The thing is, what he's describing is not pertinent to TFA. I've set up a similar tunnel into my home network for when I'm traveling and need remote access to my file server or virtual machines.
That wasn't what LogMeIn was used for. In fact you couldn't use LogMeIn for this type of remote access because it requires the computer you're trying to access to have a person in front of it to authorize you to access it. For situations where you want to use LogMeIn, the solution he's described is totally inappropriate and a huge security breach (most of my clients are doctors whose networks need to be secured to comply with HIPAA) because the client has now granted you or anyone you share the keys with permanent unilateral access to their network. You've essentially installed a backdoor into their network. LogMeIn was something a client could simply and quickly use to temporarily grant you remote access to their computer. You just send them a download URL, they grab the program and run it, you tell them a number to type in over the phone, and blammo - you have remote access until you or they end the session.
I'm all for describing DIY solutions when they're pertinent. But in this case it comes across as off-topic bragging, with a token mention of an alternative to try to keep his post on-topic.
1) Throttling doesn't work because residential internet service is over-provisioned by about 20x. i.e. if you're paying for 10 Mbps service, the ISP actually only has 0.5 Mbps of bandwidth per customer. If you're ok with being throttled to 512 kbps, then I guess it could work. But the vast majority of customers would riot. Yeah they could not over-provision, but then they'd have to charge you about $1000 for 10 Mbps. And the vast majority of customers would again riot.
2) It's over-provisioned because averaged over time, each customer actually uses only about 512 kbps. So on average, the total bandwidth used by all customers equals the actual bandwidth available. In that respect, metered service is the same thing as throttling, except it's on a monthly timeframe and gives you the customer the choice of when you want to throttle yourself.
Actually, rather than split and tilt like the current ergonomic keyboards, I was wondering if just split would work. Have the right half the keyboard detach from the laptop and double as a mouse. If you place the two halves about shoulder width apart, there is no need to tilt the two halves (though you could if you wanted). And using the right half as a mouse also gets rid of the annoying time waster of moving your hand back and forth from mouse to keyboard. (I suppose to satisfy the lefties, there should be an option to detach the left half of the keyboard instead.)
If you think about it, the gaming mice with a gazillion buttons on them are already halfway to this point.
Bitcoin is a pyramid. There are a total of about 21 million bitcoins which can be mined. The easier ones are mined first, leaving the harder ones to be mined later, forming a pyramid of mining rate. About 11 million have been mined so far, so we are about halfway up the pyramid.
It is not a pyramid scheme in the traditional sense, where the addition of new members directly props up older members. But its design causes the same thing to happen, just indirectly. You don't seriously believe bitcoins will remain viable once the last coin is mined? At that point (probably long before, as adoption rate far outstrips mining rate increase), it ceases being a currency and turns into a collectable - its value increases over time because more people want it, rather than holding relatively steady like a currency. And collectables are only worth as much as people want to collect it - there is zero reason to collect a string of numbers.
If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.
The Beethoven's 9nth story is probably popular among the record labels' marketing divisions because it counters the conspiracy theory that they picked inefficient linear PCM coding to deliberately reduce the amount of audio which could be stored on a CD, to try to make it better match the two-sided LP (about 45-50 minutes for both sides). Customers would have been up in arms if they found out the record companies were producing CDs with 35 minutes of music on it when the CDs could hold 2-3 hours. Since these things were usually sold at about $15-$18 per disc (not per song), consumer demand to "fill up" the discs with more music would have been devastating to their revenue stream.
Regardless of whether that conspiracy theory is true, it sowed the seeds for the success of MP3s. Because the CD audio format was uncompressed and so bloated because it was encoded linearly, it compressed fantastically (roughly 10x) once people were able to get their hands on the digital data and do what they wanted with it, rather than have to live with whatever format the labels preferred. It's a good lesson in giving customers what they want. If you try to force them to accept what you want, you just sow the seeds of your own demise.
Utilities should be public, and not operated for profit. Since they're in the public good
It's a pretty simplistic position. Why should gas infrastructure be public when surely it isn't as critical, or at least no more so, than food, water, medicine, logistics, drilling for oil?
I'm a pretty hardcore free-market capitalist, but I agree utilities should be public. They key is the distribution system.
Food, medicine, logistics, and oil have multiple channels via which they can be delivered from source to final consumer. It's not obvious which of these channels will be the optimal means of distribution, so you need a market system to try them out and determine which is most effective.
Utilities OTOH require building a distribution system, and once it's built it is the most optimal since producing a new channel incurs the expense of building a new distribution system. i.e. When the major cost of distribution is the recurring costs (e.g. trucking, oil tankers, grocery stores, etc), a market solution is most effective at reducing costs. When the major cost of distribution is building the system (e.g. telephone and power lines, gas and water pipes, fiber optic lines to the home), a public utility is most effective at reducing costs because it prevents the construction of multiple redundant distribution infrastructure.
