Through a fortunate coincidence, the number of hours in a year and the average cost of electricity in the U.S. ($0.12/kWh) means if a device is plugged in 24/7, the Watts it draws translates almost exactly into $ per year. Most laptops draw about 30 W while charging. A phone about 5 W. So if people were constantly using that outlet to charge their laptops and phones 24/7, the school or business would only pay $30 or $5 extra in a year. They may very well decide that's small enough they'll just pay it as a convenience to their visitors.
1 kW to charge an EV is an entirely different matter (it's actually probably closer to 1.5 kW which is about the safe limit for most residential 110V 20A circuits; 1 kW is probably the battery's charge rate after thermal losses). Allowing your outlets to be used to to charge EVs would drive up your electric bill by hundreds of dollars a year per outlet to a max $1500. So it's perfectly reasonably for a school or business to prohibit visitors charging EVs on their dime.
Or from the EV owner's perspective, if you can leech a 8 hours of electricity from your workplace and random stores and schools 5 days/week for a year, you'll have stolen about $350 worth of electricity by the end of the year. That's what this is about, not 5 cents. Saying it's about 5 cents is like saying a bank robber should go free because he was caught before he actually managed to steal any money.
Let's say an artist earns $0.0084 per stream; it would still take 400,000 'plays' per month in order to reach that indie-album threshold of approximately $3,300.
If a "stream" is a single person who listens to the artist in a month, then yeah 400,000 'plays' is a bit onerous.
If a "stream" is a single song listened to once, and the artist has (say) 10 reasonably popular songs, then only 4,000 fans worldwide listening to each of those songs once every 3 days would be enough for the artist to live comfortably. That doesn't sound too bad.
- Software does not fix the problem. You still have to update the tax tables. Any city anywhere in the country can change its tax rate overnight, and your software has to be updated to reflect it. So simply having software isn't enough. You need to constantly monitor the legislation produced by every state, county, and city in the country to make note of and update any changed tax rate. That's a solution which unfairly discriminates against smaller businesses.
- A paid service which collates and updates the tax tables doesn't fix the problem either. Every one of these services indemnifies itself against damages caused by an error. If they make a typo or miss an update, and you fail to collect $1000 in taxes because of it, you owe the $1000 in taxes, not them. They make the error, but you pay the costs. That's not a solution that works.
The proposed federal legislation backed by Amazon actually fixed this the right way. It established a central federal database. All states, counties, and cities were responsible for updating this database if they changed their tax rate. A business could then query the database and pull out the correct tax rate. If the state/county/city didn't update the database correctly, then it's their fault and they're out the money. If the business didn't pull the right tax rate from the database, then it's their fault and they're out the money. No passing the buck or shifting the blame - the party which makes the error pays the penalty. That's a solution that works.
If it's anything like the Canadian online retailer I helped set up, the HDMI cable never hits the U.S. border. While the purchase transaction is processed outside the U.S via an international financial transaction., the company outside the U.S. simply instructs a warehouse within the U.S. to ship the goods to your home address in the U.S. They later pay the warehouse using another international financial transaction.
i.e. Instead of the money going from NY => WA => TX and NY claiming that under U.S. law they can tax it, the money goes NY => Antigua => TX. And since NY has no legal right to tax financial transactions with Antigua, they're SOL. (The Federal government could impose some tax or levy for the international payments, but they didn't in the US / Canada case.)
See, the problem is people are thinking of this whole thing backwards. They think the default state is you should pay your taxes, and any method of avoiding taxes is an aberration. In reality it's the other way around. The default state is the lack of taxes, and requiring payment of taxes is the aberration. Consequently, unless you legislate taxes on all transactions (intrastate, interstate, international, an eventually interplanetary or interdimensional), this sales tax "loophole" will continue to exist. Because it's not a loophole. It's the natural state of things, and your tax law just doesn't cover all the possible ways to transfer money.
It's not exact, but I did run across an unusual and unlikely method of simulating the sensation. In high school I was helping make props for a play. We were coating party balloons in paper mache. After it had dried a bit, we popped the balloon and removed it. As a joke, one of us held the hole up to our ear, half expecting to "hear the ocean" like you do from a seashell. The result instead was silence and a feeling of low pressure, as if your eardrum were being sucked out. It wasn't just me either - everyone who tried it reported the same sensation.
Years later when I went into an anechoic chamber for a hearing test, I recognized the same feeling. It isn't "silence" like when you're in a quiet room. The minute echos tell you you're still in a room. It's more like an open emptiness, with a similar feeling of low pressure against my ears. Close your eyes and you can't tell you're in a room.
