On a volumetric basis, a 4 TB HDD contains as much info as a 80 BDs at 50 GB per disc. So a HDD is a more compact storage form factor.
Blu-ray, like other WORM (write-once read-many) storage devices, fills a particular niche - long-term archival and storage of static data. It doesn't really fit Facebook's particular use case (dynamic data), unless they're planning to use it as an excuse not to have to delete user data upon request.
Binoculars won't cut it if you want to see Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings.
The problem with this argument is that you've just listed the only things he will be missing with a budget purchase. Ideal viewing times for these come rarely, and at the magnifications required he would also need a very expensive tracking mount in order to really enjoy them.
The four Galilean moons around Jupiter are easily visible with binoculars. Heck if you have good eyesight and dark skies, you can sometimes barely make out Ganymede or Callisto at maximum separation with the naked eye. Max separation is about 10 arc-minutes, while 20/20 vision is the ability to distinguish a 1 arc-minute separation. The 4.5-5.5 magnitude is the bigger problem. I'd say tracking the movement of Jupiter's moons from night to night is probably the best fun "project" for a kid just getting into astronomy. It really drives home the point that these things move.
I don't know why you'd think ideal viewing times are rare. They're the same as for anything else in the sky other than the sun. Say you define "ideal" viewing as a 150 degree swath of sky (anything more than 15 degrees above the horizon). Figure the kid can view from an hour after sunset til midnight, so an average 5 hours (less in the summer, more in winter). The sky rotates 15 degrees per hour, so that's an additional 75 degrees of visibility. So on any given evening, 225 degrees of the sky will fall under "ideal" viewing conditions for part of the night. i.e. On average Jupiter and Saturn can be seen 62.5% of evenings. (The fact that they move doesn't change the percentage of time they're in any given part of the sky. It just means their visibility does not map to the same months every year.)
You don't need a tracking mount to see bands on Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. I saw those things just fine with a non-tracking 60mm refractor from K-mart. It's only a problem showing kids these things because the planet will cross outside the field of view within 20-30 seconds.* That's not much time to locate the planet, then get the kid in position to look through the eyepiece to see. The tracking mount makes it a lot easier, but is not necessary. (*The sky rotates at 15 deg/hr, or 15 arc-seconds per second. Jupiter is about 30-50 arc-seconds across, so it'll move a full diameter every 2-3 seconds. At a decent magnifcation, Jupiter will span about 10% of your field of view, so it'll move from edge to edge in 20-30 sec.)
Astronomy binoculars have many benefits in the budget arena. They are rugged, low maintenance, both eyes is nice, and most importantly portable.
The other reply had mentioned that a downside is that they are hard to hold steady. Thats what a tripod is for.
I agree with the recommendation for binoculars. But realistically, you're going to use binoculars handheld most of the time, with the kid locating objects in the sky on his/her own. Using them with a tripod is more difficult and complicated than using a scope with a tripod.
You have to look straight through binoculars, so you have to view them with your head pointed up (sometimes even straight up). That means the tripod needs to hold them higher than your head. Even if you're seated, that's a really tall tripod. It also complicates switching off viewing to your kid. You take a seat in front of the tripod and adjust the binoculars. Then the kid gets in the seat and... the binoculars are too high. So you lower them, and get back in the seat to reposition them and... now it's too low for you.
Most telescopes come with a 90 degree inverting mirror/prism, which vastly simplifies viewing by allowing you to iew through the scope with your head pointed down. You just position the scope low enough for the child to view through it, then you just stoop lower so you can look through it to position it. Because you're viewing down instead of up, stooping lower doesn't require you to angle you head further (or impossibly) back.
The only thing wrong with it is that the self-anointed control-freak editors who consider Wikipedia their personal property can't possibly know or research information to that level of detail. They will have to (gasp!) rely on others to provide it. And they'll have to make objective editorial decisions to determine which articles are likely fake or likely true, instead of just flying by the seat of their pants and editing/deleting based on their personal opinion.
I'm shopping for a house right now. If Wikipedia had basic information about individual homeowners associations, townhouse developments, and condo complexes - like when it was built, who provides Internet service and what speeds you should expect, what type of and how many community facilities it has (pool, tennis courts, etc), nearby supermarkets and other resources - that would be incredibly useful information. I'm finding this sort of stuff is rarely mentioned in the housing listings, most developments and complexes don't have a website which states these things, and realtors aren't too fond of digging up this info for you if you're still in the stage of eliminating houses that don't fit your needs.
But as I said, that would require the control-freaks on Wikipedia to let the people who live there write the wiki article, and they just won't stand for giving up control like that. That's the slippery slope they're afraid of.
It is the same way with travel. Rather than give you a per diem of $100, they want itemized receipts, which you have to collect, enter into the system, submit, your manager has to review and approve, and then Travel has to audit and approve. All because they don't want you to go eat Ramen and pocket the other $97. They spend thousands of dollars of company time to save a few hundred dollars on travel expenses.
