I never understood this desire to keep Pluto a planet. Even an elementary school student could see it was a bit of an oddball compared to the other eight, with a highly eccentric and tilted orbit, a dimunitive size, and recurring announcements every few years of possible discovery of other tiny planet like things out in a similarly distant orbit.
Size is not really the point. Pluto (2300 km radius) is almost the same size as Mercury (2440 km). Both are smaller than the moons Ganymede (2634 km) and Titan (2575 km), while Callisto (2408 km) falls right in between them.
People just need to get over the notion that a "planet" is somehow better or higher ranking or more important than a "moon" or "Kuiper belt object" / whatever. Those are not hierarchical terms. They are just definitions of what a body's orbit is like, and the effect its gravity has on other nearby objects (or vice versa). Nailing down a static definition of "planet" was also important for not having to rewrite school science textbooks every couple years.
Considering how bookshops have been obliterated by Amazon in the US and the UK I don't think the French attitude towards restraining Amazon is bad. It simply puts everyone on the same playing field.
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This ensure really big companies like Amazon can't destroy local shops only on price.
You've completely mis-identified the problem, which means mostly likely your proposed solution will not work.
Amazon is not obliterating local bookshops. The Internet obliterated the old definition of "local". Amazon is the local bookshop for most people now. I can access and browe Amazon in far less time than it took me to go visit the corner bookstore.
This effect of the Internet is most prominent on purveyors of software - virtual goods like computer software, movies, music, and yes, books. The Internet gives you instant access to those. It has had less of an impact on merchants selling physical goods. But even there, distance for the purposes of defining "local" is no longer measured in miles or km. It's measured in shipping time and cost.
Correct. And since they're not authorized by the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work the statute should kick in.
For the umpteenth time, no that's not how the DMCA's perjury clause works.
I own the rights to a video I made about dogs. I file a DMCA takedown notice claiming your video about cats violates my copyright.
Because I am asserting you're infringing my video about dogs, and I own the copyright to that video, there is no perjury. I am legitimately filing takedown notices to protect the copyright on the dog video. That your video is about cats is irrelevant to the DMCA. By issuing a takedown notice, I am swearing that I own the rights to (or am authorized by the owner of) the dog video. It is only perjury if I don't own the dog video or am not authorized by the owners of the dog video (e.g. what those lawyers filing lawsuits against people downloading porn were doing - threatening to sue even though they weren't authorized by the real copyright owners, in the hopes that because it was porn people would roll over and settle without a fight).
There's tons of precedent for this, by the way. If I call the police and say "so and so robbed my house today" and then, when they come and investigate and find no evidence that my house was robbed I say "oh, well, not really" - I'm going to jail in that case. That's filing a false report and it's a crime.
Yes that's the way it should work. But that's not the way the DMCA is written. At this point I think the only way this will ever be fixed is if millions of everyday people start filing DMCA takedown notices against stuff owned by studios (e.g. official Justin Bieber videos on YouTube), claiming it violates the copyright on their cat or dog video. Since the DMCA puts the burden of proof entirely upon the accused with no penalty for the accuser, the only way to stop the abuse is to accuse the accusers who are abusing it.
Yeah, this could lead to the demise of the cable companies as we know them. For a long time I've said cable TV/Internet needs to be regulated as a utility. With a utility like gas or electricity, the utility company owns the pipes but is prohibited from selling the content that's carried over the pipes. They can set up a subsidiary to sell the content, but they must also allow other gas/electric suppliers to sell to customers at the same transport rates they charge their subsidiary. Those transport rates are set by a public utilities commission. Effectively, the utility company has a monopoly on the pipes (it makes no sense to install multiple gas or electric lines to each house), but due to the monopoly its transport pricing is subject to government approval and it must offer the same pricing to all sellers. Thus maintaining a free competitive market for gas and electricity.
In the U.S., cable TV/Internet has been the big exception. Because it doesn't make sense to install multiple cable lines, most municipalities only grant access to a single cable company. Yet that artificial monopoly is not regulated like a utility - the cable company completely controls the pipes and the content that's sent over those pipes. (This is a necessary step when an industry is first developing. Different companies have to be allowed to try different ways to lay down pipe and offer content over those pipes for the market to determine the most efficient way to distribute that content. But once the best method is determined, the industry is essentially a utility. At this point I think we all know TV/Internet delivery is headed towards fiber to the home.)
If Aereo can get themselves classified as a cable company, that does to cable TV what VoIP did to phone service. Right now the cable companies sell you TV, and oh by the way you can get Internet access too. With Aereo's model, you only need to get Internet from the cable company, and you can get your TV from Aereo. The cable company essentially becomes a utility giving you only Internet service. Companies like Aereo could then sell you TV service delivererd over the Internet.
Unfortunately, this means Aereo is going to have both the broadcasters and cable companies arguing against them to the FCC and the courts. While I hope they succeed like VoIP did, the influence of money in politics makes me think their chances are slim.
