Wasn't there a Dr. Who episode based on something like that? Where the public got to decide at any time if an elected official's performance was not in their best interests. And if they voted that it wasn't, he was summarily executed?
This sort of thing is more easily prevented by prohibiting the provider of the pipes from also selling what's sent through the pipes, and vice versa. So if you sold cellular data service, you wouldn't be able to also sell a video streaming service. That's how electricity and natural gas is sold in most places. One company gets an exclusive contract to lay down the wires/pipes, but are prohibited from selling electricity or gas. Instead, other companies sell those utility services (sometimes using the pipe-owner as a billing intermediary, other times adding an "access fee" to their bill to cover what they have to pay the pipe owner).
Unfortunately, we're in a funny in-between state right now because phone service is moving from point-to-point to packet-based. That is, your phone calls used to require a dedicated line(s) between you and the call recipient - a line you had total and exclusive access to for the duration of the call. There is no distinction between pipes and the content in the pipes in this model. Now we're switching more to a VoIP model where voice traffic is sent as data packets over shared pipes, and the distinction makes sense. Until this transition is finished, entrenched companies will be able to argue against separation of the pipe business and content business.
Yeah, who would have thought that European 'socialism' would be more effective at bringing the internet to the masses than American private enterprise?
Unfortunately, the Internet service market in "socialist" Europe is actually more free market than in the U.S. You guys have multiple companies vying to provide and improve internet service. In the U.S., most local governments have regulated the market (under the guise of limiting unsightly wires by restricting who can build in public easements) so most Americans typically have only one choice of phone company and one choice of cable company.
The size comparison to the Surface Pro 3 (12") is very impressive, almost hilarious.
The Achilles heel of the Macbook Air has always been the display. Not only is it lower resolution (currently 1440x900), but it's a TN panel with poor color gamut (about 60% sRGB). I suspect this is deliberate market stratification by Apple, to give people a reason to pay extra the Macbook Pro. So the MBP gets a retina IPS panel covering 100% sRGB. The MBP gets a low-res TN panel covering 60% sRGB.
The Surface Pro 3 took square aim at this chink in Apple's armor, by putting in a 95%-100% sRGB screen. The Dell does as well by using a 1920x1080 Sharp IGZO panel with 98% sRGB coverage. That increases pressure for Apple to put a retina panel on their MBA, at the risk of cannibalizing MBP sales (basically any artist who does color-sensitive work right now is forced to pay extra for the MBP). Comparison to the Dell with the MBA here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2FPvHFLSOI
Unless you have enough room for a proper GPU, low end discrete GPUs are increasingly somewhat pointless, since they always add complexity and cost; but don't necessarily outperform integrated ones by all that much.
Here are game benchmarks for the Intel HD5500, nVidia 820m, and AMD R7 M265 (older 35 Watt tech I throw in only for comparison since their current lowest-end R9 is equivalent to an 840m).
The 820m is a 15 Watt part, and best case hits nearly 2x the framerate of the HD5500. Probably about 1.7x faster on average, with a few titles being CPU-bottlenecked. The R9 M265X is also a 35 Watt part like the 840m and performs slightly better, so I imagine if/when AMD puts out 15 Watt version of the R9 to compete with the 820m, it'll roughly double the HD5500's FPS as well.
Having a discrete GPU does complicate the cooling solution (the iGPU on the Intel gets cooled by the CPU's cooler). But if you're planning to do some gaming, you should still opt for the dGPU over the iGPU if at all possible. The exception would be if you only play titles not needing powerful GPUs, like Sims, DOTA, LOL, WoW.
I tried setting Chrome to use HTML5 on YouTube for about a month. I had to switch it back to flash because of one thing - Flashblock. With flashblock, you can open a bunch of videos at once in different tabs, and they will not start playing until you flip to the tab and click the flashblock button. With HTML5, all those videos start playing in the background tabs simultaneously as soon as the pages finish loading. So you're basically limited to opening one video at a time. No queuing up videos you want to watch and flipping through them tab by tab.
Does anyone know of an extension similar to flashblock but for HTML5 on Chrome?
Depends on the composition of your "rocky" planet. Fusion reagents are energy-positive up to iron. So basically, elements heavier than iron requires multiple supernovae to generate a substantial quantity. Elements lighter than iron can be released in just 1-2 supernovae.
The elements which make up most of the "rock" on our rocky planet are oxygen, silicon, calcium, iron, potassium, aluminum, and sodium. Of these, oxygen, silicon, and iron are a regular product of stellar fusion, and can be distributed from a single supernova.
If you're that worried, you can always route your traffic through a VPS for about $5/mo extra. Google peeking in on your data packets is so easily circumvented it's barely worth mentioning.
