The media pretends they don't, but they do a huge amount of distorting of the news we see.
It's why we strive to further reduce airliner fatalities when it's already one or two orders of magnitudes safer than any other form of transport. The media gives plane accidents disproportionately more coverage than other transportation accidents, causing the public to demand planes be made safer than they already are.
Same thing with child abductions. Abduction by a stranger is incredibly rare - only a few dozen cases happen each year. But because the media gives those cases wildly disproportionate coverage, every parent is scared to death to let their child out of their sight for 2 minutes.
School shootings are another example - they've actually been decreasing over the last two decades. But because the media automatically splashes any school shooting on the national news, the public incorrectly thinks they're becoming more common. Statistically, more high school students are killed by complications from pregnancy (page 3) than from non-gang, non-suicide school shootings. But I've yet to see a news story take that angle against teen pregnancy.
Terrorism. If you include all the 9/11 fatalities, you're roughly 4x as likely to die from terrorism than lightning. Exclude 9/11 and you're roughly 6x more likely to be killed by lightning. I think I've seen one news story in 40 years of someone being killed by lightning. Yet every terrorist incident, even the ones which fail and cause no damage or injury, seem to automatically make national news.
Until the last couple years, the media basically ignored the decade-long rise in drug overdose deaths. It wasn't until it surpassed car accident deaths that they finally began taking it seriously. The day which crystallized this in my mind was the 2016 murder-suicide on the UCLA campus. That story immediately made national news with live coverage on all the major networks. On the very same day 2 people died and over 57 were hospitalized from drug overdoses at a music festival in Florida. But that story barely made it beyond the local papers, and I didn't see any coverage of it on TV. I only happened to see it because I clicked on a different story from a Florida newspaper in Google News.
After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.
The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone. Consequently, the government enacted a system of subsidies to assure there's always overproduction of food. An oversupply would normally crater the market price, so the government buys all that food at a fixed price (high enough to keep the farmers in business). Then resells the food to the public at a lower price.
That's why corn ethanol and high fructose corn syrup exist. Due to this system, the country grows more corn than it consumes. Consequently the government has to figure out things to do with the excess corn. It becomes foreign aid, feed for cattle, corn ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup. This is why those reports about beef costing us $x per pound in subsides doesn't really mean that we would save $x per pound if we ended the subsidies for cattle feed. The cost to grow that extra corn is a sunk cost. If we stopped using the excess corn for feed, that doesn't mean we get our money back. Its cost would just be distributed to other things we do with the excess corn - corn we send as foreign aid would cost us more, and ethanol and HFCS prices would go up. The way it's set up now, if farmers have a bad corn crop, all that happens is some cows go hungry instead of people going hungry (in fact those cows which can't be fed will probably be slaughtered to produce beef).
This is also why we we pay farmers not to grow anything - so their land is ready and available to be turned into cropland in case existing cropland should be decimated by disease, pestilence, or another dust bowl. If we didn't pay the farmers, they'd sell the land and it would be used to build condominiums and other things that you can't eat.
So the subsidies are basically insurance. We're paying extra to guarantee there's always an oversupply of food. We could kill the subsidies and the average price of food over time would be lower. But some years we wouldn't produce enough food to feed everyone and food prices would spike.
The first step of many towards English losing it's place as the premier language in the world and the world's "second language". More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power.
That remains to be seen. GDP per capita basically measures how much productivity each citizen generates on average. The amount of inefficiency in a country's economy (due to corruption, lack of economic liquidity, and poor government policies) shows up as a lower GDP per capita.
The U.S. has a GDP per capita of nearly $60,000. Most EU nations are between $40k-$60k. Japan is around $40k. Ireland is around $70k due to its tax policies causing most foreign businesses to set up EU HQ there. Norway's is around $75k due to its oil exports. And Switzerland and Luxembourg are higher yet due to their heavy presence in banking. Likewise, the city-states (Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc) are skewed high due to not having any low-income farmers in their stats.
Corruption or poor government policies limit the country's GDP per capita. South Korea and Taiwan's GDP per capita have stalled at around $25k-$30k for this reason. Despite both countries being capitalistic power houses, corruption and nepotism infest business practices there, and there's still a heavy stigma against women working (you cripple your productivity per capita when you discourage half of your able-bodied population from working).
Countries without a solid capitalistic base and with high corruption or poor government policies are usually mired at a GDP per capita of around $10k. Eastern Europe and much of Central and South America.
China is currently at $8k. If its Communist government and inherent corruption (you need to bribe people and officials to get any business done there) limits its GDP per capita to $10k, then the growth of its total GDP will stall at around $15 trillion. The U.S. and EU GDPs are already at $19 trillion each. So China would not surpass them in global economic influence. Even if China manages Taiwan-like levels of productivity (unlikely IMHO as long as its government remains Communist and insists on wasting capital on things like building empty cities), its total GDP would max out at around $35 trillion, giving it less economic influence than the U.S. and EU combined despite having twice the population.
No surprise it's happening in Kenya as Africa is heavily invested in by China.
China's heavy investment abroad has been fueled by its rapidly growing economy, which left it plenty of excess money to spend abroad. The signs are that growth is now slowing. (Sorry the bottom of the graph is 6%, not 0%. Every graphic I could find online did that.)
At a 6.5% growth rate, it will take 4 years for China's GDP per capita to hit $10k, 10 years to hit $15k, and 20 years to hit $20k. So we will know in the next 10-15 years whether the Chinese economy will continue growing, or if it will stall.
