The funny thing is Facebook bought for billions a company which makes software running over XMPP. THAT was pathetic.
They didn't pay $19 billion for the app. They paid for the userbase. From what I read it's about 450 million, which would make the purchase price about $42 per user. A little steep, but not outlandish in advertising terms. Now they have to figure out how to hang on to those users and grow the user base.
That and 90 billion gallons of water in Alfalfa sent to China, and 97 billion gallons
used for fracking...
That's about 275,000 and 300,000 acre-feet respectively. According to the wiki, agricultural use was 29 million acre-feet, urban use about 8.7 million acre-feet. So the two uses you cite represent less than 1% of overall water usage each. (And are your figures nationwide or just for California? I assumed just for California.) I'm all for righteous indignation, but let's try to keep some perspective on scale.
Also I hear the commercial water rate is lower then the residential rate, ie.
the per gallon price is cheaper for the corporates then for the sheeple.
As it so happens, I have our latest commercial water bill right next to me (for water used at a commercial strip mall in Southern California). $30 per hcf (hundred cubic feet) + $29.75 per hcf in service and delivery charges. Works out to:
$59.75 / 748 gallons = 7.99 cents/gallon.
My residential water bill is a flat monthly service charge of $26.87 + $2.29 per hcf for the first 12 hcf, $2.55 per hcf for the next 18 hcf, and $3.41 per hcf for any water use beyond that. Or:
1 hcf = $29.16 = 3.90 cents/gallon
10 hcf = $49.77 = 0.67 cents/gallon
25 hcf = $87.5 = 0.47 cents/gallon
50 hcf = $168.45 = 0.45 cents/gallon
So once you get past very low usage amounts, the commercial rate is about an order of magnitude higher than the residential rate.
I suspect it's agricultural water use which gets a lower rate than residential, and you're misremembering.
It can be used both ways. What they're describing is basically tomography. By analyzing the signal recorded from different locations, you can construct a 2D or 3D representation of signal strength, thus allowing you to pin down a specific phone's transmissions based on location (rather than frequency or code or time - what's used for OFDMA, CDMA, and TDMA respectively). The reverse process would involve modulating the transmission strength and phase from multiple towers in a synchronized fashion so that the peak signal strength in a 2D or 3D field happens to be where that phone is located. It also frees you from the Shannon limit on bandwidth because the amount of channel noise is now location-dependent, rather than solely being frequency-, code- or time-dependent. Very clever work.
Well duh. This is all a CYA attempt to cast this as something terribad the U.S. did, and they themselves are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Just like the U.S. Congress and President have mostly successfully cast this as something terribad the NSA did, and they themselves are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. It's not like they funded, got regular reports on, and used the data collected by the NSA program they created and authorized, right?
3. Why then, do we have only 3 spatial dimensions?
This one is pretty easy. Math in 2 dimensions is fundamentally different from math in 3 dimensions. Certain functions which converge in 2D (e.g. a random wandering path will always eventually hit its starting point) will diverge in 3D (will usually never hit its starting point). It turns out that dimensions >3D mathematically act pretty much like 3D. So for most purposes there is no need to simulate more than 3 spatial dimensions.
The minimum wage should be set such that no person working full time qualifies for any sort of food stamps or welfare AT LEAST. If we set it at any less than that the taxpayer ends up subsidizing employer's payroll.
This again...
A job pays what the product of the job is worth. No more. If you raise the minimum wage to above what the job's productivity is worth, the job's wage doesn't magically increase. The job simply ceases to exist. All those no-skill jobs kids in high school get to make some spending cash? Gone. All those entry-level jobs for people who learned a lot of book knowledge but don't yet have practical experience? Gone. All those unskilled assembly line jobs? Exported to third world countries or replaced by robots.
I'm sure there are lots of low-wage jobs where employers aren't paying what the job is actually worth. But don't be so blinded by your zeal to curtail those abuses that you demolish a large fraction of the functional economy in the process. The taxpayers aren't just subsidizing certain employers' payroll. They're also subsidizing the inability or unwillingness of certain employees to find/work a more productive job.
This is why funding and providing educational opportunities (both for children and adults) is a much better approach to solving this than raising the minimum wage. True economic growth comes from increasing each individual's productivity. The goal should be to allow people to move from less productive jobs to more productive jobs; not shifting money from more productive jobs to less productive jobs to make those less productive jobs more appealing.
While The Color Run's response is a bit extreme, they are correct that what Jackson is asking for is completely unreasonable. Typical compensation for a full-page photo published with a distribution of between 10,000 to 100,000 is on the order of $500-$1000. For a photo used in advertisements at retail stores, it's about $1000-$2000. Usually, if the parties involved can't come to an agreement, these type of unattributed photographer incidents wind up in small claims court because the amounts involved are so small, not federal court.