Companies would love to give you a $100 per diem for meals. As you point out, in addition to being easier for the employee, it saves them money.
The reason they require you to itemize receipts is because if they're ever audited by the IRS, they need to be able to produce the receipts to prove those were real incurred business expenses. Not imaginary numbers made up to pad the expenses and scam the IRS out of tax revenue.
We also tried it the laid back way - we'll give you a $100 per diem, you don't have to itemize, just collect all your receipts and hand them in after your trip. The accountant who was going to double-check your numbers anyway will just do the itemizing. Net result was that employees forgot to save their receipts or "lost" them. They'd already been paid $100 for the meals, so there was no incentive for them to be careful with the receipts. So back we went to having the employee itemize if they wanted reimbursement.
My guess is that without advertising, content providers would have to turn to a subscription-based model. I would actually like to see this, because it means a lot of sites would finally die off. Take any website (IGN, Gamespot, Gamefaqs) that does videogame reviews and/or guides. Most of these websites are dinosaurs - they come from a time before the Wiki model and streaming video, when people had to go to them to get reviews.
[...]
Nowadays, if I want to find out how to do something in a game or whether a game is worth playing, I can go on Youtube and look it up - usually resulting in better quality than a published guide or review on one of those sites.
That's all well and good. But without advertising, YouTube wouldn't exist. At least not in the form it currently does. Someone ha to pay for all that video storage and bandwidth. Same with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, even slashdot. Advertising provides market fluidity, where the tiniest action by a visitor (a click or even pausing on a page to read it) can be translated directly into additional revenue to the site for providing content visitors find "interesting." Maybe there's a better way to provide this fluidity than ads - if you find it you'll probably become the next dot-com billionaire. But ignorance of this beneficial side of ads does not negate their usefulness.
On the receiving end, as much as I dislike ads, I do acknowledge that they free me up to try out different sites at no cost. With a subscription model, I'd have to pay to subscribe to a site to try it out (or get in on a limited-time free trial, which would probably involve me giving the site my mailing address and phone number which they could sell to marketers - probably worse than seeing ads online). There's also a small informational benefit to ads. I found that out when I got rid of my TV. A year later I was hanging out with some friends and we decided to go see a movie. That's when I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and even when I was told the titles I couldn't classify them into categories I might find interesting (sci-fi, action, etc). My friends had to take the time to give me a 10-second summary of each movie before I could tell them if I was voting yea or nay on it.
In the time it took me to read that, I could look up a video on Youtube and see the same thing done in less than thirty seconds and without terrible ASCII art - and without ads plastered all over.
I think your gripe is more about artificially limiting the FAQs so they can't include pictures. Except for linear 3D guides (e.g. jumping puzzles), video is also a terrible format for guides. Video is a time-dependent format, whereas a written page with pictures allows you to quickly skim forward and back to find the section you want. It's the same reason you can quickly browse a directory full of unnamed pictures to get an idea of what's there, but you can't do the same for a directory full of MP3s. The pictures are time-independent and you can quickly scan through them. MP3s (and video) are time-dependent, and you have to sit there and listen/watch them at something close to real-time to figure out what the content is.
You can thwart this if your phone is rooted. At first I used an app which blocked apps from accessing certain features and data I didn't want them to see, like my location. But then they started to make apps crash when they were blocked this way.
I'm currently using xprivacy. It generates fake data for things like location, networks, and sensors. If the app insists on getting my location and I don't give it that permission, it still gets a location. But that location is a random place in the world. Same for networks and sensor data - it'll get fake SSIDs if I don't give it network access, fake gyroscope readings if I don't give it permission to access the gyros.
Be forewarned, xprivacy is a PITA to install (uses the xposed framework) and set up (newer versions query you when an app makes a request, so you don't have to set everything blind). But after a few weeks of pain getting everything in place, it's been smooth sailing.
That analogy doesn't work. For it to work, lots of other people have to have put up signs pointing to you saying "Small cock." Google just provides a list saying who has the most such signs pointed at them. i.e. Google is just providing a numerically sorted statement of fact, not making up new signs. Removing an entry from Google doesn't change the fact that all those other such pointers out there in the web continue to exist and continue to say you have a small penis. Indeed, once you've used Google for a while to find copyrighted content, you quickly learn which sites consistently rank high on Google, and are best for finding such files (e.g. animesuki.com for unlicensed current anime scanlations). After a while you just bookmark them directly so you can skip Google.
Anyhow, the way the DMCA is worded, Google has to remove these links or face liability for being an accessory to copyright infringement. So it's a moot point. If you have a problem with the morality of it and want to change it, you need to change the DMCA.
Other materials like steel or titanium can be designed so it can withstand an infinite number of stress cycles and not fatigue. Given the nature of the mission and power source (multi-year if not multi-decade operation on another planet with no hope of human intervention if something should go wrong), they really should have allocated sufficient weight budget for non-aluminum wheels. This is basic materials science that every undergrad mechanical engineer learns. I was very surprised when I heard they were going with thin aluminum wheels on this rover.