The app is inert if it's disabled. It doesn't run. (Disabling it also reverts it to the original version which came with the device, which is actually a bit troubling since although it's supposed to be a space-saving move, it implies that if you don't disable it your device actually wastes storage space on two copies of the app. On some devices, the original version is just a placeholder about 8 kB in size.)
The problem is another app - Facebook App Manager or whatever they're calling it now. It's responsible for keeping Facebook's suite of apps updated. You're supposed to be able to disable it, but on some devices it can't be disabled. I disabled the Facebook app on my Motorola phone, but couldn't disable Facebook App Manager. I found it's activity spiking one day, then noticed that the Facebook had been enabled and updated. So I disabled the Facebook app again, only to find it re-enabled and updated again a few days later. I had been being lazy and hadn't rooted this phone yet, but that's what finally got me to put aside the time one evening to root it. Both are gone for good now.
Don't know where you got this made up fact. I'm typing this on a PC that has Windows 10 and does not have an SSD and it runs just fine. (well... as fine as Windows ever runs)
Try it again when Win 10 is installing an unschedulable automatic update. I wasted 2 hours at a client's office because a HDD Win 10 system decided to start updating just as I began troubleshooting. After struggling to do anything with the thrashing HDD for over an hour, I gave up and told the client I was wasting his money trying to fix a computer which was updating. I'd visit the next client on my list that day, and be back at his office later after a few hours.
Win 7 at least gave you the option of picking when it would install updates. The only thing you had to watch for on HDD systems were virus scans which were incorrectly scheduled during working hours.
More bullshit. I'll agree it's pretty bloated but it demonstrably does not require that much space. If you have that much shovel-ware installed, switch PC vendors. On the machine I'm running right now Windows takes about 45GB of space.
Actually, I'd agree that 120 GB is the absolute minimum I'd recommend for a Win 10 system drive. I've been using 256 GB SSDs as a minimum on client machines for a couple years now. Yes Win 10 by itself usually only takes about 30-40 GB (though I've run across one system where it bloated to 75 GB - it gets bigger over time). The problem is when it does one of its forced major updates, it keeps the old version around for a few days in case you decide to revert to the previous version. That Windows.old folder is usually 20-25 GB. So now you're at about 60-75 GB for just Windows. Add in the pagefile and hibernate file, a few tens of GB for programs you've installed, plus 15% free space to keep the SSD's write speeds fast, and you're at 120 GB before you've even put any data on the drive. (I recommend enabling System Restore with a reasonable amount of space for restore files, so that's another 10 GB. Making Win 10 on a 120 GB SSD unviable.)
Yeah, I think they have this backwards. Both digital and physical hoarding are caused by the desire not to throw stuff away because "it might be useful in the future." There is nothing inherently wrong with this desire. But in physical hoarding, the person fails to properly compare the cost of storing the physical clutter versus the benefit of having potentially kept something which becomes useful in the future. They end up keeping too much old stuff, needlessly incurring additional personal expense.
In digital hoarding, the person usually has done this comparison properly. The cost of retaining digital clutter is so cheap that it actually makes sense to keep those tens or hundreds of thousands of old emails around just in case one of them turns out to be useful in the future.
It's actually the people who insist on clearing out their inbox who have the mental problem. Their OCD desire to have a "clean" mailbox is overriding the potential benefit of retaining old emails. They end up deleting too many old emails, needlessly incurring additional personal expense.
Reminds me of a TV reporter in the Los Angeles area who did a segment on how easy it was to commit voting fraud. He went to a bunch of polling stations on election day, signed up using the "register to vote at the ballot" option which was available at the time, and voted. He didn't mark anything on each ballot, and tore them in half before dropping it in the ballot box to assure it wasn't counted.
After his TV segment was aired, rather than address the potential for voting fraud he exposed, the government promptly charged him with voting fraud. Served half a year in prison if I recall.
You misunderstand. The problem wasn't that Win 10 was failing to update because you didn't have enough enough free storage space. The problem was some people were managing to prevent Win 10 from updating by limiting the amount of free storage space.
My laptop had a problem with the 2017 Fall Creators update. It turned the icons for roughly a third of my installed programs and associated files into default icons, making it impossible to tell them apart. The correct icons were selectable in Windows' app settings, but they would still remain the default icons on the desktop and in File Explorer. It was impossible to tell which files were things like Office documents. So I reverted to the previous version of Win 10, and disabled the Windows Update service and set my connection to metered to prevent it from downloading and auto-installing the FC update.
About 6 months later I started getting warning messages that support for the Win 10 version I was on was ending, and that I must update. I tried updating, my icons were still broken, so reverted back as usual, sending a feedback report that the update was breaking my icons (hoping that they'd fix the problem at their end). Well, at some point it began ignoring my connection being set to metered, and would automatically re-enable the Windows Update service to push the new version (by now the Spring 2018 update, which still caused the same problem). It would update, I'd roll it back so I could get work done, and it'd update again every time I forgot to suspend the laptop and stepped away for a couple hours. It downloaded the update so many times I had to turn off my cable modem because I was in danger of going over my ISP's monthly quota. I had to use my phone for anything Internet-related.
Microsoft doesn't want you using old versions of Win 10. They will do anything they can to force you onto a current version. That is their primary objective here. Merely checking that there's enough free space for an update is not enough, because then someone could use that to block the update. The update must install for them to be happy.