I think what we have a kid here who hears stories about how much 30 year veteran pro photographers with well-established reputations make, and thinks it's normal to snap a few photos and be set for the year. The only way he could realistically collect $100,000 is if (1) he registered the copyrights on his photos with the U.S. Library of Congress, and (2) he managed to prove in court that The Color Run knowingly, deliberately, and willfully violated his copyright. I highly doubt he's going to be able to prove (2), and if he didn't do (1) he's only entitled to damages suffered (in this case, probably zero unless he has a letter from another advertiser saying they wanted to pay him $x to use his photos but decided not to after seeing that The Color Run was already using them.
To any budding photographers: Copyright infringement on the Internet is rampant. If you find your photos being used without your permission, you are not the first person this has happened to. If you don't want to pay for a lawyer, ask what to do in online photo forums. Lots of photographers who've had the same thing happen will be more than happy to give you advice on how to proceed, and provide guidelines on reasonable pricing like the link I gave above.
From January 2012 through Nov. 30, 2012, there were approximately 1,732 cellphone related thefts reported in San Francisco out of a total of 3,487 robberies â" making 50% of all robberies cellphone related.
So in 11 months there were 1732 cellphone thefts in San Francisco, or an annual rate of 1889 thefts/year.
In 2012 there were 5339 automobile thefts in San Francisco. So where's the legislation requiring a remote kill switch on all cars to render them inoperable, to discourage theft?
Same thing happened to Samsung. Here's a digital picture frame they made in 2005 and sold in 2006. Long before Apple even came out with the iPhone much less the iPad. (Yes the back doesn't look like a tablet - that's beside the point since it wasn't a tablet.) After you've seen the picture frame you realize Samsung didn't copy the iPad's appearance when they made the Galaxy Tab 10.1. They just took their old digital picture frame design (black face, silver/white trim, and yes rounded corners) and repurposed it as a tablet. Even their name/logo is in the same location.
But because almost nobody saw/bought their digital picture frame, they just assume the iPad was first and anything that looked like it must be a copy. I'm of the opinion that with minimalist designs like this, pretty much everyone will come up with the same design. But if you insist there was copying, it's far more likely that it was Apple who lifted Samsung's digital picture frame design when they were settling on the iPad's appearance.
It's a joint venture by South Korean businesses building factories in North Korea to use North Korean labor. Funding for its construction was from South Korea, most of the managers are South Korean, most of the workers are North Korean. It provides the few North Korean managers with experience in running an entrepreneurial business, as well as provides the workers some badly needed income. It hasn't gone all that smoothly - the North has unilaterally shut it down on several occasions for random reasons, and tried to use its continued operation as negotiating leverage for concessions from the South.
Unlike the rest of the world, South Korea does not have the luxury of writing off North Korea. Inevitably at some point in the future, the two will have to reintegrate into a single Korea. And the South would much prefer it be with a modernized North Korea, much like the advanced state of the East German economy made German reunification go a lot more smoothly. So despite the drawbacks and the North's odd behavior, the South still supports it.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, it was common for people at parties to ask "What's your sign?" and "Age of Aquairus" was playing on the radio.
Actually, the age of Aquarius is one of the few things astrologers got sort of right. The Earth's tilt precesses over time (just like a gyroscope), resulting in the solstices and equinoxes shifting relative to the position of the stars. Currently, the moment the Spring Equinox occurs, the constellation Pisces is directly overhead opposite the sun (i.e. looking at the center of the ecliptic at midnight). Over time, this will shift until Aquarius is overhead. An entire precession cycle takes just shy of 26,000 years, sending the Spring equinox through all twelve zodiac constellations during that span.
What they got wrong was: (1) The constellations are not all the same size, so you can't divide a full precession into 12 equal ages based on the constellations. (2) The song in particular was based on a common misinterpretation of each age being 2000 years. Hence the misnomer that the the year 2000 was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Simple math should tell you that this doesn't work, as it results in only 24,000 years for a precession cycle. Dividing the precession into 12 equal ages actually results in each age being about 2150 years. (3) There are higher order effects also at play, so even a calculation based solely on precession is not exact.
But it is in fact a real astronomical phenomenon behind the term "Age of Aquarius."
I wonder if part of it is that BMW/Merc drivers simply enjoy blinding the poors they drive past, forcing them to slow down and pull to the side to avoid an accident. It must inflate their sense of superiority for their car to inconvenience so many other people.
This attitude that someone who is rich must be on an ego trip has always baffled me. It's hypocritical because your own ego is inflating your own self worth, making you think rich people are doing something which annoys you specifically to annoy you. The simple truth is, the rich are like everyone else - they don't care about you. It's just that being rich gives them more ways to not care.
The solution then is to make them care. I've always thought cars should have return mirrors mounted on the front and back at the level of the side mirrors. e.g. On the front of the side mirrors, and on the rear about where the center brake light is. The mirrors (three mirrors at 90 degrees to each other forming the inside corner of a cube) will reflect any light back at the source. Putting them on every car will cause anyone with misaligned headlights to be blinded by their own headlights any time they approach another car from front or behind. It'll give them a clear indication (and incentive) that they need to take their car to the shop to have their headlights realigned.