OTOH, with Verizon announcing it's ending FiOS rollouts, they need a good swift competitive kick in the rear to get them to provide what the market wants, rather than milking their existing infrastructure for as much money as they can. The only reason they're able to do things like stop fiber rollout is because they have a government-granted monopoly in the areas they serve. A competitor - be it Google or anyone else - is exactly what's needed to break up that monopoly and give the people what the want.
It seems like trained economists are just as likely to fuck up an economy as would be trained monkeys -- because at the end of the day you have shockingly little control over things, and probably less of an understanding that you claim. Let's not start pretending that economists actually know anything about the economy. They know what their ideologically driven view of economics tells them to they know.
It's not really the economists' fault. Theirs is a profession based on predicting human behavior, which is unpredictable at best. A trained economist can make some basic, fundamental predictions which will correctly improve economic efficiency, especially in a developing economy. But once you get to a well-developed economy, most of the efficiency gains have already been made. And economic direction depends more on random variances in individual people's decisions.
Normally you can get around this problem by using a huge sampling size to average out the variances. But economics has the added twist that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And if housing prices start going up, people think "wow, other people must know something I don't know, and I'd better start investing in housing" even though they have no idea why it's going up. That herd mentality messes up even averaging out the variances, and can turn even the perfect economist's predictions wrong.
The best engineering analogy I can come up with is a dynamically unstable (chaotic) system. You can predict the long-term (decades) and overall trends. But the day-to-day and year-to-year motions are highly irregular. But nobody cares about the long-term trends, and take economists to task for incorrectly predicting year-to-year movements.
An external hard drive is most convenient, but you have to be careful with RW media. One of my photos I was working on became corrupted. No problem, I just plugged in my external drive where I kept the backups. Then in a momentary drop in brain oxygen, I proceeded to drag and drop the corrupted file over the good backup, not the other way around. Goodbye backup. And undelete doesn't work when you copy a file over another file with the same name. (Fortunately this was a slide scan so I still had the analog original.)
If it's archival material (stuff that doesn't change), this is still a strong argument for using WORM (write once, read many) media - optical discs like DVD and Blu-ray. I'd been hoping someone would make a HDD enclosure with a write-protect switch like on SD cards. But the only one I've found was a specialty item apparently designed for police forensic work, not user friendliness. The write-protect "switch" is a jumper - I've mounted it inside another enclosure I had, but I have to open up the enclosure to switch the jumper. Which is probably fine if you're only using it on evidence hard drives which you never want to write to. But for home use where I'm toggling between writing new backups and occasionally restoring old backups, it's rather inconvenient.
It's basically an interferometer - the maximum separation of the telescope's mirror/lens is what gets you resolution. The surface area just makes dim objects brighter. Using a diffraction lens is irrelevant to the interferometry - it's just a way of bending the incoming light.
The catch is, the surface area of your lens needs to be aligned within a fraction of a wavelength of light for interferometry to work. It's been done on smaller optical telescopes and bigger radio telescopes (radio waves are much longer than light waves, so proper alignment is a lot easier). Getting the edges of a half mile diameter ring to remain within less than one wavelength of light from your sensor is going to be very difficult. There are methods to correct for differing distances. But I'd imagine rotating such a large annular scope would induce a lot of micro-vibrations (bigger than a wavelength) which may thwart such methods.
It's worse than that. Taxing wealth is inherently unfair because it's double taxation. Wealth is an amount (e.g. $100,000). Income is a rate (e.g.($50,000/yr). Income taxes are also a rate (e.g. 10% of your $50,000/yr is $5000/yr). You cannot mix rates and amounts. In particular, wealth is what's left over after it's already been taxed.
Take two people making $50,000/yr. Each pays $5000 in taxes. Each pays $20,000/yr on essentials like housing and food. One person buys all the latest toys, parties every night, and in general fritters away her remaining $25,000. At the end of 10 years, she's earned $500,000, paid $50,000 in taxes, has spent $250,000 on fun, and has zero accumulated wealth.
The other person eschews the toys and parties and saves the $25,000. At the end of 10 years, she's earned $500,000, paid $50,000 in taxes, and has $250,000 in accumulated wealth. But then you come by with a wealth tax and say she has to pay an extra 10%. So now she's paid $75,000 in taxes even though she earned exactly as much money as the other person who paid $50,000 in taxes. She's only allowed to spend $225,000 on herself because she had the temerity to save her money instead of blowing it on fun.
A wealth tax is taxing money that has already been taxed, and the fact that it's taxing an amount instead of a rate makes it impossible to synchronize with other income taxes - i.e. examples like the one I just gave are inevitable. It's inherently unfair. If you want to tax richer people more, just crank up the income tax rate on higher income brackets.