Note that by this reasoning, internet service should also be a utility.
b) If a consumer gets hit by a fraudulent cc charge, they don't eat the charge. They call their cc issuer and the issuer eats the charge. That is in part what your double digit interest rate is paying for.
Fraudulent credit card charges are paid for by the merchant who sold the goods to the fraudster. When you contest a charge, the credit card issuer does a chargeback and reverses the charges on the merchant who made that transaction. The merchant then has to try to prove the charge is legit (e.g. produce a signed receipt whose signature matches the cardholder's), or he is out both the merchandise and the money. The issuer pays nothing for fraud, except for small transactions where they may decide to credit the cardholder without reversing the charges on the merchant (the charge is deemed too small and not worth the expense of investigating).
Your double-digit interest rate pays for other credit card holders who default on their bills. And to line the pockets of the credit card issuer.
Given this data, here's a hypothetical question: Suppose efficiency grows so that the infrastructure could produce all the needs of the population using only 90% of the current workforce.
Q: What happens to the unneeded 10% workforce?
We passed that point long ago. Once a country's productivity advances past the point where it can fulfill everyone's needs, it starts fulfilling people's wants. That's why a huge chunk of our economy is devoted to TV shows, movies, music, fiction books, games, sports, fashion, tourism, recreational and leisure activities. None of those are necessary, but you can make a pretty good (in some cases damn good) living working in or in support of those industries.
The only way there can be insufficient jobs is if you don't pay workers enough to self-sustain the economy (i.e. people can't afford to pay what it costs to make), or you raise wages to the point where it's not cost-effective to produce those things (i.e. people aren't willing to pay what it costs to make). That's right, both conservatives and liberals are wrong. The best economic state happens when people are paid slightly less than the value of what they produce.
- If she uses Google Glass to prove she was driving within the speed limit, she proves she was using a monitor while driving and has to pay that fine.
- If she doesn't use Google Glass to prove she was driving within the speed limit, she can't disprove the speeding charge and has to pay that fine.
Read my other reply. This is a slick misuse of statistics by Apple fans. The numbers they're using are unique visitors per month, not actual web traffic. If you look at actual web traffic usage, Android heads by a pretty hefty margin. The heavy web users are on Android. The occasional web users are on Apple devices.
Of course Microsoft are doing their best to fuck up Windows, so it's not that surprising that people are jumping ship for Mac OS. Windows OEMs must be pretty pissed off at this.
Mac sales are actually pretty flat. It just isn't falling as fast as PC sales are. The illusion that people are switching to Macs is generated from the inappropriate use of percentage market share in this context. As a percentage, the share of Macs sold is increasing, even though the unit sales are flat.
Which makes sense if you recall that Macs are generally higher-priced, higher-quality computers which people keep for a longer time. PCs were generally cheap devices people replaced more frequently. But now that processor speed requirements have plateaued, there is no longer a compelling reason to upgrade every 2-3 years and people are keeping their PCs longer like Mac users.
The press has a hard-on for Apple. The best example was when iPad tablet share started falling. Prior to then, there were lots of articles in the press about how the iPad still dominated the tablet market. As its share dropped from 90% to 85% to 75%, nobody in the press mentioned this. In fact most of them still stuck with the "iPads still dominate" tagline. I had to figure it out for myself from the actual numbers the marketing companies were releasing.
In 2012 it dropped to about 60% and Android was poised to overtake it the following year. I saw one (1) article in the press about this. Most were still sticking with "most tablets sold are iPads". 2013 saw Android tablet sales surpass iPads for the first time, and suddenly there were a spate of stories about how Android had overtaken the iPad. Then nothing. No mentions of how Android tablets continued to dominate iPad sales (about 2:1 now). It it doesn't show Apple in the lead or poised to overtake the lead, apparently it's not newsworthy.
Because while Androids outsell Apple 4:1 or more, there's a very strange thing going on. Mobile web traffic has iOS using TWICE the amount of data over Android. Or, put another way, 1 iOS user consumes as much data as 8 Android users.
There are three big companies which monitor web traffic. Statcounter (which I've linked), W3Counter, and Netmarketshare. The latter two are frequently cited by Apple fans because they show iOS in the lead. What they don't tell you is that the latter two count unique visitors in a month, not web traffic. That is, in their statistics someone who visits a site once a month counts as much as someone who visits the site every day. Statcounter counts actual web visits, which is what corresponds to web data. It shows Android pretty clearly in the lead.
So the way it breaks down is:
People who never browse the web on their phones are mostly on Android.
People who occasionally browse the web on their phones are mostly on iPhones.
People who browse the web a lot on their phones are mostly on Android. Despite having roughly half the number of people browsing the web as iPhones, they generate twice as much web traffic. i.e. They use the web 4x as much as the typical iPhone user who uses the web.
Although you can have a long argument about picture and sound quality, if Betamax was better, it wasn't enough to make enough people choose that product.
