If the ISP market were competitive, Comcast and Verizon would be paying Netflix and Apple for the privilege of locally hosting their content. The ISPs would want these streaming services to work well on their networks, lest their customers flee to a different ISP which provided better streaming service. The incentive would be strong enough for the ISP to pay Netflix and Apple so they could host the content locally.
That the opposite is happening is entirely an artifact of the government-granted monopoly Comcast and Verizon enjoy. This is why net neutrality should be a required part of every cable, phone, or internet service the government grants a monopoly for.
Your mistake is the romantic, disturbing, and false notion that 'hunting' is meant to be fair to both parties.
Where do people get this strange, disturbing, and false notion that hunting is supposed to be fair?
Hunting is a game of probability. Drop your typical burger-eating city dweller in the woods with a rifle (or bow if you prefer) and they have practically zero chance of finding anything to kill worth eating. Study and learn the behavior of your prey and that probability increases. Learn how to avoid alerting the prey to your presence and that probability increases more. If you properly maintain your equipment and practice with it, the probability increases even more. That's what hunting is about - self improvement, discipline, and preparation. The quarry you gain at the end (if you're lucky) is just your prize for all that work.
Because it's a probability game, the game is most fun if the probability for success is low (but not too low so as to be a frustrating waste of time). That's where improvements in probability make the biggest difference. If knowing what a twig broken by a passing deer looks like improves my chances of success by 5%, that makes a huge difference if my pre-existing chances were 10%. Not that big a difference if they were 50%. Likewise, the game becomes pointless as the probability gets close to 100%. That's why pre-rigged shoots (where a farm-raised "wild" animal is released in the target area for you to kill), using drones, and throwing sticks of dynamite into a lake are frowned upon - they defeat the whole point. Yes you could just walk up to the dart board and insert all the darts into the bulls eye. Or just reveal every questionable square in Minefield. But that defeats the whole point - making the process challenging enough so as to reward self-improvement, discipline, and preparation.
It was never about fairness. The only people who think that it was are folks who get their meat from a grocery store and have no idea what goes into producing it. The animals they eat were born in captivity, lived in captivity, and were slaughtered in captivity. I don't hunt, but I do fish. The animals I eat were born free, lived free to do whatever they wanted, and were captive only in the last minute or so of their lives just before they were captured and slaughtered (which incidentally is how 99% of animals die even if they're not killed by a hunter or fisherman). Yet somehow I'm the bad guy?
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food.
Alaska does a really good job managing its fisheries; probably the best in the world. Commercial fishing "season" is not just a "catch as much as you can" free-for-all. It starts on a specified date, each ship is allocated a certain tonnage it's allowed to catch, and they have until a certain date to catch it. The use of spotter planes (actually I'm not sure they use those in Alaska, but hypothetically) would allow a ship to meet its quota more quickly, thus minimizing cost and risk to the lives of those at sea.
If there were commercial hunting, then it'd be the same. Drones would make sense because it would make the activity safer and more cost-effective. However, "commercial hunting" turned into cattle ranching several thousand years ago. The only remaining forms of hunting are sustenance and recreational. While an argument for drones could be made for sustenance hunters (people living in remote areas who have to kill wild game for their food), it contradicts the rationale for recreational hunters who are presumably doing it for "the thrill of the hunt."
I think that we are going to be in for a very, very long wait before we find out what happened
It's possible we'll never find out what happened even if we find the plane. The cockpit voice recorder only records the last 30-120 minutes of audio. Since most everyone agrees the flight flew on for 7 hours after the "incident" which caused it to deviate from its flight plan, the CVR is unlikely to contain any which could explain what happened. The flight data recorder records about 24 hours, but can be turned off manually from inside the plane with a circuit breaker. If the prevailing theory that this was a deliberate act by a trained pilot is correct, he likely pulled the breaker for the FDR when he killed the transponder.
To be honest my mom never understood some of the things she helped me with.
Maybe her parents didn't help her enough with her homework?
I joke, but I'm half-serious. This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents don't help with with homework, kid never really understands the material, grows up to be another parent who doesn't help with homework. From a control systems standpoint, there are probably two stable points in this system - above a certain threshold helping with homework helps and reinforces that behavior in future generations, and below that threshold helping with homework hurts and reinforces that behavior in future generations. The trick is to figure out a way to get most people above that threshold, rather than giving up and consigning everyone to live below that threshold.
The planes have ELTs designed to activate upon impact and relay their GPS location to satellites (Steve Fossett's plane would've been found within hours if he had had one of these). AFAIK those aren't waterproof though. The escape slides (which double as rafts) should have EPIRBs aboard, which are waterproof. However if the rafts aren't deployed then obviously they'll sink and the EPIRBs won't do a whole lot of good.
The black boxes give off a 35 KHz acoustic ping every second. The batteries should be good for 30-35 days. Unfortunately, 35 KHz sound attenuates rapidly in seawater, so you only likely to hear it up to about 2 km away. If the plane is sitting in more than 2 km of water, the only way you'll hear the pings is if you're very lucky on the surface, or from deep water submersibles.