(And if you're wondering if I ever found a fix for the icon problem, yes I did but it wasn't really a fix. I had to uninstall and reinstall every program whose icons were broken. Except after the update I couldn't uninstall the affected programs. The uninstall would bomb out with an unspecified error. I had to update, write down a list of each program whose icons were broken, revert the update, then uninstall each program on the list one by one, then reinstall each of them, then allow the Win 10 to update.)
As someone who runs a business, I've always hated it when employers skimped on employee equipment costs. The cost of a business laptop isn't just the purchase price. It's the purchase price + training costs + software cost (which you're trying to make zero) + setup costs + maintenance costs ( - sale price if you manage to sell it at the end). In most cases, these other costs far exceed the purchase price.
On top of that, the cost isn't really a one-time expense. It's the cost divided by the number of months you'll use the equipment. So even a $2000 laptop with $3000 in other costs used for 3 years ends up costing your business just $139/mo. If you're paying your employee $3000/mo, this is a mere 4.6% increase. Less if you manage to sell the laptop at the end. You're already paying your employee a (relatively) huge amount of money. It's counterproductive to skimp on weak equipment which lowers their productivity. Unless the Chromebook will do everything and anything your employee needs, don't skimp. Spend a little more to get a nice system that will maximize her productivity. (And no I'm not trying to justify the cost of the Macs, which I think are overpriced unless you're in an art/photo/video/music/print business. There's a reason the just-as-expensive Thinkpads are so popular among businesses. Two-day turnaround for warranty repairs via overnight delivery is a huge plus if you're trying to minimize downtime.)
Don't forget to budget for a file sync and backup system. If you don't have one yet, you'll need some sort of file server at your end, which her laptop connects to daily via a VPN to backup her work to your server. And that file server will need a backup system (preferably at least 2).
Also, technically this should be a company laptop, not the employee's laptop. Unless you plan to make it a gift or part of her compensation package, it should stay with the company after she moves on or moves up. Avoids the awkward situation where the employee quits after 3 months and takes the laptop with them.
I suspect the distinction is simply to allow one company to get around the other company's patents. HDD areal density is currently at about 1 Gb per square inch, or 155 Mb per cm^2. Each bit thus has an area of about 800x800 nm.
Microwaves have a wavelength of roughly 12 cm, which is 150,000 times bigger than 800nm. There's no way you could aim microwaves precisely enough to heat up the surface area that represents a single bit on a disk platter. Both HAMR and MAMR probably just rely on injecting a small amount of heat quickly enough that only the platter surface closest to the heating element experiences substantial temperature increase.
Swipe down from the top.
Settings
Applications (or Apps & Notifications)
Default Apps (or Advanced -> Default Apps)
(might have to select Assist & voice input)
Assist App
Change from Google to None
Windows uses subpixel rendering for fonts (ClearType) to essentially turn a 1920x1080 display into a 5760x1080 display.
One of the primary markets for Macs is page layout artists. When they design a page, they need the letters of a font to show up exactly where they will in the final printout so they can get the kerning right. Image clarity is secondary, since the final printout will be much higher resolution than the screen. Consequently, OS X does not do subpixel rendering of fonts. It anti-aliases them at the pixel level based on their exact location. If it tried to use subpixel rendering, it would have to shift each letter slightly to align with the subpixel grid, which is unacceptable for page layout work. If you ever hook up a Mac and a Windows PC to the same monitor, you'll notice that the Mac's fonts look like crap compared to the PC's. This is why.
The only way OS X could increase font clarity was by moving to high DPI displays. Unless you're working with extremely detailed high-resolution graphics (e.g. photo editing), such displays are unnecessary with Windows, since it basically triples the pixels of your regular monitor when rendering fonts.
The problem is that people think digital results in a different waveform than the original analog waveform. They can't understand how you can go from a stairstep digital signal to a smooth analog signal, and incorrectly conclude that something must be lost when you store music digitally. Yes something is lost, but it's only frequencies higher than Nyquist - half the sampling frequency, which is carefully chosen so the only frequencies lost are those beyond your hearing range (and weren't captured in the original analog recording anyway).
Monty Montgomery demonstrated this in a video using an analog wave generator, an analog spectrum analyzer, an analog oscilliscope, and A/D and D/A converters. At 20 kHz, the stairstep digital waveform is an awful mess, but after conversion back to analog it's still a perfectly smooth sine wave.
The mistake people make is thinking that the digital signal is a series of stairsteps. It's not stairsteps, it's just the corners of each stairstep. The sound's value is only defined at each corner. In between the corners, it's undefined. And it turns out that there is only one analog waveform which can be drawn through every one of those corners, yet contain no frequencies higher than Nyquist. So the digital sample of the waveform can perfectly recreate the original analog waveform (within the chose frequency limit).
Africa is an interesting case because some technologies were introduced before predecessor technologies (Star Trek prime directive fans take note). For example, wired phone lines had been installed in only a tiny part of Africa before cellular phone technology because widely available. Cellular was clearly superior, so that was adopted instead. Resulting in Africa having the highest ratio of cellular to wired phones in the world. So it's not a simple case of something being used more because it's increasingly available. They leapfrogged the rest of the world by skipping an earlier phone technology.
That we're seeing a similar leapfrogging in content that's viewed has implications for things like dictatorships, which used to control the masses by doing things like controlling TV news broadcasts. If most of the people are now getting their news from streamed international news sources, then it becomes harder for a dictator to hold on to power.
