Per unit of power generated, wind and solar are much more dangerous than nuclear even if you factor in the meltdowns. What's going on is the same reason some people are afraid of flying. When a plane crashes it gets reported all over the world, with hours of coverage and video and pictures.. Meanwhile, most car crashes go unreported (did you know wind turbines killed more people in 2011 than Fukushima?). Thus creating the misperception that cars are safer, even though statistically planes are far safer.
Making more money in and of itself isn't a problem. Money is just a representation of productivity. The more productive you are for a given cost (relative to your competitors), the more money you'll make. By that token, it's in society's best interest for everyone to try to make as much money as they can. i.e. It's good to want to make more money (in a productive manner - scamming or skimming doesn't contribute any productivity). Whether you do so with a hobby or a job is irrelevant - the fact that you're making money means you're doing something productive which someone else values and is willing to pay for. (I think the AC was trying to distinguish between non-productive "hobbies" and productive "work". But what distinguishes those is productivity, not how well the employees are compensated.)
The problem comes about with how that money is distributed within a company. The owners/high-level executives have too much control over the process of wage/bonus distribution. It's like passing around a bag with money (profits), and the owners/executives get to pull as much out as they want first. Not enough is left over by the time you get to bonuses and salary increases for regular employees.
I don't know a good solution to this problem. It's one of the reasons I'm not opposed to unions despite my fiscally conservative beliefs (as long you don't make the union a monopoly, which just creates different problems). The taboo against telling others how much you make helps contribute to it though (not all countries have this taboo). Maybe if you required companies to post annual salary/bonus stats with the names redacted out? That would give individual employees a better idea where they stand, and if they should be demanding higher wages because they know they're one of the better employees but they see they're near the bottom of the pay scale. Giving regular employees stock options helps too, though I always felt the rules regarding exercising those options and what happens when you leave the company were too complex and arbitrary.
I always analyzed bonus distribution for my employees as a pie chart, so I could see which fraction of bonuses were going to managers, salaried employees, hourly employees, etc. The idea was to try to make sure the ratios of the bonuses in the pie chart were pretty close to the ratio of wages (which is also a general measure of productivity). That way it'd be pretty obvious if I or the managers were taking too much money out of the bag first, and grabbing a disproportionate share of the bonuses. (Actually I tried to bias it the other way - with non-managers getting a greater share of the bonus than the managers, who were already pretty well-paid.)
Unless you are literally playing in a sick persons bodily fluids, the risk is almost 0
As I said last time this topic came up, the fear is not that Ebola will spread by people playing in each others' bodily fluids. The fear is that it'll spread beyond a containment zone in Africa, then mutate into a form which can be spread through the air. That's what happens to the various strains of flu. It usually starts off in a form which jumps from animals to man via direct contact. That limits it to farmers and people who work directly with animals (e.g. butchers, cooks in restaurants). But then mutates into a form which spreads easily via the air, which is when it becomes a pandemic.
Of course Ebola is very different from the flu. It may be very difficult or impossible for Ebola to mutate into a form which can survive long enough in water droplets that sick people cough/sneeze into the air. But we don't know that. Given how deadly the disease is (50%-90% fatality rate, vs about 15% for the Spanish Flu that killed more people than WWI), it's a stupid assumption to make. That's why the international health agencies are assuming the worst-case and handling it as if it was going to mutate into something communicable via the air.
If they'd put the diesel generators (and fuel) in different places, instead of all in a row in the same basement, the four reactors which melted down at Fukushima could've been shut down in a controlled manner despite some of the generators being swamped. Y'know, like the fifth operating reactor at Fukushima which had their diesel generators and fuel in a different location that was shut down safely. Putting redundant backup systems all in the same location just makes them vulnerable to simultaneously failing due to a single cause.
In fact, Samsung internationally hasn't been on the winning side - they've instead been stirring up shitstorms of controversy. Because what patents Samsung does assert are ones under FRAND, and it's lead to many a jurisdiction doing inquiries about asserting FRAND patents in this fashion, including the EU and Korea.
That's actually the bigger problem with everything that's been going on that supersedes Apple and Samsung. The total market value of a FRAND patent must exceed the total market value of a non-FRAND patent. The FRAND patent may have lower royalties per device, but it makes up in volume what it lacks in price. If the total value of a FRAND patent is less than a non-FRAND patent, then you've just destroyed all incentive for anyone to submit their patents under FRAND. Why in the world would anyone decrease the value of their patent by submitting it under FRAND?
Unfortunately this is precisely what was happening with Samsung losing because their patents were FRAND. The courts were getting lost in arguments over minutia and losing sight of this bigger picture. FRAND patents were being devalued relative to regular patents. The difference in pricing Apple was asking for (a few cents per device for FRAND, vs $15-$20 per device for regular patents) would've required FRAND be applicable to hundreds of times more devices than a regular patent before they'd be worth it. In other words, almost never worth it - a single licensing deal with a manufacturer with more than about 0.3% market share would've guaranteed keeping the patent non-FRAND was more profitable. It was setting us on course for a tech world where everything was proprietary and non-interoperable. That they've decided to drop all litigation before more damage was done is great news.
The Panama Canal - by virtue of being the only alternative to a trip around the tip of South America - can charge passage fees just less than the cost of a trip around South America. Consequently they make a huge profit margin off of operating it. A quick google search says it brings in about $2 billion/yr, but only costs about $600 million/yr to operate. So they've got a massive 233% profit margin.
Add a second canal, and suddenly they're not competing with a trip around South America. They're competing with each other. Unless they collude together to fix the prices so that they're essentially the same (divide traffic 50/50, which might actually be a good thing since I hear wait times at the Panama Canal can be a week or more), the price is going to drop to slightly higher than what it costs them to operate the more expensive canal. That is the nature of competition. e.g. If the profit margin drops to a still-high 50%, profit from the current level of traffic would be just $300m/yr, and it'll take them 167 years to recoup the $50b construction cost even if they were able to borrow that $50b interest-free. Since the Panama Canal is essentially paid for, the Nicaraguan canal would probably have higher costs and thus slimmer margins, and will likely take centuries to pay for its construction.