Solar thermal is terrible if you try to use it to make electricity. The steam turbine you need for that conversion is typically only about 33% efficient.
However, if your desired form of energy is heat, solar thermal is one of the most cost-effective energy sources. Put a small, black water tank in your backyard (or in a greenhouse if it's cold outside) and use it to feed your hot water heater, and the savings in your water heating bill will usually pay for the tank in 2-3 years.
Not quite. If you RTFA, the BND made the recordings and dutifully transcribed the calls. They got passed along to higher-ups, who once they realized who was talking ordered the transcripts be destroyed. The person believed to be a double-agent for the U.S. was responsible for destroying the transcripts, and didn't. So no, he's not responsible for making the call recording - that falls squarely in the BND's lap. He just didn't follow through on the BND's good faith effort not to spy on the U.S. (or to cover up their spying on the U.S. depending on how you want to spin it).
It does raise questions about the allegations that he's a U.S. agent though. Why would he be so keen to keep a transcript of a call between Clinton and Kofi Anon to send back to the U.S., knowing full well that the U.S. would already know everything about that call? The only explanations I can think of are that he wasn't a double-agent as Germany is claiming (or at least not a double-agent for the U.S.), or that he was a U.S. double-agent and included that transcript to implicate Germany in case the story ever blew (which would've been remarkably far-sighted).
Not to mention it would've given Barbra Streisand the legal ammo to defeat the Streisand effect. I expect Google and Bing will make sure this doesn't get out of hand, before they're forced to devote more resources to policing their satellite/aerial photo maps than they currently are abiding by the EU's right to be forgotten law.
But seriously, I've seen the same technique used to discredit a movie of a UFO shot on 8 mm film. If you just watch the movie, you see an elliptical blob flying. Someone scanned the blob from each frame, aligned them, and averaged them. The increased contrast (bit-depth and resolution basically) let you see that the elliptical blob was more a diagonal prism, and that there were dark features underneath it. Basically it was a Cessna with the sun reflecting off the top of the wing.
Hate to break it to you, but nearly everyone in any job doesn't respect anyone who doesn't do the same job. The problem isn't specific to any one profession. The problem is being hyper-aware of the challenges in the job you do, and ignorant of the challenges in the jobs you don't do. So you end up overestimating the difficulty of your job (relative to people who don't do your job), and underestimating the difficulty of other people's jobs.
I've done a lot of different jobs over 3 decades (engineering, programming, technical writing, accounting, IT, property management, business management, and business owner). Every one of them had their share of trials, challenges, and complexities I didn't expect coming into them as an outsider (except engineering, since that's what I studied in college). It's easy to think the engineer's, designer's, IT's, salesman's, HR's, accountant's, management's, or CEO's job is oh so easy if you've never done it. But that's usually a conclusion based on ignorance rather than fact. I'd actually say a small business owner or a business manager in a medium-sized company is most likely to have the most neutral viewpoint of job difficulty, because they're constantly getting progress and problem reports from people doing all sorts of different things within the company.
I'm sure Verizon is evil of course, but are they evil for upgrading to fiber or for not upgrading to fiber?
Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their monopoly position to slow down upgrades (both fiber and copper) as a cost-cutting measure. If there were a competitor in the market offering DSL/FO/cable service and Verizon dragged their feet on upgrading to fiber or neglecting to maintain their copper, they would hemorrhage customers and lose a lot of money. But in most areas they have a (government-granted) monopoly. They can take their sweet time upgrading to fiber, and there's nothing their customers can do about it. They can let areas with older copper lines rot, and there's nothing their customers can do about it.
Case in point, the city I live in was one of the first which contracted for Verizon to provide FIOS. They rolled it out to half the city, then got into some sort of disagreement with the city and stopped. If there had been a competing cable/fiber service, they would've had a huge incentive to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible and get back to work. But they were the only game in town so they dragged it out. For six years, the houses two blocks down the street had FIOS and I didn't. Then after an election, the city council changed, Verizon got what they wanted, and resumed rolling out FIOS.
Meanwhile, the city I work in has Verizon DSL as the only provider of business Internet. Cable companies provide cable internet to residences, but apparently they're prohibited from providing it to business. So again, Verizon is the only game in town. They have absolutely refused to upgrade or maintain their copper lines. The fastest DSL speed we can get is 3 Mbps down / 768 kbps up. For this "privilege" we pay $100/mo. Most of the phone lines are of such poor quality they can't even get you that speed, and 1.5/512 or 1.5/256 is the best they can do ($50/mo). The service is such a poor value that most companies in the area just get the lowest-tier 1.0/128 service for $40/mo to minimize how much they have to pay for any Internet. Others have signed on to cellular companies' 4G data services and willingly pay per GB for overages - because it beats having to get reamed in the rear by Verizon.
I've heard that a few times over the years. Americans don't know what war is like because we've never had to suffer it personally. Our soldiers always go somewhere else to fight.