Close, but what's happening here is similar to what happened with Pandora and online music broadcasters. They tried to get by by paying the same royalty rates as radio stations, which are negotiated between the RIAA and all radio broadcasters en masse. The RIAA smelled an opportunity and finangled the courts so Internet radio got defined as something new and different, and thus they could negotiate rates against a much smaller and less established entity. Consequently, Internet radio pays much higher royalties than broadcast radio.
I suspect the TV stations are trying for a similar play here. It's completely illogical (like saying you're not buying the movie, you're just buying a license to view it; but then saying you need to buy a new one at full price if you're upgrading from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray), but logic is secondary to them if there's an opportunity to extract more money from people. I think that's my biggest gripe with Copyright law - since it's a completely artificial monopoly I think the rules governing it must make logical sense in order for supply and demand to work as with natural property. But instead the copyright holders are twisting that artificiality to completely illogical means that break how markets naturally work.
Air Transat 236 also glided in to a safe landing. A fuel leak in one tank and crew misdiagnosis of the problem led them to pump all the fuel in the good tank into the leaking tank, resulting in fuel starvation at cruise altitude. The incident is not as well known because the pilots have refused to talk about it.
The altitude (10 km) and distance to the final airport (120 km) when the second engine flamed out also point to a 12:1 glide ratio. Slightly better in fact as the pilot had to execute a 360 and some S-turns to bleed off altitude just prior to landing. It was an A330, which is slightly larger than a 767. Both are widebody (twin aisle) aircraft, and both were saved by the RAT providing emergency power. So while it's certainly possible to power electronics even with total engine failure, it's not something a good engineer should be designing the plane to be reliant upon in an emergency.
The point of airport security isn't to stop terrorists. It's to calm and reassure the public. After every major airliner accident, there's a drop in airline travel. (Least there was back when we'd have 2-3 commercial airliner crashes a year. We're now to the point where it's so safe we go 2-5 years between accidents.) How do you think these people are traveling if they're too scared to fly? Some of them just stay home, but most of them travel by car. Where they are more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack.
So the point of airport security is literally security theater. Show the public, "Hey we're doing something to stop those terrorists, so it's safe to fly!" When the real goal is to stop people from getting themselves killed while driving because they're too scared of terrorists to fly.
Unfortunately, the people running the TSA never got the memo and are taking their jobs way too seriously.
That said, every time I've had a phone or laptop die from a drained battery, I've been able to turn it on, and it'll power up for at least 5-30 seconds before sensing the low battery and automatically powering off again. This is due to an intentional safety feature of Li-ion batteries - if you drain them too much, they can explode when charged. So devices are designed to shut off long before the battery reaches this point, and consequently there's always enough juice left to briefly turn the device back on again. The only way you can get to a state where the device literally will not power on is if you drain the battery, then let the device sit there for weeks or months so that it self-discharges below the voltage where the device will refuse to use the battery at all. So the guy whose phone dies while traveling shouldn't be affected by this policy change at all (unless the TSA decides to be assholes and require you to demonstrate something more than the phone booting, while not providing a standard microUSB charger).
Oh, yes, there are MANY problems with this whole scheme. And a lot of it could be solved TOMORROW by the FCC choosing to regulate ISPs as Title II Common Carriers.
Actually, all this is probably exactly why the FCC is choosing not to regulate ISPs as common carriers. If they do that, then the copyright holders and the government have to do the legwork of tracking down and prosecuting copyright violators. The way it's set up now, they can just threaten the ISP and make the ISP do the busywork for them.
A member of Germany's foreign intelligence agency has been detained for possibly spying for the U.S. The 31-year-old is suspected of giving a U.S. spy agency information about a parliamentary inquiry of NSA activities.
So the investigation into the NSA's secret spying activities, is itself being conducted in secret under penalty of espionage charges should any German violate that secrecy?
We seem to be forgetting why people object to the NSA's activities. Something about governments being open and transparent in their operation so the public can be assured their actions are trustworthy. Any investigation into the NSA's activities should be done publicly and openly, to demonstrate a contrast with how the NSA operated.
Unless that is the German government has something it wants to keep secret from its own people. But in that case they become the pot calling the kettle black.
Ideally we'd like a "right to be forgotten" that means when I ask Facebook to delete my account, then by delete I mean "not a single bit of my accounts data remains".
Even that is problematic. Presumably Facebook keeps backups. And for a backup to be a true backup, it has to be offline and off-site. So when you submit an account deletion request, they can't just scrub your data from their servers. They have to bring those backups back on-site and online, and scrub your data from them as well.
A better solution is to mandate a maximum period to private data retention policies, e.g. 1 year. Then you can submit your deletion request, Facebook scrubs your data from their servers immediately. But by law they're allowed to keep the offline backup for up to a year, at which point they're required to scrub it. When it's a year old, it's not any good as a backup anymore, so they can just delete the whole thing instead of having to find your specific data within it.
Yeah you probably want all the backups scrubbed immediately. But the whole point of living in society is that everyone makes compromises to arrive at a solution which works better for everyone overall. You don't get your data entirely scrubbed immediately. Facebook doesn't get to keep that data forever.