And the biggest culprit of headlight alignment misalignment I've seen aren't BMWs and Mercedes. It's off-road vehicles with raised suspensions whose headlights are not subsequently aimed lower. And cars with lowered suspensions whose headlight aim is then raised to compensate for the aiming point being lowered. A few states check headlight aim as part of their annual or bi-annual smog inspection before you can renew your car's registration. But most of the states I've lived in do not, so I think a more general and in-your-face solution is required.
And only if the software fails to deliver on the specifications laid out in the contract. If it crashes when they try to use the software on a different dataset than the contract specified, that's not your problem. If the software doesn't perform as per the contract, then yeah the onus is on you (the contractor) to fix it. If you've already been paid for the job and used up that money, then yeah you need to fix it on your dime.
If you're an employee though, then there is no distinction between your work and the company's work. They are one and the same. If you deliver buggy code, the company delivered buggy code, and the company has to fix it (whether it be by telling you to fix it, or reassigning/firing you and getting someone else to fix it). Same reason the company is liable if an employee screws up and causes a fire which burns down an apartment complex.
Assuming you're an employee (if you're a contractor, technically you don't have a boss at that company - having a supervisor who can tell you what and how to do your job makes you an employee per IRS definitions), you can turn the argument on its head against the boss. Since he hired you and was responsible for managing you to produce the required bug-free code, if you fail to deliver it and refuse to fix it on your own time, then per his reasoning it becomes his responsibility to find someone who will fix it, and he has to do it on his own time and pay for the new hire out of his own pocket.
Yeah, why hasn't the US got on board yet with implementing technology that allows banks and issuers to absolve themselves of responsibility and push the blame onto the consumers?
How quaint. You think the banks and card issuers bear any responsibility right now.
Currently, the merchants pay for credit card fraud. You contest a charge, the card issues a chargeback, and the merchant is out the product and money. The banks and credit card companies pay nothing for fraudulent use of the card except for the cost of customer service agents. The exorbitant interest rates you pay are to cover for customers who fail to pay their credit card bill.
That's the entire reason credit card security is in the sorry state it's in. The party bearing the cost of fraud (the merchants) aren't in a position where they can improve the security of the system. The party who can improve the security of the system (the banks and card issuers) aren't paying for any of the fraud, so they had no incentive for them to improve the system - doing so would just be additional cost for no benefit to them.
The garage door opener industry went through the same thing in the 1990s. People figured out you could record an opener's transmission, and replay it to open someone else's garage door. In that case, the party who could fix the problem (the garage door opener companies) ended up bearing the cost of the security flaw (they got sued). So they fixed it right away with rolling codes (the opener never uses the same code twice - it and the remote use a synchronized code which changes after each successful use).
That it's taken the credit card industry 20 years to feel the same pressure to improve security tells you how good of a scam they had going. You should never be allowed to decouple costs from risks. If you profit from an activity, you should always be forced to bear the costs associated with it. Allowing you to transfer that cost onto another party (onto merchants for credit card purchases, onto the public at large for pollution) destroys any incentive to improve the product.
The signature isn't sent to the credit card company to be immediately checked with the signature they have on file for you. That only happens if you contest the charge. When you do that, the merchant has to prove that you actually made the purchase. The proof the merchant supplies is usually the signed credit card receipt - they send this to the credit card processor, who compares it with the signature they have on file for you. If they match, your contested charge is denied. If they don't match, the credit card processor executes a chargeback and the merchant loses the money.
So yeah you can sign whatever you want on there. It's in the best interests of the merchant to insure that the signature you signed is your actual signature. But they can be as strict or lax with that as they wish. In a low crime/fraud area (e.g. upscale restaurant) they may not bother. In a high crime/fraud area (e.g. corner liquor store) they may be anal about checking.
And the 4-digit PIN is only half of the solution. The other half is a public/private encryption key stored in the card (hence why it's called chip and pin). This key cannot be duplicated without destroying the card. So to purchase something with a credit card, you have to (1) have the physical card with you, and (2) know the PIN. This is substantially better than the current situation where (1) you only need the credit card number, or a copy of the number, or a copy of a copy of a copy of the number, and (2) you can draw a picture of a cow for your signature. The fact that we can't come up with a perfectly secure system is no reason to deny adoption of a more secure system.
The FCC wrote the Net Neutrality rules in the first place. It was the federal courts that struck them down, declaring the FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality.
We're blaming the FCC now for...reasons?
The other two respondents already answered, but perhaps not as clearly as they could have. The FCC had two choices - they could categorize ISPs as common carriers, or as information services.
Common carriers are like phone companies. They provide the lines, but they cannot control who has access nor what is conveyed over those phone lines. If you call up to request a phone line be installed at your house, they are not allowed to say no (as long as you can pay). But in exchange, they are not liable for what is transmitted over those phone lines. If a drug deal happens over the phone line, the phone company cannot be hauled into court for facilitating illegal activity.