I think the assumption was that you would have enough radar data to narrow down the search area to a few hundred or few thousand square km at most. AF447 was probably considered a fluke. Now that a second plane has "disappeared" in a similar manner, expect to see the required locating equipment changed. One obvious change would be to equip all commercial aircraft with an EPIRB designed to float free if the plane sinks. It won't give you the plane's exact location due to wind and currents, but it'll prevent these "we have no idea where the plane is" situations. Unlike the previous locating idea posted on/. which cost $100k per plane, an EPIRB only costs a few hundred dollars.
Companies are complaining about lack of supply and are unwilling to do anything about it when they hold most of the power and have most of the resources. They want to treat people like dirt and they're surprised it's biting them in the butt.
That's not quite what happened. A friend of mine got hired by EDS out of college (back when they were pretty competent). He stayed with them for about 9 months I think? Long enough to complete their training; then he quit and took a job elsewhere for a much higher salary since he'd had the EDS training.
So it's not that companies are unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply. It's that the ones that do try to do something about it just see the trained employees walk away to be hired by other companies which can offer higher salaries because they didn't have to pay for the training. It creates a race to the bottom where no company is willing to pay for the training.
The obvious solution for this particular problem is not one that those with a pro-employee / anti-corporate mindset like. Companies need to be able to require employees continue working with them for x years if they pay to further train the employee. Or the employee needs to pay for their training up-front, and the company gradually reimburses them over time. From a market perspective, if you find a diamond in the rough, you can pay to cut it and polish it to greatly increase its value. Then you can wear it, or sell it for a much higher price. But if you find an employee in the rough and pay to polish him and greatly increase his value, he can simply walk out on you and you're out the money you paid to polish him.
tl;dr - One of the prices you pay for banning non-competes is that companies are less willing to train their employees, and are more likely to want to hire someone who is already trained. This isn't to say that non-competes are good; just that like most things in life, they come with both positives and negatives. And while banning them eliminates the negatives, it also eliminates the positives.
You're right though, the referendum was a joke, I don't even know why dictators like Putin do this, you'd think if you're going to rig a vote you at least make it semi-believable at like 60% or something, but really, 97%, are they actually trying to take the piss or what?
Not to pull a Godwin, but all of this has happened before. I really fear that all of this will happen again. The parallels are just eerie.
Vandenberg AFB is just a couple hours northwest of Los Angeles. It handles the country's launches into polar orbit (stuff like spy satellites and scientific monitoring satellites - polar orbits cover a greater percentage of the earth's surface area). The viewing is not as good as Kennedy Space Center (most of the launch platforms are behind foothills inside a restricted access military base). But about 10 seconds after launch the rocket is above the hills and the show is the same.
Someone is being screwed -- the people the money is being left to.
How so? They aren't losing anything out of their own pockets, and they certainly aren't losing anything they earned.
Betty earns $50k/yr. She's a single mother who spoils her child by giving him whatever he wants. She pays $10k/yr in taxes, spends $30k/yr on living expenses, and blows $10k/yr on parties, toys and amusement park trips for her child. By the time she's 40, she's grossed $1 million and saved nothing, when tragically her life is cut short by a car accident. There is nothing for her child to inherit, so no taxes are assessed.
Jane earns $50k/yr. She's a single mother who scrimps and saves for her child's college fund. She pays $10k/yr in taxes, spends $30k/yr on living expenses, and socks away $10k/yr in her savings. By the time she's 40, she's grossed $1 million and saved up $200k, when tragically her life is cut short by a car accident. Her child inherits the $200k, but California takes 45% of it in estate/death taxes.
Betty and Jane both lived 40 years and earned the exact same amount of money.
Betty has paid $200k in taxes.
Jane has paid $290k in taxes.
Betty's child has received the benefit of $200k worth of parties, toys, and trips during his lifetime.
Jane's child has received nothing beyond the bare necessities during his life, and after taxes he will receive only $110k in inheritance.
Do you consider this to be fair? Or do you agree that Jane's child has been screwed?
You have to make laws based on the wide range of possible cases (or in this case, comparable cases). Making laws based on extreme outliers like Paris Hilton is a really poor way to legislate, and leads to all sorts of unintended consequences among the vast majority of people who aren't like Paris Hilton.
All taxes are a rate. Income taxes are per annum. Sales taxes are per sale. Your phone taxes are per call. Without a time interval or frequency, you have no basis for comparing taxes.*
Estate/death taxes are probably best described as "once in a lifetime" taxes. "Death taxes" is the next most descriptive term since it tells you exactly at what interval the taxes are assessed. Calling them an estate tax is a nondescriptive euphemism that doesn't tell you the rate at which it's collected. I currently have an estate - why isn't it taxed by estate taxes? It'd be kinda like calling income taxes a "money tax". I'll grant you that euphemisms are common when we're talking about death, but there's nothing douche-y about calling it what it is. Do you call someone a douche because they say their uncle died, instead of their uncle passed away?