A Nicaraguan canal would have the advantage of allowing passage of larger-than-Panamax ships (ships designed so their width barely fits through the Panama Canal). But again, if they try to charge significantly more for such ships, operators will simply continue building Panamax ships. Any surcharge they add on has to be less than the money operators would save by using larger-than-Panamax ships. (Significantly more since such ships would have to be built in the first place.)
It'll be great for the rest of the world - cheaper transport costs, more capacity, faster travel. But could end up tanking both the Nicaraguan and Panamanian economies.
Why is everyone assuming this is an all-or-nothing proposition and picking the worst possible cases as a counterargument? I don't decide a spoon is useless because it does a terrible job at cutting steak. You should evaluate this idea based on whether it can improve education if applied judiciously, not focus on the cases where it won't help or could even hurt.
Being able to mix and match partial-semester courses doesn't mean every course needs to be mix and match. Certainly required sequential core subjects like calculus will be long enough that they don't need to be broken up. It was already 2 semesters when I went to undergrad, and no you weren't allowed to take Calc 2 before Calc 1 (unless you passed the AP exam, in which case you were allowed to skip Calc 1). But there were certain short topics in linear algebra I would've loved to recap (I was out for almost 3 weeks with the flu when I took the course in undergrad).
There is also no rule or law of physics says that an educational topic must be exactly one semester. Those of you who only went to undergrad may not see it because you're still mostly taking courses there which are deep enough to warrant a full semester or two. But during grad school, I've taken many courses which would've been better as half or 3/4 of a semester, but which had to be filled out with other stuff to make it fit within the semester system. One course I took covered the new material relevant to my thesis in about a month, then the remainder was an easy ride on cruise control because I had already learned it as part of another course in undergrad. I've even sat in a few classes for few weeks as a listener (i.e. I didn't get credits for it) because that was the only way to learn the part of the course material I needed without over-committing my time by taking the full course.
If you look specifically at the cases where this idea would help, I think it has a lot of merit.
Just test it with a Nexus 5. The ones you buy from Google are unlocked and there's only one version which works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint (technically the hardware is capable of mostly working on Verizon, except Verizon blacklists it). Just pop in a SIM card for the different carriers and test away.
Autonomy was audited by Deloitte. HP hired KPMG (who subcontracted Ernst & Young) to double-check Deloitte's audit. Those are three of the four biggest accounting firms in the world. All gave the green flag.
That's a nice sentiment, except this has nothing to do with Tech/IT workers. Most white collar jobs are exempt from the FLSA's overtime protections. Generally, salaried professionals and managers are exempt; in that respect Tech/IT workers are no different from other salaried professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, musicians. Salaried non-commissioned salespeople are one of the few white collar jobs which are non-exempt, and that's where Linkedin got in trouble - they weren't keep track of their overtime hours for some of their salespeople.
Everyone developing FOSS wants to do all the fun programming stuff. But no one wants to do the boring hard work of documentation, UI polishing, promotion/marketing, etc. That's why FOSS tends to suck in those areas compared to the commercial stuff (where they actually pay technical writers, designers, marketers, etc.)
Let me present an alternative hypothesis. There are plenty of technical writers, designers, and marketers out there interested in and using FOSS. They'd probably be more than happy to contribute to documentation, UI polish, and promotion just as programmers are happy to contribute to development. The problem is the FOSS developers won't talk to these guys, brushing them off with "if it's that important to you, figure it out yourself noob!"
The problem is a lack of respect for those who aren't programmers, including users. Commercial software developers respect users because the users are the ones who ultimately pay for the commercial developers' paycheck. One of the unintentional side-effects of the unpaid FOSS philosophy is the lack of a need to respect the users. Whether or not your FOSS project lives or dies depends on how many programmers contribute to it, not on how many users use it.
Services that people need in order to live - energy, water, medical - shouldn't be on the free market. All that stuff should be publicly owned and the goal shouldn't to be to make money but to provide critical services to the people for the cheapest amount possible.
Services that people need in order to live should start off on the free market. Once it becomes clear which method of providing the service is most efficient, then it should be transitioned to a publicly-owned service. e.g. What's the best way to provide fresh water? Wells? Desalination? Buy it from your neighbors and pipe/truck it in? The answer to that isn't at all clear and is constantly changing, so you need market forces to indicate to you the best (cheapest) method of acquiring fresh water. Distribution OTOH tends to be more static - there aren't any up and coming new ways to send water through pipes. So laying down and maintaining pipes is more amenable to a public service.
GSM is a good example of the trouble you can get yourself into if the government prematurely decides something should not be subject to market forces. The EU mandated all wireless phone carriers adhere to GSM. The U.S. did not. Consequently a different method of transmitting phone calls and data - CDMA - was also tried in the U.S. CDMA turned out to be superior to the TDMA used in GSM, particularly when it came to data services (TDMA divides bandwidth equally between users, even if they aren't using the bandwidth; CDMA bandwidth effectively gets allocated as needed as a side-effect of how the technology works). And eventually CDMA was incorporated into the GSM standard (most HSPA and HSDPA implementations use wideband CDMA - yes your GSM phone uses CDMA). If the U.S. had gone along with the EU and required GSM, data services would've been several years behind where they are now, and we'd probably still be stuck at around 1 Mbps cellular data speeds.