Information services (the current FCC classification for ISPs) are the opposite. The ISP can control who they provide service to and what service they provide. But in exchange, they are liable for what's transmitted over their lines. If a customer is torrenting movies, the ISP can be hauled into court for facilitating illegal activity. This is why all of them roll over and hand over customer data when a proper DMCA claim is filed - they don't want to end up having to pay for their customers' copyright infringement.
The last bit is the reason why the FCC classified ISPs as information services. The RIAA/MPAA didn't want to go through the trouble of tracking down by themselves individual users who were filesharing. They wanted the ISP to do the work for them - collect usage data, hand it over to them (via the feds), and shut the person down when ordered. So they pressured the FCC, and the FCC classified ISPs as an information service. But then the FCC tried to pass net neutrality rules as if the ISPs were common carriers. The courts rightly said "nuh uh, you can't have it both ways." Either they're an information service or they're a common carrier. You cannot say they control and are liable for the data they carry in one case, but they're not allowed to control what data they carry in another case.
So yeah, it's the FCC's fault. For deciding to be the RIAA/MPAA's lapdog instead of thinking of what was best for The People.
These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do.
NBC is free to limit access to their broadcasts. What they shouldn't be allowed to do is ban other media companies from providing coverage of the games.
NBC doesn't ban other media companies. It's the IOC which bans them. See, the IOC figured out that if they grant an exclusive broadcast license for each country, the media companies will get into a bidding war with each other and the IOC makes more money. More than if they sold non-exclusive broadcast rights to multiple broadcasters, monopolies being lucrative as they are.
Ownership of IP is an artificial government construct. There's a procedure where the government can classify a patent as vital to national defense and use it without paying royalties (they can even prohibit you from licensing your patent to anyone else). I'm sure if they're really pressed, they'd be more than happy to do the same with a copyright.
Sure you can stop them. You can revoke their Incorporation Charter.
You don't even have to go that far. Just revoke their government-granted municipal monopoly. Either open up the field to competitors, or rule that they're a common carrier and require them to allow other ISPs to lease their lines at a fair rate.
Back when cable modems first came out, the city I was living in announced they were going to allow a second cable company to provide service. The very next day my cable company cut my TV/internet bill from $70/mo to $60/mo. Meaning they could have done so at any time, they just weren't because there was no competing service to steal away their customers if they charged too much or provided crappy service.
There's a strong anti-free market sentiment on slashdot, but in this particular case the problem isn't a free market failure. The problem is the government-granted monopolies. If the government were doing its job and riding hard on the neck of the company they granted the monopoly to - making sure they were providing excellent service at a fair price - maybe it wouldn't be a problem. But they've granted Verizon a monopoly and given them free rein charge whatever they want and provide whatever level of service they want. That's a lose-lose combination. Either start regulating it like a monopoly, or allow competition to move in.
Daily Doubles are the real wildcard here. They're worth the most money (based on your own wager) and you are given time to think it over, instead of rushing to beat out the competition. "He who controls the spi- err, Daily Doubles, controls the game."
Just make the Daily Doubles appear anywhere on the board then, not predominantly in the bottom. Assign all of them the same difficulty level (regardless of if it's a $200 question or a $1000 question).
As you say, the Daily Doubles are the wildcards. But instead of distributing the wildcards randomly to spice up the game, they've distributed them systematically, giving someone who picks questions based on that system an advantage (better chance to get wildcards). It's the game's design that's flawed, not the player's strategy.
I would be curious if the car is efficient enough to charge with say a 50 gallon inflatable water bladder in the trunk. IE could I drive to the top of the 9000' mountain pass with a stream, use a electric pump to fill the bladder with stream water, drive to the bottom using the regenerative brakes and empty the bladder. Would I have more energy than I started with?
A sedan needs about 20-25 hp to maintain highway speeds on level ground. This is mostly aerodynamic losses (there are smaller losses due to rolling rubber tires, friction of the axle, etc). Going with the lower figure, 20 hp is about 14.9 kW.
A 50 gallon water bladder would weigh about 189 kg. To extract 14.9 kJ of potential energy from it each second would require 14900 J/s / (189 kg * 9.81 m/s^2) = 8 meters/sec altitude drop.
So no, even if your regenerative braking were 100% efficient (thus the energy to push the car up the mountain is completely recovered during the downhill trip), 50 gallons of water isn't enough to overcome air resistance to move the car forward at highway speeds for the trip. It's short by about two orders of magnitude. The concept works for undersea gliders because they're content with moving at less than 1 m/s, which keeps friction losses minimal.
I live in Seattle, where even backed up rush-hour traffic can saturate the cellular network. We had a windstorm here a few years ago that made everything but a POTS line utterly unusable for three days. We also have earthquakes, floods, wildfires and several big honking volcanoes in the area.