That's why Google shouldn't be wasting time trying to do this. It's not their job, and the task is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
They should simply invert the process - remove every search result older than x years from the countries affected by this court decision. Pre-comply with all possible cases before people submit privacy takedown requests. Then provide the court with a list of all removed content and say they will add each removed link back if and when the court approves it. Make the people who want old stuff to reappear submit their request to the government - the institution who thinks this policy is a good or even workable idea.
Meanwhile even at current energy consumption levels US per-capita energy consumption is 308 million BTU per year, or 247 kWh per day. At 5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day (a conservative number achievable almost anywhere with low-to-mid-range solar panels) that's only 49.5 meters of panels per person, or 532 square feet. A little high, but not unachievable.
That's the panel's peak output - what it produces when it's oriented normal to incident sunlight on a cloudless day at noon. e.g. An average 16% efficient panel is rated at about 125 W/m^2 peak. Multiply that by 24 hours and you get 3 kWh/day for a square meter of panels. Unfortunately the sun doesn't stay directly overhead 24 hours/day.
To get average panel output, you need to multiply by PV solar's capacity factor. That takes into account night, movement of the sun, weather, etc. For the continental U.S., PV solar's capacity factor is about 0.145 (for northern Europe it's closer to 0.10). So averaged over a year, your 16% efficient panel is only going to generate 0.435 kWh/day.
Assuming your other energy figures are correct, this equates to 568 square meters of panels per person.
This is something that's bugged me about people (ab)using email. This sort of stuff doesn't even need to be "sent". Presumably anyone with a GS brokerage account has a login to some place on the GS website. The email should just be a notice that some new important information is available, and they need to login to their account and read it. (If they don't and they lose money because they didn't, then the fault is theirs.)
People seem to have long forgotten that email isn't secure. As we used to say in the 1980s, sending someone an email isn't like sending a letter in a sealed envelope. It's like sending a postcard - anyone along the route the email takes to the final recipient can read it.
In this particular case, if you've got the same information which needs to be read by multiple recipients, email is a stupid way to do it. Why make x copies and send it to the corners of the world via the Internet, when you can put just one copy on your company's website and only authorized people can view it after logging in? Multiple recipients for an identical large or important file should immediately equate to "not for email" in your mind.
In the case that started all this a man had been bankrupt. That's a fact, but one which credit rating agencies are not allowed to report after a certain period of time has passed. If any bank could see the newspaper reports about the bankruptcy simply by searching Google that would have been undermined - society decided that after time bankruptcy would be "forgotten" so people could move on with their lives.
So what does Google have to do with it? What's to stop a bank from using a different search engine to find past bankruptcies older than 7 years. Or running their searches on a VM hosted in a non-EU country.
The fundamental error in this ruling is the assumption that Google = History. All Google is is an algorithmic survey of which "historical facts" (things mentioned on websites) are more densely cross-linked. In programming terms, Google is a pointer, not the data itself. You delete the pointer, the data remains. You delete the data, the pointer is useless. If the EU were really serious about a right to be forgotten, they'd be encouraging Google to retain this stuff, and using Google to go after the sites which list the outdated information. For crying out loud, Google is doing a fantastic job telling you which sites with the most cross-links are hosting the outdated data. Way to shoot the messenger!
Going after Google reeks of a luddite misunderstanding of the difference between pointers and objects, thinking that eliminating the pointers will be a cheap and easy (for them) solution to the problem. Kinda like someone thinking that deleting all the shortcuts on his Windows desktop will free up disk space. Yeah it'll make you desktop look prettier, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problem.
I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule. Regardless of the technical nuances, Aereo operates like a rebroadcaster (takes services subscriptions, forwards broadcast transmissions to them). Therefore it must be a rebroadcaster.
I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas, and only charged an installation fee to host the antenna and monthly hardware insurance fee to replace broken ones. To draw from the analogy someone posted below, that'd be like you buying your own antenna and asking to place it on your neighbor's property because he sits on top of the hill blocking your house. Dynamically assigning a micro-antenna to a subscriber on-demand just blurs the line. (The fact that all this is technically stupid when you could just use a single antenna is simply a consequence of Copyright law creating artificial scarcity and giving content producers a monopoly on distribution.)
The units on gigawatts/hr works out to energy/time^2. I'm not even sure what that means. Rate of acceleration of energy use?
Assuming the Reuters reporter never took physics and the actual figure is 22 gigawatts, while it's an impressive amount, it's peak production. Solar has just about the worst capacity factor (ratio of average production to max peak production) of any energy source. If you look at Germany's solar statistics, they produced 31400 GWh in 2013. The average of their 2012 and 2013 installed (peak) generating capacity was (32.643+35.948) / 2 = 34.296 GW (averaged to take into account new plants coming online through the year).
34.3 GW * 8766 hours (1 year) = 1.08 * 10^18 joules
= 300673.8 GWh of potential solar production - i.e. how much the plants could have produced if they were operating at max capacity the entire year.
So their solar capacity factor is just 31400 / 300674 = 0.1044.