I think the low pressure sensation is psychosomatic. When you ride a plane, the pressure change mutes the sounds you can hear as well as puts pressure on your eardrum. The quiet of the anechoic chamber or the paper mache balloon is very much like the muting of sound you get from a pressure change. And I think the brain automatically concludes you must be experiencing a pressure change, and makes up the sensation of low pressure.
Not to be confused with the spectacular comet Lovejoy (2011). Both were discovered by the same guy so bear his name.
Lovejoy (2013) isn't as bright (barely visible to the naked eye), but should be easily visible with binoculars. It made its closest approach to Earth on Nov 19 and will reach perihelion (closest approach to the sun) Dec 25. It's fairly high up in the Northern hemisphere sky right now. http://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-lovejoy-c2013-r1-charts-photos
I'm starting to wonder if we aren't going about this backwards. Maybe we should be coming up with a way for the computer owner to dictate a EULA to software, and tell it what it is allowed to do and how it's allowed to run. i.e. Instead of UAE in essence asking "do you want to allow this software to install and do whatever it likes?", it could ask "based on your understanding of what the program you're installing will do, should it be able to do...", followed by a bunch of check boxes and sliders.
So you could prohibit the program from setting itself to start at boot time. Or if you're only expecting the program to run only locally (e.g. a benchmark app), you could set it to not have network access. Or if it's supposed to be a simple program (e.g. a text editor), you could set it so a warning pops up if the program consumes an unusually large amount of CPU time. Or if it's not a content creation app (e.g. a browser) you could proactively prohibit it from writing in any directories except its own and the downloads directory.
That's the case right now, with popular consensus being that Google Glass is useless or has trivial functionality. As the technology progresses and augmented reality becomes more commonplace and more useful, this is no longer going to be a one-sided issue whose solution is to simply ban it everywhere. Thinking forward a couple decades, you could visit a foreign country and the glasses could automatically translate all the signs you see (including the menu in a restaurant). You could tour a museum and the glasses would give you additional information of each exhibit you're seeing. You could see someone being mugged and be able to quickly snap the assailant's picture before he flees (faster than you can pull out a phone, turn on the camera app, and press the shutter).
Google Glass is the first exposure most of you have had to this technology. My lab at MIT in the 1990s was two blocks from Steve Mann's, and I frequently crossed paths with him while buying lunch (the gear he wore back then was much more obvious than Google Glass). My initial reaction was like that of most people here - extreme discomfort at the idea of being recorded without my knowledge or consent. But after I'd read some of his work and gotten used to the idea (it still bugged me, it just didn't elicit an overwhelming emotional response in my anymore), I started to think of the possible uses of the technology. Contrary to what most people are saying, the tech does have potential. Maybe not enough to become a huge market success, but it is not completely devoid of merit as many here are arguing.
There must be a reasonable expectation of privacy at all times. For restaurants that does mean you are not worrying about people making video recordings of the environment showing that you were there, who you were with, and what you were doing. At least with a phone it would require the person holding it or otherwise acting in a visible manner. There must be a reasonable expectation of privacy at all times. For restaurants that does mean you are not worrying about people making video recordings of the environment showing that you were there, who you were with, and what you were doing. At least with a phone it would require the person holding it or otherwise acting in a visible manner.
If the restaurant is like pretty much any modern restaurant, it has a security camera system installed which is recording everything every patron is doing. I thought all the video the FBI used to track down the Boston Marathon bombers had made it clear to everyone that there are security cameras all over the place, including in and in front of "private" stores and restaurants.
While technically the restaurant is a private setting, you have to remember that they do business by inviting the public in. Consequently you will be (gasp!) seen by other members of the public whom you don't know. I don't have a problem with a restaurant setting a no-camera policy, and I don't have a problem with people who wish to frequent such places. I do have a problem with said people arguing as if every restaurant must have a no-camera policy. That's hypocritical. Just as someone's desire to take pictures should not override the wishes of the restaurant owner who wants to prohibit such pictures, neither should the desires of those who don't want their pictures to be taken be able override the wishes of a restaurant owner who wants to allow patrons to take pictures while there. Either way, you're visiting someone else's private space, so it's that private space's owner's right to decide what is and isn't allowed, not yours.
If the biometric sensor can read the key (hemoglobin in your veins), then so can a key duplicator. And using what the duplicator reads, you can make a duplicate key which unlocks the biometric sensor just like the original key.
The only benefit biometric sensors bring to the table is that the keyholder cannot misplace the key. If you want real security, you need to go with public/private key encryption or rolling codes (essentially a continuous one-time pad), and multi-factor authentication. Biometrics can't do the former, and can only do part of the latter.
A common solution to this is to tell people just to text instead of making calls, that helps reduce the load on the cellular infrastructure.