In USA money earned by blood, sweat, tears and brains (wages, earned income) is taxed at much higher rate than money earned by money (capital gains, carried interest, qualified dividends, etc). This is the root cause of the inequality.
That's not quite true. Look at the individual income tax stats for 2012. Scroll over to column T. That's the actual tax paid as percent of gross income. It neatly sums up the effect of graduated tax brackets, tax credits, and deductions.
4.1% - $15,000 under $20,000
5.2% - $20,000 under $25,000
6.1% - $25,000 under $30,000
6.8% - $30,000 under $40,000
7.4% - $40,000 under $50,000
8.6% - $50,000 under $75,000
9.5% - $75,000 under $100,000
12.7% - $100,000 under $200,000
19.6% - $200,000 under $500,000
24.0% - $500,000 under $1,000,000
24.6% - $1,000,000 under $1,500,000
24.6% - $1,500,000 under $2,000,000
24.3% - $2,000,000 under $5,000,000
23.4% - $5,000,000 under $10,000,000
19.8% - $10,000,000 or more
As you can see, you have to be making about $200,000 or more before the actual average income tax rate exceeds the 15% capital gains tax. That is, on average, people making less than $200,000 pay a smaller percentage of their blood and sweat income as taxes than the 15% capital gains tax. (If you make less than $200,000 and pay more than 15%, you are a statistical anomaly.) The effect you ascribe to the capital gains tax doesn't kick in until about $1.5 million in income, when the actual tax rate begins decreasing. Someone making $10 million or more on average pays roughly the same tax (as a percentage) as someone making $200,000-$500,000.
So what needs to happen is the capital gains tax rate (1) needs to increase if your income is about $1 million or higher, and (2) needs to decrease if your income is less than $200,000. Right now, the 15% capital gains tax rate is so high that it discourages middle- and lower-income people from investing, which is the most direct way to partake in the country's economic growth. And the fruits of the country's economic growth will instead continue to fall mainly in the lap of the wealthy.
I'll add that the large group of voters in Florida (Cuban exiles) has undue influence because it's Florida - typically a swing state in Presidential elections with 29 electoral votes (nearly 11% of what you need to win the Presidency). If they'd settled in, say, Alabama instead of Florida, the Cuban embargo would've ended decades ago.
The Chinese model (trade with the Communist baddie to insure their citizens interact with and are informed about the outside world, and fully aware how much worse off they are than everyone else) seems to be much more successful. You may not replace the government, but you force it to be more honest when dealing with its people, and you force it to make concessions to economic ideas which actually work.
The original Google Nexus and Nexus S only had 512 MB of RAM. While it's possible to run Jelly Bean, Kit Kat, and Lollipop in 512 MB, I really don't recommend it. I did that on my original Galaxy S for a year. Kit Kat (which actually uses less RAM than Jelly Bean) leaves less than 100 MB free, and you're limited to using about 2-3 apps. The moment you exceed that the phone goes into a kill-loop where it runs out of RAM so it kills the oldest program, then it needs to load that program again so it kills the next oldest program, repeat.
The primary culprit is the Google Apps suite (Play store, email, maps, Chrome, Drive, etc). They've been growing in size and features as phone hardware has improved, leaving older 512MB devices in the dust. If you can figure out a way to uninstall unneeded apps, you may be able to get it to work. I decided it was time to retire my 4-year old phone and bought a new one. My laptop upgrade cycle is about 3 years, so the phone actually lasted longer than other comparable tech.
Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers.
The number of miles you drive every year is one of the factors used to calculate your non-commercial insurance rate. Go read your complete auto insurance policy if you don't believe me. There's a line in there for number of miles driven per year. Most people ignore it, but if you exceed it and get into an accident, your insurer may refuse to cover you.
I'm just going to come out and say that to advertise the card with 4GB, but then disable any amount of it, is false advertising. Sure, most games can't actually hit 4GB since most games are still brain-dead 32-bit applications that can't access more than 4GB of any memory.
But this is a sign of things to come. Where the next generation sub-20nm GPU's will be advertised with RAM amounts and supposed to have 2-3X the processing power, but part of the GPU will be competely unusable because the operating system or software being used isn't 64-bit aware.
VRAM has nothing to do with system RAM. VRAM is special memory used by the dGPU, and only the dGPU, for storing framebuffers, textures, models, and other data needed to draw a 3D scene. It's faster than system RAM (GDDR5 is typical, vs DDR3 for regular RAM), and positioning it closer to the GPU reduces latency due to the speed of light (which travels only 10 cm in a single 3 GHz cycle). So the 32- or 64-bitness of the OS and apps has nothing to do with the video card's ability to access 4GB or more of VRAM.
