sends an initial "who are you?". The RFID tag responds with its ID. The scanner then looks up the ID in its list of public keys. It then creates a data packet comprised of the RFID tag's ID, and a random block of data. Encrypts this with its private key and the tag's public key, and transmits that with the scanner ID.
The RFID tag reads the scanner ID, looks it up in its list of scanner public keys, then uses the appropriate public key and its private key to decrypt the query. This confirms that an authorized scanner did in fact send the query, and the query included the RFID tag's ID so it should respond. Then it generates a response with its ID and the original random data block. It encrypts this response with its private key and the scanner's public key, and transmits it back to the scanner.
The scanner uses its own private key and the RFID tag's public key to decrypt the response data. Since these are the right keys, the decrypted response includes the original random block of data, thus confirming that the response could have (1) only come from that RFID tag, and (2) was a response to that particular query and not a pre-recorded response.
It's contingent on the RFID tag being designed so the private key it contains is destroyed if anyone tries to tamper with it to read the private key. And you could probably beef up the RFID tag's initial response a bit more (having the RFID tag generate a random data block is problematic, since it's unpowered and would default back to a random seed any time a scanner powered it up). But this solves the problem of someone just recording responses and playing them back.
The granddaddy of science fiction was H.G. Wells, who published fiction from 1895-1941. My hunch is the primary impetus for science fiction was the industrial revolution. Prior to it, the rate of technological progress was slow enough that very little changed throughout your lifetime. Without visible advancement, there was little reason to speculate on what the future might bring. But once the rate of advancement took off, actual development began to outstrip people's imagination, which challenged their imagination to become more speculative.
I'm not sure why people keep trying to cast these stories as a failure of market capitalism, and socialism to the rescue. The cable and telecom industries in the U.S. are a classic example of a failure of government regulation. The monopolies exist because they were granted by the local governments, which prohibit competition. And many of the problems we see like net non-neutrality would in fact be solved by allowing market competition. If Comcast had had competition and they deliberately degraded Netflix service, they would've bled customers once word got around that Netflix sucked on Comcast but worked great with competing ISPs.
"Socialist" Europe has actually gotten this one right. For the most part they're not trying to control their ISPs with heavy-handed regulations. They're regulating it just enough to maximize competition. i.e. Their ISP is closer to a free market than in the U.S.
Problem is, indifference is an emotional response too. Honestly, most of the coverage I've seen of ISIS has been indifferent - understating the threat.
At one extreme, you have totalitarianism. A group which has sufficient manpower and equipment to completely control the sociopolitics of a region.
At the other extreme, you have terrorism. A group without sufficient manpower or equipment to have any real impact on sciopolitics of a region. Consequently, they resort to extreme acts which leverage the media to elicit emotional reactions from people to obtain maximal political impact for minimal effort.
Most groups fall somewhere between these extremes. Most of the coverage I've seen of ISIS is to characterize them towards the terrorist end of the scale. Including your analysis since you openly call them terrorists.
ISIS is not a terrorist group per se. Yes they occasionally resort to terrorist-like tactics, but that's because of the depravity of their ideology, not because it's the most effective way for them to achieve their goals. They don't have to resort to terrorist acts to achieve their goals - they have the manpower, equipment, and economic resources to achieve real military victories against their opponents in the region. They are a real geopolitical force in the region. Pretending they are "just" a terrorist organization and treating them as if they're an outlier which can be safely ignored because of its infrequency is an act of emotional indifference - you don't want there to be a problem, so you're pretending there isn't a problem.
ISIS is a real threat which stands a good chance of toppling two if not three countries in the region. People need to wake up to the scope of the threat they pose, instead of casually dismissing them as random acts of terrorism. At the risk of pulling a Godwin, the people who believed Hitler wasn't serious about conquering Europe and sought "peace for our time" badly needed a wake-up call. If posting a grotesque video is what's needed to provide the same wake-up call today about the threat ISIS poses, then so be it.
That is totally not an excuse. Banks have some of the biggest profit margins of any industry. If there's any industry which can afford to hire top-notch IT staff, it's banks.
Most U.S. high schools require two years of a foreign language for you to graduate. But the U.S. is big enough that the vast majority of graduates can promptly forget it and live out their lives without ever having to use that foreign language. Quite different from, say, Europe where you can drive a couple hours in any direction and be in a different country with a completely different language.