About 13% of Americans are immigrants, many from war-ravaged countrires. They know exactly what war is. Probably better than you do.
When they're adults, these kids will be able to look back and use this experience to make an informed decision on whether or not to fight in whatever conflict their country gets into. Sweden's next generation of decision makers will be better equipped because of the presence of these kid's experience.
Not quite. You're making the fundamental mistake of attributing the suffering to war. War comes about from a refusal to settle disagreements amicably. That almost never happens except when what one side is arguing for is considered to be worse than war by the other side. The refugees fleeing ISIS aren't at war. But I'll bet every one of them wishes the world would go to war for their sake.
This is the problem I have with the current crowdfunding options like Kickstarter. All the risks of providing venture capital, none of the benefits. They're being pitched as if you're pre-buying a product the company will make once it receives enough funding. But really what you're doing is providing them venture capital. Normally when you provide venture capital, you get partial ownership of the company. (Not all kickstarters work this way - e.g. artists who agree to draw pictures for funding. But as you point out, the companies pitching hardware do.)
I'd really like to see a crowdfunding site which takes venture capital out of the realm of multi-millionaires, and puts it within reach of the common person. People complain that the rich just keep getting richer. Well, judiciously investing venture capital is one of the ways they do that. The nature of the business is that startup companies aren't gonna waste their time on you waving around your $20 investment, while someone with a $2 million bankroll will be wined and dined. Crowdfunding could really change this IMHO. Startups may not care about your $20 investment, but a hundred thousand people wanting to invest $20 each and they'll be interested. At least it'll be a helluva lot more productive than getting low- and middle-income people to play the lottery. (The low- to middle-income folks currently unable to provide venture capital are frequently the customers of the products it produces. So they should on average pick good product ideas, making it positive sum, whereas lotteries are zero or negative sum.)
Can we get off the "Company X is copying company Y" fanboy bandwagon? There are only so many ways you can design a housing for a flat rectangular screen which needs to fit comfortably in your pocket. The "metal band around the edges" look for example originates not with Apple, but with the early Sony Clies (though it was a plastic band made to look like it was metal).
The problem isn't companies copying. The problem is fanboys trying to claim their favorite company "owns" simple design elements like rounded corners, metal bands, and lines. You don't see car racing enthusiasts trying to claim a certain manufacturer or driver owns the concept of racing stripes painted on a car.
Because in my state, the wording means their recording is legal but mine is not. So that makes me think people should not rely on logic for legal matters.
Are you sure? 12 states have laws requiring both (all) parties consent to a recording. This means party A agrees the conversation can be recorded, and party B agrees the conversation can be recorded. The requirement of mutual consent would seem to exclude your interpretation. i.e. Their notice is not just getting your consent to have the conversation recorded (just hang up if you don't approve), but also their announcement that they are consenting to have the conversation recorded.
The remaining states, recording is legal if one party consents. So you can record it if you want regardless of what the other party says.
(Your interpretation also violates reciprocity and consideration, making me think a recording under those terms would be thrown out in court.)
Windows RT was simply Microsoft's hedge in the x86/ARM battle. If ARM had utterly dominated Intel in the low-power processor market and the world moved away from Wintel, then RT would've been Microsoft's safety net. If that had happened and Microsoft hadn't made RT, all the armchair quarterbacks currently criticizing Microsoft for making RT would've been criticizing them for not making RT and missing the ARM boat. RT didn't need to succeed. It just needed to be there.
The tests are designed to (or ideally should) measure how well you've learned material people in charge of education have decided is important for you to know to further your future career and contribution to society. Whether you learn the material through genetic predisposition or by using sheer willpower to study is irrelevant. All that matters is whether you know the material or not.
If you're arguing that the tests cover material not relevant to children's future success, then that's something you have to take up with the people making the tests. Or we as a society have to re-evaluate what should be incorporated into compulsory education. The tests in and of themselves are not the problem. They're just a way of collecting data on how the education system is performing (in fact you could theoretically replace them with random sampling, but I suspect that would just lead to scandals of teachers and administrators rigging their samples).
I'd say it's the other way around. Nothing is happening because they get sued. All the time. Every time there's a serious accident involving injury or death, the automaker gets sued. Doesn't matter if something about the car contributed to the accident or not, they're the ones with the deep pockets so the lawyers sue them as a matter of course. Defending against these suits costs enough that in many cases it's cheaper for them to just settle rather than really look into the matter and fight it.
Except for extreme cases, there's too much of this noise for lawsuits to be an effective means of signaling genuine problems with the vehicles to the automakers. In particular, serious problems which are extremely low frequency events like people hacking into vehicles' computer systems do not generate enough signal to cut through the noise. For a similar case, look at the recent GM recall of ignition switches. It seems to have stemmed from a real design problem, but with only a dozen or so injuries or deaths caused per year, the signal was too infrequent to rise above the statistical noise until many years had passed. When you're sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of accidents each year blaming faulty vehicle design, how do you sift out a dozen cases which are tied to a single genuine problem?