* This is also why a wealth tax doesn't work. Wealth is not a rate, it's an accumulated sum based on income (from which taxes have already been taken out). Taking a percentage of wealth on a time interval results in a unit inconsistency which leads to mathematical nonsense. (Income = $/year, income tax = $/year, divide the two to get the percent of income paid in taxes. Wealth = $, wealth tax = $/year, divide the two and you get 1/years, not a percent.) Consequently, if you try to implement an annual wealth tax, the guy who scrimps and saves ends up paying more taxes during his lifetime than the guy who blows everything on parties every night, even if the two had the exact same income and lifetime earnings profile.
You already see this happening with estate/death taxes (where the tax rate is $/lifetime). Two guys earn $50k/yr through their lives and die after working 40 years. One spends all his money and dies penniless - he pays no taxes upon death. The other wanted to help out his kids so saved a quarter of his earnings ($500k) in order to give it to them. He ends up being taxed upon death. Why do two people who earned the exact same amount of money in their lifetimes have to pay a different amount of tax? (And no, thinking of the estate wealth as $/lifetime doesn't fix it. Because it's not $ earned in a lifetime. It's the sum of $ earned - $ taxes paid - $ spent, the last of which doesn't correctly map into a rate.)
If you want to "stick it" to people who have higher incomes, then: crank up the rate on the higher tax brackets, put extra sales taxes on luxury items, and implement a graduated capital gains tax which ramps up the more unearned income you receive. All of these are a proper percentage achieved by dividing one rate by another rate. An estate/death tax is mathematically the wrong way to do it. (And covering for it by making a lifetime tax-free gift allowance doesn't really fix the fundamental mathematical unfairness of it.)
Nature has a simple way of dealing with people who think death is wrong - it kills them off.
But seriously, from what I've observed of human behavior, I don't want to live in a world where people are immortal. My grandmother watched Japanese soldiers rape and kill her sister and niece during WWII. She hated the Japanese til the day she died two years ago. As long as human psychology allows us to hold life-long grudges like this, the only way for society to shed them and move on is for older people to die.
The longer you let a neural net learn, the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. At some point it becomes so inflexible that it's unable to deal with the unexpected situations which were the whole point of using them in the first place. I'm pretty sure the same thing goes on in our brains - the older you are, the less likely you are to change your beliefs and views. So the only way to restart with a fresh perspective is for old people to die.
However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.
I don't think this is a black/white question, but rather a matter of probability, scale, and variety of options. Many people do make a living in creative industries without really relying on copyright all that much.
For example, most of the work I do is subject to copyright protection, and in some of my roles I would normally transfer the copyright to clients/customers at the end of a job. However, often neither I nor my customers much care about that, because if we're talking about software that is running on their web server or embedded in their device, it has much more practical protection against someone ripping it than copyright affords, and in any case the software would have limited value in isolation so there's not much incentive for others to copy it.
Any artist in a work for hire situation (i.e. just about all of them) are in the same boat. Their copyright gets immediately transferred to whomever they're working for, so they're making a living in the creative industry without the benefit of copyright. (Don't get me wrong - I don't have a problem with this. There's no way to make a movie or video game if all the artists, actors, voice actors, programmers, production designers, editors, etc. all retained their individual copyright. A single person being fired could lead to a huge chunk if not all of the movie having to be scrapped and redone. I'm just pointing out that from the individual artist's perspective, they don't directly benefit from copyright.)
Whether the person who hired them would do so without copyright is a different matter. I can't see Disney doing so, at least not in the scale they do now. However commissioned work still functions without copyright. Wedding photographers used to shoot the wedding for free and charged you for the prints. If you wanted reprints or extra copies, you had to go back to the photographer and buy more prints, because he retained the copyright. Then scanners and photo printers happened. Rather than fight a hopeless battle, wedding photographers now charge for shooting the wedding, and just give you the digital pictures. While legally they still retain copyright, for all intents and purposes the transaction is handled as if copyright didn't exist. I see just as many wedding photographers today as before.
I think this is actually a good change. The IP industry is slowly moving away from the "work once, get paid forever based on how many copies you can sell" model which quite frankly was always silly. They're moving to the same model the rest of us live by - do some work and get paid for it. Want to get paid more? Do more work. Popular success still brings you more money under the new model; it's just in the form of volume of new work and people willing to pay you more for your work. Not in the form of being able to hit a button to print off 100,000 extra copies for sale. That's also the problem I see with TFA. Sutter argues as if the old model is his birthright, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of us don't live by that model. We live live by the model Google is pushing his industry towards.
Potentially there's a lot of middleman removal as a pleasant side effect,
A typical retail business works with about a 15% margin. So the fact that middlemen like Google, Apple, et al are skimming off 30% is pretty staggering. The fact that authors and musicians are embracing 30% because the traditional publishing industry skims off closer to 90% is absolutely disgusting.
and perhaps most dramatically in 1968, when an intelligence team found the submarine Scorpion, which sank in the North Atlantic after losing contact under equally baffling circumstances. "The same approach we used with Scorpion could be applied in this case and should be," says John P. Craven who helped pioneer the use of Bayesian search techniques to locate objects lost at sea.