The best solution is actually to make a website post (be it a personal website, Facebook, Twitter, etc) saying you're alright. That requires only a single transmission from each person in the affected area, while the multiple transmissions are sent to people outside the affected area. Hub and spoke vs. point to point. (Yeah you could send a multi-recipient text, but if you forget to notify anyone you have to send another text.)
People are starting to figure this out after 9/11 and the Indian Ocean and Japanese Tsunamis. There really needs to be a single central database of who's alive. That way survivors only have to report in to one site, and relatives only have to check at one site. The database can be mirrored, but there really needs to be one master. Otherwise you end up with relatives checking countless databases, never knowing for sure if their loved one hasn't checked in yet, or if they simply haven't yet found the database where they did check in.
I hope not. The 1960s space race was detrimental to long-term manned space travel. Before Sputnik, in the mid-1950s the U.S. plan for getting people into space was with a hypersonic plane which used both aerodynamic lifting surfaces while in the atmosphere, and a rocket for lift when the air got too thin. Several of the X-15 pilots flew high enough to earn the USAF's astronaut wings (50 miles), and two flew high enough to enter the international definition of space (100 km).
With the space race and especially the race for the moon, projects like this took a back seat to the quick and dirty (and expensive) solution - rockets.
After playing around with rockets for a few decades, we are now... researching a hypersonic plane for ferrying people inoto space and around the world. Except now we're 4 decades behind where we could've been if we hadn't been distracted by getting to the moon before the Soviets. Rockets are great once you're in space, but they burn a prodigious amount of fuel just to counteract air resistance, and generate a lot less lift per kg of fuel compared to aerodynamic lift. The economics still favor a vehicle which flies like a plane until the air is very thin, then has a rocket take over.
Contracts restrict the first amendment right to free speech (which only applies to the government) all the time. A non-disclosure agreement is a perfect example.
The problem in this case is that KlearGear failed to fulfil their part of the contract (didn't deliver the goods), but then are trying to say the other party is still bound by the contract terms. You cannot hold the other party accountable to a contract while you willfully ignore it. There is no longer a valid contract because KlearGear broke it. The negative reviews are basically the woman saying KlearGear broke the contract.
Actually, the U.S. already spends more public money per capita on health care (via Medicare/Medicaid) than Canada does. So the problem cannot be attributed entirely to private health insurance.
I'm fairly certain the problem is the combination of private + public money used to pay for health care. If you go with completely public health care, there is just one payer. When you go with completely private health care, there is also just one payer (the person/insurer paying for a procedure). When you combine private + public, there are two payers. And just like government subsidized school loans end up driving up the cost of tuition, having two payers drives up the cost of health care. (I'm only "fairly certain" because the two conflate through a complicated mix of different patients paying different amounts for the same procedure, and doctors/hospitals cost-shifting in the accounting books to even everything out).
This is CBP (customs and border patrol). Although they are a part of DHS now, they've pretty much had free reign to deny people entry at the border for whatever reason long before they became a part of DHS.
I lived in Point Roberts and commuted to Canada for work 5 days a week for 3 years, with weekend shopping trips to mainland Washington. So I got very familiar with how CBP works. You're probably right that it was some border agent power tripping. But aside from U.S. citizens, nobody has an inherent right to enter into the U.S. (and sometimes they even make U.S. citizens feel like you don't have a right to enter). Their default is to deny a foreigner entry unless the agent feels comfortable letting the person in, not let the person in unless the agent can find a reason to deny them entry. If you do or say anything which makes the agent wary or suspicious, you risk being denied entry. If pressed, they will just make up a reason if they're deciding based on a gut feeling. Be polite, answer their questions openly, no veiled insults, no jokes which might be misconstrued, and you'll usually fly right through. If they say something insulting to you, smile and ignore it.
Yes that leaves a lot of opportunity for agents to act like an asshole or practice all sorts of discrimination. It doesn't matter to them. There's very little consequence for them incorrectly denying someone entry, while they suffer huge consequences for incorrectly allowing someone in. Most of the agents I met were polite and professional. All were strict. Only a few were jerks (all of us who commuted cross-border knew who the jerk agents were). Their job isn't to be fair, it's to prevent threats from entering the country. If you're trying to judge them based on fairness, I could write pages of crazy things they did (like strip someone of their Nexus pass for life because a half-eaten sandwich in the car's trash had a slice of tomato, tomatoes being on the USDA's prohibited list that month - yes the list changed monthly). I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's just how CBP works. The whole system is designed to err on the side of the country's safety - denying entry to lots of innocents is considered a worthwhile tradeoff for prohibiting entry to one threat.
LOL. I came here to post exactly those three sites.