Your SSN was never supposed to be secret. Your SSN was supposed to be used only by the SSA for collection and disbursement of social security payments. It was never intended to be used as a national ID. However, in light of there being no other ID which uniquely identifies each individual in the country, everyone glommed onto using the SSN for that purpose. Which is when it started to become important to keep it secret.
Samsung pushed out Lollipop for the S5 a month after Google released it. You can thank your carrier for the extra 2 month delay.
I had this discussion with a friend recently. He'd reported great success in his family using elderberry extract to get over the flu. I'm pretty open-minded to trying new things (trying it can't kill you, usually), so when I started exhibiting flu symptoms after babysitting my sister's kids while she had the flu, I gave it a shot. I grabbed a bottle of elderberry extract 16 hours after the first symptoms appeared (slight tickling in sinuses that morning, progressing to a slightly sore throat by the evening). And I took the doses as suggested. I took no other medication.
Over the next 12 hours, I developed the full-blown flu. I've had colds, and I've had the flu before, and this was the flu. I felt like I'd been run over by a truck, and could barely crawl out of bed. It was so bad I was tempted to take sleeping pills just so I could sleep through the misery, but I held off so as not to contaminate the experiment. By 36 hours the aches were gone. At 48 hours the runny nose ended and my fever broke. All I had left was a slightly sore throat.
I was quite frankly amazed at the efficacy of a so-called homeopathic remedy. I did a bit more research and found that scientific studies have shown that elderberry extract is effective against the flu. I suspect the only reason it hasn't been studied more extensively is that there's no money to be made from it. Someone pays to fund the study, proves it's effective, and anyone can make the medicine. Nobody wants to be the one stuck paying for the bill (the study), so nobody bothers funding it.
Anyway, my point is, don't be so quick to dismiss homeopathic remedies. There's a widespread misbelief that everything is false until proven true. Science operates on that premise because it assigns burden of proof in inverse proportion of difficulty of proof. e.g. You can't prove a negative, so science places no burden of proof on those who believe the negative state. But this does not mean the negative is automatically correct. Logically, things actually break down into three states - unknown/cannot be determined, true, and false; and the vast majority of things fall into the first category.
There are probably many homeopathic "remidies" as you put it which actually do work, they just haven't been as thoroughly studied as a drug from which some pharmaceutical company stands to make $billions. By all means dismiss as quackery the remedies which have been tested and fail to do better than a placebo. But it's a gross illogical leap to then conclude that all such remedies are quackery before they've even been tested. And that the PharmCo method of coming up with a new molecule, and testing it extensively in rigorous controlled studies is the only way to come up with viable treatments.
The most common forms of High Fructose Corn Syrup is actually 55% fructose / 42% glucose (soft drinks). Or 42% fructose / 53% glucose (other foods). For comparison, sucrose or cane sugar breaks down in the body to 50% fructose / 50% glucose.
So there's really no difference. It's only called "high fructose" because it contains more fructose than regular corn syrup (which is about 90% glucose). Not because it contains more fructose than other sugars you normally ingest.
While they were to blame, that wasn't exactly what happened. They bound themselves to a contract which was skewed wildly in Apple's favor. Basically they bore all the risk - borrowing all of the money to gear up for production, resulting in them bearing all the losses if the product didn't live up to specs or if they weren't able to produce sufficient quantity. Normally in a situation like this, a vendor orders and pays for samples, the manufacturer produces them, then the vendor decides whether or not to pay for a full order. In this case, Apple requested samples, the GTAT execs went "OMG Apple!" and bent over backwards (or forwards depending on what analogy you want to use), borrowing huge amounts of money and investing it in massive production facilities when they didn't even have a firm order from Apple yet.
Apple bears some of the responsibility for using their huge size to coerce behavior out of a supplier, like how Walmart coerces suppliers to give them ruinous pricing. But the bulk of the responsibility lies squarely with GTAT for agreeing to those terms. Companies like GTAT or Walmart suppliers (or even employees who meekly accept whatever terms their employer sets) put themselves into these situations through their unwillingness to stand up for themselves just to hold onto a contract (or a job).