POTS was usable only because fewer people still use it. Neither cellular nor POTS use dedicated lines. Both can support far fewer simultaneous calls than there are phones. In fact back in the day when payphones were common, a moderate earthquake would make the POTS lines useless. The shaking would knock all the payphone handsets off the hook. The system would interpret that as someone trying to make a call and assign a line to that payphone. Meaning anyone trying to call over POTS immediately after the earthquake would get an all circuits busy signal (fast busy signal). We were taught in school that after an earthquake, if you saw a payphone with its handset off the hook, to put it back on.
Cellular also gives you the option of sending out your emergency message via a low-bandwidth text or email/tweet, instead of a high-bandwidth voice call. If you're going to be late because you're stuck in a traffic jam, and can't get a call through because a thousand other people in the cars next to you are trying to do the same thing, just send a text.
I tried to opt out the last three times I flew. Each time, the lines with the scanners were roped off and empty, and everyone went through the regular metal detectors. When I asked why, I was told the machines were down for maintenance.
Maybe some of the local TSA supervisors aren't idiots. Even TFA says that the instructor tasked with teaching TSA agents how to use the scanners said, off the record, that "they're shit."
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They didn't pay $19 billion for the app. They paid for the userbase. From what I read it's about 450 million, which would make the purchase price about $42 per user. A little steep, but not outlandish in advertising terms. Now they have to figure out how to hang on to those users and grow the user base.
That's about 275,000 and 300,000 acre-feet respectively. According to the wiki, agricultural use was 29 million acre-feet, urban use about 8.7 million acre-feet. So the two uses you cite represent less than 1% of overall water usage each. (And are your figures nationwide or just for California? I assumed just for California.) I'm all for righteous indignation, but let's try to keep some perspective on scale.
As it so happens, I have our latest commercial water bill right next to me (for water used at a commercial strip mall in Southern California). $30 per hcf (hundred cubic feet) + $29.75 per hcf in service and delivery charges. Works out to:
$59.75 / 748 gallons = 7.99 cents/gallon.
My residential water bill is a flat monthly service charge of $26.87 + $2.29 per hcf for the first 12 hcf, $2.55 per hcf for the next 18 hcf, and $3.41 per hcf for any water use beyond that. Or:
1 hcf = $29.16 = 3.90 cents/gallon
10 hcf = $49.77 = 0.67 cents/gallon
25 hcf = $87.5 = 0.47 cents/gallon
50 hcf = $168.45 = 0.45 cents/gallon
So once you get past very low usage amounts, the commercial rate is about an order of magnitude higher than the residential rate.
I suspect it's agricultural water use which gets a lower rate than residential, and you're misremembering.
It can be used both ways. What they're describing is basically tomography. By analyzing the signal recorded from different locations, you can construct a 2D or 3D representation of signal strength, thus allowing you to pin down a specific phone's transmissions based on location (rather than frequency or code or time - what's used for OFDMA, CDMA, and TDMA respectively). The reverse process would involve modulating the transmission strength and phase from multiple towers in a synchronized fashion so that the peak signal strength in a 2D or 3D field happens to be where that phone is located. It also frees you from the Shannon limit on bandwidth because the amount of channel noise is now location-dependent, rather than solely being frequency-, code- or time-dependent. Very clever work.
Well duh. This is all a CYA attempt to cast this as something terribad the U.S. did, and they themselves are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Just like the U.S. Congress and President have mostly successfully cast this as something terribad the NSA did, and they themselves are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. It's not like they funded, got regular reports on, and used the data collected by the NSA program they created and authorized, right?
This one is pretty easy. Math in 2 dimensions is fundamentally different from math in 3 dimensions. Certain functions which converge in 2D (e.g. a random wandering path will always eventually hit its starting point) will diverge in 3D (will usually never hit its starting point). It turns out that dimensions >3D mathematically act pretty much like 3D. So for most purposes there is no need to simulate more than 3 spatial dimensions.
This again...
A job pays what the product of the job is worth. No more. If you raise the minimum wage to above what the job's productivity is worth, the job's wage doesn't magically increase. The job simply ceases to exist. All those no-skill jobs kids in high school get to make some spending cash? Gone. All those entry-level jobs for people who learned a lot of book knowledge but don't yet have practical experience? Gone. All those unskilled assembly line jobs? Exported to third world countries or replaced by robots.
I'm sure there are lots of low-wage jobs where employers aren't paying what the job is actually worth. But don't be so blinded by your zeal to curtail those abuses that you demolish a large fraction of the functional economy in the process. The taxpayers aren't just subsidizing certain employers' payroll. They're also subsidizing the inability or unwillingness of certain employees to find/work a more productive job.
This is why funding and providing educational opportunities (both for children and adults) is a much better approach to solving this than raising the minimum wage. True economic growth comes from increasing each individual's productivity. The goal should be to allow people to move from less productive jobs to more productive jobs; not shifting money from more productive jobs to less productive jobs to make those less productive jobs more appealing.
While The Color Run's response is a bit extreme, they are correct that what Jackson is asking for is completely unreasonable. Typical compensation for a full-page photo published with a distribution of between 10,000 to 100,000 is on the order of $500-$1000. For a photo used in advertisements at retail stores, it's about $1000-$2000. Usually, if the parties involved can't come to an agreement, these type of unattributed photographer incidents wind up in small claims court because the amounts involved are so small, not federal court.