Not so fast. The Scorpion was found because the U.S. had an extensive underwater listening array in the Atlantic (SOSUS) designed specifically to (wait for it...) locate and track submarines. Soviet submarines, but it worked equally well on U.S. submarines which were making a lot of noise - like one in its death throes from an onboard explosion and imploding as it passed crush depth. One of their first clues that something disastrous had happened was when those sounds showed up on SOSUS audio tapes.
Yes the same methodology can (and should) be applied inn locating MH370. But we're talking about uncertainties in location and time an order or three in magnitude larger than for the Scorpion or AF447.
Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it.
The beauty of crying that the sky is falling is that if you say it long enough, eventually you'll be right.
While I'm a bit skeptical of the study after reading TFA, they avoid that particular pitfall and put their money where their mouth is. They conclude that if things don't change, we're looking at about 15 more years before collapse.
If you want to commit suicide, why not ditch the plane straight down? Why would you plot a course somewhere into the middle of the Indian Ocean?
Note: I'm extremely skeptical of the suicide theory. If you want to kill yourself, you just go and do it. You don't kill a planeload of passengers with you unless you've got a serious axe to grind. But since we're discussing what ifs...
What if you're Muslim, and your religion frowns upon suicide? Pointing the plane straight down is kinda like active suicide. Flying a plane into the middle of the ocean until it runs out of fuel, leaving you no way to save it (and yourself) is more like passive suicide. Same difference between putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger, vs. swallowing a hundred sleeping pills. Same end result, except you are not in direct control of what actually kills you in the latter.
Another angle I haven't seen (haven't seen it much since the 1980s in fact) is the insurance scam. You're in dire financial straits (credit card bills, gambling losses, whatever). You can't see a way out of it but you don't want that burden to fall upon your family. You take out a life insurance policy which would pay for all your debts and then some. Then you kill yourself in a way that seems like an accident. Or in the case of an airliner since they have black boxes, kill yourself in a way that those black boxes will never be found.
In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.
"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.
However, the idea that the WinRT / Modern App platform needs to go away in a future Windows version is also misguided. What you refer to as "Metro" fills a useful function that isn't otherwise served on Windows, which is enabling touch screen use, and it does a very nice job of that.
If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).
Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.
And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.
Imagine if you wanted an Apple computer you had to buy it through Best Buy or Radio Shack, and dealing with their personnel. The companies that do business this way are maddening.
Questionable analogy. Apple's laptops are actually made by Quanta. Almost no laptop manufacturer actually makes their own laptops. The vast majority are made by a handful of Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) who do both the design and manufacturing (as opposed to an OEM who only does the manufacturing). In essence, Apple, HP, Dell, etc are the "dealers" who handle sales and aftermarket service. Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Pegatron are the "automakers."
'No one could possibly fail to understand my simple user interface.'
One of my first website coding projects was a simple survey. I modeled it after the numerous like/dislike surveys you see everywhere, both on the web and on paper. "Dislike" at one end, 5 radio buttons in the midde, and "Like" at the other end. Totally obvious how to use it, right?
About a third of the testers sent me email asking me what they were supposed to do.
we will NEVER get a cellphone that is perfect for "geeks" not in the sense of a tiny pocket device.
The problem isn't that nobody is willing to make a "perfect" cellphone for geeks. The problem is that when you design something for a limited market, its design cost has to be amortized over fewer sales. Consequently it costs a lot more.
Unfortunately the same geeks who clamor for these features also demand rock-bottom pricing. They look at your expensive "geek" phone, complain why it's priced so high compared to "consumer" phones, and refuse to buy. The geek phone maker then goes bankrupt, causing the geeks to complain that nobody makes phones that suit their needs. The industries where the limited markets do not have this cost bias - the customers are willing to fork over the extra money - are all doing well (performance car enthusiasts, off-roaders, PC gaming enthusiasts, audiophiles, "prosumer" amateur photographers, etc).
Wall Stree with its immoral eye on profits at any cost ends up calling the shots.
Profit is what the economy translates improved economic efficiency into. So if you improve the efficiency of a useful mechanism or process, the economy converts it into profit for you. Calling it immoral is equivalent to calling all technological progress immoral.
The problem is things other than improved efficiency can also translate into profit (e.g. a scam or con job). Those things deservedly need to be labeled as immoral. But it's also immoral to not even attempt to distinguish between the two. Like calling all men rapists just because they've used their penis.
It may be my eyes, the angle at which I use my screen, the brightness and contrast I prefer, or something else, but the background color has always been almost undetectable to me.
