It's not a big deal because the submitter is confused. Just reading the summary, it's obvious he's grossly oversimplified the Republican position as "renewables = bad" in his head, and is now surprised to learn that their position is actually more nuanced than that. Pricing relative to other energy sources is what matters to them, not whether an energy source is renewable or not. Republicans don't give a whit (pro or con) if an energy source is "green". If it were cheaper than coal, they'd be all for it.
I'd even suggest that since people tend to assume others think and behave as they themselves do, that the actual gross oversimplification is in the submitter's head. His position is that "renewables = good", and therefore concludes anyone who opposes renewables must think "renewables = bad".
Just to be clear, I'm not dismissing everyone who supports renewables. There's a sound economic reason for subsidizing R&D of renewables - fossil fuels externalize costs via pollution, so the subsidy just helps level the playing field. But just like there's an idiot segment of the right who can't grok the externalized cost problem, there's an idiot segment of the left who can't grok that the cost to produce energy still matters, regardless of how beneficial renewables are. Higher energy costs translate directly into lower standard of living. We've just been fortunate so far that our rate of technological progress has managed to outpace the drag higher oil prices have put on our productivity.
Off the top of my head I can't think of a whole lot of options for locally-produced protein in Norway. If you eliminate the animal proteins, what's left?
Instead of going vegetarian, they could become humanitarian.
Actually, Samsung can argue that they didn't infringe on the patents. The jury cleared their tablet of infringement because of copious prior art. It found that they infringed on the iPhone, but that was most likely because of a technicality (they missed a filing deadline by a day), the judge disallowed Samsung from showing the jury prototype designs they were working on in 2006 prior to the iPhone being made public.
Anyone who wasn't sequestered like the jury and saw the evidence the judge disallowed knows Samsung didn't "copy" the iPhone's design. It's because of a technicality that the legal decision deviated from reality.
This is probably why Samsung rushed their watch device to market. If you think about it, a computer on a watch is the next logical step to the shrinking mobile computer. Samsung wanted to establish with absolute certainty in the public record that they didn't copy anyone when making a smartwatch. No way a technicality can prohibit them from telling a jury what is common knowledge.
A lot of Apple's product stasis comes down to the idiotic decision (from Jobs?) to go with fixed pixel resolution which really limits their room to manoeuver on screen resolution and aspect. While Android scales everything on the fly, Apple apps have to be recompiled, probably the source code has to change too.
The crazy thing is, Apple pretty much pioneered scaling during the 1980s. The whole point of Postscript was to make fonts scalable. If you hooked up a Mac to any Apple monitor it would autosense the display size and supported resolutions, and automatically scale the GUI so a 12 point font would always be the same linear size. I don't know what they were smoking when they decided to make iOS a fixed resolution.
Natural gas power plant: 60% efficient
Electrical transmission from plant to home: 98% efficient
Battery charging: 75% efficient
Net efficiency:.6*.98*.75 = 44%
Natural gas power plant: 60% efficient
Electrolysis next door to power plant: 65% efficient (this is about the best you can get in a lab, so I'm being generous)
Hydrogen fuel cell: 75% efficient (again being generous - they've gotten over 90% in a lab, but anything over 50% commercially is good)
Net efficiency:.6*.65*.75 = 29%
Gasoline engine: ~30% efficient
Yes the gasoline engine suffers additional losses when operating outside its optimal RPM, and the transmission. But electric motors are the same when not run at their optimal RPM. So I've omitted the last step in the power transfer to the wheels.
The only way hydrogen fuel cells make sense compared to regular gasoline cars (never mind EVs) is if you don't use electrolysis and liberate the hydrogen directly from petrochemicals like natural gas. If gasoline-like refueling is an important market factor, I think biofuels are going to end up the winner, not hydrogen.
Historically, people have usually had the ability to move to a location where they are in proximity to and observed by like-minded people. The internet brings all people into proximity and therefore we subject to a raft of populations who we we would have historically avoided. This is like being put into prison, where all inmates are able to see all other inmates actions and are under constant watch by authorities. It's demeaning and oppressive. Not much good comes out of it except to keep the inmates segregated and controlled.
I disagree. Whether it's a negative or a positive depends on what you're doing. Yes if you want secrecy or privacy, it's a negative. But if you want collaboration and to share knowledge, it's the greatest boon mankind has ever seen. When I was growing up, I could only speak with my relatives in Korea just once every month or so because international phone calls were expensive. Now we can share photos of our daily lives with each other immediately.
The cold, hard, oxide that records most of what is observed now is neither forgiving nor fades with time (if backups don't fail lol,) And that makes the situation different. Small misjudgements are spread to an immense population instantly, and recorded forever. This makes the impact of what used to be small, gargantuan. In short, everything is amplified, judged, and impermeable.