The picture quality of Betamax was significantly better. The problem was most people had crappy TVs back then. It wasn't like today where all displays are digital so capable of the same resolution. TVs were analog, and the build quality directly affected phosphor size, electron beam control, and dot width. When I tested both formats on a high-end Sony monitor at a recording studio, the quality difference was obvious. But on my family's home TV, not so much. By the time analog TV quality improved to where Betamax was obviously better on every new home TV, VHS had already won (and in fact improved so the difference wasn't quite so obvious anymore).
It's true though that a substantial number of people didn't care about picture quality. They had no problem recording football games on VHS in SLP mode (6 hours, later 8 hours). The picture looked like a 240p Youtube video with extreme compression artifacts, but recording the entire game was more important than picture quality to these folks.
Sound-wise, I think VHS was better? I vaguely remember some audiophiles were recording their music onto VHS because it was superior to the audio tape formats.
The President sends a proposal, Congress works out the details (with negotiation and ultimatums with the President), and the President signs it. So both are responsible.
What usually happens is when something unpopular happens with the budget, people blame Congress OR the President depending on which one is controlled by the party they dislike. Likewise when something popular happens with the budget, people give credit to Congress OR the President depending on which is controlled by the party they like.
That's why it's common to see self-contradictory opinions like giving Clinton credit for balancing the budget in 1998, but blaming the Republicans in Congress for cutting science funding that year. The truth is both were responsible for balancing the budget, and one of the things they did to achieve that was to cut science funding.
The biggest increase (in raw dollars) in R&D spending in recent years (both defense and non-defense) happened under Bush's administration. Obama has more or less been holding non-defense R&D spending steady until it spiked last year, while cutting defense R&D.
In my book, holding a past increase steady warrants credit too (Obama resisted the urge to cut it back down to save money). But credit for bringing us up to current levels has to go to Bush. (Lots more pretty graphs to look at.)
The onus is upon the merchant to prove the charge was legit. For an in-store transaction, this usually means a copy of the signature on the credit card receipt. You send that to the credit card clearinghouse, they compare it to the signature the credit card company provides, and decide if the cardholder really made the purchase or not.
For online transactions, you're pretty much SOL. The credit card companies provide tools to let you try to confirm the cardholder is legit before completing the transaction. e.g. Compare billing address and phone number to that provided by the purchaser (this is why gas station pumps require you to type in a zip code - they're not trying to collect marketing data, it's cross-checking what you type with the zip code on file for the card). The better cards also keep a list of authorized shipping addresses on file, and the merchant can decline the sale if the shipping address for the order doesn't match that on file. But if the customer makes a chargeback, all you can do is show the clearinghouse that you used the tools they provided and hope they decline the chargeback. Usually the customer wins no questions asked, and the merchant just eats the loss as a cost of doing business (like shoplifting).
The banks and credit card companies have done a pretty good job making sure they don't pay anything for fraud (except the customer support rep's wages), all while charging exorbitant interest and fees purportedly to combat fraud. (In their defense, the interest and fees do pay for a different type of fraud - non-payment from customers, though I still think it's excessive.)
Do you have a reference for that? I've got a 300 W halogen lamp in my computer room which I never turn up past 50% brightness (it's bright enough, and there's something flaky with the plug which makes it turn off at 100%). I use it about 4-6 hours a night. I've been using it for the last 4 years with one bulb change, meaning I'm getting slightly better than the average 2500 hour lifespan per halogen bulb.
I've been looking into replacing it because there's a faint buzz at 50% brightness, and I know it's a huge energy waster. But I've never had an issue with the bulb prematurely burning out.
Matterform anticipates archeologists reproducing artifacts so that students can study them without handling the precious originals.
I anticipate thieves reproducing artifacts so that museums cannot tell the originals have been stolen after the copy has been substituted for the real thing.
This brings up a question which everyone has been trying to skirt. Is the value in the object itself, or in the arrangement of the molecules which make up the object? That's already bitten the content industry. For a long time they thought they sold hardware - books, records, and films. It's now become apparent that they sell software - text, music, movies - and the hardware those used to be published on is interchangeable and in fact unnecessary. It's the arrangement that matters, not the molecules which make up the object.
The same thing is going to happen to physical objects as 3D printers improve and eventually maybe we arrive at Star Trek-type replicators. If the facsimile of a precious original artifact is indistinguishable from the real thing, does it really matter which is the original?
For the attack to happen the way Target says, there must be two MAJOR flaws in their network:
- the POS machines must be accepting software updates from the network - to allow the attackers to download their firmware;
- the POS machines must be able to connect to an arbitrary server not on the Target network - to allow the POS machines to transmit the collected data.
There is no valid reason for either of these.
Just because you want it to not be possible doesn't mean it isn't possible. Worms can spread themselves to other POS machines without going through the regular update channels or a server. Even if you're firewalled and air-gapped, all it takes is one corrupt employee to introduce the worm to the internal network. Care to guess how many Target employees have that level of access to their POS network?