2700 TWh * $0.15/kWh = $400 billion worth of electricity each year generated by nuclear. 2700 TWh * $0.09/kWh = $243 billion net benefit each year from nuclear. Even if you factor in the once-a-decade multi-billion dollar accident, the benefit from nuclear exceeds the harm by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The cost of the accidents are literally a drop in the bucket.
Slashdot Mirror
On a volumetric basis, a 4 TB HDD contains as much info as a 80 BDs at 50 GB per disc. So a HDD is a more compact storage form factor.
Blu-ray, like other WORM (write-once read-many) storage devices, fills a particular niche - long-term archival and storage of static data. It doesn't really fit Facebook's particular use case (dynamic data), unless they're planning to use it as an excuse not to have to delete user data upon request.
The four Galilean moons around Jupiter are easily visible with binoculars. Heck if you have good eyesight and dark skies, you can sometimes barely make out Ganymede or Callisto at maximum separation with the naked eye. Max separation is about 10 arc-minutes, while 20/20 vision is the ability to distinguish a 1 arc-minute separation. The 4.5-5.5 magnitude is the bigger problem. I'd say tracking the movement of Jupiter's moons from night to night is probably the best fun "project" for a kid just getting into astronomy. It really drives home the point that these things move.
I don't know why you'd think ideal viewing times are rare. They're the same as for anything else in the sky other than the sun. Say you define "ideal" viewing as a 150 degree swath of sky (anything more than 15 degrees above the horizon). Figure the kid can view from an hour after sunset til midnight, so an average 5 hours (less in the summer, more in winter). The sky rotates 15 degrees per hour, so that's an additional 75 degrees of visibility. So on any given evening, 225 degrees of the sky will fall under "ideal" viewing conditions for part of the night. i.e. On average Jupiter and Saturn can be seen 62.5% of evenings. (The fact that they move doesn't change the percentage of time they're in any given part of the sky. It just means their visibility does not map to the same months every year.)
You don't need a tracking mount to see bands on Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. I saw those things just fine with a non-tracking 60mm refractor from K-mart. It's only a problem showing kids these things because the planet will cross outside the field of view within 20-30 seconds.* That's not much time to locate the planet, then get the kid in position to look through the eyepiece to see. The tracking mount makes it a lot easier, but is not necessary. (*The sky rotates at 15 deg/hr, or 15 arc-seconds per second. Jupiter is about 30-50 arc-seconds across, so it'll move a full diameter every 2-3 seconds. At a decent magnifcation, Jupiter will span about 10% of your field of view, so it'll move from edge to edge in 20-30 sec.)
I agree with the recommendation for binoculars. But realistically, you're going to use binoculars handheld most of the time, with the kid locating objects in the sky on his/her own. Using them with a tripod is more difficult and complicated than using a scope with a tripod.
You have to look straight through binoculars, so you have to view them with your head pointed up (sometimes even straight up). That means the tripod needs to hold them higher than your head. Even if you're seated, that's a really tall tripod. It also complicates switching off viewing to your kid. You take a seat in front of the tripod and adjust the binoculars. Then the kid gets in the seat and... the binoculars are too high. So you lower them, and get back in the seat to reposition them and... now it's too low for you.
Most telescopes come with a 90 degree inverting mirror/prism, which vastly simplifies viewing by allowing you to iew through the scope with your head pointed down. You just position the scope low enough for the child to view through it, then you just stoop lower so you can look through it to position it. Because you're viewing down instead of up, stooping lower doesn't require you to angle you head further (or impossibly) back.
The only thing wrong with it is that the self-anointed control-freak editors who consider Wikipedia their personal property can't possibly know or research information to that level of detail. They will have to (gasp!) rely on others to provide it. And they'll have to make objective editorial decisions to determine which articles are likely fake or likely true, instead of just flying by the seat of their pants and editing/deleting based on their personal opinion.
I'm shopping for a house right now. If Wikipedia had basic information about individual homeowners associations, townhouse developments, and condo complexes - like when it was built, who provides Internet service and what speeds you should expect, what type of and how many community facilities it has (pool, tennis courts, etc), nearby supermarkets and other resources - that would be incredibly useful information. I'm finding this sort of stuff is rarely mentioned in the housing listings, most developments and complexes don't have a website which states these things, and realtors aren't too fond of digging up this info for you if you're still in the stage of eliminating houses that don't fit your needs.
But as I said, that would require the control-freaks on Wikipedia to let the people who live there write the wiki article, and they just won't stand for giving up control like that. That's the slippery slope they're afraid of.
To form an organ, cells need to multiply, grow, and specialize, then stop multiplying at some point except as needed to maintain the organ.
Cancer is what you get when they lose the "stop multiplying" instruction.
Companies would love to give you a $100 per diem for meals. As you point out, in addition to being easier for the employee, it saves them money.