To me, the obvious solution is for social norms to change. It used to be that if you committed a faux pas, it was quickly forgotten if minor. Only if it were a major transgression of social norms (e.g. child porn) did knowledge of it become widespread (because of it spreading by word of mouth) and your reputation ruined.
Now because of what you point out, even a minor faux pas (e.g. the Star Wars kid video) can become widespread. The solution isn't to ban the distribution of a video of a minor faux pas. The solution is for society to recalibrate its norms and judge the faux pas based on the seriousness of its transgression, not based on how widely distributed it is.
People aren't perfect. They're human, and will make dumb mistakes. If someone accidentally hits reply to all when sending out a vitriolic email, that doesn't mean they're a bitter and bad person who should be fired immediately. It means they're a human being who responds emotionally from time to time. If you expect perfect behavior from people, you'll end up with what we have in politics. Nobody is perfect, and when you require perfect behavior the only people who can qualify are those who have no qualms about lying about having perfect behavior. Consequently all our politicians are liars.
The problem is, if the computer notices a discrepancy between its location as reported by the GPS and INS, how does it decide which one to believe and which one has failed?
If your 'idea' can be 'ripped off' that easily, it sure as heck doesn't deserve a government-granted monopoly.
In innovative idea is frequently one which is obvious in hindsight. A friend of mine in Korea grew up with a bathroom which connected to the house, but it was essentially a detached room with no shared heating. For ventilation it had a simple fan mounted in the window, used only when needed because electricity was expensive. In winter this meant the bathroom got very cold and he hated having to use it.
He came up with a fan whose blades were spring-loaded. When the fan was off, the springs would snap the blades flat and it would block the opening. When the fan was on, centrifugal force on some counterweights would cause the blades to resume their normal fan-like angle, allowing it to push air. This allowed the bathroom to share heating with the house without losing heated air through a hole in the window, while retaining the ability to vent stinky air outside.
His idea is obvious in hindsight, but nobody had thought of it in the 50+ years they'd been using electric fans for ventilation. It's like learning something new in school - once you'd seen it work and gotten your mind past the assumption that the blades in a fan need to be fixed, it's dirt easy to understand and replicate even if you've never seen any internal schematics. Because of poor patent protection in Asia, there were Chinese knockoffs being sold within a year.
The main problems I see with patents are (1) overly broad descriptions which try to cover every possible solution to a problem, rather than describe a single implementation of a solution. This was what sunk the infamous Selden patent. Selden was a patent attorney who tried to patent the concept of a gasoline-powered car. For almost a decade he succeeded and extracted huge royalties from the companies actually working on building and improving the automobile. His patent was eventually bypassed when Ford and other automakers pointed out the patent was for an engine using the Brayton cycle, while their engines used the Otto cycle. It was a technicality, but one that I think is important for patents to serve their purpose. You want people to dream up alternative solutions to the same problem.
And (2) re-implementation of ideas which already exist in other branches of engineering or physics. The NTP patent on "email over wireless cellular networks" which cost Blackberry 3/4 of a billion dollars is a great example. So is Apple's bounce animation patent, which is just an animated implementation of the step response of an underdamped second order linear system which has been known about for centuries. Or the XOR patent (yes, the USPTO granted a patent on one of the fundamental logical operators). A hardware example would be the patent on electronic time-delayed intermittent windshield wipers. The mechanical version had already been invented, and all the electronic version did was take the same feedback control system in the mechanical system, and implement it using electronic components.
If you made those two reasons grounds for immediately invalidating a patent, I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away.
Bingo. I've see the same thing with companies using Quickbooks as their accounting software. When you're first starting out, you don't know much about running a business or business accounting, and Quickbooks is really tempting because it's easy to use and popular enough that all the CPAs out there are familiar with the reports it'll generate at tax time. So most small businesses start using Quickbooks.
As they grow, some of the warts behind Quickbooks start to show up. You've started using it for your payroll, but Quickbook phases out payroll support after two years, forcing you to replace your perfectly functional version of QB with an expensive new version if you want your payroll to still work. The new version is frequently bloated enough that you also need to buy a new computer to run it. Eventually you say "Screw them, I'm just going to replace my accounting software." Then you discover that there is no way to extract your past accounting data from QB to import it into new software. It's your data, but you do not control it. QB does. They've trapped you in their ecosystem with forced bi-annual upgrades.
False, on several points. Every time one of those "masterminds" pushes some abusive big-brother shit, police unions invariably support it, to make them "more effective."
While I'm all against abusive big-brother type monitoring, how else do you expect this to work? Initially there is no clear defining line saying when a type of monitoring becomes unacceptable. In order for the courts to establish that line, one side needs to argue to them that it is acceptable, while the other argues that it is not. If law enforcement doesn't argue the pro side, who will?