The best protection I can think of is a physical write-protect switch which needs to be flipped before you can modify the software running on the POS. And even that is vulnerable to a corrupt employee modifying a legit firmware update so it carries the malware.
I'd (very possibly wrongly) assumed that a honeycomb structure would be three dimensional to address this risk?
The problem with square structures is that they're made of four structural members which can collapse into a diamond when subject to an off-axis load. The structural members themselves remain intact, it's the joint connecting them which has failed allowing the members to change the angle at which they meet. You then have a structural failure without any of the individual members having failed (been crushed or bent). If you've ever folded a box flat, that's what you're doing. You straighten out the flaps so you're just left with four flat pieces of cardboard arranged in a square, then you collapse the square into a diamond until it's flat.
Triangles are better because you can't change the angle between the members in a triangle without also crushing one of the members. i.e. The only way to have a structural failure in a triangle is if at least one of the individual members fails.
Honeycombs are a great way to increase the structural rigidity of a single member against torsion. But by arranging them in squares which can collapse without challenging the rigidity of a single member, you're wasting their strength.
I downloaded the entire spreadsheet for spending at a portion of the LAUSD several years ago and spent a few hours going over it to try to answer that question. Unfortunately I can't find the link I used to download, and it might be long gone (it was part of a spending report at a single school).
But long story short, the bulk of it is going to Administration. The paper-pushers who aren't really essential to operating the school, but have added so much paperwork that they've made themselves essential. It was the largest single budget item, and more than half of payroll. When the State cuts school funding, the administrators simply pass the cuts on to the teachers and rile them up so they'll protest about how we're jeopardizing our children's futures. When the State increases school funding, they keep most of it for themselves, passing on just enough to keep the teachers happy.
I suspect the real reason charter schools do so well is not because of differences in programs, but because they allow money to bypass the existing administrative hegemony without being diminished.
If charter schools bleed off all of the kids from homes where learning and education are prized, whose parents are going to be involved, and all that's left in the public school are the kids rounded up by the truancy officer, it's not going to go well.
If bleeding off the kids who prize education results in a public school with problems, it is already not doing well. The only thing the good students are doing is adding numbers which statistically cover up the problem (make the problem a smaller percentage of the student body, even though numerically it remains unchanged). Their removal just umasks the pre-existing problem, it doesn't cause the problem.
To me, this whole debate about charter schools is an interesting, almost humorous, example of reversed conservative and liberal talking points. Normally it's the conservatives who want to stick with the tried and true - even if it doesn't work very well, at least you know it works. And it's the liberals who want to strike out into uncharted waters and try new and different approaches which may work better. Here you have the liberals protecting the tried and true, and the conservatives wanting to try new approaches.
They state that a 15mph crash can subject the brain to 220G of force wearing a polystyrene helmet. Using the paper helmet, the test units brain-analogue was subjected to a mere 70G of force. This was tested in Europe, where regulations state for a helmet to be approved, the brain may not be subjected to more than 300G of force at 15mph.
15 mph = 6.7 m/s. 220 Gs = 220*9.81 m/s^2 = 2158 m/s^2. To generate 220 Gs decelerating from 6.7 ms, you need to decelerate in 6.7 / 2158 = 0.003 sec.
At a constant deceleration, that's a distance of v^2 = 2ad, or d = v^2 / 2a = (6.7)^2 / (2*220*9.81) = 0.0104 meters = 1 cm.
To generate 70 Gs, you need to decelerate in 6.7 m/s / (70*9.81 m/s^2) = 0.0098 sec.
At a constant deceleration, that's d = v^2 / 2a = (6.7)^2 / (2*70*9.81) = 0.0327 meters = 3.3 cm.
I posit that this is most likely due to the fact that paper does not recoil back to its original form as much as the polystyrene.
The speed at which polystyrene springs back is so slow you almost need time lapse photography to watch it (crush a styrofoam coffee cup and see how long it takes to uncrush itself). The decreased G forces are entirely due to the distance the structure collapses. Polystyrene is a stiffer, closed-cell material with limited deformation due to the cells resisting popping (indeed, breakage is usually due to adjacent cells shearing apart, rather than the cells popping). While cardboard is essentially open cell and more likely to collapse its entire thickness.
That's a double-edged sword though. The cardboard helmet is more likely to be ruined or structurally compromised from lesser impacts, like having the bike fall on top of it while you're transporting it in the back of your truck. Stuff the polystyrene helmet can survive because such impacts do not have sufficient force to pop the cells or shear adjacent cells. The air in the cells just gets compressed more, and springs the cell back to shape once the load is removed. Since the cardboard is open cell, it has to rely entirely upon the paper's ability to spring back to shape to survive such loads intact.