Likewise, I'm very curious to see if Hollywood's dominance of the movie industry and a handful of record companies' dominance of the music industry are inherent, or just an artifact of past technological limitations. It used to be that only a large movie/music studio could afford the cameras and recording equipment necessary to make and distribute a movie or music album. You can now do those things on your phone and upload them to YouTube. I'm of the opinion that Hollywood and the record labels are dinosaurs, using political influence to pass laws to stave off their inevitable demise. And the long-term path is a reversion to the Medieval era when entertainers worked independently instead of under the control of a studio. But that's just an opinion. It'll be interesting to see what type of cottage film and music industry develops in Africa.
Anything done to excess can be bad for you. That does not mean those things are intrinsically bad. Lack of exercise is bad, too much exercise is also bad. Overeating is bad, too much dieting is also bad. If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body. Except doing nothing is also bad for you, which leaves you stuck in a catch-22.
The key is moderation. Do the things you enjoy like staring at a screen (and some of the things you don't enjoy, like exercising). Just don't do them to excess.
Feces are biological. Its constituents are chemically simple and able to be used as food by other organisms. We're just careful with where we dump human feces because they contain diseases which can rapidly spread out of control to other humans if you allow human feces to mix with open water. Insects, birds, and animals dump their feces everywhere all the time (the oceans are full of feces from fish). We don't really care about it because for the most part they don't contain diseases which can spread to humans.
Plastics are created using a natural material (oil) which some bacteria can break down and use. But the manufacturing process turns the relatively short petroleum molecules into extremely long molecules which no bacteria can break down. You have to wait for ultraviolet light (whose frequency is high enough to be ionizing) to break it into molecules short enough for bacteria can handle. That's why plastic turns brittle when left in the sun for months. The problem is it can take a very, very long time for plastics to break down to molecular lengths short enough for bacteria to consume when the polymer is tens or hundreds of thousands of CHn chains long.
In about 2012, I switched to Android, mostly cause I run linux everywhere else and like it.
I thought I'd have more privacy, then slowly realized how stupid that was.
Looked into Cyanogenmod and LineageOS over and over, but ran out of time to ever actually do it.
If you were considering Cyanogenmod (phone has unlocked bootloader and is rooted), you didn't look hard enough.
AFWall+ lets you block apps from sending data over the network. Let's you selectively allow/deny access to the LAN, WiFi, and/or cellular networks for each app and service on your phone. (NetGuard claims to do the same without root, but I haven't tried it.)
XPrivacyLua takes a different approach. It allows the apps to send data back, it just turns the data they see into fake data. So your location will be spoofed as being in the South Pacific, they will see a fake contact list instead of your real one, This works better if an app you need needs network access to function or crashes if you simply block its network access.
The best compromise is a rooted Android device. No walled garden, and you can use something like AFWall+ to block apps from sending info over the network unless you explicitly allow it. Or you can use XPrivacyLua to feed the privacy-invading apps fake data to pollute what they collect. e.g. Make Facebook think you're located in the South Pacific. The root hiding tools are mostly effective at running apps which normally refuse to run on rooted devices (e.g. Netflix).
That said, some privacy must be given up for functionality. I had to mull over giving Google my location data for several months. In the end, I gave it to them because I use Google Maps' current traffic conditions heavily. The traffic updates are generated by phones sending their locations to Google in real-time; so if everyone chose to protect their location data, there would be no live traffic on Maps. I could either participate in helping provide the service I use, or I could become a leech - using but not giving. I decided I was morally obligated to participate.
Today, most illegals are coming from further south: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. $25B spent on economic cooperation with these countries would do infinitely more good than the same money spent on a wall.
The problem is if you send economic assistance to those countries, you get accused of helping prop up corrupt governments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think a wall is a stupid idea. But I also think welcoming refugees from those countries with open arms does more damage than good. Ultimately, changing the government of a country for the better is the social and moral responsibility of the citizens of that country. Outsiders cannot intervene on their behalf for the same reason we're upset that Russia meddled in our elections. So if we accept any and all refugees, we just delay the political reform or revolution that's necessary to fix those countries up so its citizens no longer wish to flee them. Every refugee you accept is one fewer voter or freedom fighter in the battle to free the country from government corruption.
Accepting the refugees may seem like the humanitarian thing to do, but it actually prolongs and increases the suffering in the countries producing refugees, by delaying the socio-political reform that's badly needed there. Reform that morally can only originate from the refugees themselves. People in other countries cannot do it for them without violating their own democratic ideals.
I always like to cross-check with past performance to see if a list is actually the result of good research, or just an opinion piece disguised as journalism.
2018: Uber, Twitter, Faraday Future, LeEco, Net Neutrality, HTC, SoundCloud
I think what they're doing is stupid. But rather than the "idiot redneck" rationale proposed by most EV advocates, I suspect their rational is more along the lines of, "These arrogant EV advocates vote themselves government rebates, free passes into HOV lanes when driving alone, and get privileged parking spots at certain businesses. They deserve to be taken down a notch."
This is the problem with using incentives to encourage wider adoption of something than normal market forces would generate. What you perceive as an incentive for something that makes sense, someone else can perceive as unfair punishment for their different lifestyle choices. You have to be careful that your incentives never cross into the realm of privilege, because that becomes the start of a caste division.
The distinguishing factor is more likely that it's free. A single seat license for a VxWorks developer costs tens of thousands of dollars.
I did get a chuckle when I was aboard a plane recently. The seat-back entertainment player in front of me crashed, and when it rebooted it came up with a Red Hat splash screen
... as a friend of me told me that it was a great way to keep a professional contact as people changed organizations and therefore changed email.