The distinction needs to be based on the size of the technological solution space and the uncertainty over the best solution - factors which are inherent to the technology required to provide a service. Not based on whether or not those services are necessary for life - a factor completely independent of the technology needed to provide the service. Once you realize this, you realize that other things not necessary for life should probably be publicly owned - e.g. cable TV lines. When cable TV first began, it wasn't at all obvious what was the best way to distribute high-bandwidth content to houses. But now it's pretty clear that fiber to the home is the end-game. So the government should be installing fiber to each home, then allowing multiple cable TV vendors to compete selling service over that fiber.
The money for the reactor's decommissioning comes from surcharges to electrical rates collected while the plant was in operation. This money was earmarked specifically for reactor decommissioning costs, and placed into a trust fund which currently contains about $2.7 billion (the $4.4 billion cost will be accrued over several decades, so interest on the $2.7 billion makes them more equal than the raw numbers suggest). That there is sufficient money despite the reactor shutting down only halfway through its expected lifetime means there's a huge margin for error in these nuclear decommissioning funds. Edison has said if there's any money left over, it'll be refunded to rate payers.
Logan -> Blue line -> Orange or Green Line -> Red line -> Kendall/MIT
How hard is that?
Three transfers on the T (there's also a bus you have to take from the Logan T station to your airline terminal) is hardly ideal when you're hauling around luggage with kids in tow and on a schedule. When I was traveling by myself with a single suitcase I'd do the three transfers. But outside that case, a taxi is just easier and quicker.
More succinctly, an effective free market requires participants to be rational and informed. Product behaviors like keeping a purchase window up for 15 minutes without notifying the customer deliberately try to mislead and misinform the public. That's the sort of thing the FTC is there to crack down on.
I don't see any problem with a pop-up after a purchase asking if you wish to continue to make purchases for 15 min without having to re-authorize. But to silently make it the default behavior is pretty obviously deceptive. I'd even call it a scam.
The other half is that some carriers (I'm looking at you Verizon) won't activate a phone they didn't sell, even though it's capable of operating on their network. What good is an unlocked phone if no other carriers are willing to activate it? To be effective, this needs a partner law requiring carriers to activate phones which can operate on their network, regardless of where the customer bought it.
Another benefit this would have is that manufacturers would start selling phones directly instead of only through the carriers. The carriers are already busy trying thwart the unlock requirement - most of the new carrier-branded phones I'm seeing support only the frequencies that carrier uses. Even if you could unlock it, it won't work on another carrier (or will work with degraded capability). But if the manufacturers began selling phones directly, it would be in their best interests to sell a single phone model which supported all carrier frequencies in that country. With another bonus being that it'll work in most of the rest of the world as well.
The meters on traditional cabs may sometimes be tinkered with, but that's illegal, and in the vast majority of cases they're accurate and legally binding. Whereas with the new wave of rideshare apps there's no indication of what charges you're reacking up until you arrive.
There's another way to tinker with meters besides hacking them - drive a different route. My first taxi ride from Boston Logan to MIT took what seemed like an unusually winding route through downtown Boston. A year later when I got a car and began driving around the city myself, I realized I'd been taken for a ride, literally. I mentioned this to a fellow student at my lab, and he remarked that it had taken him 3 years to figure out what the actual cost of a cab from his apartment to the airport was, because every time he'd be taken on a different, circuitous route to rack up extra miles. It was 3 years until he actually got an honest driver who took him straight home.
Modern navigation software means you can get an exact distance from start point to destination before you even step into the taxi. There's no need for a meter (other than to time the ride). A lot of airport taxis already do this for longer rides - they charge based on zones, with further zones costing more. No meter needed. The only case this doesn't handle is rerouting to avoid traffic. An alternative might be a meter which prints out your GPS route so you can see that you were taken almost straight to your destination, and not in circles.
My SUV cost me around $800 a month in replacement costs. Another $200 in maintenance. I was burning through $12,000 a year in gas.
Are you sure you calculated your gas costs right? That's a helluva lot of money to be spending on gas, even for an SUV. At $4/gal, that's 3000 gallons/yr. At 14 MPG, that's 42,000 miles/yr.
The average vehicle is only driven 12,000 miles/yr, the average commute vehicle about 15,000 miles/yr. If your gas cost is accurate, your use case is just so far outside the norm that your anecdote is probably only applicable to about 0.01% of the population. (Your other vehicle costs seem absurdly high too, even if insurance is included in "replacement costs".)
I spent an average of 1000 hours a year in the car, for work, for groceries, for fun.
Consider my annual total: about $25,000 + 1000 hours of my time. For the "privilege" to sit in Chicago traffic.
Which translates into an average speed of 42 MPH, which is unusually high. You must've lived ~70 miles away from your workplace and spent most of your driving on the freeway to (1) rack up that many miles, and (2) have such a high average MPH.
I spent about $5000 a year on UberX. $100 a week
[...]
I figure I'm $20,000 ahead in vehicle costs
UberX lists their Chicago rates as $2.40 + $0.24/min + $1/mile. There is absolutely no way you're replacing your 42,000 miles/yr commute with fewer than 5000 UberX miles. At 42,000 miles/yr @ 42 MPH and 500 commutes/yr (250 workdays, 2 commutes per day), completely replacing your SUV with UberX would cost you:
I mean think about it. It's effectively a taxi service. There's no way it can be cheaper than driving your own car (unless it's an UberX carpool) because that would mean the UberX driver would be losing money. Any reduction in your commute costs now that you got rid of the SUV is because you're taking public transportation. Any solo rides you're taking on UberX are costing you more than it took you to drive your SUV.
The IRS places the standard deductible cost for mileage at $0.56/mile. That's probably a good average to use for a commute vehicle's cost per mile nationwide. UberX costs nearly 3x that.
First there were Picasa Web Albums. Last year my albums got moved to my Google+ account. Now there is a new branding coming along.. My albums will be moved to another service once again.