And (judging from the pictures) if you hit at the wrong angle, you can cause the cardboard to collapse by twisting and falling over rather than crushing, thus greatly reducing its protection. Standardized tests are great in that they're reproducible, but they suck because by always testing in the exact same manner you allow designers to optimize for the test instead of for real-life conditions. i.e. You can improve performance in tested orientations by reducing crash protection in non-tested orientations. The more solid structure of polystyrene allows forces to be better transmitted between cells thus helping even out its crash protection at all orientations. The cardboard helmet looks like it's traded off that uniformity for anisotropic crash protection which peaks in the orientations which are being tested (longitudinal and transverse). A better design would mesh the cardboard into triangles, not squares. Squares are notorious for collapsing without using any of the structural material's innate strength. It's why the most common fiberglass weaves are 0/30/60 degrees, or 0/90 layered at 30 or 45 degree increments so you're not putting all your strength along just 0 and 90 degrees like this cardboard helmet does).
Well that makes their conclusion that the divide begins before college rather dubious, since the only reason to take the AP CS test is if the college/university you're planning to attend will give you credits for it. If they don't, you're throwing money down the drain by taking the test. (Not that I believe the divide is something caused by colleges - men and women are just interested in different things. But if you're starting from the premise that it's something caused by colleges, you can't disprove it with participation in a test based on college requirements.)
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The thing is, what he's describing is not pertinent to TFA. I've set up a similar tunnel into my home network for when I'm traveling and need remote access to my file server or virtual machines.
That wasn't what LogMeIn was used for. In fact you couldn't use LogMeIn for this type of remote access because it requires the computer you're trying to access to have a person in front of it to authorize you to access it. For situations where you want to use LogMeIn, the solution he's described is totally inappropriate and a huge security breach (most of my clients are doctors whose networks need to be secured to comply with HIPAA) because the client has now granted you or anyone you share the keys with permanent unilateral access to their network. You've essentially installed a backdoor into their network. LogMeIn was something a client could simply and quickly use to temporarily grant you remote access to their computer. You just send them a download URL, they grab the program and run it, you tell them a number to type in over the phone, and blammo - you have remote access until you or they end the session.
I'm all for describing DIY solutions when they're pertinent. But in this case it comes across as off-topic bragging, with a token mention of an alternative to try to keep his post on-topic.
1) Throttling doesn't work because residential internet service is over-provisioned by about 20x. i.e. if you're paying for 10 Mbps service, the ISP actually only has 0.5 Mbps of bandwidth per customer. If you're ok with being throttled to 512 kbps, then I guess it could work. But the vast majority of customers would riot. Yeah they could not over-provision, but then they'd have to charge you about $1000 for 10 Mbps. And the vast majority of customers would again riot.
2) It's over-provisioned because averaged over time, each customer actually uses only about 512 kbps. So on average, the total bandwidth used by all customers equals the actual bandwidth available. In that respect, metered service is the same thing as throttling, except it's on a monthly timeframe and gives you the customer the choice of when you want to throttle yourself.
Actually, rather than split and tilt like the current ergonomic keyboards, I was wondering if just split would work. Have the right half the keyboard detach from the laptop and double as a mouse. If you place the two halves about shoulder width apart, there is no need to tilt the two halves (though you could if you wanted). And using the right half as a mouse also gets rid of the annoying time waster of moving your hand back and forth from mouse to keyboard. (I suppose to satisfy the lefties, there should be an option to detach the left half of the keyboard instead.)
If you think about it, the gaming mice with a gazillion buttons on them are already halfway to this point.
Bitcoin is a pyramid. There are a total of about 21 million bitcoins which can be mined. The easier ones are mined first, leaving the harder ones to be mined later, forming a pyramid of mining rate. About 11 million have been mined so far, so we are about halfway up the pyramid.
It is not a pyramid scheme in the traditional sense, where the addition of new members directly props up older members. But its design causes the same thing to happen, just indirectly. You don't seriously believe bitcoins will remain viable once the last coin is mined? At that point (probably long before, as adoption rate far outstrips mining rate increase), it ceases being a currency and turns into a collectable - its value increases over time because more people want it, rather than holding relatively steady like a currency. And collectables are only worth as much as people want to collect it - there is zero reason to collect a string of numbers.
If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.
The Beethoven's 9nth story is probably popular among the record labels' marketing divisions because it counters the conspiracy theory that they picked inefficient linear PCM coding to deliberately reduce the amount of audio which could be stored on a CD, to try to make it better match the two-sided LP (about 45-50 minutes for both sides). Customers would have been up in arms if they found out the record companies were producing CDs with 35 minutes of music on it when the CDs could hold 2-3 hours. Since these things were usually sold at about $15-$18 per disc (not per song), consumer demand to "fill up" the discs with more music would have been devastating to their revenue stream.
Regardless of whether that conspiracy theory is true, it sowed the seeds for the success of MP3s. Because the CD audio format was uncompressed and so bloated because it was encoded linearly, it compressed fantastically (roughly 10x) once people were able to get their hands on the digital data and do what they wanted with it, rather than have to live with whatever format the labels preferred. It's a good lesson in giving customers what they want. If you try to force them to accept what you want, you just sow the seeds of your own demise.