Compare to U.S. average capacity factors of
0.9 for nuclear
0.7 for geothermal
0.64 for coal
0.4 for hydro
0.35 for offshore wind
0.22 for onshre wind
0.145 for PV solar in the U.S. (not on chart)
So if Germany's peak solar production was equivalent to 20 nuclear plants, that means their entire installed base of solar plants has only eliminated the need for two nuclear plants. (There's some wriggle room here because they're comparing a peak load power source to a base load power source, but I'm just rolling with the comparison they made.) This is why you don't compare power production technologies based on peak production. It's like comparing the fuel efficiency of different cars only when they're going downhill - it unreasonably favors cars with low drag coefficients even if they may have inefficient engines. You should be comparing average production through the year (equivalent to peak production * capacity factor). Just like you should be comparing the average fuel efficiency of cars across all use cases.
It's pretty simple to me. Women tend to prefer careers where they interact with people. Men tend to prefer careers where they interact with things. When I worked at a hotel, the vast majority of applicants we got for front desk clerk or event planner were women. The vast majority of applicants for maintenance were men. CS just happens to be an extreme form of interacting with things. (The earlier comment about beta males fits too - part of being an alpha male is being able to interact well with other people.)
You'll see this disappear in low-income jobs (e.g. assembly line workers), where finances make the job a necessity. But by the time you get to mid- and high-paying jobs, the person has the luxury of choosing what he/she does, and this gender-based self-bias exerts itself.
Most women don't strive to immerse themselves in a culture that is predominated by socially awkward beta males. I don't understand why nobody accepts this obvious explanation for the lack of women.
Let me throw that right back at you: Why do you think the culture is predominated by socially awkward beta males?
You admit that non-misogynistic factors cause the field to disproportionately attract one type of person (socially awkward beta males). Yet when considering a different type of person (women) you immediately shift the blame to misogyny rather than assuming those same non-misogynistic factors are what are deterring women. This self-contradiction is why it's not an "obvious" explanation.
The federal gas tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon, where it has been set since 1993, when gas cost $1.16 a gallon.
Since the gas tax is ostensibly for the construction and maintenance of roads and highways, it should be compared to that. The cost of maintenance and construction scale mostly according to CPI, not the price of gas. I can't think of any reason why you'd compare the tax to the price of gas unless you're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it needs to go up more (political arguments about energy taxes aside).
Putting $1.16 into an inflation calculator yields $1.90 in 2014 dollars, or a 64% increase. 64% of 18.4 cents is 11.7 cents. So a 12 cent increase is exactly what's needed for the tax to keep pace with inflation.
Up to now, they haven't wanted to. Japan, however, is threatened by not one but two nuclear-armed nations.
Three nuclear-armed nations. Part of the Kuril Islands are contested by Japan and Russia. Russia (the Soviets at the time) won control of the entire chain (plus Sakhalin) at the end of WWII as a hedge by the Allies. Basically we weren't sure if Japan would surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped. So we begged Russia to violate their non-aggression pact with Japan and invade after the bombings to put further pressure on Japan to surrender. They did so, and have claimed those territories ever since. Japan gave up most of their claims following WWII, but still claim four islands that Russia currently administrates.
I wonder if this ought to invalidate crap like the infamous Amazon one-click patent.
Unfortunately, you have to (1) be sued by Amazon for violating the patent (else you have no standing to challenge it), and (2) pay the expense of multi-year court battles with practically no hope of recouping your costs even if you win.
OTOH, I actually like the one-click patent even though I think it's a stupid and invalid patent. It prevents other online stores from putting in a button which can cause you to instantly buy something if you accidentally click it (this has happened to me on Amazon).
The person it's deriding gets to decide if it's offensive. That's kind of how it works. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Nigger is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Chink is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Redskin is a bad word. Etc etc etc... This is plain common sense, and everyone arguing against it is an ass.
I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.
The important thing is the intent of the person using the word. If the person is using it to denigrate someone or a group, it's offensive. If the person is using it out of ignorance or in an unrelated context, it's not offensive. The person feeling offended has nothing to do with it other than in the general social context that certain words are known to offend certain groups.
The problem comes about when the person using the word is using it to be offensive, but claims he's not. In that respect it's better to avoid using words known to be offensive. But it's just plain wrong to assume that any time an offensive word is used, that offense is intended.
You Ignorant Redneck Honkies. -- See what I did there? Doesn't seem offensive to ME... It's up to YOU to decide, because you're the ones I'm deriding.
When someone uses a derogatory word without intent to offend, and someone else is offended by the use of the word, it is a misunderstanding. Not an offense. However, in this case you clearly demonstrate that you knew the term could be offensive, and thus indict yourself that you wrote them with the intent to offend.
I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.
It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.
Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.
Some will call me a troll, but as a gamer I'm no longer interested in 4K video since I know Occulus Rift (and competing VR set) are coming.
Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?
You're making a fundamental error many people make when it comes to display resolution. What matters isn't resolution or pixels per inch. It's pixels per degree. Angular resolution, not linear resolution.