For laptops, I would add NotebookCheck. It's an English translation of a German site, but their reviews are incredibly consistent and thorough. They even tell you how hard it is to take apart if you want to replace/fix some of the components.
The Chicago Transit Authority provided 620 million rides in 2011. A $454 million system thus represents a cost of just 7 cents per ride over 10 years, compared to the typical $2-$5 fare per ride. I think the vast majority of public transport riders would say an extra 7 cents per ride is worth it for the convenience of a card which they can buy/refill online vs tokens they have to stand in line to buy. Even if the average rider has to fumble around just 10 seconds per trip to buy a token, that represents over two hours per person in lost time each year, and a staggering 196 man-years lost each year for the entire city.
As a developer of original software products, I consider it impossible - just my opinion - to determine if any software I create infringes on existing patents. There are usually thousands and often tens of thousands of ideas, algorithms and design approaches in a product that would need to be checked, and patents are so wordy that the time it would take to determine if there was infringement would always far exceed the time it takes to make the product. This seems to me to pose an undue burden, and is therefore unconstitutional?
You shouldn't even have to go that far. If you, as an ordinary software developer, came up with an idea independently on your own, and you later find out that the idea was already patented, then the patent should be invalidated because it is obvious to someone with ordinary skill in the art.
Unfortunately it's nigh impossible to prove that in hindsight, since you can't prove that you didn't peek at the USPTO website to see the patent you supposedly infringed.
It's not just video that plays automatically. A little part of me cries when I see a CNN story is only available in video, or an NPR story is audio only. The problem with the video and audio formats is that you cannot fast-forward through them to see if might be interested in watching/listening to the whole thing.* With a text article or a transcript, I can skim it really quickly, then decide if it's interesting enough to warrant me taking the time to reading the whole thing.
Yes video and audio clips have their place on a website. But that place is not as the primary form of access. The whole point of the web was to allow people to consume content in the format most convenient and comfortable to them, not a format dictated by a video. It's the same reason flash websites coded to a specific fixed resolution suck.
* This is not strictly true. VLC has a feature which pitch-corrects the audio if you play back the video at a faster speed. I've been using it to gulp down anime in half the time (it makes you appreciate how much anime is just filler put in to try to make the 24 min runtime). But a ~2x speedup is about the limit before the audio becomes difficult to decipher. I can push it to about 2.5x-3x if it has subtitles. But it's still a lot slower than I can skim through a text news article (because you have to glance away from the subtitles to see what's going on in the images to follow the plot).
From what I can tell from TFA, this isn't Cold War-era splicing a listening device into a cable in the middle of the ocean. It's getting the country where the cable comes up to the surface on board with the surveillance, and they simply eavesdrop on the cable traffic when it's split apart and routed to different cables on its way to the final destination.
This certainly helps explain why the U.S. Navy decommissioned NR-1 in 2008. While ostensibly it was for deep sea research and salvage operations (e.g. it helped find and recover parts of the Challenger), it was fairly obvious the primary purpose of a nuclear powered long-duration deep submersible with observation ports and manipulator arms was to tap undersea cables.
Far east Asian foreign policy is even more about playing off internal factions than it is in the West.
The U.S. is bound by treaty to defend Japan against an attack by a foreign power. That was one of the stipulations of the treaties which ended WWII -- Japan disarms, and in exchange the U.S. agrees to provide for its international defense. So it is not strictly an East Asian affair.
The chances of nukes and bang bangs over this are very, very low. See also North Korea.
I agree the chance of war is very low. But the route to this turning into war between the U.S. and China is also very short. A few dumb moves by people trying to "draw a line in the sand" and we could end up with a war neither side really wants just to save face.
The guy probably didn't register his copyright with the U.S. Library of Congress (who would for pictures posted on twitter?). If you didn't register your copyright, the most you can collect are actual damages suffered. You can't collect attorney's fees or statutory damages. i.e. the $1.2 million represents how much Getty et al wold have had to pay the rightful copyright holder if they had licensed the images in the first place. $1.2 million / $500 which is typical for a headlining photo of a newbreaking event = 2400 infringements, which is probably about the number of news organizations which reproduced the photo.
It's only if you register your copyright that the $150,000 per infringement limit kicks in. That's a statutory damages limit.
The projects I've been a part of where function took priority over form usually ended up a marketing disaster. The projects I've been a part of where form took priority over function ended up operational or support disaster.
The best projects have a good balance of form and function.
No, it's a real concern. The once-per-year drive to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving is a factor in their decision on which car to buy. The prospect of having to wait 45 min to recharge for every 2.5 hours driving on a long trip is extremely discouraging.