Are you sure a friend really told you that? Linkedin's MO around that time was to get access to your mail program ostensibly so it could read your contact list and figure out who you knew. What it really did was send out a spam email in your name to your entire contact list, telling everyone what a great service it was and that they should sign up too.
They're still on my boycott list for that sleazy tactic. Though I'm insulated from any positive benefit of having a Linkedin account since I run my own business.
When the old "king" died, the new one changed feet and thumb and elbow according to his own body size.
We look upon that with horror today, but it just didn't matter back then because they didn't have standardized measuring tools. The machines necessary to mass produce standardized measuring tools didn't come about until the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. So the king could mess with the units all he wanted. The people would just ignore it and build using whatever measuring tools they had on hand. As long as a "foot" remained consistent for a single building project, it worked out.
Weights remained more consistent because they were used for measuring the value of things (sacks of wheat, grains of gold, etc). Merchants carried standardized weights to use in trades (though I'm sure many of them cheated).
The most interesting aspect of Imperial measurements is how liquid volume was measured. In the Imperial system they're based on powers of 2. 4 pecks in a bushel, 2 gallons in a peck, 4 quarts in a gallon, 2 pints in a quart, etc. Ask yourself, how do you split a liquid into equal parts if you don't have standardizes measuring containers? You put two containers on a balance scale, and pour liquid into both sides until they're balanced. Then you know you've divided the original volume into equal halves.
Slashdot Mirror
And these are the
The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone. Consequently, the government enacted a system of subsidies to assure there's always overproduction of food. An oversupply would normally crater the market price, so the government buys all that food at a fixed price (high enough to keep the farmers in business). Then resells the food to the public at a lower price.
That's why corn ethanol and high fructose corn syrup exist. Due to this system, the country grows more corn than it consumes. Consequently the government has to figure out things to do with the excess corn. It becomes foreign aid, feed for cattle, corn ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup. This is why those reports about beef costing us $x per pound in subsides doesn't really mean that we would save $x per pound if we ended the subsidies for cattle feed. The cost to grow that extra corn is a sunk cost. If we stopped using the excess corn for feed, that doesn't mean we get our money back. Its cost would just be distributed to other things we do with the excess corn - corn we send as foreign aid would cost us more, and ethanol and HFCS prices would go up. The way it's set up now, if farmers have a bad corn crop, all that happens is some cows go hungry instead of people going hungry (in fact those cows which can't be fed will probably be slaughtered to produce beef).
This is also why we we pay farmers not to grow anything - so their land is ready and available to be turned into cropland in case existing cropland should be decimated by disease, pestilence, or another dust bowl. If we didn't pay the farmers, they'd sell the land and it would be used to build condominiums and other things that you can't eat.
So the subsidies are basically insurance. We're paying extra to guarantee there's always an oversupply of food. We could kill the subsidies and the average price of food over time would be lower. But some years we wouldn't produce enough food to feed everyone and food prices would spike.
That remains to be seen. GDP per capita basically measures how much productivity each citizen generates on average. The amount of inefficiency in a country's economy (due to corruption, lack of economic liquidity, and poor government policies) shows up as a lower GDP per capita.
The U.S. has a GDP per capita of nearly $60,000. Most EU nations are between $40k-$60k. Japan is around $40k. Ireland is around $70k due to its tax policies causing most foreign businesses to set up EU HQ there. Norway's is around $75k due to its oil exports. And Switzerland and Luxembourg are higher yet due to their heavy presence in banking. Likewise, the city-states (Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc) are skewed high due to not having any low-income farmers in their stats.
Corruption or poor government policies limit the country's GDP per capita. South Korea and Taiwan's GDP per capita have stalled at around $25k-$30k for this reason. Despite both countries being capitalistic power houses, corruption and nepotism infest business practices there, and there's still a heavy stigma against women working (you cripple your productivity per capita when you discourage half of your able-bodied population from working).
Countries without a solid capitalistic base and with high corruption or poor government policies are usually mired at a GDP per capita of around $10k. Eastern Europe and much of Central and South America.
China is currently at $8k. If its Communist government and inherent corruption (you need to bribe people and officials to get any business done there) limits its GDP per capita to $10k, then the growth of its total GDP will stall at around $15 trillion. The U.S. and EU GDPs are already at $19 trillion each. So China would not surpass them in global economic influence. Even if China manages Taiwan-like levels of productivity (unlikely IMHO as long as its government remains Communist and insists on wasting capital on things like building empty cities), its total GDP would max out at around $35 trillion, giving it less economic influence than the U.S. and EU combined despite having twice the population.
China's heavy investment abroad has been fueled by its rapidly growing economy, which left it plenty of excess money to spend abroad. The signs are that growth is now slowing. (Sorry the bottom of the graph is 6%, not 0%. Every graphic I could find online did that.)
At a 6.5% growth rate, it will take 4 years for China's GDP per capita to hit $10k, 10 years to hit $15k, and 20 years to hit $20k. So we will know in the next 10-15 years whether the Chinese economy will continue growing, or if it will stall.
The app is inert if it's disabled. It doesn't run. (Disabling it also reverts it to the original version which came with the device, which is actually a bit troubling since although it's supposed to be a space-saving move, it implies that if you don't disable it your device actually wastes storage space on two copies of the app. On some devices, the original version is just a placeholder about 8 kB in size.)
The problem is another app - Facebook App Manager or whatever they're calling it now. It's responsible for keeping Facebook's suite of apps updated. You're supposed to be able to disable it, but on some devices it can't be disabled. I disabled the Facebook app on my Motorola phone, but couldn't disable Facebook App Manager. I found it's activity spiking one day, then noticed that the Facebook had been enabled and updated. So I disabled the Facebook app again, only to find it re-enabled and updated again a few days later. I had been being lazy and hadn't rooted this phone yet, but that's what finally got me to put aside the time one evening to root it. Both are gone for good now.