I think it's their duty to argue how much the monitoring will improve their effectiveness. And it's the duty of civil libertarians to argue the chilling effects of such monitoring. The courts can listen to both and decide if the benefits outweigh the costs.
The alternative is to establish geminidomino as dictator and let him unilaterally decide what is and isn't acceptable, without giving those for or against certain policies an opportunity to present arguments in favor of their position.
And, since in private industry it has been repeatedly determined that you have no right to privacy while on the job, why is a police officer any different?
The same goes for politicians. They're employees of the public. Every meeting they have with every lobbyist should be video recorded and put on the web for anyone to see and hear.
Like many people, you fail see that Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: it is a useful medium of exchange. There is a predictable inflationary curve,
There is a predictable deflationary curve if you want to think of it as a currency - it is consistently going up in value. That makes it a terrible medium of exchange, because it encourages people to shove it under the mattress and wait for its value to go up instead of using it to get real productive work done. A good medium of exchange encourages you to go out and do something useful with it, thus encouraging more economic activity, and increasing the productivity of the people using it. As long as bitcoins' value is going up, it is a speculative investment, not a medium of exchange.
The trick to getting a currency to work, and the reason pretty much every developed country has switched to a fiat currency, is to keep the currency's value relatively steady despite the growth of your country's economy. If your currency's value goes up over the long term, it encourages hoarding and discourages productive economic activity. With a fiat currency it is easy to maintain this balance - print more money as your economy grows. With a currency based on a fixed resource (whether it be gold or bitcoins), this only happens if by sheer luck the rate of mining new gold/bitcoins matches the rate the economy is growing. If the mining rate does not keep up with economic growth, you get deflation and people will try to hoard the currency as a method of getting rich, instead of spending it or investing it to do actual productive work.
The point is that my government is doing that, and I strongly disapprove of it. Your government is doing that and you (perhaps) strongly disapprove of it. If we have the luck to live in democracies, it's our fucking duty to do something about it.
As distasteful as I find all this spying, I suspect it's necessary. The reason everyone does it is probably simple evolution. Those who don't spy on their neighbors, end up losing negotiations and being relegated to political-economic irrelevance best case, being invaded and taken over worst case. In other words, those who don't spy cease to exist, leaving only those who do spy.
for alternatives. When Apple bought AuthenTec (who made the fingerprint scanners on most laptops), they put out one final version of the software then unceremoniously dropped support for the hardware. Now the AuthenTec website is just gone. I managed to grab the latest (last) version of the software (for the scanner on my laptop) before the website vanished, but only because I happened to do a wipe and reinstall of the OS earlier in the year.
If Apple wants to make some tech exclusive to their devices, they have no problem with screwing over previous customers.
The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser eschews armor in favor of an electronic aerial defense system designed to keep away/destroy threats before they come close enough to attack the ship. It's actually built on a destroyer hull. You know, the things affectionately called tin cans in the Navy. Whatever armor they have is minimal. In geeky RPG terms, it's your evasive rogue, not your beefy tank.
There's been criticism of how effective these AEGIS ships are, especially after the Iranian airliner shootdown when apparently they couldn't distinguish a large civilian airliner from a small military jet. But in this case the drone was supposed to have been operating nearby so was allowed into airspace the ship would normally try to keep clear of hostiles during war.
Japan has enough off-shore wind to power the entire country at all times, if enough turbines were build. Of course no-one is suggesting that as there would be other issues, but off-shore wind is a massive resource for Japan.
You are aware that per MWh generated, more people have been killed from falling while maintaining wind turbines than have been killed due to nuclear power accidents? If "Japan's seismic instability and population density make it an inherently inappropriate location for nuclear power plants" as GP said, then the height of wind turbines makes them an inherently inappropriate location for machinery which needs to be maintained.
People seem to want to compare Fukushima Daiichi to a single wind turbine and think the risk is so low it's negligible. You can't replace that plant's power output with a single wind turbine. You'd need to replace it with something on the order of ten thousand 2 MW wind turbines. And when you multiply the minuscule risk of maintaining one turbine by 10,000, it ends up being more dangerous than a nuclear plant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the safety of wind turbines can be improved with sufficient regulation, training, and procedures (which will drive up the price of wind power just as it does for nuclear). How safe can it get? I don't know. But the lackadaisical attitude that "it must be safe!" because it introduces no new types of risk outside those of our daily experience is going to get far more people killed than Fukushima and Chernobyl combined.
The corn lobby is a big part of it. There is no algae lobby. But there is much more to it. I remember reading about "fuel from algae" back in the 1970s.