I don't really see the problem - buy an EV and just rent a gasoline vehicle for that rare long trip. But I'm different from most people in that I think of a car purchase and ownership costs in terms of depreciation and operating costs per mile. So renting a gasoline car for a long trip doesn't "cost" me more than if I drove my regular car on that trip. But most people think of the car purchase as a one-time lump sum cost, and any miles they drive on it afterwards are "free." So by their thinking, renting a gasoline car for a long trip represents extra cost.
That is nice, where is my EV full-size SUV for a similar price to my gas full-size SUV?
The Tesla S weighs almost as much as a full-size SUV - 4650 to 4900 lbs depending on the battery size. That's what's holding back EV versions of SUV - batteries to give them a decent range would probably push the vehicle weight to 6000-7000 lbs.
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Through a fortunate coincidence, the number of hours in a year and the average cost of electricity in the U.S. ($0.12/kWh) means if a device is plugged in 24/7, the Watts it draws translates almost exactly into $ per year. Most laptops draw about 30 W while charging. A phone about 5 W. So if people were constantly using that outlet to charge their laptops and phones 24/7, the school or business would only pay $30 or $5 extra in a year. They may very well decide that's small enough they'll just pay it as a convenience to their visitors.
1 kW to charge an EV is an entirely different matter (it's actually probably closer to 1.5 kW which is about the safe limit for most residential 110V 20A circuits; 1 kW is probably the battery's charge rate after thermal losses). Allowing your outlets to be used to to charge EVs would drive up your electric bill by hundreds of dollars a year per outlet to a max $1500. So it's perfectly reasonably for a school or business to prohibit visitors charging EVs on their dime.
Or from the EV owner's perspective, if you can leech a 8 hours of electricity from your workplace and random stores and schools 5 days/week for a year, you'll have stolen about $350 worth of electricity by the end of the year. That's what this is about, not 5 cents. Saying it's about 5 cents is like saying a bank robber should go free because he was caught before he actually managed to steal any money.
If a "stream" is a single person who listens to the artist in a month, then yeah 400,000 'plays' is a bit onerous.
If a "stream" is a single song listened to once, and the artist has (say) 10 reasonably popular songs, then only 4,000 fans worldwide listening to each of those songs once every 3 days would be enough for the artist to live comfortably. That doesn't sound too bad.
To address the counterpoints brought up:
- Software does not fix the problem. You still have to update the tax tables. Any city anywhere in the country can change its tax rate overnight, and your software has to be updated to reflect it. So simply having software isn't enough. You need to constantly monitor the legislation produced by every state, county, and city in the country to make note of and update any changed tax rate. That's a solution which unfairly discriminates against smaller businesses.
- A paid service which collates and updates the tax tables doesn't fix the problem either. Every one of these services indemnifies itself against damages caused by an error. If they make a typo or miss an update, and you fail to collect $1000 in taxes because of it, you owe the $1000 in taxes, not them. They make the error, but you pay the costs. That's not a solution that works.
The proposed federal legislation backed by Amazon actually fixed this the right way. It established a central federal database. All states, counties, and cities were responsible for updating this database if they changed their tax rate. A business could then query the database and pull out the correct tax rate. If the state/county/city didn't update the database correctly, then it's their fault and they're out the money. If the business didn't pull the right tax rate from the database, then it's their fault and they're out the money. No passing the buck or shifting the blame - the party which makes the error pays the penalty. That's a solution that works.
If it's anything like the Canadian online retailer I helped set up, the HDMI cable never hits the U.S. border. While the purchase transaction is processed outside the U.S via an international financial transaction., the company outside the U.S. simply instructs a warehouse within the U.S. to ship the goods to your home address in the U.S. They later pay the warehouse using another international financial transaction.
i.e. Instead of the money going from NY => WA => TX and NY claiming that under U.S. law they can tax it, the money goes NY => Antigua => TX. And since NY has no legal right to tax financial transactions with Antigua, they're SOL. (The Federal government could impose some tax or levy for the international payments, but they didn't in the US / Canada case.)
See, the problem is people are thinking of this whole thing backwards. They think the default state is you should pay your taxes, and any method of avoiding taxes is an aberration. In reality it's the other way around. The default state is the lack of taxes, and requiring payment of taxes is the aberration. Consequently, unless you legislate taxes on all transactions (intrastate, interstate, international, an eventually interplanetary or interdimensional), this sales tax "loophole" will continue to exist. Because it's not a loophole. It's the natural state of things, and your tax law just doesn't cover all the possible ways to transfer money.
It's not exact, but I did run across an unusual and unlikely method of simulating the sensation. In high school I was helping make props for a play. We were coating party balloons in paper mache. After it had dried a bit, we popped the balloon and removed it. As a joke, one of us held the hole up to our ear, half expecting to "hear the ocean" like you do from a seashell. The result instead was silence and a feeling of low pressure, as if your eardrum were being sucked out. It wasn't just me either - everyone who tried it reported the same sensation.