The reason they require you to itemize receipts is because if they're ever audited by the IRS, they need to be able to produce the receipts to prove those were real incurred business expenses. Not imaginary numbers made up to pad the expenses and scam the IRS out of tax revenue.
We also tried it the laid back way - we'll give you a $100 per diem, you don't have to itemize, just collect all your receipts and hand them in after your trip. The accountant who was going to double-check your numbers anyway will just do the itemizing. Net result was that employees forgot to save their receipts or "lost" them. They'd already been paid $100 for the meals, so there was no incentive for them to be careful with the receipts. So back we went to having the employee itemize if they wanted reimbursement.
That's all well and good. But without advertising, YouTube wouldn't exist. At least not in the form it currently does. Someone ha to pay for all that video storage and bandwidth. Same with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, even slashdot. Advertising provides market fluidity, where the tiniest action by a visitor (a click or even pausing on a page to read it) can be translated directly into additional revenue to the site for providing content visitors find "interesting." Maybe there's a better way to provide this fluidity than ads - if you find it you'll probably become the next dot-com billionaire. But ignorance of this beneficial side of ads does not negate their usefulness.
On the receiving end, as much as I dislike ads, I do acknowledge that they free me up to try out different sites at no cost. With a subscription model, I'd have to pay to subscribe to a site to try it out (or get in on a limited-time free trial, which would probably involve me giving the site my mailing address and phone number which they could sell to marketers - probably worse than seeing ads online). There's also a small informational benefit to ads. I found that out when I got rid of my TV. A year later I was hanging out with some friends and we decided to go see a movie. That's when I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and even when I was told the titles I couldn't classify them into categories I might find interesting (sci-fi, action, etc). My friends had to take the time to give me a 10-second summary of each movie before I could tell them if I was voting yea or nay on it.
I think your gripe is more about artificially limiting the FAQs so they can't include pictures. Except for linear 3D guides (e.g. jumping puzzles), video is also a terrible format for guides. Video is a time-dependent format, whereas a written page with pictures allows you to quickly skim forward and back to find the section you want. It's the same reason you can quickly browse a directory full of unnamed pictures to get an idea of what's there, but you can't do the same for a directory full of MP3s. The pictures are time-independent and you can quickly scan through them. MP3s (and video) are time-dependent, and you have to sit there and listen/watch them at something close to real-time to figure out what the content is.
You can thwart this if your phone is rooted. At first I used an app which blocked apps from accessing certain features and data I didn't want them to see, like my location. But then they started to make apps crash when they were blocked this way.
I'm currently using xprivacy. It generates fake data for things like location, networks, and sensors. If the app insists on getting my location and I don't give it that permission, it still gets a location. But that location is a random place in the world. Same for networks and sensor data - it'll get fake SSIDs if I don't give it network access, fake gyroscope readings if I don't give it permission to access the gyros.
Be forewarned, xprivacy is a PITA to install (uses the xposed framework) and set up (newer versions query you when an app makes a request, so you don't have to set everything blind). But after a few weeks of pain getting everything in place, it's been smooth sailing.
That analogy doesn't work. For it to work, lots of other people have to have put up signs pointing to you saying "Small cock." Google just provides a list saying who has the most such signs pointed at them. i.e. Google is just providing a numerically sorted statement of fact, not making up new signs. Removing an entry from Google doesn't change the fact that all those other such pointers out there in the web continue to exist and continue to say you have a small penis. Indeed, once you've used Google for a while to find copyrighted content, you quickly learn which sites consistently rank high on Google, and are best for finding such files (e.g. animesuki.com for unlicensed current anime scanlations). After a while you just bookmark them directly so you can skip Google.
Anyhow, the way the DMCA is worded, Google has to remove these links or face liability for being an accessory to copyright infringement. So it's a moot point. If you have a problem with the morality of it and want to change it, you need to change the DMCA.
Aluminum does not have a fatigue limit. That is, no matter how beefy you make an aluminum part, after enough cyclic stresses it will suffer fatigue failure. This is why airframes are retired after about 100,000 pressurization cycles - to avoid the fate which befell the de Havilland Comet.
Other materials like steel or titanium can be designed so it can withstand an infinite number of stress cycles and not fatigue. Given the nature of the mission and power source (multi-year if not multi-decade operation on another planet with no hope of human intervention if something should go wrong), they really should have allocated sufficient weight budget for non-aluminum wheels. This is basic materials science that every undergrad mechanical engineer learns. I was very surprised when I heard they were going with thin aluminum wheels on this rover.
Solar thermal is terrible if you try to use it to make electricity. The steam turbine you need for that conversion is typically only about 33% efficient.
However, if your desired form of energy is heat, solar thermal is one of the most cost-effective energy sources. Put a small, black water tank in your backyard (or in a greenhouse if it's cold outside) and use it to feed your hot water heater, and the savings in your water heating bill will usually pay for the tank in 2-3 years.