I'm a pretty hardcore free-market capitalist, but I agree utilities should be public. They key is the distribution system.
Food, medicine, logistics, and oil have multiple channels via which they can be delivered from source to final consumer. It's not obvious which of these channels will be the optimal means of distribution, so you need a market system to try them out and determine which is most effective.
Utilities OTOH require building a distribution system, and once it's built it is the most optimal since producing a new channel incurs the expense of building a new distribution system. i.e. When the major cost of distribution is the recurring costs (e.g. trucking, oil tankers, grocery stores, etc), a market solution is most effective at reducing costs. When the major cost of distribution is building the system (e.g. telephone and power lines, gas and water pipes, fiber optic lines to the home), a public utility is most effective at reducing costs because it prevents the construction of multiple redundant distribution infrastructure.
Note that by this reasoning, internet service should also be a utility.
Fraudulent credit card charges are paid for by the merchant who sold the goods to the fraudster. When you contest a charge, the credit card issuer does a chargeback and reverses the charges on the merchant who made that transaction. The merchant then has to try to prove the charge is legit (e.g. produce a signed receipt whose signature matches the cardholder's), or he is out both the merchandise and the money. The issuer pays nothing for fraud, except for small transactions where they may decide to credit the cardholder without reversing the charges on the merchant (the charge is deemed too small and not worth the expense of investigating).
Your double-digit interest rate pays for other credit card holders who default on their bills. And to line the pockets of the credit card issuer.
We passed that point long ago. Once a country's productivity advances past the point where it can fulfill everyone's needs, it starts fulfilling people's wants. That's why a huge chunk of our economy is devoted to TV shows, movies, music, fiction books, games, sports, fashion, tourism, recreational and leisure activities. None of those are necessary, but you can make a pretty good (in some cases damn good) living working in or in support of those industries.
The only way there can be insufficient jobs is if you don't pay workers enough to self-sustain the economy (i.e. people can't afford to pay what it costs to make), or you raise wages to the point where it's not cost-effective to produce those things (i.e. people aren't willing to pay what it costs to make). That's right, both conservatives and liberals are wrong. The best economic state happens when people are paid slightly less than the value of what they produce.
Catch-22.
- If she uses Google Glass to prove she was driving within the speed limit, she proves she was using a monitor while driving and has to pay that fine.
- If she doesn't use Google Glass to prove she was driving within the speed limit, she can't disprove the speeding charge and has to pay that fine.
Read my other reply. This is a slick misuse of statistics by Apple fans. The numbers they're using are unique visitors per month, not actual web traffic. If you look at actual web traffic usage, Android heads by a pretty hefty margin. The heavy web users are on Android. The occasional web users are on Apple devices.
Mac sales are actually pretty flat. It just isn't falling as fast as PC sales are. The illusion that people are switching to Macs is generated from the inappropriate use of percentage market share in this context. As a percentage, the share of Macs sold is increasing, even though the unit sales are flat.
Which makes sense if you recall that Macs are generally higher-priced, higher-quality computers which people keep for a longer time. PCs were generally cheap devices people replaced more frequently. But now that processor speed requirements have plateaued, there is no longer a compelling reason to upgrade every 2-3 years and people are keeping their PCs longer like Mac users.
The press has a hard-on for Apple. The best example was when iPad tablet share started falling. Prior to then, there were lots of articles in the press about how the iPad still dominated the tablet market. As its share dropped from 90% to 85% to 75%, nobody in the press mentioned this. In fact most of them still stuck with the "iPads still dominate" tagline. I had to figure it out for myself from the actual numbers the marketing companies were releasing.
In 2012 it dropped to about 60% and Android was poised to overtake it the following year. I saw one (1) article in the press about this. Most were still sticking with "most tablets sold are iPads". 2013 saw Android tablet sales surpass iPads for the first time, and suddenly there were a spate of stories about how Android had overtaken the iPad. Then nothing. No mentions of how Android tablets continued to dominate iPad sales (about 2:1 now). It it doesn't show Apple in the lead or poised to overtake the lead, apparently it's not newsworthy.
No it doesn't. Android mobile web traffic is about 2x that of iOS mobile web traffic and pulling ahead. iOS still has a huge lead in tablet web traffic, but tablet + mobile web traffic Android passed iOS last year and is pulling ahead at a pretty fast clip (iOS is losing both phone and tablet web traffic share).
There are three big companies which monitor web traffic. Statcounter (which I've linked), W3Counter, and Netmarketshare. The latter two are frequently cited by Apple fans because they show iOS in the lead. What they don't tell you is that the latter two count unique visitors in a month, not web traffic. That is, in their statistics someone who visits a site once a month counts as much as someone who visits the site every day. Statcounter counts actual web visits, which is what corresponds to web data. It shows Android pretty clearly in the lead.