In particular, the 970 GTX has a 256-bit memory bus. The speed constraint of having to retrieve data from VRAM one 32-bit (float) or 64-bit (double) "chunk" at a time became a bottleneck long before the inability to address that VRAM as a flat memory space. So mid- and high-end video cards are designed to retrieve multiple "chunks" of data from VRAM simultaneously. You have to drop all the way down to the GT 730 before you get to video cards using a 64-bit memory bus.
I'm projecting a 1080p image onto a 150" screen (my wall). It's damn obvious 1080p isn't enough. From 12' away I can see the individual pixels, and the anti-aliasing is obvious on news and sports graphics. I'd say 1080p video looks about as sharp as 480i video (DVD) on a 50" screen - not very sharp at all. And I'm 45 and my prescription 2 years out of date, so it's not like my eyes are as good as they used to be. If my next eyeglass prescription is sharper, I may have to intentionally defocus the projector image slightly to mitigate the screen door effect.
I'm seeing more and more 70"+ HDTVs for sale in stores, so I have to believe people are buying them. That's about the point when 1080p starts to become limiting at typical living room distances (about 8 ft between sofa and TV). Theoretical max for a room with 8' ceilings is just shy of 200 inches at 16:9, so there's still a lot of room for TVs to potentially grow. Add in more cameras capable of recording 4k, and 4k is going to gain traction in the next 5-10 years whether you want it or not. I've already decided that when the bulb on my current projector deteriorates, I'm just going to replace it with a 4k projector.
What free market? By local government decree, Verizon is the only company allowed to offer POTS (plain old telephone service) in the areas it covers. If the local governments would embrace the free market and allow anyone with a credible proposal and business plan to lay down fiber in public easements and offer service (instead of just the anointed monopoly phone, cable, and electric company), Verizon's incentive to not upgrade its copper wires to fiber would evaporate overnight.
This is actually a perfect example of how government interference in the market initially done with the best of intentions (you don't want a zillion unsightly wires being laid down in easements, so the government decides which companies may do it) can quickly morph into a corrupt scheme where the government protects the monopolies in exchange for kickbacks (in the last city I lived in, the city asked cable companies how much they were willing to pay the city per home wired up, and awarded the monopoly to the highest bid).
200+ replies and nobody seems to understand net neutrality well enough to pin down why his argument is wrong, besides some nebulous arm-waving about it being impractical. What he's saying is actually not that illogical. If the government is going to mandate that network traffic must not be discriminated against based on source, why not mandate that app development not discriminate based on platform?
Where the argument falls apart is in market interference. The ISP market in the U.S. has been grossly interfered with by government - local governments have awarded monopoly contracts to certain ISPs, making them in many cases the sole provider of high-speed internet. Consequently further government interference is needed to insure these ISPs don't abuse their monopoly position by degrading network traffic based on source. That's the jist of net neutrality. If you had lots of competing ISPs, then there would be no need for net neutrality because any company deliberately degrading Netflix would have customers canceling the next day to switch to another ISP. But since the government has artificially limited the number of ISPs and people can't switch, you need net neutrality to prevent that type of monopoly abuse.
There has been no such government interference in the software platform market. Aside from the phones of government employees (which are probably biased in favor of Blackberry anyway compared to the general population), there is no government interference limiting people's choice of which phones to get. Consequently there is no need to mandate that software development be platform-neutral.
Quiet (or as quiet as possible) is one aesthetic that may be desirable. For other people (or perhaps cars), a good rumble (as long as it not excessively load and obnoxious) is equally a desirable aesthetic. It's not so different, as you note, than choice of paint job.
Not like a paint job. You can choose to avert your eyes from a garish paint job. You can't choose to shut off your ears to an obnoxiously noisy car. If you want your car to have a throaty rumble, fine, but pipe it through your internal speakers only. Don't inflict it on the rest of us just to stroke your own ego.
Right now the cellular phone industry (at least in the U.S.) is highly vertically integrated. A single company owns the service, owns the towers, owns the POTS connections, and sells the phones. This has resulted in people begrudgingly subscribing with a provider not because they like their phone selection or service plans, but because they have the best network. Or subscribing with another provider because they have an exclusive on a phone. etc.
IMHO this vertical integration is a tremendous impediment to market forces trying to improve price and quality, and needs to be split up. You should be able to buy the phone from anyone. Get your service subscription from anyone. They should be able to contract with individual tower owners to create a network. And connect to the POTS independent of everything else I've just listed. This would make competition orthogonal within each of these layers. The best phones would sell the most independent of other factors. The company with the best plans and prices would get the most subscribers independent of phone selection or tower buildout. Tower networks providing the best coverage would be available to all service providers willing to pay. And POTS interconnects would, like it has for VoIP, be driven down to the cheapest cost for reasonable quality.