Try it again when Win 10 is installing an unschedulable automatic update. I wasted 2 hours at a client's office because a HDD Win 10 system decided to start updating just as I began troubleshooting. After struggling to do anything with the thrashing HDD for over an hour, I gave up and told the client I was wasting his money trying to fix a computer which was updating. I'd visit the next client on my list that day, and be back at his office later after a few hours.
Win 7 at least gave you the option of picking when it would install updates. The only thing you had to watch for on HDD systems were virus scans which were incorrectly scheduled during working hours.
Actually, I'd agree that 120 GB is the absolute minimum I'd recommend for a Win 10 system drive. I've been using 256 GB SSDs as a minimum on client machines for a couple years now. Yes Win 10 by itself usually only takes about 30-40 GB (though I've run across one system where it bloated to 75 GB - it gets bigger over time). The problem is when it does one of its forced major updates, it keeps the old version around for a few days in case you decide to revert to the previous version. That Windows.old folder is usually 20-25 GB. So now you're at about 60-75 GB for just Windows. Add in the pagefile and hibernate file, a few tens of GB for programs you've installed, plus 15% free space to keep the SSD's write speeds fast, and you're at 120 GB before you've even put any data on the drive. (I recommend enabling System Restore with a reasonable amount of space for restore files, so that's another 10 GB. Making Win 10 on a 120 GB SSD unviable.)
Yeah, I think they have this backwards. Both digital and physical hoarding are caused by the desire not to throw stuff away because "it might be useful in the future." There is nothing inherently wrong with this desire. But in physical hoarding, the person fails to properly compare the cost of storing the physical clutter versus the benefit of having potentially kept something which becomes useful in the future. They end up keeping too much old stuff, needlessly incurring additional personal expense.
In digital hoarding, the person usually has done this comparison properly. The cost of retaining digital clutter is so cheap that it actually makes sense to keep those tens or hundreds of thousands of old emails around just in case one of them turns out to be useful in the future.
It's actually the people who insist on clearing out their inbox who have the mental problem. Their OCD desire to have a "clean" mailbox is overriding the potential benefit of retaining old emails. They end up deleting too many old emails, needlessly incurring additional personal expense.
Reminds me of a TV reporter in the Los Angeles area who did a segment on how easy it was to commit voting fraud. He went to a bunch of polling stations on election day, signed up using the "register to vote at the ballot" option which was available at the time, and voted. He didn't mark anything on each ballot, and tore them in half before dropping it in the ballot box to assure it wasn't counted.
After his TV segment was aired, rather than address the potential for voting fraud he exposed, the government promptly charged him with voting fraud. Served half a year in prison if I recall.
You misunderstand. The problem wasn't that Win 10 was failing to update because you didn't have enough enough free storage space. The problem was some people were managing to prevent Win 10 from updating by limiting the amount of free storage space.
My laptop had a problem with the 2017 Fall Creators update. It turned the icons for roughly a third of my installed programs and associated files into default icons, making it impossible to tell them apart. The correct icons were selectable in Windows' app settings, but they would still remain the default icons on the desktop and in File Explorer. It was impossible to tell which files were things like Office documents. So I reverted to the previous version of Win 10, and disabled the Windows Update service and set my connection to metered to prevent it from downloading and auto-installing the FC update.
About 6 months later I started getting warning messages that support for the Win 10 version I was on was ending, and that I must update. I tried updating, my icons were still broken, so reverted back as usual, sending a feedback report that the update was breaking my icons (hoping that they'd fix the problem at their end). Well, at some point it began ignoring my connection being set to metered, and would automatically re-enable the Windows Update service to push the new version (by now the Spring 2018 update, which still caused the same problem). It would update, I'd roll it back so I could get work done, and it'd update again every time I forgot to suspend the laptop and stepped away for a couple hours. It downloaded the update so many times I had to turn off my cable modem because I was in danger of going over my ISP's monthly quota. I had to use my phone for anything Internet-related.
Microsoft doesn't want you using old versions of Win 10. They will do anything they can to force you onto a current version. That is their primary objective here. Merely checking that there's enough free space for an update is not enough, because then someone could use that to block the update. The update must install for them to be happy.
(And if you're wondering if I ever found a fix for the icon problem, yes I did but it wasn't really a fix. I had to uninstall and reinstall every program whose icons were broken. Except after the update I couldn't uninstall the affected programs. The uninstall would bomb out with an unspecified error. I had to update, write down a list of each program whose icons were broken, revert the update, then uninstall each program on the list one by one, then reinstall each of them, then allow the Win 10 to update.)
Too bad there's no way to install Kodi onto an independent device which plugs into the HDMI port of your Sony TV.
Crappy move by Sony, but ultimately futile.
As someone who runs a business, I've always hated it when employers skimped on employee equipment costs. The cost of a business laptop isn't just the purchase price. It's the purchase price + training costs + software cost (which you're trying to make zero) + setup costs + maintenance costs ( - sale price if you manage to sell it at the end). In most cases, these other costs far exceed the purchase price.