You can still access your albums via picasaweb.google.com (picasa.com directs to a download without any links to get you to your albums). It's much more flexible and has more options than Google+ (particularly when it comes to album management). I've just continued to use picasaweb for my albums (there's a Lightroom extension which automatically uploads my photos to it). I've just been using it as though my photos also happen to show up on Google+, not the other way around.
I suspect the "another service" they'll move it to is photos.google.com (redirects to plus.google.com/photos). They've already migrated the photo viewer in Android to a Photos app. As long as they keep the additional functionality that's on picasaweb, it won't make any difference to me what they call it nor what URL I have to use to get to it.
Selling bitcoin mining rigs is a guaranteed profit.
Mining bitcoins is a potential profit, potential loss. It all depends on what happens to the value of bitcoins. Your reasoning only works if the equipment seller is absolutely certain that bitcoins will hold their value. From what I gather, the vast majority of people don't think they will, but will happily sell equipment to those who do.
The disease is not particularly communicable. It tends to externalize a lot of bodily fluids, which is why in places with poor sanitary conditions, it spreads pretty quickly. Hospitals which handle patients like these tend not to be considered poor sanitary conditions..
The various strains of the flu which become pandemics don't start off as particularly communicable either. They usually develop in other animals (e.g. birds or pigs) and mutate into a form which can infect humans. Even then their outbreak is usually limited to farmers and people who work closely with animals because, like current Ebola strains, they can only be transmitted via direct contact.
They become a pandemic when they mutate into a form which can be transmitted via the air. Not saying this will happen with Ebola. Just saying that just because it's not particularly communicable now doesn't mean it'll stay that way. Ebola is so deadly (50%-90% mortality rate, c.f. 10%-20% for the Spanish Flu) that it inhibits its own spread - killing its victims before they have a chance to mingle with other people and spread the disease. That's also why they haven't transported a patient out of Africa yet - they tend to die before the red tape is cleared. Given the deadly nature of the disease I think it's a good idea to be able to study a case in a modern hospital facility rather than some rural village in Africa. They just need to be super careful handling the case, which it sounds like they are.
There's also something to be said for backing up the doctors who are working on this outbreak with the best possible care we can provide them should they become infected. These folks are casualties on the front lines of an inter-species war. Writing them off and treating them as pariahs if they become infected doesn't exactly bolster their confidence nor encourage other doctors to try to help contain similar outbreaks. Modern epidemiology has become a victim of its own success. People point to fizzled outbreaks like MERS, SARS, the Bird Flu, and criticize our disease control agencies of overreacting because those diseases didn't really spread that far, when the reason those diseases didn't spread that far was likely in large part due to the quick actions of those agencies. We need to be backing these people up. They need to know that should they become casualties, the world is going to provide them with the best possible care to help them recover, not treat them like lepers.
Assuming the copper filaments are cylindrical in shape, that's a surface area to volume ratio of (2pi*r*l) / (pi*r^2*l) = 2/r.
OTOH, in a copper fin configuration, the ratio of surface area to volume is (2lw) / (lwt) = 2/t.
In other words, if you use the same volume of copper and the thickness of the fin is half the diameter of the sponge cylinders, you have the exact same surface area. The thinner fins may be weaker, but since the additional fin material on the sides reinforces the structural strength, I assume that's not too big a deal. Just place thicker (stronger) fins along the outsides and you have a structure which is much more solid than the sponge.
Now consider that in passive cooling the airflow is slow enough to be laminar. The flat surface of the fins (oriented vertically) will then impose less aerodynamic resistance, leading to higher flowrate, and thus greater heat exchange.
Unless there's something else going on here (maybe the sponge filaments are wrinkled instead of smooth), or it's that much harder to make thin fins than spongy cylinders, I don't see how this could be better than a traditional fin-type heatsink.
I've also heard of, particularly gym memberships, being sent to collections because the company had constructed a labyrinth of obstacles to cancelling membership (e.g. Gold's Gym). So people would simply stop paying, and ultimately be sent to collections for non-payment of a service they didn't use. I suspect this form of collections will be on the rise, as the growing trend of writing mandatory recurring payments into contracts increases.
I accidentally discovered why more companies want to go with recurring payments instead of a one-time payment. Subscriptions can survive a credit card cancellation. I lost one of my credit cards and called the credit card company within 24 hours to cancel it. They issued me a new card with a different number and I thought all was well in the world.
A month and half later, I got the bill for my new card and there was some charge I didn't recognize for a website subscription on it. After a lot of phone calls I finally got the whole story on what had transpired. The thief had used the card on the website (whether he was in cahoots with the site, I don't know). When my card was declined because it had been canceled, the website processed it as a non-electronic transaction. You know, the old machine where they put carbon paper over your credit card and slide a pressure roller over it to make an imprint? Apparently these are not time-gated like electronic transactions since it can take an unknown number of days for the forms to be mailed back to the credit card company. A legitimate paper transaction can arrive at the credit card company after the card has been cancelled.
Normally this would've raised some flags and the credit card company would've done some investigation or notified me to verify the charge. But the website had labeled it as a charge for a subscription. Apparently the policy on subscriptions is that they're rolled over to the new card automatically. On the one hand I can understand this - if you have to cancel a card as I did, you don't want a legit magazine subscription to be suspended because you forgot to notify them of the new card number. On the other hand, a scammer or disreputable merchant can use this to charge your new card without you ever telling them your new card number.
Visa/MC and the banks have security measures in place, merchants who follow the process aren't liable for loss from fraudulent cards. Asking for ID provides no additional protection to merchants and to the extent they rely on it instead of established Visa/MC processes it can lessen security.