You have to understand how corn ethanol got started.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was exacerbated by the crop failures caused by the Dust Bowl. For the first time, Americans were starving because the country wasn't producing enough food to feed itself. Consequently, the government said "Never again" and began subsidizing food production. Primarily corn. The effect of any subsidy is to increase the supply of what you're subsidizing. That meant the U.S. was now producing more corn than it needed. Supply exceeds demand, and the price crashes. Corn became so cheap farmers couldn't make enough money selling it to stay in business. So the U.S government begins buying all the corn at a fixed price, then sells it back to the market. (This is why we often pay farmers to not plant anything in their fields. We don't need the extra food, but at the same time we want the farmer and the field ready and available to produce if there's drought or pest-induced failure elsewhere.)
The government sells what the domestic market needs. But because supply exceeds demand, there's a lot left over. What to do with it? Some of it gets sent abroad to developing countries as foreign aid. Some of it gets turned into cattle feed. Some bright people figured out how to turn it into high fructose corn syrup.
Fast-forward to the 1970s. The Arab Oil Embargo. Gas shortages. Lines at the gas stations. The price of gas skyrockets, and Americans are ready to riot in the streets. Someone in Washington sees all this and says to himself, "Hey, we could turn this extra corn into ethanol and use it as a gasoline substitute!" Because it's excess corn, the price doesn't matter. It's corn that would otherwise rot in silos or feed rats, so anything you can do with it is a net plus.
And thus was born corn ethanol. That's why we're using a non-ideal crop to produce ethanol. Since then it's been taken over by the corn lobby, and an idea which makes perfect sense when you're talking about excess corn has morphed into a program which by some calculations is net energy negative (costs more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back from burning it). That's why we use corn, not sugar cane, not sugar beets, not algae.
Use whatever gas you want to all season. At the end of the season run it dry, put in a gallon of the good stuff, run it dry, repeat.
California doesn't allow gas stations to sell the good stuff. The only place I know you can get it is from race tracks that sell it for race cars designed to use pure gasoline.
There really isn't much technology in an EV to "squander" a lead. It's just an electric motor, a battery, and a switch between the two to flip between charging vs. operating. Any electric golf cart or even a RC kid's toy has the same thing.
The only state of the art technology in an EV is the battery. And battery development is currently being driven by the laptop/tablet/phone industry, not EVs. So even if the automakers had continued to produce those EVs from the 1990s (predominantly lead-acid or NiMH battery based), they wouldn't have been much better off than they are today where most of the new batteries are lithium-based.
The EV1 was destroyed because California pulled the rug out from under GM. The whole reason GM built the EV1 was to qualify for California's Zero Emissions Vehicle requirement. California passed a law saying that by (I think) 2000, a certain percentage of all vehicles each company sold had to be ZEVs. Some of the automakers researched fuel cells, GM and others went the EV route.
About a year before the deadline, it was pretty clear GM was the only company with a viable ZEV. They stood to make $billions licensing the technology to the other companies so they too could meet California's ZEV requirement (and thus be allowed to continue to sell cars in California). The other companies got together, lobbied California saying the technology just wasn't ready for a ZEV yet, and presented the hybrid as an interim alternative. California agreed and rescinded the ZEV requirement. The environmentalists howled (because hybrids still burned gas - yes, the environmentalists initially hated hybrids). And GM was royally screwed. The $1 billion or so in R&D they'd pumped into the EV1 program was now worthless.
GM systematically dismantled and destroyed every EV1 it had made. They were silent about why, but if you know the whole story it's pretty obvious. If you dangle a carrot in front of a company to lead them to invest a billion dollars in R&D, you don't take the carrot away just as they're about to grab it. California set up a law to reward companies who spent substantial R&D money qualifying for the law, then changed the law at the last minute to take away the reward. But they still wanted the benefit of the R&D those companies did. GM wasn't having any of that, and if they weren't going to profit from developing the EV1, then neither was California.
The problem with debating this in terms of the minimum wage is that the value of money isn't a constant. An argument which works when the currency has a certain value might not work when the currency has a different value, even if the minimum wage stays exactly the same.
If you want to see what's really going on, you have to look at the wage in terms of individual productivity. If the minimum wage is significantly lower than the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising the minimum wage will increase the country's overall productivity (an income distribution which is more proportional to individual productivity results in fewer people wasting money on extravagances like gold toilet seats). But if the minimum wage is close to the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising it will simply result in their jobs disappearing. An employer would lose money hiring a worker because he'd end up paying the worker more money than he got back in terms of productivity.
While I do think the U.S. minimum wage is too low, this is the crucial aspect those arguing for a "living wage" as the minimum wage are missing. Raise the minimum wage beyond a certain point and you don't magically create wealth for the working poor. You simply put them out of work (and the average wage goes up because these people disappear from the denominator). For the minimum wage to work while keeping the lowest-wage workers in a job, it has to remain slightly lower than the productivity generated by those workers. Otherwise an employer is simply better off not hiring them. If that productivity is below what would be considered a "living wage", then you have to choose between paying them less than a living wage, or not giving them a job at all.