On top of that, the cost isn't really a one-time expense. It's the cost divided by the number of months you'll use the equipment. So even a $2000 laptop with $3000 in other costs used for 3 years ends up costing your business just $139/mo. If you're paying your employee $3000/mo, this is a mere 4.6% increase. Less if you manage to sell the laptop at the end. You're already paying your employee a (relatively) huge amount of money. It's counterproductive to skimp on weak equipment which lowers their productivity. Unless the Chromebook will do everything and anything your employee needs, don't skimp. Spend a little more to get a nice system that will maximize her productivity. (And no I'm not trying to justify the cost of the Macs, which I think are overpriced unless you're in an art/photo/video/music/print business. There's a reason the just-as-expensive Thinkpads are so popular among businesses. Two-day turnaround for warranty repairs via overnight delivery is a huge plus if you're trying to minimize downtime.)
Don't forget to budget for a file sync and backup system. If you don't have one yet, you'll need some sort of file server at your end, which her laptop connects to daily via a VPN to backup her work to your server. And that file server will need a backup system (preferably at least 2).
Also, technically this should be a company laptop, not the employee's laptop. Unless you plan to make it a gift or part of her compensation package, it should stay with the company after she moves on or moves up. Avoids the awkward situation where the employee quits after 3 months and takes the laptop with them.
I suspect the distinction is simply to allow one company to get around the other company's patents. HDD areal density is currently at about 1 Gb per square inch, or 155 Mb per cm^2. Each bit thus has an area of about 800x800 nm.
Microwaves have a wavelength of roughly 12 cm, which is 150,000 times bigger than 800nm. There's no way you could aim microwaves precisely enough to heat up the surface area that represents a single bit on a disk platter. Both HAMR and MAMR probably just rely on injecting a small amount of heat quickly enough that only the platter surface closest to the heating element experiences substantial temperature increase.
Swipe down from the top.
Settings
Applications (or Apps & Notifications)
Default Apps (or Advanced -> Default Apps)
(might have to select Assist & voice input)
Assist App
Change from Google to None
Windows uses subpixel rendering for fonts (ClearType) to essentially turn a 1920x1080 display into a 5760x1080 display.
One of the primary markets for Macs is page layout artists. When they design a page, they need the letters of a font to show up exactly where they will in the final printout so they can get the kerning right. Image clarity is secondary, since the final printout will be much higher resolution than the screen. Consequently, OS X does not do subpixel rendering of fonts. It anti-aliases them at the pixel level based on their exact location. If it tried to use subpixel rendering, it would have to shift each letter slightly to align with the subpixel grid, which is unacceptable for page layout work. If you ever hook up a Mac and a Windows PC to the same monitor, you'll notice that the Mac's fonts look like crap compared to the PC's. This is why.
The only way OS X could increase font clarity was by moving to high DPI displays. Unless you're working with extremely detailed high-resolution graphics (e.g. photo editing), such displays are unnecessary with Windows, since it basically triples the pixels of your regular monitor when rendering fonts.
The problem is that people think digital results in a different waveform than the original analog waveform. They can't understand how you can go from a stairstep digital signal to a smooth analog signal, and incorrectly conclude that something must be lost when you store music digitally. Yes something is lost, but it's only frequencies higher than Nyquist - half the sampling frequency, which is carefully chosen so the only frequencies lost are those beyond your hearing range (and weren't captured in the original analog recording anyway).
Monty Montgomery demonstrated this in a video using an analog wave generator, an analog spectrum analyzer, an analog oscilliscope, and A/D and D/A converters. At 20 kHz, the stairstep digital waveform is an awful mess, but after conversion back to analog it's still a perfectly smooth sine wave.
The mistake people make is thinking that the digital signal is a series of stairsteps. It's not stairsteps, it's just the corners of each stairstep. The sound's value is only defined at each corner. In between the corners, it's undefined. And it turns out that there is only one analog waveform which can be drawn through every one of those corners, yet contain no frequencies higher than Nyquist. So the digital sample of the waveform can perfectly recreate the original analog waveform (within the chose frequency limit).
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Africa is an interesting case because some technologies were introduced before predecessor technologies (Star Trek prime directive fans take note). For example, wired phone lines had been installed in only a tiny part of Africa before cellular phone technology because widely available. Cellular was clearly superior, so that was adopted instead. Resulting in Africa having the highest ratio of cellular to wired phones in the world. So it's not a simple case of something being used more because it's increasingly available. They leapfrogged the rest of the world by skipping an earlier phone technology.
That we're seeing a similar leapfrogging in content that's viewed has implications for things like dictatorships, which used to control the masses by doing things like controlling TV news broadcasts. If most of the people are now getting their news from streamed international news sources, then it becomes harder for a dictator to hold on to power.
Likewise, I'm very curious to see if Hollywood's dominance of the movie industry and a handful of record companies' dominance of the music industry are inherent, or just an artifact of past technological limitations. It used to be that only a large movie/music studio could afford the cameras and recording equipment necessary to make and distribute a movie or music album. You can now do those things on your phone and upload them to YouTube. I'm of the opinion that Hollywood and the record labels are dinosaurs, using political influence to pass laws to stave off their inevitable demise. And the long-term path is a reversion to the Medieval era when entertainers worked independently instead of under the control of a studio. But that's just an opinion. It'll be interesting to see what type of cottage film and music industry develops in Africa.
Anything done to excess can be bad for you. That does not mean those things are intrinsically bad. Lack of exercise is bad, too much exercise is also bad. Overeating is bad, too much dieting is also bad. If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body. Except doing nothing is also bad for you, which leaves you stuck in a catch-22.
The key is moderation. Do the things you enjoy like staring at a screen (and some of the things you don't enjoy, like exercising). Just don't do them to excess.