Years later when I went into an anechoic chamber for a hearing test, I recognized the same feeling. It isn't "silence" like when you're in a quiet room. The minute echos tell you you're still in a room. It's more like an open emptiness, with a similar feeling of low pressure against my ears. Close your eyes and you can't tell you're in a room.
I think the low pressure sensation is psychosomatic. When you ride a plane, the pressure change mutes the sounds you can hear as well as puts pressure on your eardrum. The quiet of the anechoic chamber or the paper mache balloon is very much like the muting of sound you get from a pressure change. And I think the brain automatically concludes you must be experiencing a pressure change, and makes up the sensation of low pressure.
Not to be confused with the spectacular comet Lovejoy (2011). Both were discovered by the same guy so bear his name.
Lovejoy (2013) isn't as bright (barely visible to the naked eye), but should be easily visible with binoculars. It made its closest approach to Earth on Nov 19 and will reach perihelion (closest approach to the sun) Dec 25. It's fairly high up in the Northern hemisphere sky right now.
http://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-lovejoy-c2013-r1-charts-photos
I'm starting to wonder if we aren't going about this backwards. Maybe we should be coming up with a way for the computer owner to dictate a EULA to software, and tell it what it is allowed to do and how it's allowed to run. i.e. Instead of UAE in essence asking "do you want to allow this software to install and do whatever it likes?", it could ask "based on your understanding of what the program you're installing will do, should it be able to do...", followed by a bunch of check boxes and sliders.
So you could prohibit the program from setting itself to start at boot time. Or if you're only expecting the program to run only locally (e.g. a benchmark app), you could set it to not have network access. Or if it's supposed to be a simple program (e.g. a text editor), you could set it so a warning pops up if the program consumes an unusually large amount of CPU time. Or if it's not a content creation app (e.g. a browser) you could proactively prohibit it from writing in any directories except its own and the downloads directory.
That's the case right now, with popular consensus being that Google Glass is useless or has trivial functionality. As the technology progresses and augmented reality becomes more commonplace and more useful, this is no longer going to be a one-sided issue whose solution is to simply ban it everywhere. Thinking forward a couple decades, you could visit a foreign country and the glasses could automatically translate all the signs you see (including the menu in a restaurant). You could tour a museum and the glasses would give you additional information of each exhibit you're seeing. You could see someone being mugged and be able to quickly snap the assailant's picture before he flees (faster than you can pull out a phone, turn on the camera app, and press the shutter).
Google Glass is the first exposure most of you have had to this technology. My lab at MIT in the 1990s was two blocks from Steve Mann's, and I frequently crossed paths with him while buying lunch (the gear he wore back then was much more obvious than Google Glass). My initial reaction was like that of most people here - extreme discomfort at the idea of being recorded without my knowledge or consent. But after I'd read some of his work and gotten used to the idea (it still bugged me, it just didn't elicit an overwhelming emotional response in my anymore), I started to think of the possible uses of the technology. Contrary to what most people are saying, the tech does have potential. Maybe not enough to become a huge market success, but it is not completely devoid of merit as many here are arguing.
If the restaurant is like pretty much any modern restaurant, it has a security camera system installed which is recording everything every patron is doing. I thought all the video the FBI used to track down the Boston Marathon bombers had made it clear to everyone that there are security cameras all over the place, including in and in front of "private" stores and restaurants.
While technically the restaurant is a private setting, you have to remember that they do business by inviting the public in. Consequently you will be (gasp!) seen by other members of the public whom you don't know. I don't have a problem with a restaurant setting a no-camera policy, and I don't have a problem with people who wish to frequent such places. I do have a problem with said people arguing as if every restaurant must have a no-camera policy. That's hypocritical. Just as someone's desire to take pictures should not override the wishes of the restaurant owner who wants to prohibit such pictures, neither should the desires of those who don't want their pictures to be taken be able override the wishes of a restaurant owner who wants to allow patrons to take pictures while there. Either way, you're visiting someone else's private space, so it's that private space's owner's right to decide what is and isn't allowed, not yours.
If the biometric sensor can read the key (hemoglobin in your veins), then so can a key duplicator. And using what the duplicator reads, you can make a duplicate key which unlocks the biometric sensor just like the original key.
The only benefit biometric sensors bring to the table is that the keyholder cannot misplace the key. If you want real security, you need to go with public/private key encryption or rolling codes (essentially a continuous one-time pad), and multi-factor authentication. Biometrics can't do the former, and can only do part of the latter.