The info on the ID is the security measures Visa/MC have in place. They allow a merchant to enter info like address or phone number, and their computers will tell the merchant whether or not it matches the address/phone they have on file for that card. When you pay for gas with a credit card and the pump asks you to punch in your zip code, it's not collecting marketing information. It's using the zip code as a (rather flimsy) security measure to protect against someone buying gas with a lost/stolen credit card. Yeah you can ask the customer to recite their address, but any burglar who stole the card from a house or mugger who got their victim's entire wallet would know the address. A photo ID with that info, while fairly easy to fake, requires a bit more effort on the part of the thief.
Credit card security is in the dismal state it's currently in because Visa/MC/Amex have successfully transferred all the damage from fraudulent transactions onto the merchants. Since they lose practically no money to fraud, they have very little incentive to improve security. (The exorbitant interest rates are to cover the cost of credit card holders who default on their debt.) For market forces to work correctly, financial penalties for risks which fail must be linked to financial profits when those same risks succeed. What Visa et al have done is decouple the penalties from the profits (profits go to them, penalties to the merchant), leading to a situation where they are not penalized when the risks they take (poor security) fail. Consequently there is no motivation for them to improve credit card security beyond the laughable state it's currently in.
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Per unit of power generated, wind and solar are much more dangerous than nuclear even if you factor in the meltdowns. What's going on is the same reason some people are afraid of flying. When a plane crashes it gets reported all over the world, with hours of coverage and video and pictures.. Meanwhile, most car crashes go unreported (did you know wind turbines killed more people in 2011 than Fukushima?). Thus creating the misperception that cars are safer, even though statistically planes are far safer.
Making more money in and of itself isn't a problem. Money is just a representation of productivity. The more productive you are for a given cost (relative to your competitors), the more money you'll make. By that token, it's in society's best interest for everyone to try to make as much money as they can. i.e. It's good to want to make more money (in a productive manner - scamming or skimming doesn't contribute any productivity). Whether you do so with a hobby or a job is irrelevant - the fact that you're making money means you're doing something productive which someone else values and is willing to pay for. (I think the AC was trying to distinguish between non-productive "hobbies" and productive "work". But what distinguishes those is productivity, not how well the employees are compensated.)
The problem comes about with how that money is distributed within a company. The owners/high-level executives have too much control over the process of wage/bonus distribution. It's like passing around a bag with money (profits), and the owners/executives get to pull as much out as they want first. Not enough is left over by the time you get to bonuses and salary increases for regular employees.
I don't know a good solution to this problem. It's one of the reasons I'm not opposed to unions despite my fiscally conservative beliefs (as long you don't make the union a monopoly, which just creates different problems). The taboo against telling others how much you make helps contribute to it though (not all countries have this taboo). Maybe if you required companies to post annual salary/bonus stats with the names redacted out? That would give individual employees a better idea where they stand, and if they should be demanding higher wages because they know they're one of the better employees but they see they're near the bottom of the pay scale. Giving regular employees stock options helps too, though I always felt the rules regarding exercising those options and what happens when you leave the company were too complex and arbitrary.
I always analyzed bonus distribution for my employees as a pie chart, so I could see which fraction of bonuses were going to managers, salaried employees, hourly employees, etc. The idea was to try to make sure the ratios of the bonuses in the pie chart were pretty close to the ratio of wages (which is also a general measure of productivity). That way it'd be pretty obvious if I or the managers were taking too much money out of the bag first, and grabbing a disproportionate share of the bonuses. (Actually I tried to bias it the other way - with non-managers getting a greater share of the bonus than the managers, who were already pretty well-paid.)
As I said last time this topic came up, the fear is not that Ebola will spread by people playing in each others' bodily fluids. The fear is that it'll spread beyond a containment zone in Africa, then mutate into a form which can be spread through the air. That's what happens to the various strains of flu. It usually starts off in a form which jumps from animals to man via direct contact. That limits it to farmers and people who work directly with animals (e.g. butchers, cooks in restaurants). But then mutates into a form which spreads easily via the air, which is when it becomes a pandemic.
Of course Ebola is very different from the flu. It may be very difficult or impossible for Ebola to mutate into a form which can survive long enough in water droplets that sick people cough/sneeze into the air. But we don't know that. Given how deadly the disease is (50%-90% fatality rate, vs about 15% for the Spanish Flu that killed more people than WWI), it's a stupid assumption to make. That's why the international health agencies are assuming the worst-case and handling it as if it was going to mutate into something communicable via the air.
If they'd put the diesel generators (and fuel) in different places, instead of all in a row in the same basement, the four reactors which melted down at Fukushima could've been shut down in a controlled manner despite some of the generators being swamped. Y'know, like the fifth operating reactor at Fukushima which had their diesel generators and fuel in a different location that was shut down safely. Putting redundant backup systems all in the same location just makes them vulnerable to simultaneously failing due to a single cause.
That's actually the bigger problem with everything that's been going on that supersedes Apple and Samsung. The total market value of a FRAND patent must exceed the total market value of a non-FRAND patent. The FRAND patent may have lower royalties per device, but it makes up in volume what it lacks in price. If the total value of a FRAND patent is less than a non-FRAND patent, then you've just destroyed all incentive for anyone to submit their patents under FRAND. Why in the world would anyone decrease the value of their patent by submitting it under FRAND?
Unfortunately this is precisely what was happening with Samsung losing because their patents were FRAND. The courts were getting lost in arguments over minutia and losing sight of this bigger picture. FRAND patents were being devalued relative to regular patents. The difference in pricing Apple was asking for (a few cents per device for FRAND, vs $15-$20 per device for regular patents) would've required FRAND be applicable to hundreds of times more devices than a regular patent before they'd be worth it. In other words, almost never worth it - a single licensing deal with a manufacturer with more than about 0.3% market share would've guaranteed keeping the patent non-FRAND was more profitable. It was setting us on course for a tech world where everything was proprietary and non-interoperable. That they've decided to drop all litigation before more damage was done is great news.