Feces are biological. Its constituents are chemically simple and able to be used as food by other organisms. We're just careful with where we dump human feces because they contain diseases which can rapidly spread out of control to other humans if you allow human feces to mix with open water. Insects, birds, and animals dump their feces everywhere all the time (the oceans are full of feces from fish). We don't really care about it because for the most part they don't contain diseases which can spread to humans.
Plastics are created using a natural material (oil) which some bacteria can break down and use. But the manufacturing process turns the relatively short petroleum molecules into extremely long molecules which no bacteria can break down. You have to wait for ultraviolet light (whose frequency is high enough to be ionizing) to break it into molecules short enough for bacteria can handle. That's why plastic turns brittle when left in the sun for months. The problem is it can take a very, very long time for plastics to break down to molecular lengths short enough for bacteria to consume when the polymer is tens or hundreds of thousands of CHn chains long.
If you were considering Cyanogenmod (phone has unlocked bootloader and is rooted), you didn't look hard enough.
AFWall+ lets you block apps from sending data over the network. Let's you selectively allow/deny access to the LAN, WiFi, and/or cellular networks for each app and service on your phone. (NetGuard claims to do the same without root, but I haven't tried it.)
XPrivacyLua takes a different approach. It allows the apps to send data back, it just turns the data they see into fake data. So your location will be spoofed as being in the South Pacific, they will see a fake contact list instead of your real one, This works better if an app you need needs network access to function or crashes if you simply block its network access.
The best compromise is a rooted Android device. No walled garden, and you can use something like AFWall+ to block apps from sending info over the network unless you explicitly allow it. Or you can use XPrivacyLua to feed the privacy-invading apps fake data to pollute what they collect. e.g. Make Facebook think you're located in the South Pacific. The root hiding tools are mostly effective at running apps which normally refuse to run on rooted devices (e.g. Netflix).
That said, some privacy must be given up for functionality. I had to mull over giving Google my location data for several months. In the end, I gave it to them because I use Google Maps' current traffic conditions heavily. The traffic updates are generated by phones sending their locations to Google in real-time; so if everyone chose to protect their location data, there would be no live traffic on Maps. I could either participate in helping provide the service I use, or I could become a leech - using but not giving. I decided I was morally obligated to participate.
The problem is if you send economic assistance to those countries, you get accused of helping prop up corrupt governments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think a wall is a stupid idea. But I also think welcoming refugees from those countries with open arms does more damage than good. Ultimately, changing the government of a country for the better is the social and moral responsibility of the citizens of that country. Outsiders cannot intervene on their behalf for the same reason we're upset that Russia meddled in our elections. So if we accept any and all refugees, we just delay the political reform or revolution that's necessary to fix those countries up so its citizens no longer wish to flee them. Every refugee you accept is one fewer voter or freedom fighter in the battle to free the country from government corruption.
Accepting the refugees may seem like the humanitarian thing to do, but it actually prolongs and increases the suffering in the countries producing refugees, by delaying the socio-political reform that's badly needed there. Reform that morally can only originate from the refugees themselves. People in other countries cannot do it for them without violating their own democratic ideals.
So how good is their track record?
Final tally:
.500. Not exactly stellar.
7 correct
3 premature by one year, one obvious (Radio Shack, Yahoo, Theranos)
9 wrong
4 unknown (Gearbox, Uber, Faraday Future, SoundCloud)
So they're batting around
I think what they're doing is stupid. But rather than the "idiot redneck" rationale proposed by most EV advocates, I suspect their rational is more along the lines of, "These arrogant EV advocates vote themselves government rebates, free passes into HOV lanes when driving alone, and get privileged parking spots at certain businesses. They deserve to be taken down a notch."
This is the problem with using incentives to encourage wider adoption of something than normal market forces would generate. What you perceive as an incentive for something that makes sense, someone else can perceive as unfair punishment for their different lifestyle choices. You have to be careful that your incentives never cross into the realm of privilege, because that becomes the start of a caste division.
The distinguishing factor is more likely that it's free. A single seat license for a VxWorks developer costs tens of thousands of dollars.
I did get a chuckle when I was aboard a plane recently. The seat-back entertainment player in front of me crashed, and when it rebooted it came up with a Red Hat splash screen
Are you sure a friend really told you that? Linkedin's MO around that time was to get access to your mail program ostensibly so it could read your contact list and figure out who you knew. What it really did was send out a spam email in your name to your entire contact list, telling everyone what a great service it was and that they should sign up too.
They're still on my boycott list for that sleazy tactic. Though I'm insulated from any positive benefit of having a Linkedin account since I run my own business.
We look upon that with horror today, but it just didn't matter back then because they didn't have standardized measuring tools. The machines necessary to mass produce standardized measuring tools didn't come about until the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. So the king could mess with the units all he wanted. The people would just ignore it and build using whatever measuring tools they had on hand. As long as a "foot" remained consistent for a single building project, it worked out.
Weights remained more consistent because they were used for measuring the value of things (sacks of wheat, grains of gold, etc). Merchants carried standardized weights to use in trades (though I'm sure many of them cheated).
The most interesting aspect of Imperial measurements is how liquid volume was measured. In the Imperial system they're based on powers of 2. 4 pecks in a bushel, 2 gallons in a peck, 4 quarts in a gallon, 2 pints in a quart, etc. Ask yourself, how do you split a liquid into equal parts if you don't have standardizes measuring containers? You put two containers on a balance scale, and pour liquid into both sides until they're balanced. Then you know you've divided the original volume into equal halves.