Hawks and other raptors kill lots of birds too. So if you really want to stop the carnage, you should kill them too.
Not quite. If you RTFA, the BND made the recordings and dutifully transcribed the calls. They got passed along to higher-ups, who once they realized who was talking ordered the transcripts be destroyed. The person believed to be a double-agent for the U.S. was responsible for destroying the transcripts, and didn't. So no, he's not responsible for making the call recording - that falls squarely in the BND's lap. He just didn't follow through on the BND's good faith effort not to spy on the U.S. (or to cover up their spying on the U.S. depending on how you want to spin it).
It does raise questions about the allegations that he's a U.S. agent though. Why would he be so keen to keep a transcript of a call between Clinton and Kofi Anon to send back to the U.S., knowing full well that the U.S. would already know everything about that call? The only explanations I can think of are that he wasn't a double-agent as Germany is claiming (or at least not a double-agent for the U.S.), or that he was a U.S. double-agent and included that transcript to implicate Germany in case the story ever blew (which would've been remarkably far-sighted).
Not to mention it would've given Barbra Streisand the legal ammo to defeat the Streisand effect. I expect Google and Bing will make sure this doesn't get out of hand, before they're forced to devote more resources to policing their satellite/aerial photo maps than they currently are abiding by the EU's right to be forgotten law.
Here's what I got when I gave it every pic in my photo library.
But seriously, I've seen the same technique used to discredit a movie of a UFO shot on 8 mm film. If you just watch the movie, you see an elliptical blob flying. Someone scanned the blob from each frame, aligned them, and averaged them. The increased contrast (bit-depth and resolution basically) let you see that the elliptical blob was more a diagonal prism, and that there were dark features underneath it. Basically it was a Cessna with the sun reflecting off the top of the wing.
Like that's ever gonna work. /sarcasm
Hate to break it to you, but nearly everyone in any job doesn't respect anyone who doesn't do the same job. The problem isn't specific to any one profession. The problem is being hyper-aware of the challenges in the job you do, and ignorant of the challenges in the jobs you don't do. So you end up overestimating the difficulty of your job (relative to people who don't do your job), and underestimating the difficulty of other people's jobs.
I've done a lot of different jobs over 3 decades (engineering, programming, technical writing, accounting, IT, property management, business management, and business owner). Every one of them had their share of trials, challenges, and complexities I didn't expect coming into them as an outsider (except engineering, since that's what I studied in college). It's easy to think the engineer's, designer's, IT's, salesman's, HR's, accountant's, management's, or CEO's job is oh so easy if you've never done it. But that's usually a conclusion based on ignorance rather than fact. I'd actually say a small business owner or a business manager in a medium-sized company is most likely to have the most neutral viewpoint of job difficulty, because they're constantly getting progress and problem reports from people doing all sorts of different things within the company.
Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their monopoly position to slow down upgrades (both fiber and copper) as a cost-cutting measure. If there were a competitor in the market offering DSL/FO/cable service and Verizon dragged their feet on upgrading to fiber or neglecting to maintain their copper, they would hemorrhage customers and lose a lot of money. But in most areas they have a (government-granted) monopoly. They can take their sweet time upgrading to fiber, and there's nothing their customers can do about it. They can let areas with older copper lines rot, and there's nothing their customers can do about it.
Case in point, the city I live in was one of the first which contracted for Verizon to provide FIOS. They rolled it out to half the city, then got into some sort of disagreement with the city and stopped. If there had been a competing cable/fiber service, they would've had a huge incentive to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible and get back to work. But they were the only game in town so they dragged it out. For six years, the houses two blocks down the street had FIOS and I didn't. Then after an election, the city council changed, Verizon got what they wanted, and resumed rolling out FIOS.
Meanwhile, the city I work in has Verizon DSL as the only provider of business Internet. Cable companies provide cable internet to residences, but apparently they're prohibited from providing it to business. So again, Verizon is the only game in town. They have absolutely refused to upgrade or maintain their copper lines. The fastest DSL speed we can get is 3 Mbps down / 768 kbps up. For this "privilege" we pay $100/mo. Most of the phone lines are of such poor quality they can't even get you that speed, and 1.5/512 or 1.5/256 is the best they can do ($50/mo). The service is such a poor value that most companies in the area just get the lowest-tier 1.0/128 service for $40/mo to minimize how much they have to pay for any Internet. Others have signed on to cellular companies' 4G data services and willingly pay per GB for overages - because it beats having to get reamed in the rear by Verizon.
Both are evil.
About 13% of Americans are immigrants, many from war-ravaged countrires. They know exactly what war is. Probably better than you do.
Not quite. You're making the fundamental mistake of attributing the suffering to war. War comes about from a refusal to settle disagreements amicably. That almost never happens except when what one side is arguing for is considered to be worse than war by the other side. The refugees fleeing ISIS aren't at war. But I'll bet every one of them wishes the world would go to war for their sake.