I think what we have a kid here who hears stories about how much 30 year veteran pro photographers with well-established reputations make, and thinks it's normal to snap a few photos and be set for the year. The only way he could realistically collect $100,000 is if (1) he registered the copyrights on his photos with the U.S. Library of Congress, and (2) he managed to prove in court that The Color Run knowingly, deliberately, and willfully violated his copyright. I highly doubt he's going to be able to prove (2), and if he didn't do (1) he's only entitled to damages suffered (in this case, probably zero unless he has a letter from another advertiser saying they wanted to pay him $x to use his photos but decided not to after seeing that The Color Run was already using them.
To any budding photographers: Copyright infringement on the Internet is rampant. If you find your photos being used without your permission, you are not the first person this has happened to. If you don't want to pay for a lawyer, ask what to do in online photo forums. Lots of photographers who've had the same thing happen will be more than happy to give you advice on how to proceed, and provide guidelines on reasonable pricing like the link I gave above.
So in 11 months there were 1732 cellphone thefts in San Francisco, or an annual rate of 1889 thefts/year.
In 2012 there were 5339 automobile thefts in San Francisco. So where's the legislation requiring a remote kill switch on all cars to render them inoperable, to discourage theft?
Same thing happened to Samsung. Here's a digital picture frame they made in 2005 and sold in 2006. Long before Apple even came out with the iPhone much less the iPad. (Yes the back doesn't look like a tablet - that's beside the point since it wasn't a tablet.) After you've seen the picture frame you realize Samsung didn't copy the iPad's appearance when they made the Galaxy Tab 10.1. They just took their old digital picture frame design (black face, silver/white trim, and yes rounded corners) and repurposed it as a tablet. Even their name/logo is in the same location.
But because almost nobody saw/bought their digital picture frame, they just assume the iPad was first and anything that looked like it must be a copy. I'm of the opinion that with minimalist designs like this, pretty much everyone will come up with the same design. But if you insist there was copying, it's far more likely that it was Apple who lifted Samsung's digital picture frame design when they were settling on the iPad's appearance.
It's a joint venture by South Korean businesses building factories in North Korea to use North Korean labor. Funding for its construction was from South Korea, most of the managers are South Korean, most of the workers are North Korean. It provides the few North Korean managers with experience in running an entrepreneurial business, as well as provides the workers some badly needed income. It hasn't gone all that smoothly - the North has unilaterally shut it down on several occasions for random reasons, and tried to use its continued operation as negotiating leverage for concessions from the South.
Unlike the rest of the world, South Korea does not have the luxury of writing off North Korea. Inevitably at some point in the future, the two will have to reintegrate into a single Korea. And the South would much prefer it be with a modernized North Korea, much like the advanced state of the East German economy made German reunification go a lot more smoothly. So despite the drawbacks and the North's odd behavior, the South still supports it.
Actually, the age of Aquarius is one of the few things astrologers got sort of right. The Earth's tilt precesses over time (just like a gyroscope), resulting in the solstices and equinoxes shifting relative to the position of the stars. Currently, the moment the Spring Equinox occurs, the constellation Pisces is directly overhead opposite the sun (i.e. looking at the center of the ecliptic at midnight). Over time, this will shift until Aquarius is overhead. An entire precession cycle takes just shy of 26,000 years, sending the Spring equinox through all twelve zodiac constellations during that span.
What they got wrong was: (1) The constellations are not all the same size, so you can't divide a full precession into 12 equal ages based on the constellations. (2) The song in particular was based on a common misinterpretation of each age being 2000 years. Hence the misnomer that the the year 2000 was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Simple math should tell you that this doesn't work, as it results in only 24,000 years for a precession cycle. Dividing the precession into 12 equal ages actually results in each age being about 2150 years. (3) There are higher order effects also at play, so even a calculation based solely on precession is not exact.
But it is in fact a real astronomical phenomenon behind the term "Age of Aquarius."
This attitude that someone who is rich must be on an ego trip has always baffled me. It's hypocritical because your own ego is inflating your own self worth, making you think rich people are doing something which annoys you specifically to annoy you. The simple truth is, the rich are like everyone else - they don't care about you. It's just that being rich gives them more ways to not care.
The solution then is to make them care. I've always thought cars should have return mirrors mounted on the front and back at the level of the side mirrors. e.g. On the front of the side mirrors, and on the rear about where the center brake light is. The mirrors (three mirrors at 90 degrees to each other forming the inside corner of a cube) will reflect any light back at the source. Putting them on every car will cause anyone with misaligned headlights to be blinded by their own headlights any time they approach another car from front or behind. It'll give them a clear indication (and incentive) that they need to take their car to the shop to have their headlights realigned.