Google's background is white - 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The old sponsored links background was 254, 247, 221 (RGB). Our eyes are pretty bad at detecting differences in blue, so it didn't take much of a bad monitor or settings to clip the colors to where you couldn't distinguish the two backgrounds. This mostly happens on poor quality low-gamut screens (laptops!) where the colors are so pale, the manufacturer or user pushes the saturation to try to make them stand out more. So 0 => 0, 100 => 125, 200 => 250, and anything 205-255 is clipped and the same shade since that's the most saturated color the screen is capable of displaying.
The new "Ad" icon is 234, 176, 53 (RGB). If you can't see it, you either need to replace your monitor (and marvel at all the wonderful pictures on the web you've been missing out), or get your eyes checked.
And they opt for a small yellowish graphical element that is barely different from the background color?
I just pulled the new layout into Photoshop. The background is 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The yellow "Ad" label is 234, 176, 53 (RGB), or since we're talking about a white background, 0%, 32%, 92%, 0% in CMYK. If that is "barely different from the background color," you need to throw away your monitor and buy a new one. No don't try to sell it used; it'd be a crime to inflict such a poor screen onto anyone.
They've recently made some changes that (deliberately?) broke support on xbmc, so we don't stream from Amazon at home anymore. For some reason, there is no way to stream to Android phones, even though their Kindle Fire is Android based.
It's not just that. Most of their content is SD if you stream to a PC. They'll only give you the HD version if you stream to a Kindle or a DVD/Blu-ray player. They are really shooting themselves in the foot with these limitations.
Slashdot Mirror
If the ISP market were competitive, Comcast and Verizon would be paying Netflix and Apple for the privilege of locally hosting their content. The ISPs would want these streaming services to work well on their networks, lest their customers flee to a different ISP which provided better streaming service. The incentive would be strong enough for the ISP to pay Netflix and Apple so they could host the content locally.
That the opposite is happening is entirely an artifact of the government-granted monopoly Comcast and Verizon enjoy. This is why net neutrality should be a required part of every cable, phone, or internet service the government grants a monopoly for.
Where do people get this strange, disturbing, and false notion that hunting is supposed to be fair?
Hunting is a game of probability. Drop your typical burger-eating city dweller in the woods with a rifle (or bow if you prefer) and they have practically zero chance of finding anything to kill worth eating. Study and learn the behavior of your prey and that probability increases. Learn how to avoid alerting the prey to your presence and that probability increases more. If you properly maintain your equipment and practice with it, the probability increases even more. That's what hunting is about - self improvement, discipline, and preparation. The quarry you gain at the end (if you're lucky) is just your prize for all that work.
Because it's a probability game, the game is most fun if the probability for success is low (but not too low so as to be a frustrating waste of time). That's where improvements in probability make the biggest difference. If knowing what a twig broken by a passing deer looks like improves my chances of success by 5%, that makes a huge difference if my pre-existing chances were 10%. Not that big a difference if they were 50%. Likewise, the game becomes pointless as the probability gets close to 100%. That's why pre-rigged shoots (where a farm-raised "wild" animal is released in the target area for you to kill), using drones, and throwing sticks of dynamite into a lake are frowned upon - they defeat the whole point. Yes you could just walk up to the dart board and insert all the darts into the bulls eye. Or just reveal every questionable square in Minefield. But that defeats the whole point - making the process challenging enough so as to reward self-improvement, discipline, and preparation.
It was never about fairness. The only people who think that it was are folks who get their meat from a grocery store and have no idea what goes into producing it. The animals they eat were born in captivity, lived in captivity, and were slaughtered in captivity. I don't hunt, but I do fish. The animals I eat were born free, lived free to do whatever they wanted, and were captive only in the last minute or so of their lives just before they were captured and slaughtered (which incidentally is how 99% of animals die even if they're not killed by a hunter or fisherman). Yet somehow I'm the bad guy?
Alaska does a really good job managing its fisheries; probably the best in the world. Commercial fishing "season" is not just a "catch as much as you can" free-for-all. It starts on a specified date, each ship is allocated a certain tonnage it's allowed to catch, and they have until a certain date to catch it. The use of spotter planes (actually I'm not sure they use those in Alaska, but hypothetically) would allow a ship to meet its quota more quickly, thus minimizing cost and risk to the lives of those at sea.
If there were commercial hunting, then it'd be the same. Drones would make sense because it would make the activity safer and more cost-effective. However, "commercial hunting" turned into cattle ranching several thousand years ago. The only remaining forms of hunting are sustenance and recreational. While an argument for drones could be made for sustenance hunters (people living in remote areas who have to kill wild game for their food), it contradicts the rationale for recreational hunters who are presumably doing it for "the thrill of the hunt."
It's possible we'll never find out what happened even if we find the plane. The cockpit voice recorder only records the last 30-120 minutes of audio. Since most everyone agrees the flight flew on for 7 hours after the "incident" which caused it to deviate from its flight plan, the CVR is unlikely to contain any which could explain what happened. The flight data recorder records about 24 hours, but can be turned off manually from inside the plane with a circuit breaker. If the prevailing theory that this was a deliberate act by a trained pilot is correct, he likely pulled the breaker for the FDR when he killed the transponder.