It's like the saying goes, before you can respect someone else, you have to respect yourself. These companies (or employees) didn't respect themselves, and it's only a natural consequence that they get walked all over. Show some pride in your work. If you truly believe you have the best thing since sliced bread, then it's Apple which should come to you on their knees begging if they want their products to have the best components. If they don't, it's their loss and their competitors' gain.
I believe GP is proposing that you use a swamp cooler to chill one channel of outside air. Then run it past another channel of outside air via a heat exchanger. The net result would be outside air chilled by the same amount as the swamp cooler, but without the added humidity. In fact you could do this multiple times for extremely hot air (a swamp cooler will only lower the air temp by about 15-20 F, which if the outside temperature is 100+ F leaves the air at a still-uncomfortable 80+ F).
It's gotten to the point where I buy the blu-ray, then download the movie off TPB and toss it on my media server. I initially ripped the blu-ray myself, but after the LotR series (where each movie is on two discs) I decided it wasn't worth wasting my time doing that when someone else already had.
Unfortunately, the tax treaties for the most part only cover earned income. When I worked in Canada, I had to be careful not to spend more than 50% of my time in Canada (i.e. I had to live in the U.S. and commute). Canada bases their taxation on residency - if you've spent more than 50% of the year in Canada, you're a resident and have to pay Canadian taxes on all income. If I did that, my unearned income (e.g. bank interest, stock gains) would've been subject to double-taxation. U.S. taxes it because I'm a U.S. citizen, Canadian taxes it because they'd have considered me a resident.
I wouldn't really mind the taxation based on citizenship if it were applied in a fair and uniform manner as you're proposing - e.g. I pay the greater of U.S. and/or foreign taxes. But the IRS seems to apply it in whatever manner maximizes its income. Even if it would hypothetically mean you could owe more in taxes than you made (e.g. foreign country and U.S. both charge more than 50% in taxes).
It's insanity because it's based on the misconception that taxing companies is somehow different from taxing people. What do you think those companies will do if you increase their taxes? Roll over and just fork it over even if it puts them in the red? No. They're going to raise their prices, and/or cut their costs to compensate.
Ultimately, all taxes are paid for by taxpayers. Whether it's directly through income and sales taxes, or indirectly through corporate taxes which get passed on to customers as price increases and employees as pay cuts (or smaller pay raises). The end result is the same - less money for taxpayers, more money for the government.
You can argue that we need more taxation. But never make the mistake of thinking that taxing corporations has zero impact on taxpayers. It has exactly the same economic effect as directly raising taxes on taxpayers. The only thing that gets changed is who gets blamed (people curse the companies for raising their prices, instead of the government for collecting so many taxes).
* Numerical example for people who still don't get it. Say you make $50k/yr and pay $10k/yr in taxes, thus leaving you with $40k/yr to spend on yourself. The country changes law eliminating income tax, and getting all funding from corporate taxes instead. Do you think you'll now get $50k/yr to spend? No. Companies now have to pay an extra $10k/yr per citizen in taxes. So either your pay gets cut to $40k/yr, or prices increase 20% which after adjusting for inflation leaves you with $40k/yr just like before. You see, average real income is purely a function of productivity. And changing how taxes are collected doesn't change average productivity per capita. So where from the economy you extract taxes can't change the amount of real take-home pay. It's all just shell game.
There is no competition because the local governments in most of the areas Comcast services has given them a government-approved monopoly. The market has nothing to do with this because the government has deliberately eliminated market forces.
They represent you pro bono because they think you have a good chance of winning, and standard lawyer's fee is 33% of any award or settlement. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The dozen or so lawyers in the $200 billion tobacco company master settlement became instant billionaires.
Close, but you're not thinking big enough. Microsoft committed the same blunder as the Maginot line. They built their empire on PC (x86+x64) dominance - making sure Windows dominated the architecture, and making sure their software dominated Windows. Their defenses were built around x86, and their warning tripwires were set up to detect anyone encroaching on their x86 territory.
They were blindsided when iOS and Android sprang up outside of x86, essentially creating their own Microsoft-free playing fields. They actually had a mobile OS long before iOS and Android (Windows CE, which eventually became Windows Phone after about 5 different renamings), but they were so focused on bringing it into the x86 fold (some of the WinCE PDAs look like Win XP clones) that they completely missed the opportunity for a new mobile sector.