The best solution is actually to make a website post (be it a personal website, Facebook, Twitter, etc) saying you're alright. That requires only a single transmission from each person in the affected area, while the multiple transmissions are sent to people outside the affected area. Hub and spoke vs. point to point. (Yeah you could send a multi-recipient text, but if you forget to notify anyone you have to send another text.)
People are starting to figure this out after 9/11 and the Indian Ocean and Japanese Tsunamis. There really needs to be a single central database of who's alive. That way survivors only have to report in to one site, and relatives only have to check at one site. The database can be mirrored, but there really needs to be one master. Otherwise you end up with relatives checking countless databases, never knowing for sure if their loved one hasn't checked in yet, or if they simply haven't yet found the database where they did check in.
I hope not. The 1960s space race was detrimental to long-term manned space travel. Before Sputnik, in the mid-1950s the U.S. plan for getting people into space was with a hypersonic plane which used both aerodynamic lifting surfaces while in the atmosphere, and a rocket for lift when the air got too thin. Several of the X-15 pilots flew high enough to earn the USAF's astronaut wings (50 miles), and two flew high enough to enter the international definition of space (100 km).
With the space race and especially the race for the moon, projects like this took a back seat to the quick and dirty (and expensive) solution - rockets.
After playing around with rockets for a few decades, we are now... researching a hypersonic plane for ferrying people inoto space and around the world. Except now we're 4 decades behind where we could've been if we hadn't been distracted by getting to the moon before the Soviets. Rockets are great once you're in space, but they burn a prodigious amount of fuel just to counteract air resistance, and generate a lot less lift per kg of fuel compared to aerodynamic lift. The economics still favor a vehicle which flies like a plane until the air is very thin, then has a rocket take over.
Contracts restrict the first amendment right to free speech (which only applies to the government) all the time. A non-disclosure agreement is a perfect example.
The problem in this case is that KlearGear failed to fulfil their part of the contract (didn't deliver the goods), but then are trying to say the other party is still bound by the contract terms. You cannot hold the other party accountable to a contract while you willfully ignore it. There is no longer a valid contract because KlearGear broke it. The negative reviews are basically the woman saying KlearGear broke the contract.
Actually, the U.S. already spends more public money per capita on health care (via Medicare/Medicaid) than Canada does. So the problem cannot be attributed entirely to private health insurance.
I'm fairly certain the problem is the combination of private + public money used to pay for health care. If you go with completely public health care, there is just one payer. When you go with completely private health care, there is also just one payer (the person/insurer paying for a procedure). When you combine private + public, there are two payers. And just like government subsidized school loans end up driving up the cost of tuition, having two payers drives up the cost of health care. (I'm only "fairly certain" because the two conflate through a complicated mix of different patients paying different amounts for the same procedure, and doctors/hospitals cost-shifting in the accounting books to even everything out).
This is CBP (customs and border patrol). Although they are a part of DHS now, they've pretty much had free reign to deny people entry at the border for whatever reason long before they became a part of DHS.
I lived in Point Roberts and commuted to Canada for work 5 days a week for 3 years, with weekend shopping trips to mainland Washington. So I got very familiar with how CBP works. You're probably right that it was some border agent power tripping. But aside from U.S. citizens, nobody has an inherent right to enter into the U.S. (and sometimes they even make U.S. citizens feel like you don't have a right to enter). Their default is to deny a foreigner entry unless the agent feels comfortable letting the person in, not let the person in unless the agent can find a reason to deny them entry. If you do or say anything which makes the agent wary or suspicious, you risk being denied entry. If pressed, they will just make up a reason if they're deciding based on a gut feeling. Be polite, answer their questions openly, no veiled insults, no jokes which might be misconstrued, and you'll usually fly right through. If they say something insulting to you, smile and ignore it.
Yes that leaves a lot of opportunity for agents to act like an asshole or practice all sorts of discrimination. It doesn't matter to them. There's very little consequence for them incorrectly denying someone entry, while they suffer huge consequences for incorrectly allowing someone in. Most of the agents I met were polite and professional. All were strict. Only a few were jerks (all of us who commuted cross-border knew who the jerk agents were). Their job isn't to be fair, it's to prevent threats from entering the country. If you're trying to judge them based on fairness, I could write pages of crazy things they did (like strip someone of their Nexus pass for life because a half-eaten sandwich in the car's trash had a slice of tomato, tomatoes being on the USDA's prohibited list that month - yes the list changed monthly). I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's just how CBP works. The whole system is designed to err on the side of the country's safety - denying entry to lots of innocents is considered a worthwhile tradeoff for prohibiting entry to one threat.
LOL. I came here to post exactly those three sites.
For laptops, I would add NotebookCheck. It's an English translation of a German site, but their reviews are incredibly consistent and thorough. They even tell you how hard it is to take apart if you want to replace/fix some of the components.