The study wasn't for you. The people who are really worried about this stuff will replace their drives with new ones after 3 years, when the failure rates start climbing again. If you're using your drives past that time, you are not the intended target audience of the article.
And no the failure rate isn't that low. But it's acceptable if you're storing your data on a RAID like the intended target audience does.
The brand doesn't really matter. Storage Review has a user-submitted hard drive reliability database. Unfortunately you have to submit a HDD report to gain access to it, and the site's popularity has waned resulting in most modern drives being listed as insufficient sample size. But the older drives showed enormous variance within a brand name's lineup. e.g. The IBM Deskstar 75GXP (aka Deathstar) drive model had one of the highest failure rates in the survey. But the model which succeeded it had one of the lowest failure rates in the survey.
In other words, the model of the drive matters more than the brand.
In this case it's not the corporations. It's the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which puts on the games. They sell everything - exclusive coverage, exclusive food rights, exclusive t-shirt sales, etc. The corporations are as much a victim as the press and public. You pay lots of money for the privilege of covering/attending the Olympics, and in exchange the IOC makes damn sure nobody else infringes on the privilege they've sold you. Including local merchants who've been selling in the area long before the Olympics ever came. Have a store named "Olympic Sporting Goods" which is so named because it's on Olympic St? Gotta cover up your name during the Olympics.
Yeah it sucks that only McDonalds can sell fast food on the Olympics venue, but can you really blame them for kicking out Joe the hot dog stand vendor? They paid the IOC huge bucks to become the official exclusive food sponsor. The IOC makes every right it sells exclusive if they can, because it makes a bidding war where they can extract the most money possible from the corporate sponsors. If you want to stop it, you need to put a leash on the IOC. Don't give them rights that infringe on the rights of pre-existing businesses. But cities are so desperate to host the Olympics they'll service the IOC like a $2 whore and and give the IOC anything it asks for.
When Pierre de Coubertin came up with the idea of the modern Olympics, he prohibited professional athletes because he didn't want money to get in the way of a competition where each individual was simply trying to do his/her best. Unfortunately he didn't foresee that the athletes weren't the only ones who could be corrupted by money.
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It's not a big deal because the submitter is confused. Just reading the summary, it's obvious he's grossly oversimplified the Republican position as "renewables = bad" in his head, and is now surprised to learn that their position is actually more nuanced than that. Pricing relative to other energy sources is what matters to them, not whether an energy source is renewable or not. Republicans don't give a whit (pro or con) if an energy source is "green". If it were cheaper than coal, they'd be all for it.
I'd even suggest that since people tend to assume others think and behave as they themselves do, that the actual gross oversimplification is in the submitter's head. His position is that "renewables = good", and therefore concludes anyone who opposes renewables must think "renewables = bad".
Just to be clear, I'm not dismissing everyone who supports renewables. There's a sound economic reason for subsidizing R&D of renewables - fossil fuels externalize costs via pollution, so the subsidy just helps level the playing field. But just like there's an idiot segment of the right who can't grok the externalized cost problem, there's an idiot segment of the left who can't grok that the cost to produce energy still matters, regardless of how beneficial renewables are. Higher energy costs translate directly into lower standard of living. We've just been fortunate so far that our rate of technological progress has managed to outpace the drag higher oil prices have put on our productivity.
Instead of going vegetarian, they could become humanitarian.
Actually, Samsung can argue that they didn't infringe on the patents. The jury cleared their tablet of infringement because of copious prior art. It found that they infringed on the iPhone, but that was most likely because of a technicality (they missed a filing deadline by a day), the judge disallowed Samsung from showing the jury prototype designs they were working on in 2006 prior to the iPhone being made public.
Anyone who wasn't sequestered like the jury and saw the evidence the judge disallowed knows Samsung didn't "copy" the iPhone's design. It's because of a technicality that the legal decision deviated from reality.
This is probably why Samsung rushed their watch device to market. If you think about it, a computer on a watch is the next logical step to the shrinking mobile computer. Samsung wanted to establish with absolute certainty in the public record that they didn't copy anyone when making a smartwatch. No way a technicality can prohibit them from telling a jury what is common knowledge.
The crazy thing is, Apple pretty much pioneered scaling during the 1980s. The whole point of Postscript was to make fonts scalable. If you hooked up a Mac to any Apple monitor it would autosense the display size and supported resolutions, and automatically scale the GUI so a 12 point font would always be the same linear size. I don't know what they were smoking when they decided to make iOS a fixed resolution.