I'm kinda like you. I jumped aboard Sprint's "unlimited data" plan way back around 2000(?) when they first implemented it. I've been tethering ever since (I got aboard before they changed their ToS to say you can't tether). Had to plug in with a cable at first, but on my rooted Nexus 5 I just use the built-in hotspot.
If you want my (biased) opinion, we're getting to the point where we're trying to jam too much functionality into our phones. Smartphones are great (I've had a PDA since 1998), but there are certain things which pretty much require a bigger screen. The way cellular data should be working is that you pay for it on your phone, and it shares it with your tablet and laptop via a hotspot. Instead, the cellular companies are so hell-bent on milking people for as much money as they can they're forcing the adoption of the more complicated and expensive solution of putting a cellular radio in your tablet and laptop, and getting a new service accounts for them.
You're confusing inevitable industry evolution for copying Apple. The LG Prada did those things before the iPhone, because that's the way the industry was headed whether Apple ever released an iPhone or not. Apple won their case against Samsung only because the judge disallowed evidence Samsung had prepared showing phones they had in the design phase before the iPhone was announced, because they missed a filing deadline. Like I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean Apple invented it. And likewise just because other companies started doing it after Apple, doesn't mean they copied Apple.
Wow, talk about Reality Distortion Field. Apple just had the biggest quarter in history. It came after they abandoned Steve "no one is going to buy a big phone" Jobs' arbitrary and damaging restrictions on what products the company could make. His ego was so inflated, he thought everyone should use the same product that best fit his needs. Since his death you've gotten an iPhone with a wider aspect ratio (something Jobs opposed), a smaller iPad (something Jobs opposed), giving buyers a choice of two different iPhones and iPads (something Jobs opposed - he thought you were so stupid you'd be confused by two choices), and a phablet iPhone (something Jobs opposed). And that's just on Apple's product lineup. If you don't see other changes and improvements in the market, it's because you're willfully ignoring them. (BTW, the MBA has one of the worst screens on any laptop above $500 - not sure why you're holding it up as your champion. The MBPs are much better.)
Most of us who don't like Apple dislike them not because they're Apple, but because they artificially restrict market choice. But Cook has been doing a good job giving users back the choice that Jobs took away. And as long as they continue down that path, there's little reason to continue to hate Apple. You folks who love Apple so much that you hate everything else OTOH...
It's worse than that. A comparison purely on efficiency ignores another vital factor - cost. Yes solar panels might be 50x more efficient than plants at capturing solar energy. But they're infinitely more expensive. You have to manufacture the solar panels. Plants manufacture themselves. Why build shiny 50-story high rises at the cost of billions, if "magical" one-story houses which build themselves and self-replicate are widespread?
That's what biofuel is. Its reputation has been tarnished badly in the U.S. by the corn lobby using it to put themselves on the public dole.* But their fundamental basis is sound. The cheapest and most prolific solar collectors in the world are plants. Not only do they cost nothing, they will spread by and maintain/repair themselves. Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years working and plants are the most efficient solution it came up with for harvesting solar energy. They are so successful that all life on earth (except at hydrothermal vents deep underwater) get their energy from plants. Heck, all oil and coal originally came from plants.
All biofuels are is taking the energy in plants and converting it into alcohol fuel, instead of an alcohol drink or ATP. The only impediment I can think of is that plants are such an attractive energy source, they've had to evolve defenses against being consumed for hundreds of millions of years. Consequently, modern plants store that energy in a form where it's exceedingly difficult to extract (cellulose). But there should be workarounds: Certain animals like termites have cultivated bacteria which breaks down cellulose into its component sugar molecules. Or we might be able to genetically engineer a plant which keeps more of its energy in the form of sugar than cellulose. Or we can take a plant which already does that (e.g. sugar cane) and engineer it to grow in a wider variety of climates.
* Corn ethanol began because of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Food shortages led to price increases and starvation. To prevent a recurrence, the government began subsidizing farming (mainly corn) to insure there was always overproduction. This crashed the price of corn, so the government set it up so it buys all the corn from farmers at a price which can keep the farms in business, then resells it. Since there is more supply than demand, there is always corn left over. This excess corn would otherwise rot in silos, so a variety of uses for it have been found - feed for cattle, HFCS, foreign aid. And during the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, someone came up with the bright idea - why don't we convert it into alcohol for fuel?