So the way it breaks down is:
The picture quality of Betamax was significantly better. The problem was most people had crappy TVs back then. It wasn't like today where all displays are digital so capable of the same resolution. TVs were analog, and the build quality directly affected phosphor size, electron beam control, and dot width. When I tested both formats on a high-end Sony monitor at a recording studio, the quality difference was obvious. But on my family's home TV, not so much. By the time analog TV quality improved to where Betamax was obviously better on every new home TV, VHS had already won (and in fact improved so the difference wasn't quite so obvious anymore).
It's true though that a substantial number of people didn't care about picture quality. They had no problem recording football games on VHS in SLP mode (6 hours, later 8 hours). The picture looked like a 240p Youtube video with extreme compression artifacts, but recording the entire game was more important than picture quality to these folks.
Sound-wise, I think VHS was better? I vaguely remember some audiophiles were recording their music onto VHS because it was superior to the audio tape formats.
The President sends a proposal, Congress works out the details (with negotiation and ultimatums with the President), and the President signs it. So both are responsible.
What usually happens is when something unpopular happens with the budget, people blame Congress OR the President depending on which one is controlled by the party they dislike. Likewise when something popular happens with the budget, people give credit to Congress OR the President depending on which is controlled by the party they like.
That's why it's common to see self-contradictory opinions like giving Clinton credit for balancing the budget in 1998, but blaming the Republicans in Congress for cutting science funding that year. The truth is both were responsible for balancing the budget, and one of the things they did to achieve that was to cut science funding.
The biggest increase (in raw dollars) in R&D spending in recent years (both defense and non-defense) happened under Bush's administration. Obama has more or less been holding non-defense R&D spending steady until it spiked last year, while cutting defense R&D.
In my book, holding a past increase steady warrants credit too (Obama resisted the urge to cut it back down to save money). But credit for bringing us up to current levels has to go to Bush. (Lots more pretty graphs to look at.)
The onus is upon the merchant to prove the charge was legit. For an in-store transaction, this usually means a copy of the signature on the credit card receipt. You send that to the credit card clearinghouse, they compare it to the signature the credit card company provides, and decide if the cardholder really made the purchase or not.
For online transactions, you're pretty much SOL. The credit card companies provide tools to let you try to confirm the cardholder is legit before completing the transaction. e.g. Compare billing address and phone number to that provided by the purchaser (this is why gas station pumps require you to type in a zip code - they're not trying to collect marketing data, it's cross-checking what you type with the zip code on file for the card). The better cards also keep a list of authorized shipping addresses on file, and the merchant can decline the sale if the shipping address for the order doesn't match that on file. But if the customer makes a chargeback, all you can do is show the clearinghouse that you used the tools they provided and hope they decline the chargeback. Usually the customer wins no questions asked, and the merchant just eats the loss as a cost of doing business (like shoplifting).
The banks and credit card companies have done a pretty good job making sure they don't pay anything for fraud (except the customer support rep's wages), all while charging exorbitant interest and fees purportedly to combat fraud. (In their defense, the interest and fees do pay for a different type of fraud - non-payment from customers, though I still think it's excessive.)
Do you have a reference for that? I've got a 300 W halogen lamp in my computer room which I never turn up past 50% brightness (it's bright enough, and there's something flaky with the plug which makes it turn off at 100%). I use it about 4-6 hours a night. I've been using it for the last 4 years with one bulb change, meaning I'm getting slightly better than the average 2500 hour lifespan per halogen bulb.
I've been looking into replacing it because there's a faint buzz at 50% brightness, and I know it's a huge energy waster. But I've never had an issue with the bulb prematurely burning out.
I anticipate thieves reproducing artifacts so that museums cannot tell the originals have been stolen after the copy has been substituted for the real thing.
This brings up a question which everyone has been trying to skirt. Is the value in the object itself, or in the arrangement of the molecules which make up the object? That's already bitten the content industry. For a long time they thought they sold hardware - books, records, and films. It's now become apparent that they sell software - text, music, movies - and the hardware those used to be published on is interchangeable and in fact unnecessary. It's the arrangement that matters, not the molecules which make up the object.
The same thing is going to happen to physical objects as 3D printers improve and eventually maybe we arrive at Star Trek-type replicators. If the facsimile of a precious original artifact is indistinguishable from the real thing, does it really matter which is the original?
Just because you want it to not be possible doesn't mean it isn't possible. Worms can spread themselves to other POS machines without going through the regular update channels or a server. Even if you're firewalled and air-gapped, all it takes is one corrupt employee to introduce the worm to the internal network. Care to guess how many Target employees have that level of access to their POS network?
The best protection I can think of is a physical write-protect switch which needs to be flipped before you can modify the software running on the POS. And even that is vulnerable to a corrupt employee modifying a legit firmware update so it carries the malware.
The problem with square structures is that they're made of four structural members which can collapse into a diamond when subject to an off-axis load. The structural members themselves remain intact, it's the joint connecting them which has failed allowing the members to change the angle at which they meet. You then have a structural failure without any of the individual members having failed (been crushed or bent). If you've ever folded a box flat, that's what you're doing. You straighten out the flaps so you're just left with four flat pieces of cardboard arranged in a square, then you collapse the square into a diamond until it's flat.