Maybe her parents didn't help her enough with her homework?
I joke, but I'm half-serious. This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents don't help with with homework, kid never really understands the material, grows up to be another parent who doesn't help with homework. From a control systems standpoint, there are probably two stable points in this system - above a certain threshold helping with homework helps and reinforces that behavior in future generations, and below that threshold helping with homework hurts and reinforces that behavior in future generations. The trick is to figure out a way to get most people above that threshold, rather than giving up and consigning everyone to live below that threshold.
The planes have ELTs designed to activate upon impact and relay their GPS location to satellites (Steve Fossett's plane would've been found within hours if he had had one of these). AFAIK those aren't waterproof though. The escape slides (which double as rafts) should have EPIRBs aboard, which are waterproof. However if the rafts aren't deployed then obviously they'll sink and the EPIRBs won't do a whole lot of good.
/. which cost $100k per plane, an EPIRB only costs a few hundred dollars.
The black boxes give off a 35 KHz acoustic ping every second. The batteries should be good for 30-35 days. Unfortunately, 35 KHz sound attenuates rapidly in seawater, so you only likely to hear it up to about 2 km away. If the plane is sitting in more than 2 km of water, the only way you'll hear the pings is if you're very lucky on the surface, or from deep water submersibles.
I think the assumption was that you would have enough radar data to narrow down the search area to a few hundred or few thousand square km at most. AF447 was probably considered a fluke. Now that a second plane has "disappeared" in a similar manner, expect to see the required locating equipment changed. One obvious change would be to equip all commercial aircraft with an EPIRB designed to float free if the plane sinks. It won't give you the plane's exact location due to wind and currents, but it'll prevent these "we have no idea where the plane is" situations. Unlike the previous locating idea posted on
That's not quite what happened. A friend of mine got hired by EDS out of college (back when they were pretty competent). He stayed with them for about 9 months I think? Long enough to complete their training; then he quit and took a job elsewhere for a much higher salary since he'd had the EDS training.
So it's not that companies are unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply. It's that the ones that do try to do something about it just see the trained employees walk away to be hired by other companies which can offer higher salaries because they didn't have to pay for the training. It creates a race to the bottom where no company is willing to pay for the training.
The obvious solution for this particular problem is not one that those with a pro-employee / anti-corporate mindset like. Companies need to be able to require employees continue working with them for x years if they pay to further train the employee. Or the employee needs to pay for their training up-front, and the company gradually reimburses them over time. From a market perspective, if you find a diamond in the rough, you can pay to cut it and polish it to greatly increase its value. Then you can wear it, or sell it for a much higher price. But if you find an employee in the rough and pay to polish him and greatly increase his value, he can simply walk out on you and you're out the money you paid to polish him.
tl;dr - One of the prices you pay for banning non-competes is that companies are less willing to train their employees, and are more likely to want to hire someone who is already trained. This isn't to say that non-competes are good; just that like most things in life, they come with both positives and negatives. And while banning them eliminates the negatives, it also eliminates the positives.
Not to pull a Godwin, but all of this has happened before. I really fear that all of this will happen again. The parallels are just eerie.
Vandenberg AFB is just a couple hours northwest of Los Angeles. It handles the country's launches into polar orbit (stuff like spy satellites and scientific monitoring satellites - polar orbits cover a greater percentage of the earth's surface area). The viewing is not as good as Kennedy Space Center (most of the launch platforms are behind foothills inside a restricted access military base). But about 10 seconds after launch the rocket is above the hills and the show is the same.
Betty earns $50k/yr. She's a single mother who spoils her child by giving him whatever he wants. She pays $10k/yr in taxes, spends $30k/yr on living expenses, and blows $10k/yr on parties, toys and amusement park trips for her child. By the time she's 40, she's grossed $1 million and saved nothing, when tragically her life is cut short by a car accident. There is nothing for her child to inherit, so no taxes are assessed.
Jane earns $50k/yr. She's a single mother who scrimps and saves for her child's college fund. She pays $10k/yr in taxes, spends $30k/yr on living expenses, and socks away $10k/yr in her savings. By the time she's 40, she's grossed $1 million and saved up $200k, when tragically her life is cut short by a car accident. Her child inherits the $200k, but California takes 45% of it in estate/death taxes.
Betty and Jane both lived 40 years and earned the exact same amount of money.
Betty has paid $200k in taxes.
Jane has paid $290k in taxes.
Betty's child has received the benefit of $200k worth of parties, toys, and trips during his lifetime.
Jane's child has received nothing beyond the bare necessities during his life, and after taxes he will receive only $110k in inheritance.
Do you consider this to be fair? Or do you agree that Jane's child has been screwed?
You have to make laws based on the wide range of possible cases (or in this case, comparable cases). Making laws based on extreme outliers like Paris Hilton is a really poor way to legislate, and leads to all sorts of unintended consequences among the vast majority of people who aren't like Paris Hilton.