Just to put some numbers on this:
.6*.98*.75 = 44%
.6*.65*.75 = 29%
Natural gas power plant: 60% efficient
Electrical transmission from plant to home: 98% efficient
Battery charging: 75% efficient
Net efficiency:
Natural gas power plant: 60% efficient
Electrolysis next door to power plant: 65% efficient (this is about the best you can get in a lab, so I'm being generous)
Hydrogen fuel cell: 75% efficient (again being generous - they've gotten over 90% in a lab, but anything over 50% commercially is good)
Net efficiency:
Gasoline engine: ~30% efficient
Yes the gasoline engine suffers additional losses when operating outside its optimal RPM, and the transmission. But electric motors are the same when not run at their optimal RPM. So I've omitted the last step in the power transfer to the wheels.
The only way hydrogen fuel cells make sense compared to regular gasoline cars (never mind EVs) is if you don't use electrolysis and liberate the hydrogen directly from petrochemicals like natural gas. If gasoline-like refueling is an important market factor, I think biofuels are going to end up the winner, not hydrogen.
I disagree. Whether it's a negative or a positive depends on what you're doing. Yes if you want secrecy or privacy, it's a negative. But if you want collaboration and to share knowledge, it's the greatest boon mankind has ever seen. When I was growing up, I could only speak with my relatives in Korea just once every month or so because international phone calls were expensive. Now we can share photos of our daily lives with each other immediately.
To me, the obvious solution is for social norms to change. It used to be that if you committed a faux pas, it was quickly forgotten if minor. Only if it were a major transgression of social norms (e.g. child porn) did knowledge of it become widespread (because of it spreading by word of mouth) and your reputation ruined.
Now because of what you point out, even a minor faux pas (e.g. the Star Wars kid video) can become widespread. The solution isn't to ban the distribution of a video of a minor faux pas. The solution is for society to recalibrate its norms and judge the faux pas based on the seriousness of its transgression, not based on how widely distributed it is.
People aren't perfect. They're human, and will make dumb mistakes. If someone accidentally hits reply to all when sending out a vitriolic email, that doesn't mean they're a bitter and bad person who should be fired immediately. It means they're a human being who responds emotionally from time to time. If you expect perfect behavior from people, you'll end up with what we have in politics. Nobody is perfect, and when you require perfect behavior the only people who can qualify are those who have no qualms about lying about having perfect behavior. Consequently all our politicians are liars.
The problem is, if the computer notices a discrepancy between its location as reported by the GPS and INS, how does it decide which one to believe and which one has failed?
In innovative idea is frequently one which is obvious in hindsight. A friend of mine in Korea grew up with a bathroom which connected to the house, but it was essentially a detached room with no shared heating. For ventilation it had a simple fan mounted in the window, used only when needed because electricity was expensive. In winter this meant the bathroom got very cold and he hated having to use it.
He came up with a fan whose blades were spring-loaded. When the fan was off, the springs would snap the blades flat and it would block the opening. When the fan was on, centrifugal force on some counterweights would cause the blades to resume their normal fan-like angle, allowing it to push air. This allowed the bathroom to share heating with the house without losing heated air through a hole in the window, while retaining the ability to vent stinky air outside.
His idea is obvious in hindsight, but nobody had thought of it in the 50+ years they'd been using electric fans for ventilation. It's like learning something new in school - once you'd seen it work and gotten your mind past the assumption that the blades in a fan need to be fixed, it's dirt easy to understand and replicate even if you've never seen any internal schematics. Because of poor patent protection in Asia, there were Chinese knockoffs being sold within a year.
The main problems I see with patents are (1) overly broad descriptions which try to cover every possible solution to a problem, rather than describe a single implementation of a solution. This was what sunk the infamous Selden patent. Selden was a patent attorney who tried to patent the concept of a gasoline-powered car. For almost a decade he succeeded and extracted huge royalties from the companies actually working on building and improving the automobile. His patent was eventually bypassed when Ford and other automakers pointed out the patent was for an engine using the Brayton cycle, while their engines used the Otto cycle. It was a technicality, but one that I think is important for patents to serve their purpose. You want people to dream up alternative solutions to the same problem.
And (2) re-implementation of ideas which already exist in other branches of engineering or physics. The NTP patent on "email over wireless cellular networks" which cost Blackberry 3/4 of a billion dollars is a great example. So is Apple's bounce animation patent, which is just an animated implementation of the step response of an underdamped second order linear system which has been known about for centuries. Or the XOR patent (yes, the USPTO granted a patent on one of the fundamental logical operators). A hardware example would be the patent on electronic time-delayed intermittent windshield wipers. The mechanical version had already been invented, and all the electronic version did was take the same feedback control system in the mechanical system, and implement it using electronic components.
If you made those two reasons grounds for immediately invalidating a patent, I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away.
Bingo. I've see the same thing with companies using Quickbooks as their accounting software. When you're first starting out, you don't know much about running a business or business accounting, and Quickbooks is really tempting because it's easy to use and popular enough that all the CPAs out there are familiar with the reports it'll generate at tax time. So most small businesses start using Quickbooks.