The Chicago Transit Authority provided 620 million rides in 2011. A $454 million system thus represents a cost of just 7 cents per ride over 10 years, compared to the typical $2-$5 fare per ride. I think the vast majority of public transport riders would say an extra 7 cents per ride is worth it for the convenience of a card which they can buy/refill online vs tokens they have to stand in line to buy. Even if the average rider has to fumble around just 10 seconds per trip to buy a token, that represents over two hours per person in lost time each year, and a staggering 196 man-years lost each year for the entire city.
You shouldn't even have to go that far. If you, as an ordinary software developer, came up with an idea independently on your own, and you later find out that the idea was already patented, then the patent should be invalidated because it is obvious to someone with ordinary skill in the art .
Unfortunately it's nigh impossible to prove that in hindsight, since you can't prove that you didn't peek at the USPTO website to see the patent you supposedly infringed.
It's not just video that plays automatically. A little part of me cries when I see a CNN story is only available in video, or an NPR story is audio only. The problem with the video and audio formats is that you cannot fast-forward through them to see if might be interested in watching/listening to the whole thing.* With a text article or a transcript, I can skim it really quickly, then decide if it's interesting enough to warrant me taking the time to reading the whole thing.
Yes video and audio clips have their place on a website. But that place is not as the primary form of access. The whole point of the web was to allow people to consume content in the format most convenient and comfortable to them, not a format dictated by a video. It's the same reason flash websites coded to a specific fixed resolution suck.
* This is not strictly true. VLC has a feature which pitch-corrects the audio if you play back the video at a faster speed. I've been using it to gulp down anime in half the time (it makes you appreciate how much anime is just filler put in to try to make the 24 min runtime). But a ~2x speedup is about the limit before the audio becomes difficult to decipher. I can push it to about 2.5x-3x if it has subtitles. But it's still a lot slower than I can skim through a text news article (because you have to glance away from the subtitles to see what's going on in the images to follow the plot).
From what I can tell from TFA, this isn't Cold War-era splicing a listening device into a cable in the middle of the ocean. It's getting the country where the cable comes up to the surface on board with the surveillance, and they simply eavesdrop on the cable traffic when it's split apart and routed to different cables on its way to the final destination.
This certainly helps explain why the U.S. Navy decommissioned NR-1 in 2008. While ostensibly it was for deep sea research and salvage operations (e.g. it helped find and recover parts of the Challenger), it was fairly obvious the primary purpose of a nuclear powered long-duration deep submersible with observation ports and manipulator arms was to tap undersea cables.
The U.S. is bound by treaty to defend Japan against an attack by a foreign power. That was one of the stipulations of the treaties which ended WWII -- Japan disarms, and in exchange the U.S. agrees to provide for its international defense. So it is not strictly an East Asian affair.
I agree the chance of war is very low. But the route to this turning into war between the U.S. and China is also very short. A few dumb moves by people trying to "draw a line in the sand" and we could end up with a war neither side really wants just to save face.
The guy probably didn't register his copyright with the U.S. Library of Congress (who would for pictures posted on twitter?). If you didn't register your copyright, the most you can collect are actual damages suffered. You can't collect attorney's fees or statutory damages. i.e. the $1.2 million represents how much Getty et al wold have had to pay the rightful copyright holder if they had licensed the images in the first place. $1.2 million / $500 which is typical for a headlining photo of a newbreaking event = 2400 infringements, which is probably about the number of news organizations which reproduced the photo.
It's only if you register your copyright that the $150,000 per infringement limit kicks in. That's a statutory damages limit.
The projects I've been a part of where function took priority over form usually ended up a marketing disaster. The projects I've been a part of where form took priority over function ended up operational or support disaster.
The best projects have a good balance of form and function.
No, it's a real concern. The once-per-year drive to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving is a factor in their decision on which car to buy. The prospect of having to wait 45 min to recharge for every 2.5 hours driving on a long trip is extremely discouraging.
I don't really see the problem - buy an EV and just rent a gasoline vehicle for that rare long trip. But I'm different from most people in that I think of a car purchase and ownership costs in terms of depreciation and operating costs per mile. So renting a gasoline car for a long trip doesn't "cost" me more than if I drove my regular car on that trip. But most people think of the car purchase as a one-time lump sum cost, and any miles they drive on it afterwards are "free." So by their thinking, renting a gasoline car for a long trip represents extra cost.
The Tesla S weighs almost as much as a full-size SUV - 4650 to 4900 lbs depending on the battery size. That's what's holding back EV versions of SUV - batteries to give them a decent range would probably push the vehicle weight to 6000-7000 lbs.