If you've used a recent version of Photoshop, their content-aware fill often does an amazing job at automatically filling in hidden backgrounds.
The Panama Canal - by virtue of being the only alternative to a trip around the tip of South America - can charge passage fees just less than the cost of a trip around South America. Consequently they make a huge profit margin off of operating it. A quick google search says it brings in about $2 billion/yr, but only costs about $600 million/yr to operate. So they've got a massive 233% profit margin.
Add a second canal, and suddenly they're not competing with a trip around South America. They're competing with each other. Unless they collude together to fix the prices so that they're essentially the same (divide traffic 50/50, which might actually be a good thing since I hear wait times at the Panama Canal can be a week or more), the price is going to drop to slightly higher than what it costs them to operate the more expensive canal. That is the nature of competition. e.g. If the profit margin drops to a still-high 50%, profit from the current level of traffic would be just $300m/yr, and it'll take them 167 years to recoup the $50b construction cost even if they were able to borrow that $50b interest-free. Since the Panama Canal is essentially paid for, the Nicaraguan canal would probably have higher costs and thus slimmer margins, and will likely take centuries to pay for its construction.
A Nicaraguan canal would have the advantage of allowing passage of larger-than-Panamax ships (ships designed so their width barely fits through the Panama Canal). But again, if they try to charge significantly more for such ships, operators will simply continue building Panamax ships. Any surcharge they add on has to be less than the money operators would save by using larger-than-Panamax ships. (Significantly more since such ships would have to be built in the first place.)
It'll be great for the rest of the world - cheaper transport costs, more capacity, faster travel. But could end up tanking both the Nicaraguan and Panamanian economies.
Why is everyone assuming this is an all-or-nothing proposition and picking the worst possible cases as a counterargument? I don't decide a spoon is useless because it does a terrible job at cutting steak. You should evaluate this idea based on whether it can improve education if applied judiciously, not focus on the cases where it won't help or could even hurt.
Being able to mix and match partial-semester courses doesn't mean every course needs to be mix and match. Certainly required sequential core subjects like calculus will be long enough that they don't need to be broken up. It was already 2 semesters when I went to undergrad, and no you weren't allowed to take Calc 2 before Calc 1 (unless you passed the AP exam, in which case you were allowed to skip Calc 1). But there were certain short topics in linear algebra I would've loved to recap (I was out for almost 3 weeks with the flu when I took the course in undergrad).
There is also no rule or law of physics says that an educational topic must be exactly one semester. Those of you who only went to undergrad may not see it because you're still mostly taking courses there which are deep enough to warrant a full semester or two. But during grad school, I've taken many courses which would've been better as half or 3/4 of a semester, but which had to be filled out with other stuff to make it fit within the semester system. One course I took covered the new material relevant to my thesis in about a month, then the remainder was an easy ride on cruise control because I had already learned it as part of another course in undergrad. I've even sat in a few classes for few weeks as a listener (i.e. I didn't get credits for it) because that was the only way to learn the part of the course material I needed without over-committing my time by taking the full course.
If you look specifically at the cases where this idea would help, I think it has a lot of merit.
Just test it with a Nexus 5. The ones you buy from Google are unlocked and there's only one version which works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint (technically the hardware is capable of mostly working on Verizon, except Verizon blacklists it). Just pop in a SIM card for the different carriers and test away.
Autonomy was audited by Deloitte. HP hired KPMG (who subcontracted Ernst & Young) to double-check Deloitte's audit. Those are three of the four biggest accounting firms in the world. All gave the green flag.
That's a nice sentiment, except this has nothing to do with Tech/IT workers. Most white collar jobs are exempt from the FLSA's overtime protections. Generally, salaried professionals and managers are exempt; in that respect Tech/IT workers are no different from other salaried professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, musicians. Salaried non-commissioned salespeople are one of the few white collar jobs which are non-exempt, and that's where Linkedin got in trouble - they weren't keep track of their overtime hours for some of their salespeople.
Let me present an alternative hypothesis. There are plenty of technical writers, designers, and marketers out there interested in and using FOSS. They'd probably be more than happy to contribute to documentation, UI polish, and promotion just as programmers are happy to contribute to development. The problem is the FOSS developers won't talk to these guys, brushing them off with "if it's that important to you, figure it out yourself noob!"
The problem is a lack of respect for those who aren't programmers, including users. Commercial software developers respect users because the users are the ones who ultimately pay for the commercial developers' paycheck. One of the unintentional side-effects of the unpaid FOSS philosophy is the lack of a need to respect the users. Whether or not your FOSS project lives or dies depends on how many programmers contribute to it, not on how many users use it.
Services that people need in order to live should start off on the free market. Once it becomes clear which method of providing the service is most efficient, then it should be transitioned to a publicly-owned service. e.g. What's the best way to provide fresh water? Wells? Desalination? Buy it from your neighbors and pipe/truck it in? The answer to that isn't at all clear and is constantly changing, so you need market forces to indicate to you the best (cheapest) method of acquiring fresh water. Distribution OTOH tends to be more static - there aren't any up and coming new ways to send water through pipes. So laying down and maintaining pipes is more amenable to a public service.
GSM is a good example of the trouble you can get yourself into if the government prematurely decides something should not be subject to market forces. The EU mandated all wireless phone carriers adhere to GSM. The U.S. did not. Consequently a different method of transmitting phone calls and data - CDMA - was also tried in the U.S. CDMA turned out to be superior to the TDMA used in GSM, particularly when it came to data services (TDMA divides bandwidth equally between users, even if they aren't using the bandwidth; CDMA bandwidth effectively gets allocated as needed as a side-effect of how the technology works). And eventually CDMA was incorporated into the GSM standard (most HSPA and HSDPA implementations use wideband CDMA - yes your GSM phone uses CDMA). If the U.S. had gone along with the EU and required GSM, data services would've been several years behind where they are now, and we'd probably still be stuck at around 1 Mbps cellular data speeds.