As they grow, some of the warts behind Quickbooks start to show up. You've started using it for your payroll, but Quickbook phases out payroll support after two years, forcing you to replace your perfectly functional version of QB with an expensive new version if you want your payroll to still work. The new version is frequently bloated enough that you also need to buy a new computer to run it. Eventually you say "Screw them, I'm just going to replace my accounting software." Then you discover that there is no way to extract your past accounting data from QB to import it into new software. It's your data, but you do not control it. QB does. They've trapped you in their ecosystem with forced bi-annual upgrades.
While I'm all against abusive big-brother type monitoring, how else do you expect this to work? Initially there is no clear defining line saying when a type of monitoring becomes unacceptable. In order for the courts to establish that line, one side needs to argue to them that it is acceptable, while the other argues that it is not. If law enforcement doesn't argue the pro side, who will?
I think it's their duty to argue how much the monitoring will improve their effectiveness. And it's the duty of civil libertarians to argue the chilling effects of such monitoring. The courts can listen to both and decide if the benefits outweigh the costs.
The alternative is to establish geminidomino as dictator and let him unilaterally decide what is and isn't acceptable, without giving those for or against certain policies an opportunity to present arguments in favor of their position.
The same goes for politicians. They're employees of the public. Every meeting they have with every lobbyist should be video recorded and put on the web for anyone to see and hear.
There is a predictable deflationary curve if you want to think of it as a currency - it is consistently going up in value. That makes it a terrible medium of exchange, because it encourages people to shove it under the mattress and wait for its value to go up instead of using it to get real productive work done. A good medium of exchange encourages you to go out and do something useful with it, thus encouraging more economic activity, and increasing the productivity of the people using it. As long as bitcoins' value is going up, it is a speculative investment, not a medium of exchange.
The trick to getting a currency to work, and the reason pretty much every developed country has switched to a fiat currency, is to keep the currency's value relatively steady despite the growth of your country's economy. If your currency's value goes up over the long term, it encourages hoarding and discourages productive economic activity. With a fiat currency it is easy to maintain this balance - print more money as your economy grows. With a currency based on a fixed resource (whether it be gold or bitcoins), this only happens if by sheer luck the rate of mining new gold/bitcoins matches the rate the economy is growing. If the mining rate does not keep up with economic growth, you get deflation and people will try to hoard the currency as a method of getting rich, instead of spending it or investing it to do actual productive work.
As distasteful as I find all this spying, I suspect it's necessary. The reason everyone does it is probably simple evolution. Those who don't spy on their neighbors, end up losing negotiations and being relegated to political-economic irrelevance best case, being invaded and taken over worst case. In other words, those who don't spy cease to exist, leaving only those who do spy.
for alternatives. When Apple bought AuthenTec (who made the fingerprint scanners on most laptops), they put out one final version of the software then unceremoniously dropped support for the hardware. Now the AuthenTec website is just gone. I managed to grab the latest (last) version of the software (for the scanner on my laptop) before the website vanished, but only because I happened to do a wipe and reinstall of the OS earlier in the year.
If Apple wants to make some tech exclusive to their devices, they have no problem with screwing over previous customers.
The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser eschews armor in favor of an electronic aerial defense system designed to keep away/destroy threats before they come close enough to attack the ship. It's actually built on a destroyer hull. You know, the things affectionately called tin cans in the Navy. Whatever armor they have is minimal. In geeky RPG terms, it's your evasive rogue, not your beefy tank.
There's been criticism of how effective these AEGIS ships are, especially after the Iranian airliner shootdown when apparently they couldn't distinguish a large civilian airliner from a small military jet. But in this case the drone was supposed to have been operating nearby so was allowed into airspace the ship would normally try to keep clear of hostiles during war.
You are aware that per MWh generated, more people have been killed from falling while maintaining wind turbines than have been killed due to nuclear power accidents? If "Japan's seismic instability and population density make it an inherently inappropriate location for nuclear power plants" as GP said, then the height of wind turbines makes them an inherently inappropriate location for machinery which needs to be maintained.
People seem to want to compare Fukushima Daiichi to a single wind turbine and think the risk is so low it's negligible. You can't replace that plant's power output with a single wind turbine. You'd need to replace it with something on the order of ten thousand 2 MW wind turbines. And when you multiply the minuscule risk of maintaining one turbine by 10,000, it ends up being more dangerous than a nuclear plant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the safety of wind turbines can be improved with sufficient regulation, training, and procedures (which will drive up the price of wind power just as it does for nuclear). How safe can it get? I don't know. But the lackadaisical attitude that "it must be safe!" because it introduces no new types of risk outside those of our daily experience is going to get far more people killed than Fukushima and Chernobyl combined.