I've got a 1080p projector. When I project a 20 ft image onto a wall 10 ft away, the pixels are quite obvious and I wish I had a 4k projector. If I move back to 20 ft away from the wall, the image becomes acceptable again. It's the angle of view that matters not the size or resolution. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with 1 arc-minute separation. So within one degree (60 arc-minutes) you'd need 120 pixels to fool 20/20 vision.
This is where the 300 dpi standard comes from. Viewed from 2 ft away, one inch covers just about 2.5 degrees, which is 150 arc-minutes, which can be fully resolved with 300 dots. So for a printout viewed from 2 ft away, you want about 300 dpi to match 20/20 vision. If it's not necessary to perfectly fool the eye, you can cut this requirement to about half.
In terms of Occulus Rift, a 1080p screen is 2203 pixels diagonal, so this corresponds to 18.4 degrees to fool 20/20 vision, 39 degrees to be adequate. If you want your VR display to look decent while covering a substantially wider angle of view than 39 degrees, you will want better than 1080p resolution. I'm gonna go out on a limb, and predict that most people will want more than a 39 degree field of view in their VR headset.
That actually gets to the real heart of the matter. Going after Google for this or the European right to be forgotten thing is shooting the messenger. Google doesn't actually host the content in question, and removing it from their index doesn't actually make the content disappear. The only reason it ranked highly in a Google search is because lots of websites linked to it, so removing it from Google's index won't stop people from getting to the info via the intermediary sites. It is literally like sticking your head in the sand in hopes it'll make the bad thing go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Size is not really the point. Pluto (2300 km radius) is almost the same size as Mercury (2440 km). Both are smaller than the moons Ganymede (2634 km) and Titan (2575 km), while Callisto (2408 km) falls right in between them.
People just need to get over the notion that a "planet" is somehow better or higher ranking or more important than a "moon" or "Kuiper belt object" / whatever. Those are not hierarchical terms. They are just definitions of what a body's orbit is like, and the effect its gravity has on other nearby objects (or vice versa). Nailing down a static definition of "planet" was also important for not having to rewrite school science textbooks every couple years.
You've completely mis-identified the problem, which means mostly likely your proposed solution will not work.
Amazon is not obliterating local bookshops. The Internet obliterated the old definition of "local". Amazon is the local bookshop for most people now. I can access and browe Amazon in far less time than it took me to go visit the corner bookstore.
This effect of the Internet is most prominent on purveyors of software - virtual goods like computer software, movies, music, and yes, books. The Internet gives you instant access to those. It has had less of an impact on merchants selling physical goods. But even there, distance for the purposes of defining "local" is no longer measured in miles or km. It's measured in shipping time and cost.
For the umpteenth time, no that's not how the DMCA's perjury clause works.
I own the rights to a video I made about dogs. I file a DMCA takedown notice claiming your video about cats violates my copyright.
Because I am asserting you're infringing my video about dogs, and I own the copyright to that video, there is no perjury. I am legitimately filing takedown notices to protect the copyright on the dog video. That your video is about cats is irrelevant to the DMCA. By issuing a takedown notice, I am swearing that I own the rights to (or am authorized by the owner of) the dog video. It is only perjury if I don't own the dog video or am not authorized by the owners of the dog video (e.g. what those lawyers filing lawsuits against people downloading porn were doing - threatening to sue even though they weren't authorized by the real copyright owners, in the hopes that because it was porn people would roll over and settle without a fight).
Yes that's the way it should work. But that's not the way the DMCA is written. At this point I think the only way this will ever be fixed is if millions of everyday people start filing DMCA takedown notices against stuff owned by studios (e.g. official Justin Bieber videos on YouTube), claiming it violates the copyright on their cat or dog video. Since the DMCA puts the burden of proof entirely upon the accused with no penalty for the accuser, the only way to stop the abuse is to accuse the accusers who are abusing it.
Yeah, this could lead to the demise of the cable companies as we know them. For a long time I've said cable TV/Internet needs to be regulated as a utility. With a utility like gas or electricity, the utility company owns the pipes but is prohibited from selling the content that's carried over the pipes. They can set up a subsidiary to sell the content, but they must also allow other gas/electric suppliers to sell to customers at the same transport rates they charge their subsidiary. Those transport rates are set by a public utilities commission. Effectively, the utility company has a monopoly on the pipes (it makes no sense to install multiple gas or electric lines to each house), but due to the monopoly its transport pricing is subject to government approval and it must offer the same pricing to all sellers. Thus maintaining a free competitive market for gas and electricity.
In the U.S., cable TV/Internet has been the big exception. Because it doesn't make sense to install multiple cable lines, most municipalities only grant access to a single cable company. Yet that artificial monopoly is not regulated like a utility - the cable company completely controls the pipes and the content that's sent over those pipes. (This is a necessary step when an industry is first developing. Different companies have to be allowed to try different ways to lay down pipe and offer content over those pipes for the market to determine the most efficient way to distribute that content. But once the best method is determined, the industry is essentially a utility. At this point I think we all know TV/Internet delivery is headed towards fiber to the home.)