All taxes are a rate. Income taxes are per annum. Sales taxes are per sale. Your phone taxes are per call. Without a time interval or frequency, you have no basis for comparing taxes.*
Estate/death taxes are probably best described as "once in a lifetime" taxes. "Death taxes" is the next most descriptive term since it tells you exactly at what interval the taxes are assessed. Calling them an estate tax is a nondescriptive euphemism that doesn't tell you the rate at which it's collected. I currently have an estate - why isn't it taxed by estate taxes? It'd be kinda like calling income taxes a "money tax". I'll grant you that euphemisms are common when we're talking about death, but there's nothing douche-y about calling it what it is. Do you call someone a douche because they say their uncle died, instead of their uncle passed away?
* This is also why a wealth tax doesn't work. Wealth is not a rate, it's an accumulated sum based on income (from which taxes have already been taken out). Taking a percentage of wealth on a time interval results in a unit inconsistency which leads to mathematical nonsense. (Income = $/year, income tax = $/year, divide the two to get the percent of income paid in taxes. Wealth = $, wealth tax = $/year, divide the two and you get 1/years, not a percent.) Consequently, if you try to implement an annual wealth tax, the guy who scrimps and saves ends up paying more taxes during his lifetime than the guy who blows everything on parties every night, even if the two had the exact same income and lifetime earnings profile.
You already see this happening with estate/death taxes (where the tax rate is $/lifetime). Two guys earn $50k/yr through their lives and die after working 40 years. One spends all his money and dies penniless - he pays no taxes upon death. The other wanted to help out his kids so saved a quarter of his earnings ($500k) in order to give it to them. He ends up being taxed upon death. Why do two people who earned the exact same amount of money in their lifetimes have to pay a different amount of tax? (And no, thinking of the estate wealth as $/lifetime doesn't fix it. Because it's not $ earned in a lifetime. It's the sum of $ earned - $ taxes paid - $ spent, the last of which doesn't correctly map into a rate.)
If you want to "stick it" to people who have higher incomes, then: crank up the rate on the higher tax brackets, put extra sales taxes on luxury items, and implement a graduated capital gains tax which ramps up the more unearned income you receive. All of these are a proper percentage achieved by dividing one rate by another rate. An estate/death tax is mathematically the wrong way to do it. (And covering for it by making a lifetime tax-free gift allowance doesn't really fix the fundamental mathematical unfairness of it.)
Nature has a simple way of dealing with people who think death is wrong - it kills them off.
But seriously, from what I've observed of human behavior, I don't want to live in a world where people are immortal. My grandmother watched Japanese soldiers rape and kill her sister and niece during WWII. She hated the Japanese til the day she died two years ago. As long as human psychology allows us to hold life-long grudges like this, the only way for society to shed them and move on is for older people to die.
The longer you let a neural net learn, the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. At some point it becomes so inflexible that it's unable to deal with the unexpected situations which were the whole point of using them in the first place. I'm pretty sure the same thing goes on in our brains - the older you are, the less likely you are to change your beliefs and views. So the only way to restart with a fresh perspective is for old people to die.
Any artist in a work for hire situation (i.e. just about all of them) are in the same boat. Their copyright gets immediately transferred to whomever they're working for, so they're making a living in the creative industry without the benefit of copyright. (Don't get me wrong - I don't have a problem with this. There's no way to make a movie or video game if all the artists, actors, voice actors, programmers, production designers, editors, etc. all retained their individual copyright. A single person being fired could lead to a huge chunk if not all of the movie having to be scrapped and redone. I'm just pointing out that from the individual artist's perspective, they don't directly benefit from copyright.)
Whether the person who hired them would do so without copyright is a different matter. I can't see Disney doing so, at least not in the scale they do now. However commissioned work still functions without copyright. Wedding photographers used to shoot the wedding for free and charged you for the prints. If you wanted reprints or extra copies, you had to go back to the photographer and buy more prints, because he retained the copyright. Then scanners and photo printers happened. Rather than fight a hopeless battle, wedding photographers now charge for shooting the wedding, and just give you the digital pictures. While legally they still retain copyright, for all intents and purposes the transaction is handled as if copyright didn't exist. I see just as many wedding photographers today as before.
I think this is actually a good change. The IP industry is slowly moving away from the "work once, get paid forever based on how many copies you can sell" model which quite frankly was always silly. They're moving to the same model the rest of us live by - do some work and get paid for it. Want to get paid more? Do more work. Popular success still brings you more money under the new model; it's just in the form of volume of new work and people willing to pay you more for your work. Not in the form of being able to hit a button to print off 100,000 extra copies for sale. That's also the problem I see with TFA. Sutter argues as if the old model is his birthright, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of us don't live by that model. We live live by the model Google is pushing his industry towards.
A typical retail business works with about a 15% margin. So the fact that middlemen like Google, Apple, et al are skimming off 30% is pretty staggering. The fact that authors and musicians are embracing 30% because the traditional publishing industry skims off closer to 90% is absolutely disgusting.