The MVNOs were one step in this direction. They partially decouple the service provider and tower networks. I've often wondered why an MVNO doesn't contract with multiple tower owners, which is what Google is doing if it's in talks with both Sprint and T-Mobile (most newer CDMA phones work on both CDMA and GSM networks). The Google Nexus phones (and to a lesser extent the iPhones) are another step in this direction - the same Nexus phone works on all carriers. It's not locked to a specific carrier if you don't buy it from the carrier.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't there a Dr. Who episode based on something like that? Where the public got to decide at any time if an elected official's performance was not in their best interests. And if they voted that it wasn't, he was summarily executed?
This sort of thing is more easily prevented by prohibiting the provider of the pipes from also selling what's sent through the pipes, and vice versa. So if you sold cellular data service, you wouldn't be able to also sell a video streaming service. That's how electricity and natural gas is sold in most places. One company gets an exclusive contract to lay down the wires/pipes, but are prohibited from selling electricity or gas. Instead, other companies sell those utility services (sometimes using the pipe-owner as a billing intermediary, other times adding an "access fee" to their bill to cover what they have to pay the pipe owner).
Unfortunately, we're in a funny in-between state right now because phone service is moving from point-to-point to packet-based. That is, your phone calls used to require a dedicated line(s) between you and the call recipient - a line you had total and exclusive access to for the duration of the call. There is no distinction between pipes and the content in the pipes in this model. Now we're switching more to a VoIP model where voice traffic is sent as data packets over shared pipes, and the distinction makes sense. Until this transition is finished, entrenched companies will be able to argue against separation of the pipe business and content business.
Unfortunately, the Internet service market in "socialist" Europe is actually more free market than in the U.S. You guys have multiple companies vying to provide and improve internet service. In the U.S., most local governments have regulated the market (under the guise of limiting unsightly wires by restricting who can build in public easements) so most Americans typically have only one choice of phone company and one choice of cable company.
MobileTechReview covered the non-touch 1920x1080 version here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP6oTd_OhoA
The size comparison to the Surface Pro 3 (12") is very impressive, almost hilarious.
The Achilles heel of the Macbook Air has always been the display. Not only is it lower resolution (currently 1440x900), but it's a TN panel with poor color gamut (about 60% sRGB). I suspect this is deliberate market stratification by Apple, to give people a reason to pay extra the Macbook Pro. So the MBP gets a retina IPS panel covering 100% sRGB. The MBP gets a low-res TN panel covering 60% sRGB.
The Surface Pro 3 took square aim at this chink in Apple's armor, by putting in a 95%-100% sRGB screen. The Dell does as well by using a 1920x1080 Sharp IGZO panel with 98% sRGB coverage. That increases pressure for Apple to put a retina panel on their MBA, at the risk of cannibalizing MBP sales (basically any artist who does color-sensitive work right now is forced to pay extra for the MBP). Comparison to the Dell with the MBA here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2FPvHFLSOI
Here are game benchmarks for the Intel HD5500, nVidia 820m, and AMD R7 M265 (older 35 Watt tech I throw in only for comparison since their current lowest-end R9 is equivalent to an 840m).
The 820m is a 15 Watt part, and best case hits nearly 2x the framerate of the HD5500. Probably about 1.7x faster on average, with a few titles being CPU-bottlenecked. The R9 M265X is also a 35 Watt part like the 840m and performs slightly better, so I imagine if/when AMD puts out 15 Watt version of the R9 to compete with the 820m, it'll roughly double the HD5500's FPS as well.
Having a discrete GPU does complicate the cooling solution (the iGPU on the Intel gets cooled by the CPU's cooler). But if you're planning to do some gaming, you should still opt for the dGPU over the iGPU if at all possible. The exception would be if you only play titles not needing powerful GPUs, like Sims, DOTA, LOL, WoW.
I tried setting Chrome to use HTML5 on YouTube for about a month. I had to switch it back to flash because of one thing - Flashblock. With flashblock, you can open a bunch of videos at once in different tabs, and they will not start playing until you flip to the tab and click the flashblock button. With HTML5, all those videos start playing in the background tabs simultaneously as soon as the pages finish loading. So you're basically limited to opening one video at a time. No queuing up videos you want to watch and flipping through them tab by tab.
Does anyone know of an extension similar to flashblock but for HTML5 on Chrome?
Depends on the composition of your "rocky" planet. Fusion reagents are energy-positive up to iron. So basically, elements heavier than iron requires multiple supernovae to generate a substantial quantity. Elements lighter than iron can be released in just 1-2 supernovae.
The elements which make up most of the "rock" on our rocky planet are oxygen, silicon, calcium, iron, potassium, aluminum, and sodium. Of these, oxygen, silicon, and iron are a regular product of stellar fusion, and can be distributed from a single supernova.