If Aereo can get themselves classified as a cable company, that does to cable TV what VoIP did to phone service. Right now the cable companies sell you TV, and oh by the way you can get Internet access too. With Aereo's model, you only need to get Internet from the cable company, and you can get your TV from Aereo. The cable company essentially becomes a utility giving you only Internet service. Companies like Aereo could then sell you TV service delivererd over the Internet.
Unfortunately, this means Aereo is going to have both the broadcasters and cable companies arguing against them to the FCC and the courts. While I hope they succeed like VoIP did, the influence of money in politics makes me think their chances are slim.
Close, but what's happening here is similar to what happened with Pandora and online music broadcasters. They tried to get by by paying the same royalty rates as radio stations, which are negotiated between the RIAA and all radio broadcasters en masse. The RIAA smelled an opportunity and finangled the courts so Internet radio got defined as something new and different, and thus they could negotiate rates against a much smaller and less established entity. Consequently, Internet radio pays much higher royalties than broadcast radio.
I suspect the TV stations are trying for a similar play here. It's completely illogical (like saying you're not buying the movie, you're just buying a license to view it; but then saying you need to buy a new one at full price if you're upgrading from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray), but logic is secondary to them if there's an opportunity to extract more money from people. I think that's my biggest gripe with Copyright law - since it's a completely artificial monopoly I think the rules governing it must make logical sense in order for supply and demand to work as with natural property. But instead the copyright holders are twisting that artificiality to completely illogical means that break how markets naturally work.
Air Transat 236 also glided in to a safe landing. A fuel leak in one tank and crew misdiagnosis of the problem led them to pump all the fuel in the good tank into the leaking tank, resulting in fuel starvation at cruise altitude. The incident is not as well known because the pilots have refused to talk about it.
The altitude (10 km) and distance to the final airport (120 km) when the second engine flamed out also point to a 12:1 glide ratio. Slightly better in fact as the pilot had to execute a 360 and some S-turns to bleed off altitude just prior to landing. It was an A330, which is slightly larger than a 767. Both are widebody (twin aisle) aircraft, and both were saved by the RAT providing emergency power. So while it's certainly possible to power electronics even with total engine failure, it's not something a good engineer should be designing the plane to be reliant upon in an emergency.
The point of airport security isn't to stop terrorists. It's to calm and reassure the public. After every major airliner accident, there's a drop in airline travel. (Least there was back when we'd have 2-3 commercial airliner crashes a year. We're now to the point where it's so safe we go 2-5 years between accidents.) How do you think these people are traveling if they're too scared to fly? Some of them just stay home, but most of them travel by car. Where they are more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack.
So the point of airport security is literally security theater. Show the public, "Hey we're doing something to stop those terrorists, so it's safe to fly!" When the real goal is to stop people from getting themselves killed while driving because they're too scared of terrorists to fly.
Unfortunately, the people running the TSA never got the memo and are taking their jobs way too seriously.
That said, every time I've had a phone or laptop die from a drained battery, I've been able to turn it on, and it'll power up for at least 5-30 seconds before sensing the low battery and automatically powering off again. This is due to an intentional safety feature of Li-ion batteries - if you drain them too much, they can explode when charged. So devices are designed to shut off long before the battery reaches this point, and consequently there's always enough juice left to briefly turn the device back on again. The only way you can get to a state where the device literally will not power on is if you drain the battery, then let the device sit there for weeks or months so that it self-discharges below the voltage where the device will refuse to use the battery at all. So the guy whose phone dies while traveling shouldn't be affected by this policy change at all (unless the TSA decides to be assholes and require you to demonstrate something more than the phone booting, while not providing a standard microUSB charger).
Actually, all this is probably exactly why the FCC is choosing not to regulate ISPs as common carriers. If they do that, then the copyright holders and the government have to do the legwork of tracking down and prosecuting copyright violators. The way it's set up now, they can just threaten the ISP and make the ISP do the busywork for them.
So the investigation into the NSA's secret spying activities, is itself being conducted in secret under penalty of espionage charges should any German violate that secrecy?
We seem to be forgetting why people object to the NSA's activities. Something about governments being open and transparent in their operation so the public can be assured their actions are trustworthy. Any investigation into the NSA's activities should be done publicly and openly, to demonstrate a contrast with how the NSA operated.
Unless that is the German government has something it wants to keep secret from its own people. But in that case they become the pot calling the kettle black.
Even that is problematic. Presumably Facebook keeps backups. And for a backup to be a true backup, it has to be offline and off-site. So when you submit an account deletion request, they can't just scrub your data from their servers. They have to bring those backups back on-site and online, and scrub your data from them as well.
A better solution is to mandate a maximum period to private data retention policies, e.g. 1 year. Then you can submit your deletion request, Facebook scrubs your data from their servers immediately. But by law they're allowed to keep the offline backup for up to a year, at which point they're required to scrub it. When it's a year old, it's not any good as a backup anymore, so they can just delete the whole thing instead of having to find your specific data within it.
Yeah you probably want all the backups scrubbed immediately. But the whole point of living in society is that everyone makes compromises to arrive at a solution which works better for everyone overall. You don't get your data entirely scrubbed immediately. Facebook doesn't get to keep that data forever.