Triangles are better because you can't change the angle between the members in a triangle without also crushing one of the members. i.e. The only way to have a structural failure in a triangle is if at least one of the individual members fails.
Honeycombs are a great way to increase the structural rigidity of a single member against torsion. But by arranging them in squares which can collapse without challenging the rigidity of a single member, you're wasting their strength.
I downloaded the entire spreadsheet for spending at a portion of the LAUSD several years ago and spent a few hours going over it to try to answer that question. Unfortunately I can't find the link I used to download, and it might be long gone (it was part of a spending report at a single school).
But long story short, the bulk of it is going to Administration. The paper-pushers who aren't really essential to operating the school, but have added so much paperwork that they've made themselves essential. It was the largest single budget item, and more than half of payroll. When the State cuts school funding, the administrators simply pass the cuts on to the teachers and rile them up so they'll protest about how we're jeopardizing our children's futures. When the State increases school funding, they keep most of it for themselves, passing on just enough to keep the teachers happy.
I suspect the real reason charter schools do so well is not because of differences in programs, but because they allow money to bypass the existing administrative hegemony without being diminished.
If bleeding off the kids who prize education results in a public school with problems, it is already not doing well. The only thing the good students are doing is adding numbers which statistically cover up the problem (make the problem a smaller percentage of the student body, even though numerically it remains unchanged). Their removal just umasks the pre-existing problem, it doesn't cause the problem.
To me, this whole debate about charter schools is an interesting, almost humorous, example of reversed conservative and liberal talking points. Normally it's the conservatives who want to stick with the tried and true - even if it doesn't work very well, at least you know it works. And it's the liberals who want to strike out into uncharted waters and try new and different approaches which may work better. Here you have the liberals protecting the tried and true, and the conservatives wanting to try new approaches.
15 mph = 6.7 m/s. 220 Gs = 220*9.81 m/s^2 = 2158 m/s^2. To generate 220 Gs decelerating from 6.7 ms, you need to decelerate in 6.7 / 2158 = 0.003 sec.
At a constant deceleration, that's a distance of v^2 = 2ad, or d = v^2 / 2a = (6.7)^2 / (2*220*9.81) = 0.0104 meters = 1 cm.
To generate 70 Gs, you need to decelerate in 6.7 m/s / (70*9.81 m/s^2) = 0.0098 sec.
At a constant deceleration, that's d = v^2 / 2a = (6.7)^2 / (2*70*9.81) = 0.0327 meters = 3.3 cm.
The speed at which polystyrene springs back is so slow you almost need time lapse photography to watch it (crush a styrofoam coffee cup and see how long it takes to uncrush itself). The decreased G forces are entirely due to the distance the structure collapses. Polystyrene is a stiffer, closed-cell material with limited deformation due to the cells resisting popping (indeed, breakage is usually due to adjacent cells shearing apart, rather than the cells popping). While cardboard is essentially open cell and more likely to collapse its entire thickness.
That's a double-edged sword though. The cardboard helmet is more likely to be ruined or structurally compromised from lesser impacts, like having the bike fall on top of it while you're transporting it in the back of your truck. Stuff the polystyrene helmet can survive because such impacts do not have sufficient force to pop the cells or shear adjacent cells. The air in the cells just gets compressed more, and springs the cell back to shape once the load is removed. Since the cardboard is open cell, it has to rely entirely upon the paper's ability to spring back to shape to survive such loads intact.
And (judging from the pictures) if you hit at the wrong angle, you can cause the cardboard to collapse by twisting and falling over rather than crushing, thus greatly reducing its protection. Standardized tests are great in that they're reproducible, but they suck because by always testing in the exact same manner you allow designers to optimize for the test instead of for real-life conditions. i.e. You can improve performance in tested orientations by reducing crash protection in non-tested orientations. The more solid structure of polystyrene allows forces to be better transmitted between cells thus helping even out its crash protection at all orientations. The cardboard helmet looks like it's traded off that uniformity for anisotropic crash protection which peaks in the orientations which are being tested (longitudinal and transverse). A better design would mesh the cardboard into triangles, not squares. Squares are notorious for collapsing without using any of the structural material's innate strength. It's why the most common fiberglass weaves are 0/30/60 degrees, or 0/90 layered at 30 or 45 degree increments so you're not putting all your strength along just 0 and 90 degrees like this cardboard helmet does).
Well that makes their conclusion that the divide begins before college rather dubious, since the only reason to take the AP CS test is if the college/university you're planning to attend will give you credits for it. If they don't, you're throwing money down the drain by taking the test. (Not that I believe the divide is something caused by colleges - men and women are just interested in different things. But if you're starting from the premise that it's something caused by colleges, you can't disprove it with participation in a test based on college requirements.)