If you're that worried, you can always route your traffic through a VPS for about $5/mo extra. Google peeking in on your data packets is so easily circumvented it's barely worth mentioning.
OTOH, with Verizon announcing it's ending FiOS rollouts, they need a good swift competitive kick in the rear to get them to provide what the market wants, rather than milking their existing infrastructure for as much money as they can. The only reason they're able to do things like stop fiber rollout is because they have a government-granted monopoly in the areas they serve. A competitor - be it Google or anyone else - is exactly what's needed to break up that monopoly and give the people what the want.
It's not really the economists' fault. Theirs is a profession based on predicting human behavior, which is unpredictable at best. A trained economist can make some basic, fundamental predictions which will correctly improve economic efficiency, especially in a developing economy. But once you get to a well-developed economy, most of the efficiency gains have already been made. And economic direction depends more on random variances in individual people's decisions.
Normally you can get around this problem by using a huge sampling size to average out the variances. But economics has the added twist that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And if housing prices start going up, people think "wow, other people must know something I don't know, and I'd better start investing in housing" even though they have no idea why it's going up. That herd mentality messes up even averaging out the variances, and can turn even the perfect economist's predictions wrong.
The best engineering analogy I can come up with is a dynamically unstable (chaotic) system. You can predict the long-term (decades) and overall trends. But the day-to-day and year-to-year motions are highly irregular. But nobody cares about the long-term trends, and take economists to task for incorrectly predicting year-to-year movements.
Japan has more public debt than Greece. But its government only spends about 35% of its GDP.
An external hard drive is most convenient, but you have to be careful with RW media. One of my photos I was working on became corrupted. No problem, I just plugged in my external drive where I kept the backups. Then in a momentary drop in brain oxygen, I proceeded to drag and drop the corrupted file over the good backup, not the other way around. Goodbye backup. And undelete doesn't work when you copy a file over another file with the same name. (Fortunately this was a slide scan so I still had the analog original.)
If it's archival material (stuff that doesn't change), this is still a strong argument for using WORM (write once, read many) media - optical discs like DVD and Blu-ray. I'd been hoping someone would make a HDD enclosure with a write-protect switch like on SD cards. But the only one I've found was a specialty item apparently designed for police forensic work, not user friendliness. The write-protect "switch" is a jumper - I've mounted it inside another enclosure I had, but I have to open up the enclosure to switch the jumper. Which is probably fine if you're only using it on evidence hard drives which you never want to write to. But for home use where I'm toggling between writing new backups and occasionally restoring old backups, it's rather inconvenient.
It's basically an interferometer - the maximum separation of the telescope's mirror/lens is what gets you resolution. The surface area just makes dim objects brighter. Using a diffraction lens is irrelevant to the interferometry - it's just a way of bending the incoming light.
The catch is, the surface area of your lens needs to be aligned within a fraction of a wavelength of light for interferometry to work. It's been done on smaller optical telescopes and bigger radio telescopes (radio waves are much longer than light waves, so proper alignment is a lot easier). Getting the edges of a half mile diameter ring to remain within less than one wavelength of light from your sensor is going to be very difficult. There are methods to correct for differing distances. But I'd imagine rotating such a large annular scope would induce a lot of micro-vibrations (bigger than a wavelength) which may thwart such methods.
Actually, of the OECD countries Chile, Mexico, and Turkey are worse.
It's worse than that. Taxing wealth is inherently unfair because it's double taxation. Wealth is an amount (e.g. $100,000). Income is a rate (e.g.($50,000/yr). Income taxes are also a rate (e.g. 10% of your $50,000/yr is $5000/yr). You cannot mix rates and amounts. In particular, wealth is what's left over after it's already been taxed.
Take two people making $50,000/yr. Each pays $5000 in taxes. Each pays $20,000/yr on essentials like housing and food. One person buys all the latest toys, parties every night, and in general fritters away her remaining $25,000. At the end of 10 years, she's earned $500,000, paid $50,000 in taxes, has spent $250,000 on fun, and has zero accumulated wealth.
The other person eschews the toys and parties and saves the $25,000. At the end of 10 years, she's earned $500,000, paid $50,000 in taxes, and has $250,000 in accumulated wealth. But then you come by with a wealth tax and say she has to pay an extra 10%. So now she's paid $75,000 in taxes even though she earned exactly as much money as the other person who paid $50,000 in taxes. She's only allowed to spend $225,000 on herself because she had the temerity to save her money instead of blowing it on fun.
A wealth tax is taxing money that has already been taxed, and the fact that it's taxing an amount instead of a rate makes it impossible to synchronize with other income taxes - i.e. examples like the one I just gave are inevitable. It's inherently unfair. If you want to tax richer people more, just crank up the income tax rate on higher income brackets.