The distinction needs to be based on the size of the technological solution space and the uncertainty over the best solution - factors which are inherent to the technology required to provide a service. Not based on whether or not those services are necessary for life - a factor completely independent of the technology needed to provide the service. Once you realize this, you realize that other things not necessary for life should probably be publicly owned - e.g. cable TV lines. When cable TV first began, it wasn't at all obvious what was the best way to distribute high-bandwidth content to houses. But now it's pretty clear that fiber to the home is the end-game. So the government should be installing fiber to each home, then allowing multiple cable TV vendors to compete selling service over that fiber.
The money for the reactor's decommissioning comes from surcharges to electrical rates collected while the plant was in operation. This money was earmarked specifically for reactor decommissioning costs, and placed into a trust fund which currently contains about $2.7 billion (the $4.4 billion cost will be accrued over several decades, so interest on the $2.7 billion makes them more equal than the raw numbers suggest). That there is sufficient money despite the reactor shutting down only halfway through its expected lifetime means there's a huge margin for error in these nuclear decommissioning funds. Edison has said if there's any money left over, it'll be refunded to rate payers.
Three transfers on the T (there's also a bus you have to take from the Logan T station to your airline terminal) is hardly ideal when you're hauling around luggage with kids in tow and on a schedule. When I was traveling by myself with a single suitcase I'd do the three transfers. But outside that case, a taxi is just easier and quicker.
More succinctly, an effective free market requires participants to be rational and informed. Product behaviors like keeping a purchase window up for 15 minutes without notifying the customer deliberately try to mislead and misinform the public. That's the sort of thing the FTC is there to crack down on.
I don't see any problem with a pop-up after a purchase asking if you wish to continue to make purchases for 15 min without having to re-authorize. But to silently make it the default behavior is pretty obviously deceptive. I'd even call it a scam.
The other half is that some carriers (I'm looking at you Verizon) won't activate a phone they didn't sell, even though it's capable of operating on their network. What good is an unlocked phone if no other carriers are willing to activate it? To be effective, this needs a partner law requiring carriers to activate phones which can operate on their network, regardless of where the customer bought it.
Another benefit this would have is that manufacturers would start selling phones directly instead of only through the carriers. The carriers are already busy trying thwart the unlock requirement - most of the new carrier-branded phones I'm seeing support only the frequencies that carrier uses. Even if you could unlock it, it won't work on another carrier (or will work with degraded capability). But if the manufacturers began selling phones directly, it would be in their best interests to sell a single phone model which supported all carrier frequencies in that country. With another bonus being that it'll work in most of the rest of the world as well.
There's another way to tinker with meters besides hacking them - drive a different route. My first taxi ride from Boston Logan to MIT took what seemed like an unusually winding route through downtown Boston. A year later when I got a car and began driving around the city myself, I realized I'd been taken for a ride, literally. I mentioned this to a fellow student at my lab, and he remarked that it had taken him 3 years to figure out what the actual cost of a cab from his apartment to the airport was, because every time he'd be taken on a different, circuitous route to rack up extra miles. It was 3 years until he actually got an honest driver who took him straight home.
Modern navigation software means you can get an exact distance from start point to destination before you even step into the taxi. There's no need for a meter (other than to time the ride). A lot of airport taxis already do this for longer rides - they charge based on zones, with further zones costing more. No meter needed. The only case this doesn't handle is rerouting to avoid traffic. An alternative might be a meter which prints out your GPS route so you can see that you were taken almost straight to your destination, and not in circles.
Are you sure you calculated your gas costs right? That's a helluva lot of money to be spending on gas, even for an SUV. At $4/gal, that's 3000 gallons/yr. At 14 MPG, that's 42,000 miles/yr.
The average vehicle is only driven 12,000 miles/yr, the average commute vehicle about 15,000 miles/yr. If your gas cost is accurate, your use case is just so far outside the norm that your anecdote is probably only applicable to about 0.01% of the population. (Your other vehicle costs seem absurdly high too, even if insurance is included in "replacement costs".)
Which translates into an average speed of 42 MPH, which is unusually high. You must've lived ~70 miles away from your workplace and spent most of your driving on the freeway to (1) rack up that many miles, and (2) have such a high average MPH.
UberX lists their Chicago rates as $2.40 + $0.24/min + $1/mile. There is absolutely no way you're replacing your 42,000 miles/yr commute with fewer than 5000 UberX miles. At 42,000 miles/yr @ 42 MPH and 500 commutes/yr (250 workdays, 2 commutes per day), completely replacing your SUV with UberX would cost you:
($2.40)*(500) + [ (1 mile / 42 MPH)*(60 min/hour)*($0.24/min) + $1/mile ] * (42000 miles) =
$1200 + [ ($0.343/mile) + ($1/mile) ] * (42000 miles) =
$1200 + $56,406 = $68,406/yr
I mean think about it. It's effectively a taxi service. There's no way it can be cheaper than driving your own car (unless it's an UberX carpool) because that would mean the UberX driver would be losing money. Any reduction in your commute costs now that you got rid of the SUV is because you're taking public transportation. Any solo rides you're taking on UberX are costing you more than it took you to drive your SUV.
The IRS places the standard deductible cost for mileage at $0.56/mile. That's probably a good average to use for a commute vehicle's cost per mile nationwide. UberX costs nearly 3x that.
You can still access your albums via picasaweb.google.com (picasa.com directs to a download without any links to get you to your albums). It's much more flexible and has more options than Google+ (particularly when it comes to album management). I've just continued to use picasaweb for my albums (there's a Lightroom extension which automatically uploads my photos to it). I've just been using it as though my photos also happen to show up on Google+, not the other way around.