That's why Google shouldn't be wasting time trying to do this. It's not their job, and the task is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
They should simply invert the process - remove every search result older than x years from the countries affected by this court decision. Pre-comply with all possible cases before people submit privacy takedown requests. Then provide the court with a list of all removed content and say they will add each removed link back if and when the court approves it. Make the people who want old stuff to reappear submit their request to the government - the institution who thinks this policy is a good or even workable idea.
That's the panel's peak output - what it produces when it's oriented normal to incident sunlight on a cloudless day at noon. e.g. An average 16% efficient panel is rated at about 125 W/m^2 peak. Multiply that by 24 hours and you get 3 kWh/day for a square meter of panels. Unfortunately the sun doesn't stay directly overhead 24 hours/day.
To get average panel output, you need to multiply by PV solar's capacity factor. That takes into account night, movement of the sun, weather, etc. For the continental U.S., PV solar's capacity factor is about 0.145 (for northern Europe it's closer to 0.10). So averaged over a year, your 16% efficient panel is only going to generate 0.435 kWh/day.
Assuming your other energy figures are correct, this equates to 568 square meters of panels per person.
This is something that's bugged me about people (ab)using email. This sort of stuff doesn't even need to be "sent". Presumably anyone with a GS brokerage account has a login to some place on the GS website. The email should just be a notice that some new important information is available, and they need to login to their account and read it. (If they don't and they lose money because they didn't, then the fault is theirs.)
People seem to have long forgotten that email isn't secure. As we used to say in the 1980s, sending someone an email isn't like sending a letter in a sealed envelope. It's like sending a postcard - anyone along the route the email takes to the final recipient can read it.
In this particular case, if you've got the same information which needs to be read by multiple recipients, email is a stupid way to do it. Why make x copies and send it to the corners of the world via the Internet, when you can put just one copy on your company's website and only authorized people can view it after logging in? Multiple recipients for an identical large or important file should immediately equate to "not for email" in your mind.
So what does Google have to do with it? What's to stop a bank from using a different search engine to find past bankruptcies older than 7 years. Or running their searches on a VM hosted in a non-EU country.
The fundamental error in this ruling is the assumption that Google = History. All Google is is an algorithmic survey of which "historical facts" (things mentioned on websites) are more densely cross-linked. In programming terms, Google is a pointer, not the data itself. You delete the pointer, the data remains. You delete the data, the pointer is useless. If the EU were really serious about a right to be forgotten, they'd be encouraging Google to retain this stuff, and using Google to go after the sites which list the outdated information. For crying out loud, Google is doing a fantastic job telling you which sites with the most cross-links are hosting the outdated data. Way to shoot the messenger!
Going after Google reeks of a luddite misunderstanding of the difference between pointers and objects, thinking that eliminating the pointers will be a cheap and easy (for them) solution to the problem. Kinda like someone thinking that deleting all the shortcuts on his Windows desktop will free up disk space. Yeah it'll make you desktop look prettier, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problem.
I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule. Regardless of the technical nuances, Aereo operates like a rebroadcaster (takes services subscriptions, forwards broadcast transmissions to them). Therefore it must be a rebroadcaster.
I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas, and only charged an installation fee to host the antenna and monthly hardware insurance fee to replace broken ones. To draw from the analogy someone posted below, that'd be like you buying your own antenna and asking to place it on your neighbor's property because he sits on top of the hill blocking your house. Dynamically assigning a micro-antenna to a subscriber on-demand just blurs the line. (The fact that all this is technically stupid when you could just use a single antenna is simply a consequence of Copyright law creating artificial scarcity and giving content producers a monopoly on distribution.)
The units on gigawatts/hr works out to energy/time^2. I'm not even sure what that means. Rate of acceleration of energy use?
Assuming the Reuters reporter never took physics and the actual figure is 22 gigawatts, while it's an impressive amount, it's peak production. Solar has just about the worst capacity factor (ratio of average production to max peak production) of any energy source. If you look at Germany's solar statistics, they produced 31400 GWh in 2013. The average of their 2012 and 2013 installed (peak) generating capacity was (32.643+35.948) / 2 = 34.296 GW (averaged to take into account new plants coming online through the year).
34.3 GW * 8766 hours (1 year) = 1.08 * 10^18 joules
= 300673.8 GWh of potential solar production - i.e. how much the plants could have produced if they were operating at max capacity the entire year.
So their solar capacity factor is just 31400 / 300674 = 0.1044.
Compare to U.S. average capacity factors of
0.9 for nuclear
0.7 for geothermal
0.64 for coal
0.4 for hydro
0.35 for offshore wind
0.22 for onshre wind
0.145 for PV solar in the U.S. (not on chart)
So if Germany's peak solar production was equivalent to 20 nuclear plants, that means their entire installed base of solar plants has only eliminated the need for two nuclear plants. (There's some wriggle room here because they're comparing a peak load power source to a base load power source, but I'm just rolling with the comparison they made.) This is why you don't compare power production technologies based on peak production. It's like comparing the fuel efficiency of different cars only when they're going downhill - it unreasonably favors cars with low drag coefficients even if they may have inefficient engines. You should be comparing average production through the year (equivalent to peak production * capacity factor). Just like you should be comparing the average fuel efficiency of cars across all use cases.