This is the problem I have with the current crowdfunding options like Kickstarter. All the risks of providing venture capital, none of the benefits. They're being pitched as if you're pre-buying a product the company will make once it receives enough funding. But really what you're doing is providing them venture capital. Normally when you provide venture capital, you get partial ownership of the company. (Not all kickstarters work this way - e.g. artists who agree to draw pictures for funding. But as you point out, the companies pitching hardware do.)
I'd really like to see a crowdfunding site which takes venture capital out of the realm of multi-millionaires, and puts it within reach of the common person. People complain that the rich just keep getting richer. Well, judiciously investing venture capital is one of the ways they do that. The nature of the business is that startup companies aren't gonna waste their time on you waving around your $20 investment, while someone with a $2 million bankroll will be wined and dined. Crowdfunding could really change this IMHO. Startups may not care about your $20 investment, but a hundred thousand people wanting to invest $20 each and they'll be interested. At least it'll be a helluva lot more productive than getting low- and middle-income people to play the lottery. (The low- to middle-income folks currently unable to provide venture capital are frequently the customers of the products it produces. So they should on average pick good product ideas, making it positive sum, whereas lotteries are zero or negative sum.)
And the leaked iPhone 6 pics look like the HTC One.
Can we get off the "Company X is copying company Y" fanboy bandwagon? There are only so many ways you can design a housing for a flat rectangular screen which needs to fit comfortably in your pocket. The "metal band around the edges" look for example originates not with Apple, but with the early Sony Clies (though it was a plastic band made to look like it was metal).
The problem isn't companies copying. The problem is fanboys trying to claim their favorite company "owns" simple design elements like rounded corners, metal bands, and lines. You don't see car racing enthusiasts trying to claim a certain manufacturer or driver owns the concept of racing stripes painted on a car.
Are you sure? 12 states have laws requiring both (all) parties consent to a recording. This means party A agrees the conversation can be recorded, and party B agrees the conversation can be recorded. The requirement of mutual consent would seem to exclude your interpretation. i.e. Their notice is not just getting your consent to have the conversation recorded (just hang up if you don't approve), but also their announcement that they are consenting to have the conversation recorded.
The remaining states, recording is legal if one party consents. So you can record it if you want regardless of what the other party says.
(Your interpretation also violates reciprocity and consideration, making me think a recording under those terms would be thrown out in court.)
Windows RT was simply Microsoft's hedge in the x86/ARM battle. If ARM had utterly dominated Intel in the low-power processor market and the world moved away from Wintel, then RT would've been Microsoft's safety net. If that had happened and Microsoft hadn't made RT, all the armchair quarterbacks currently criticizing Microsoft for making RT would've been criticizing them for not making RT and missing the ARM boat. RT didn't need to succeed. It just needed to be there.
The tests are designed to (or ideally should) measure how well you've learned material people in charge of education have decided is important for you to know to further your future career and contribution to society. Whether you learn the material through genetic predisposition or by using sheer willpower to study is irrelevant. All that matters is whether you know the material or not.
If you're arguing that the tests cover material not relevant to children's future success, then that's something you have to take up with the people making the tests. Or we as a society have to re-evaluate what should be incorporated into compulsory education. The tests in and of themselves are not the problem. They're just a way of collecting data on how the education system is performing (in fact you could theoretically replace them with random sampling, but I suspect that would just lead to scandals of teachers and administrators rigging their samples).
I'd say it's the other way around. Nothing is happening because they get sued. All the time. Every time there's a serious accident involving injury or death, the automaker gets sued. Doesn't matter if something about the car contributed to the accident or not, they're the ones with the deep pockets so the lawyers sue them as a matter of course. Defending against these suits costs enough that in many cases it's cheaper for them to just settle rather than really look into the matter and fight it.
Except for extreme cases, there's too much of this noise for lawsuits to be an effective means of signaling genuine problems with the vehicles to the automakers. In particular, serious problems which are extremely low frequency events like people hacking into vehicles' computer systems do not generate enough signal to cut through the noise. For a similar case, look at the recent GM recall of ignition switches. It seems to have stemmed from a real design problem, but with only a dozen or so injuries or deaths caused per year, the signal was too infrequent to rise above the statistical noise until many years had passed. When you're sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of accidents each year blaming faulty vehicle design, how do you sift out a dozen cases which are tied to a single genuine problem?
Nuclear currently generates about 2700 TWh/yr of elecricity. Electricity prices variy around the world but $0.15/kWh is probably a good average figure. Levelized cost of nuclear production ranges from $0.04/kWh to $012/kWh with a median of $0.06/kWh. So the net benefit of nuclear is $0.15 - $0.06 = $0.09/kWh
2700 TWh * $0.15/kWh = $400 billion worth of electricity each year generated by nuclear. 2700 TWh * $0.09/kWh = $243 billion net benefit each year from nuclear. Even if you factor in the once-a-decade multi-billion dollar accident, the benefit from nuclear exceeds the harm by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The cost of the accidents are literally a drop in the bucket.