I suspect the "another service" they'll move it to is photos.google.com (redirects to plus.google.com/photos). They've already migrated the photo viewer in Android to a Photos app. As long as they keep the additional functionality that's on picasaweb, it won't make any difference to me what they call it nor what URL I have to use to get to it.
Selling bitcoin mining rigs is a guaranteed profit.
Mining bitcoins is a potential profit, potential loss. It all depends on what happens to the value of bitcoins. Your reasoning only works if the equipment seller is absolutely certain that bitcoins will hold their value. From what I gather, the vast majority of people don't think they will, but will happily sell equipment to those who do.
The various strains of the flu which become pandemics don't start off as particularly communicable either. They usually develop in other animals (e.g. birds or pigs) and mutate into a form which can infect humans. Even then their outbreak is usually limited to farmers and people who work closely with animals because, like current Ebola strains, they can only be transmitted via direct contact.
They become a pandemic when they mutate into a form which can be transmitted via the air. Not saying this will happen with Ebola. Just saying that just because it's not particularly communicable now doesn't mean it'll stay that way. Ebola is so deadly (50%-90% mortality rate, c.f. 10%-20% for the Spanish Flu) that it inhibits its own spread - killing its victims before they have a chance to mingle with other people and spread the disease. That's also why they haven't transported a patient out of Africa yet - they tend to die before the red tape is cleared. Given the deadly nature of the disease I think it's a good idea to be able to study a case in a modern hospital facility rather than some rural village in Africa. They just need to be super careful handling the case, which it sounds like they are.
There's also something to be said for backing up the doctors who are working on this outbreak with the best possible care we can provide them should they become infected. These folks are casualties on the front lines of an inter-species war. Writing them off and treating them as pariahs if they become infected doesn't exactly bolster their confidence nor encourage other doctors to try to help contain similar outbreaks. Modern epidemiology has become a victim of its own success. People point to fizzled outbreaks like MERS, SARS, the Bird Flu, and criticize our disease control agencies of overreacting because those diseases didn't really spread that far, when the reason those diseases didn't spread that far was likely in large part due to the quick actions of those agencies. We need to be backing these people up. They need to know that should they become casualties, the world is going to provide them with the best possible care to help them recover, not treat them like lepers.
Assuming the copper filaments are cylindrical in shape, that's a surface area to volume ratio of (2pi*r*l) / (pi*r^2*l) = 2/r.
OTOH, in a copper fin configuration, the ratio of surface area to volume is (2lw) / (lwt) = 2/t.
In other words, if you use the same volume of copper and the thickness of the fin is half the diameter of the sponge cylinders, you have the exact same surface area. The thinner fins may be weaker, but since the additional fin material on the sides reinforces the structural strength, I assume that's not too big a deal. Just place thicker (stronger) fins along the outsides and you have a structure which is much more solid than the sponge.
Now consider that in passive cooling the airflow is slow enough to be laminar. The flat surface of the fins (oriented vertically) will then impose less aerodynamic resistance, leading to higher flowrate, and thus greater heat exchange.
Unless there's something else going on here (maybe the sponge filaments are wrinkled instead of smooth), or it's that much harder to make thin fins than spongy cylinders, I don't see how this could be better than a traditional fin-type heatsink.
I accidentally discovered why more companies want to go with recurring payments instead of a one-time payment. Subscriptions can survive a credit card cancellation. I lost one of my credit cards and called the credit card company within 24 hours to cancel it. They issued me a new card with a different number and I thought all was well in the world.
A month and half later, I got the bill for my new card and there was some charge I didn't recognize for a website subscription on it. After a lot of phone calls I finally got the whole story on what had transpired. The thief had used the card on the website (whether he was in cahoots with the site, I don't know). When my card was declined because it had been canceled, the website processed it as a non-electronic transaction. You know, the old machine where they put carbon paper over your credit card and slide a pressure roller over it to make an imprint? Apparently these are not time-gated like electronic transactions since it can take an unknown number of days for the forms to be mailed back to the credit card company. A legitimate paper transaction can arrive at the credit card company after the card has been cancelled.
Normally this would've raised some flags and the credit card company would've done some investigation or notified me to verify the charge. But the website had labeled it as a charge for a subscription. Apparently the policy on subscriptions is that they're rolled over to the new card automatically. On the one hand I can understand this - if you have to cancel a card as I did, you don't want a legit magazine subscription to be suspended because you forgot to notify them of the new card number. On the other hand, a scammer or disreputable merchant can use this to charge your new card without you ever telling them your new card number.
The info on the ID is the security measures Visa/MC have in place. They allow a merchant to enter info like address or phone number, and their computers will tell the merchant whether or not it matches the address/phone they have on file for that card. When you pay for gas with a credit card and the pump asks you to punch in your zip code, it's not collecting marketing information. It's using the zip code as a (rather flimsy) security measure to protect against someone buying gas with a lost/stolen credit card. Yeah you can ask the customer to recite their address, but any burglar who stole the card from a house or mugger who got their victim's entire wallet would know the address. A photo ID with that info, while fairly easy to fake, requires a bit more effort on the part of the thief.
Credit card security is in the dismal state it's currently in because Visa/MC/Amex have successfully transferred all the damage from fraudulent transactions onto the merchants. Since they lose practically no money to fraud, they have very little incentive to improve security. (The exorbitant interest rates are to cover the cost of credit card holders who default on their debt.) For market forces to work correctly, financial penalties for risks which fail must be linked to financial profits when those same risks succeed. What Visa et al have done is decouple the penalties from the profits (profits go to them, penalties to the merchant), leading to a situation where they are not penalized when the risks they take (poor security) fail. Consequently there is no motivation for them to improve credit card security beyond the laughable state it's currently in.