And the biggest culprit of headlight alignment misalignment I've seen aren't BMWs and Mercedes. It's off-road vehicles with raised suspensions whose headlights are not subsequently aimed lower. And cars with lowered suspensions whose headlight aim is then raised to compensate for the aiming point being lowered. A few states check headlight aim as part of their annual or bi-annual smog inspection before you can renew your car's registration. But most of the states I've lived in do not, so I think a more general and in-your-face solution is required.
And only if the software fails to deliver on the specifications laid out in the contract. If it crashes when they try to use the software on a different dataset than the contract specified, that's not your problem. If the software doesn't perform as per the contract, then yeah the onus is on you (the contractor) to fix it. If you've already been paid for the job and used up that money, then yeah you need to fix it on your dime.
If you're an employee though, then there is no distinction between your work and the company's work. They are one and the same. If you deliver buggy code, the company delivered buggy code, and the company has to fix it (whether it be by telling you to fix it, or reassigning/firing you and getting someone else to fix it). Same reason the company is liable if an employee screws up and causes a fire which burns down an apartment complex.
Assuming you're an employee (if you're a contractor, technically you don't have a boss at that company - having a supervisor who can tell you what and how to do your job makes you an employee per IRS definitions), you can turn the argument on its head against the boss. Since he hired you and was responsible for managing you to produce the required bug-free code, if you fail to deliver it and refuse to fix it on your own time, then per his reasoning it becomes his responsibility to find someone who will fix it, and he has to do it on his own time and pay for the new hire out of his own pocket.
How quaint. You think the banks and card issuers bear any responsibility right now.
Currently, the merchants pay for credit card fraud. You contest a charge, the card issues a chargeback, and the merchant is out the product and money. The banks and credit card companies pay nothing for fraudulent use of the card except for the cost of customer service agents. The exorbitant interest rates you pay are to cover for customers who fail to pay their credit card bill.
That's the entire reason credit card security is in the sorry state it's in. The party bearing the cost of fraud (the merchants) aren't in a position where they can improve the security of the system. The party who can improve the security of the system (the banks and card issuers) aren't paying for any of the fraud, so they had no incentive for them to improve the system - doing so would just be additional cost for no benefit to them.
The garage door opener industry went through the same thing in the 1990s. People figured out you could record an opener's transmission, and replay it to open someone else's garage door. In that case, the party who could fix the problem (the garage door opener companies) ended up bearing the cost of the security flaw (they got sued). So they fixed it right away with rolling codes (the opener never uses the same code twice - it and the remote use a synchronized code which changes after each successful use).
That it's taken the credit card industry 20 years to feel the same pressure to improve security tells you how good of a scam they had going. You should never be allowed to decouple costs from risks. If you profit from an activity, you should always be forced to bear the costs associated with it. Allowing you to transfer that cost onto another party (onto merchants for credit card purchases, onto the public at large for pollution) destroys any incentive to improve the product.
The signature isn't sent to the credit card company to be immediately checked with the signature they have on file for you. That only happens if you contest the charge. When you do that, the merchant has to prove that you actually made the purchase. The proof the merchant supplies is usually the signed credit card receipt - they send this to the credit card processor, who compares it with the signature they have on file for you. If they match, your contested charge is denied. If they don't match, the credit card processor executes a chargeback and the merchant loses the money.
So yeah you can sign whatever you want on there. It's in the best interests of the merchant to insure that the signature you signed is your actual signature. But they can be as strict or lax with that as they wish. In a low crime/fraud area (e.g. upscale restaurant) they may not bother. In a high crime/fraud area (e.g. corner liquor store) they may be anal about checking.
And the 4-digit PIN is only half of the solution. The other half is a public/private encryption key stored in the card (hence why it's called chip and pin). This key cannot be duplicated without destroying the card. So to purchase something with a credit card, you have to (1) have the physical card with you, and (2) know the PIN. This is substantially better than the current situation where (1) you only need the credit card number, or a copy of the number, or a copy of a copy of a copy of the number, and (2) you can draw a picture of a cow for your signature. The fact that we can't come up with a perfectly secure system is no reason to deny adoption of a more secure system.
The other two respondents already answered, but perhaps not as clearly as they could have. The FCC had two choices - they could categorize ISPs as common carriers, or as information services.
Common carriers are like phone companies. They provide the lines, but they cannot control who has access nor what is conveyed over those phone lines. If you call up to request a phone line be installed at your house, they are not allowed to say no (as long as you can pay). But in exchange, they are not liable for what is transmitted over those phone lines. If a drug deal happens over the phone line, the phone company cannot be hauled into court for facilitating illegal activity.
Information services (the current FCC classification for ISPs) are the opposite. The ISP can control who they provide service to and what service they provide. But in exchange, they are liable for what's transmitted over their lines. If a customer is torrenting movies, the ISP can be hauled into court for facilitating illegal activity. This is why all of them roll over and hand over customer data when a proper DMCA claim is filed - they don't want to end up having to pay for their customers' copyright infringement.