It's a fine idea for excess corn. The cost of growing and harvesting that corn is a sunk cost. You're never gonna recover that cost, so it's better to do something with it than nothing. So turning it into ethanol makes sense. But the moment you start growing corn for the sole purpose of turning it into ethanol, the economics of it completely breaks down because now it's no longer a sunk cost. Not only has the corn lobby been looting our country's treasury for decades, it's been impeding the growth of other legitimate and more efficient ethanol crops by distorting market prices with their subsidy.
That's a myth dreamt up by people wanting to protect the environment, but who had never taken any higher-level math or engineering courses and had no clue how dynamic systems function. Fragile balances are almost impossible to find in nature, for the simple reason that if something is fragile enough that any perturbation would upset it enough to destroy it, it would've self-destructed long ago before man ever showed up.
Nearly all surviving balances in nature are stable equilibria. They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point. e.g. If you tilt the bowl in the wiki picture, the ball doesn't fall off the top of the bowl like in the first picture or roll away like in the third picture.. It just settles in at a different spot on the bottom of the bowl in the second picture, now-tilted slightly.
Because the certification for twin-engine planes only looks at engine reliability and environmental factors like rain and hail. It doesn't consider being shot at with missiles and small arms fire, which is a required safety criteria for Air Force One.
An individual airframe is typically retired before 100,000 pressurization cycles. This is a limitation of the aluminum used to make the skin, which unlike other ferrous metals does not have a fatigue limit. In other words, aluminum always grows weaker with use. As you get closer to 100,000 cycles, you increase the odds of a catastrophic fatigue failure where the aluminum literally unzips like plastic shrinkwrap after you've cut a notch in it. (Aloha 243 had nearly 90,000 cycles due to its short-duration island-hopping history.)
The 747 is typically used on long-haul overseas flights lasting 10+ hours. This drastically reduces the rate at which airlines can rack up pressurization cycles. Even if one were flown 2x a day every day, it would take over 130 years to reach 100,000 cycles. By comparison, a 737 used for the 40-minute LAX to Las Vegas route may fly 10x a day and reach 100,000 cycles in a little over 25 years. This is why 747s are hanging around - their skins simply have less wear and tear on them despite being in service for more years and logging more flight hours than other planes.
The 747-8 was always a bit dodgy. When Boeing made the original 747, they weren't planning to make it with a partial second deck. It was supposed to be a stepping stone to future models with a full second deck (designing the 747 nearly bankrupted the company). Boeing pitched the full two-decker model to the airlines for decades but could never get enough interest to justify actually building it. Then Airbus came with its "who cares if we'll sell enough to make money, our governments will pay for it if it doesn't so let's build it" A380, and Boeing threw together the 747-8 as a possible alternative.
The slow rate of A380 sales (nearly 10 years old, 318 orders, 147 deliveries) seems to substantiate Boeing's marketing research that there just wasn't sufficient demand (yet) for such a large plane. By comparison, the 747-400 had 465 deliveries in its first 10 years. The 747-8 has 119 orders, 83 deliveries in the same timeframe as the A380. As you state, in the 400-525 passenger category, the market is pretty well-saturated by older 747s which are still airworthy.
In terms of airline operating economics, the number of passenger per flight nearly always has a larger magnitude of effect than efficiency gains for new technology. For an airline you are almost always nearly best-off flying a plane with slightly more capacity than the number of passengers. Airbus tried to claim the A380 would be so efficient this wouldn't matter, and you could fly a 747-sized number of passengers on a A380 for cheaper than a 747. I was very skeptical, and the fact that airlines aren't tripping over themselves to replace their old 747s with A380s is a pretty good indication that it's still cheaper to fly a 747 for 747-sized passenger capacities.
The next place to watch is to see if Airbus will roll out a twin-engine competitor to the 777 (maybe a longer A350-1000?). Airbus' competitor to the 777 had been the A340 (both are in the 300-450 passenger range). But the A340 is a 4-engine plane which uses much more fuel. Consequently, the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market. The 777 has had 1827 orders in 20 years, vs 379 orders