That's not quite true. Look at the individual income tax stats for 2012. Scroll over to column T. That's the actual tax paid as percent of gross income. It neatly sums up the effect of graduated tax brackets, tax credits, and deductions.
4.1% - $15,000 under $20,000
5.2% - $20,000 under $25,000
6.1% - $25,000 under $30,000
6.8% - $30,000 under $40,000
7.4% - $40,000 under $50,000
8.6% - $50,000 under $75,000
9.5% - $75,000 under $100,000
12.7% - $100,000 under $200,000
19.6% - $200,000 under $500,000
24.0% - $500,000 under $1,000,000
24.6% - $1,000,000 under $1,500,000
24.6% - $1,500,000 under $2,000,000
24.3% - $2,000,000 under $5,000,000
23.4% - $5,000,000 under $10,000,000
19.8% - $10,000,000 or more
As you can see, you have to be making about $200,000 or more before the actual average income tax rate exceeds the 15% capital gains tax. That is, on average, people making less than $200,000 pay a smaller percentage of their blood and sweat income as taxes than the 15% capital gains tax. (If you make less than $200,000 and pay more than 15%, you are a statistical anomaly.) The effect you ascribe to the capital gains tax doesn't kick in until about $1.5 million in income, when the actual tax rate begins decreasing. Someone making $10 million or more on average pays roughly the same tax (as a percentage) as someone making $200,000-$500,000.
So what needs to happen is the capital gains tax rate (1) needs to increase if your income is about $1 million or higher, and (2) needs to decrease if your income is less than $200,000. Right now, the 15% capital gains tax rate is so high that it discourages middle- and lower-income people from investing, which is the most direct way to partake in the country's economic growth. And the fruits of the country's economic growth will instead continue to fall mainly in the lap of the wealthy.
I'll add that the large group of voters in Florida (Cuban exiles) has undue influence because it's Florida - typically a swing state in Presidential elections with 29 electoral votes (nearly 11% of what you need to win the Presidency). If they'd settled in, say, Alabama instead of Florida, the Cuban embargo would've ended decades ago.
The Chinese model (trade with the Communist baddie to insure their citizens interact with and are informed about the outside world, and fully aware how much worse off they are than everyone else) seems to be much more successful. You may not replace the government, but you force it to be more honest when dealing with its people, and you force it to make concessions to economic ideas which actually work.
The original Google Nexus and Nexus S only had 512 MB of RAM. While it's possible to run Jelly Bean, Kit Kat, and Lollipop in 512 MB, I really don't recommend it. I did that on my original Galaxy S for a year. Kit Kat (which actually uses less RAM than Jelly Bean) leaves less than 100 MB free, and you're limited to using about 2-3 apps. The moment you exceed that the phone goes into a kill-loop where it runs out of RAM so it kills the oldest program, then it needs to load that program again so it kills the next oldest program, repeat.
The primary culprit is the Google Apps suite (Play store, email, maps, Chrome, Drive, etc). They've been growing in size and features as phone hardware has improved, leaving older 512MB devices in the dust. If you can figure out a way to uninstall unneeded apps, you may be able to get it to work. I decided it was time to retire my 4-year old phone and bought a new one. My laptop upgrade cycle is about 3 years, so the phone actually lasted longer than other comparable tech.
The number of miles you drive every year is one of the factors used to calculate your non-commercial insurance rate. Go read your complete auto insurance policy if you don't believe me. There's a line in there for number of miles driven per year. Most people ignore it, but if you exceed it and get into an accident, your insurer may refuse to cover you.
VRAM has nothing to do with system RAM. VRAM is special memory used by the dGPU, and only the dGPU, for storing framebuffers, textures, models, and other data needed to draw a 3D scene. It's faster than system RAM (GDDR5 is typical, vs DDR3 for regular RAM), and positioning it closer to the GPU reduces latency due to the speed of light (which travels only 10 cm in a single 3 GHz cycle). So the 32- or 64-bitness of the OS and apps has nothing to do with the video card's ability to access 4GB or more of VRAM.
In particular, the 970 GTX has a 256-bit memory bus. The speed constraint of having to retrieve data from VRAM one 32-bit (float) or 64-bit (double) "chunk" at a time became a bottleneck long before the inability to address that VRAM as a flat memory space. So mid- and high-end video cards are designed to retrieve multiple "chunks" of data from VRAM simultaneously. You have to drop all the way down to the GT 730 before you get to video cards using a 64-bit memory bus.