It's pretty simple to me. Women tend to prefer careers where they interact with people. Men tend to prefer careers where they interact with things. When I worked at a hotel, the vast majority of applicants we got for front desk clerk or event planner were women. The vast majority of applicants for maintenance were men. CS just happens to be an extreme form of interacting with things. (The earlier comment about beta males fits too - part of being an alpha male is being able to interact well with other people.)
You'll see this disappear in low-income jobs (e.g. assembly line workers), where finances make the job a necessity. But by the time you get to mid- and high-paying jobs, the person has the luxury of choosing what he/she does, and this gender-based self-bias exerts itself.
Let me throw that right back at you: Why do you think the culture is predominated by socially awkward beta males?
You admit that non-misogynistic factors cause the field to disproportionately attract one type of person (socially awkward beta males). Yet when considering a different type of person (women) you immediately shift the blame to misogyny rather than assuming those same non-misogynistic factors are what are deterring women. This self-contradiction is why it's not an "obvious" explanation.
Since the gas tax is ostensibly for the construction and maintenance of roads and highways, it should be compared to that. The cost of maintenance and construction scale mostly according to CPI, not the price of gas. I can't think of any reason why you'd compare the tax to the price of gas unless you're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it needs to go up more (political arguments about energy taxes aside).
Putting $1.16 into an inflation calculator yields $1.90 in 2014 dollars, or a 64% increase. 64% of 18.4 cents is 11.7 cents. So a 12 cent increase is exactly what's needed for the tax to keep pace with inflation.
Three nuclear-armed nations. Part of the Kuril Islands are contested by Japan and Russia. Russia (the Soviets at the time) won control of the entire chain (plus Sakhalin) at the end of WWII as a hedge by the Allies. Basically we weren't sure if Japan would surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped. So we begged Russia to violate their non-aggression pact with Japan and invade after the bombings to put further pressure on Japan to surrender. They did so, and have claimed those territories ever since. Japan gave up most of their claims following WWII, but still claim four islands that Russia currently administrates.
Unfortunately, you have to (1) be sued by Amazon for violating the patent (else you have no standing to challenge it), and (2) pay the expense of multi-year court battles with practically no hope of recouping your costs even if you win.
OTOH, I actually like the one-click patent even though I think it's a stupid and invalid patent. It prevents other online stores from putting in a button which can cause you to instantly buy something if you accidentally click it (this has happened to me on Amazon).
I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.
The important thing is the intent of the person using the word. If the person is using it to denigrate someone or a group, it's offensive. If the person is using it out of ignorance or in an unrelated context, it's not offensive. The person feeling offended has nothing to do with it other than in the general social context that certain words are known to offend certain groups.
The problem comes about when the person using the word is using it to be offensive, but claims he's not. In that respect it's better to avoid using words known to be offensive. But it's just plain wrong to assume that any time an offensive word is used, that offense is intended.
When someone uses a derogatory word without intent to offend, and someone else is offended by the use of the word, it is a misunderstanding. Not an offense. However, in this case you clearly demonstrate that you knew the term could be offensive, and thus indict yourself that you wrote them with the intent to offend.
I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.
It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.
Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.
You're making a fundamental error many people make when it comes to display resolution. What matters isn't resolution or pixels per inch. It's pixels per degree. Angular resolution, not linear resolution.
I've got a 1080p projector. When I project a 20 ft image onto a wall 10 ft away, the pixels are quite obvious and I wish I had a 4k projector. If I move back to 20 ft away from the wall, the image becomes acceptable again. It's the angle of view that matters not the size or resolution. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with 1 arc-minute separation. So within one degree (60 arc-minutes) you'd need 120 pixels to fool 20/20 vision.
This is where the 300 dpi standard comes from. Viewed from 2 ft away, one inch covers just about 2.5 degrees, which is 150 arc-minutes, which can be fully resolved with 300 dots. So for a printout viewed from 2 ft away, you want about 300 dpi to match 20/20 vision. If it's not necessary to perfectly fool the eye, you can cut this requirement to about half.
In terms of Occulus Rift, a 1080p screen is 2203 pixels diagonal, so this corresponds to 18.4 degrees to fool 20/20 vision, 39 degrees to be adequate. If you want your VR display to look decent while covering a substantially wider angle of view than 39 degrees, you will want better than 1080p resolution. I'm gonna go out on a limb, and predict that most people will want more than a 39 degree field of view in their VR headset.
That actually gets to the real heart of the matter. Going after Google for this or the European right to be forgotten thing is shooting the messenger. Google doesn't actually host the content in question, and removing it from their index doesn't actually make the content disappear. The only reason it ranked highly in a Google search is because lots of websites linked to it, so removing it from Google's index won't stop people from getting to the info via the intermediary sites. It is literally like sticking your head in the sand in hopes it'll make the bad thing go away.