Not so fast. The Scorpion was found because the U.S. had an extensive underwater listening array in the Atlantic (SOSUS) designed specifically to (wait for it...) locate and track submarines. Soviet submarines, but it worked equally well on U.S. submarines which were making a lot of noise - like one in its death throes from an onboard explosion and imploding as it passed crush depth. One of their first clues that something disastrous had happened was when those sounds showed up on SOSUS audio tapes.
Yes the same methodology can (and should) be applied inn locating MH370. But we're talking about uncertainties in location and time an order or three in magnitude larger than for the Scorpion or AF447.
The beauty of crying that the sky is falling is that if you say it long enough, eventually you'll be right.
While I'm a bit skeptical of the study after reading TFA, they avoid that particular pitfall and put their money where their mouth is. They conclude that if things don't change, we're looking at about 15 more years before collapse.
Note: I'm extremely skeptical of the suicide theory. If you want to kill yourself, you just go and do it. You don't kill a planeload of passengers with you unless you've got a serious axe to grind. But since we're discussing what ifs...
What if you're Muslim, and your religion frowns upon suicide? Pointing the plane straight down is kinda like active suicide. Flying a plane into the middle of the ocean until it runs out of fuel, leaving you no way to save it (and yourself) is more like passive suicide. Same difference between putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger, vs. swallowing a hundred sleeping pills. Same end result, except you are not in direct control of what actually kills you in the latter.
Another angle I haven't seen (haven't seen it much since the 1980s in fact) is the insurance scam. You're in dire financial straits (credit card bills, gambling losses, whatever). You can't see a way out of it but you don't want that burden to fall upon your family. You take out a life insurance policy which would pay for all your debts and then some. Then you kill yourself in a way that seems like an accident. Or in the case of an airliner since they have black boxes, kill yourself in a way that those black boxes will never be found.
In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.
"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.
If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).
Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.
And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.
Questionable analogy. Apple's laptops are actually made by Quanta. Almost no laptop manufacturer actually makes their own laptops. The vast majority are made by a handful of Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) who do both the design and manufacturing (as opposed to an OEM who only does the manufacturing). In essence, Apple, HP, Dell, etc are the "dealers" who handle sales and aftermarket service. Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Pegatron are the "automakers."
One of my first website coding projects was a simple survey. I modeled it after the numerous like/dislike surveys you see everywhere, both on the web and on paper. "Dislike" at one end, 5 radio buttons in the midde, and "Like" at the other end. Totally obvious how to use it, right?
About a third of the testers sent me email asking me what they were supposed to do.
The problem isn't that nobody is willing to make a "perfect" cellphone for geeks. The problem is that when you design something for a limited market, its design cost has to be amortized over fewer sales. Consequently it costs a lot more.
Unfortunately the same geeks who clamor for these features also demand rock-bottom pricing. They look at your expensive "geek" phone, complain why it's priced so high compared to "consumer" phones, and refuse to buy. The geek phone maker then goes bankrupt, causing the geeks to complain that nobody makes phones that suit their needs. The industries where the limited markets do not have this cost bias - the customers are willing to fork over the extra money - are all doing well (performance car enthusiasts, off-roaders, PC gaming enthusiasts, audiophiles, "prosumer" amateur photographers, etc).
Profit is what the economy translates improved economic efficiency into. So if you improve the efficiency of a useful mechanism or process, the economy converts it into profit for you. Calling it immoral is equivalent to calling all technological progress immoral.
The problem is things other than improved efficiency can also translate into profit (e.g. a scam or con job). Those things deservedly need to be labeled as immoral. But it's also immoral to not even attempt to distinguish between the two. Like calling all men rapists just because they've used their penis.
Google's background is white - 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The old sponsored links background was 254, 247, 221 (RGB). Our eyes are pretty bad at detecting differences in blue, so it didn't take much of a bad monitor or settings to clip the colors to where you couldn't distinguish the two backgrounds. This mostly happens on poor quality low-gamut screens (laptops!) where the colors are so pale, the manufacturer or user pushes the saturation to try to make them stand out more. So 0 => 0, 100 => 125, 200 => 250, and anything 205-255 is clipped and the same shade since that's the most saturated color the screen is capable of displaying.
The new "Ad" icon is 234, 176, 53 (RGB). If you can't see it, you either need to replace your monitor (and marvel at all the wonderful pictures on the web you've been missing out), or get your eyes checked.
I just pulled the new layout into Photoshop. The background is 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The yellow "Ad" label is 234, 176, 53 (RGB), or since we're talking about a white background, 0%, 32%, 92%, 0% in CMYK. If that is "barely different from the background color," you need to throw away your monitor and buy a new one. No don't try to sell it used; it'd be a crime to inflict such a poor screen onto anyone.
It's not just that. Most of their content is SD if you stream to a PC. They'll only give you the HD version if you stream to a Kindle or a DVD/Blu-ray player. They are really shooting themselves in the foot with these limitations.