I'm projecting a 1080p image onto a 150" screen (my wall). It's damn obvious 1080p isn't enough. From 12' away I can see the individual pixels, and the anti-aliasing is obvious on news and sports graphics. I'd say 1080p video looks about as sharp as 480i video (DVD) on a 50" screen - not very sharp at all. And I'm 45 and my prescription 2 years out of date, so it's not like my eyes are as good as they used to be. If my next eyeglass prescription is sharper, I may have to intentionally defocus the projector image slightly to mitigate the screen door effect.
I'm seeing more and more 70"+ HDTVs for sale in stores, so I have to believe people are buying them. That's about the point when 1080p starts to become limiting at typical living room distances (about 8 ft between sofa and TV). Theoretical max for a room with 8' ceilings is just shy of 200 inches at 16:9, so there's still a lot of room for TVs to potentially grow. Add in more cameras capable of recording 4k, and 4k is going to gain traction in the next 5-10 years whether you want it or not. I've already decided that when the bulb on my current projector deteriorates, I'm just going to replace it with a 4k projector.
From a little googling, the voltage between the terminals is 2 kV. The clapper draws about 1 nA.
(175 years) * (2 kV) * (1 nA) = 11045 Joules ]
Which in terms most people can relate to is about 3 Watt-hours, or about the same as a singe AA battery. Not very impressive.
What free market? By local government decree, Verizon is the only company allowed to offer POTS (plain old telephone service) in the areas it covers. If the local governments would embrace the free market and allow anyone with a credible proposal and business plan to lay down fiber in public easements and offer service (instead of just the anointed monopoly phone, cable, and electric company), Verizon's incentive to not upgrade its copper wires to fiber would evaporate overnight.
This is actually a perfect example of how government interference in the market initially done with the best of intentions (you don't want a zillion unsightly wires being laid down in easements, so the government decides which companies may do it) can quickly morph into a corrupt scheme where the government protects the monopolies in exchange for kickbacks (in the last city I lived in, the city asked cable companies how much they were willing to pay the city per home wired up, and awarded the monopoly to the highest bid).
200+ replies and nobody seems to understand net neutrality well enough to pin down why his argument is wrong, besides some nebulous arm-waving about it being impractical. What he's saying is actually not that illogical. If the government is going to mandate that network traffic must not be discriminated against based on source, why not mandate that app development not discriminate based on platform?
Where the argument falls apart is in market interference. The ISP market in the U.S. has been grossly interfered with by government - local governments have awarded monopoly contracts to certain ISPs, making them in many cases the sole provider of high-speed internet. Consequently further government interference is needed to insure these ISPs don't abuse their monopoly position by degrading network traffic based on source. That's the jist of net neutrality. If you had lots of competing ISPs, then there would be no need for net neutrality because any company deliberately degrading Netflix would have customers canceling the next day to switch to another ISP. But since the government has artificially limited the number of ISPs and people can't switch, you need net neutrality to prevent that type of monopoly abuse.
There has been no such government interference in the software platform market. Aside from the phones of government employees (which are probably biased in favor of Blackberry anyway compared to the general population), there is no government interference limiting people's choice of which phones to get. Consequently there is no need to mandate that software development be platform-neutral.
Not like a paint job. You can choose to avert your eyes from a garish paint job. You can't choose to shut off your ears to an obnoxiously noisy car. If you want your car to have a throaty rumble, fine, but pipe it through your internal speakers only. Don't inflict it on the rest of us just to stroke your own ego.
Right now the cellular phone industry (at least in the U.S.) is highly vertically integrated. A single company owns the service, owns the towers, owns the POTS connections, and sells the phones. This has resulted in people begrudgingly subscribing with a provider not because they like their phone selection or service plans, but because they have the best network. Or subscribing with another provider because they have an exclusive on a phone. etc.
IMHO this vertical integration is a tremendous impediment to market forces trying to improve price and quality, and needs to be split up. You should be able to buy the phone from anyone. Get your service subscription from anyone. They should be able to contract with individual tower owners to create a network. And connect to the POTS independent of everything else I've just listed. This would make competition orthogonal within each of these layers. The best phones would sell the most independent of other factors. The company with the best plans and prices would get the most subscribers independent of phone selection or tower buildout. Tower networks providing the best coverage would be available to all service providers willing to pay. And POTS interconnects would, like it has for VoIP, be driven down to the cheapest cost for reasonable quality.
The MVNOs were one step in this direction. They partially decouple the service provider and tower networks. I've often wondered why an MVNO doesn't contract with multiple tower owners, which is what Google is doing if it's in talks with both Sprint and T-Mobile (most newer CDMA phones work on both CDMA and GSM networks). The Google Nexus phones (and to a lesser extent the iPhones) are another step in this direction - the same Nexus phone works on all carriers. It's not locked to a specific carrier if you don't buy it from the carrier.