The last bit is the reason why the FCC classified ISPs as information services. The RIAA/MPAA didn't want to go through the trouble of tracking down by themselves individual users who were filesharing. They wanted the ISP to do the work for them - collect usage data, hand it over to them (via the feds), and shut the person down when ordered. So they pressured the FCC, and the FCC classified ISPs as an information service. But then the FCC tried to pass net neutrality rules as if the ISPs were common carriers. The courts rightly said "nuh uh, you can't have it both ways." Either they're an information service or they're a common carrier. You cannot say they control and are liable for the data they carry in one case, but they're not allowed to control what data they carry in another case.
So yeah, it's the FCC's fault. For deciding to be the RIAA/MPAA's lapdog instead of thinking of what was best for The People.
Local governments have plenty of resources to educate the nation's children. The U.S. spends more on education per student than any other country in the world. K-6 spending is 4th highest in the world, 7-12 is 5th highest (both about 40% more than the OECD average), and post-HS spending is highest in the world. The result of all this spending? Performance at or below the OECD average.
The problem isn't lack of money. The schools are completely awash in it.
NBC doesn't ban other media companies. It's the IOC which bans them. See, the IOC figured out that if they grant an exclusive broadcast license for each country, the media companies will get into a bidding war with each other and the IOC makes more money. More than if they sold non-exclusive broadcast rights to multiple broadcasters, monopolies being lucrative as they are.
Ownership of IP is an artificial government construct. There's a procedure where the government can classify a patent as vital to national defense and use it without paying royalties (they can even prohibit you from licensing your patent to anyone else). I'm sure if they're really pressed, they'd be more than happy to do the same with a copyright.
You don't even have to go that far. Just revoke their government-granted municipal monopoly. Either open up the field to competitors, or rule that they're a common carrier and require them to allow other ISPs to lease their lines at a fair rate.
Back when cable modems first came out, the city I was living in announced they were going to allow a second cable company to provide service. The very next day my cable company cut my TV/internet bill from $70/mo to $60/mo. Meaning they could have done so at any time, they just weren't because there was no competing service to steal away their customers if they charged too much or provided crappy service.
There's a strong anti-free market sentiment on slashdot, but in this particular case the problem isn't a free market failure. The problem is the government-granted monopolies. If the government were doing its job and riding hard on the neck of the company they granted the monopoly to - making sure they were providing excellent service at a fair price - maybe it wouldn't be a problem. But they've granted Verizon a monopoly and given them free rein charge whatever they want and provide whatever level of service they want. That's a lose-lose combination. Either start regulating it like a monopoly, or allow competition to move in.
Just make the Daily Doubles appear anywhere on the board then, not predominantly in the bottom. Assign all of them the same difficulty level (regardless of if it's a $200 question or a $1000 question).
As you say, the Daily Doubles are the wildcards. But instead of distributing the wildcards randomly to spice up the game, they've distributed them systematically, giving someone who picks questions based on that system an advantage (better chance to get wildcards). It's the game's design that's flawed, not the player's strategy.
A sedan needs about 20-25 hp to maintain highway speeds on level ground. This is mostly aerodynamic losses (there are smaller losses due to rolling rubber tires, friction of the axle, etc). Going with the lower figure, 20 hp is about 14.9 kW.
A 50 gallon water bladder would weigh about 189 kg. To extract 14.9 kJ of potential energy from it each second would require 14900 J/s / (189 kg * 9.81 m/s^2) = 8 meters/sec altitude drop.
So no, even if your regenerative braking were 100% efficient (thus the energy to push the car up the mountain is completely recovered during the downhill trip), 50 gallons of water isn't enough to overcome air resistance to move the car forward at highway speeds for the trip. It's short by about two orders of magnitude. The concept works for undersea gliders because they're content with moving at less than 1 m/s, which keeps friction losses minimal.
Funny. I download the Super Bowl ads from the Pirate Bay so I don't have to watch the game.
POTS was usable only because fewer people still use it. Neither cellular nor POTS use dedicated lines. Both can support far fewer simultaneous calls than there are phones. In fact back in the day when payphones were common, a moderate earthquake would make the POTS lines useless. The shaking would knock all the payphone handsets off the hook. The system would interpret that as someone trying to make a call and assign a line to that payphone. Meaning anyone trying to call over POTS immediately after the earthquake would get an all circuits busy signal (fast busy signal). We were taught in school that after an earthquake, if you saw a payphone with its handset off the hook, to put it back on.
Cellular also gives you the option of sending out your emergency message via a low-bandwidth text or email/tweet, instead of a high-bandwidth voice call. If you're going to be late because you're stuck in a traffic jam, and can't get a call through because a thousand other people in the cars next to you are trying to do the same thing, just send a text.
I tried to opt out the last three times I flew. Each time, the lines with the scanners were roped off and empty, and everyone went through the regular metal detectors. When I asked why, I was told the machines were down for maintenance.
Maybe some of the local TSA supervisors aren't idiots. Even TFA says that the instructor tasked with teaching TSA agents how to use the scanners said, off the record, that "they're shit."