You have to understand how corn ethanol got started.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was exacerbated by the crop failures caused by the Dust Bowl. For the first time, Americans were starving because the country wasn't producing enough food to feed itself. Consequently, the government said "Never again" and began subsidizing food production. Primarily corn. The effect of any subsidy is to increase the supply of what you're subsidizing. That meant the U.S. was now producing more corn than it needed. Supply exceeds demand, and the price crashes. Corn became so cheap farmers couldn't make enough money selling it to stay in business. So the U.S government begins buying all the corn at a fixed price, then sells it back to the market. (This is why we often pay farmers to not plant anything in their fields. We don't need the extra food, but at the same time we want the farmer and the field ready and available to produce if there's drought or pest-induced failure elsewhere.)
The government sells what the domestic market needs. But because supply exceeds demand, there's a lot left over. What to do with it? Some of it gets sent abroad to developing countries as foreign aid. Some of it gets turned into cattle feed. Some bright people figured out how to turn it into high fructose corn syrup.
Fast-forward to the 1970s. The Arab Oil Embargo. Gas shortages. Lines at the gas stations. The price of gas skyrockets, and Americans are ready to riot in the streets. Someone in Washington sees all this and says to himself, "Hey, we could turn this extra corn into ethanol and use it as a gasoline substitute!" Because it's excess corn, the price doesn't matter. It's corn that would otherwise rot in silos or feed rats, so anything you can do with it is a net plus.
And thus was born corn ethanol. That's why we're using a non-ideal crop to produce ethanol. Since then it's been taken over by the corn lobby, and an idea which makes perfect sense when you're talking about excess corn has morphed into a program which by some calculations is net energy negative (costs more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back from burning it). That's why we use corn, not sugar cane, not sugar beets, not algae.
California doesn't allow gas stations to sell the good stuff. The only place I know you can get it is from race tracks that sell it for race cars designed to use pure gasoline.
There really isn't much technology in an EV to "squander" a lead. It's just an electric motor, a battery, and a switch between the two to flip between charging vs. operating. Any electric golf cart or even a RC kid's toy has the same thing.
The only state of the art technology in an EV is the battery. And battery development is currently being driven by the laptop/tablet/phone industry, not EVs. So even if the automakers had continued to produce those EVs from the 1990s (predominantly lead-acid or NiMH battery based), they wouldn't have been much better off than they are today where most of the new batteries are lithium-based.
The EV1 was destroyed because California pulled the rug out from under GM. The whole reason GM built the EV1 was to qualify for California's Zero Emissions Vehicle requirement. California passed a law saying that by (I think) 2000, a certain percentage of all vehicles each company sold had to be ZEVs. Some of the automakers researched fuel cells, GM and others went the EV route.
About a year before the deadline, it was pretty clear GM was the only company with a viable ZEV. They stood to make $billions licensing the technology to the other companies so they too could meet California's ZEV requirement (and thus be allowed to continue to sell cars in California). The other companies got together, lobbied California saying the technology just wasn't ready for a ZEV yet, and presented the hybrid as an interim alternative. California agreed and rescinded the ZEV requirement. The environmentalists howled (because hybrids still burned gas - yes, the environmentalists initially hated hybrids). And GM was royally screwed. The $1 billion or so in R&D they'd pumped into the EV1 program was now worthless.
GM systematically dismantled and destroyed every EV1 it had made. They were silent about why, but if you know the whole story it's pretty obvious. If you dangle a carrot in front of a company to lead them to invest a billion dollars in R&D, you don't take the carrot away just as they're about to grab it. California set up a law to reward companies who spent substantial R&D money qualifying for the law, then changed the law at the last minute to take away the reward. But they still wanted the benefit of the R&D those companies did. GM wasn't having any of that, and if they weren't going to profit from developing the EV1, then neither was California.
The problem with debating this in terms of the minimum wage is that the value of money isn't a constant. An argument which works when the currency has a certain value might not work when the currency has a different value, even if the minimum wage stays exactly the same.
If you want to see what's really going on, you have to look at the wage in terms of individual productivity. If the minimum wage is significantly lower than the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising the minimum wage will increase the country's overall productivity (an income distribution which is more proportional to individual productivity results in fewer people wasting money on extravagances like gold toilet seats). But if the minimum wage is close to the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising it will simply result in their jobs disappearing. An employer would lose money hiring a worker because he'd end up paying the worker more money than he got back in terms of productivity.
While I do think the U.S. minimum wage is too low, this is the crucial aspect those arguing for a "living wage" as the minimum wage are missing. Raise the minimum wage beyond a certain point and you don't magically create wealth for the working poor. You simply put them out of work (and the average wage goes up because these people disappear from the denominator). For the minimum wage to work while keeping the lowest-wage workers in a job, it has to remain slightly lower than the productivity generated by those workers. Otherwise an employer is simply better off not hiring them. If that productivity is below what would be considered a "living wage", then you have to choose between paying them less than a living wage, or not giving them a job at all.
The study wasn't for you. The people who are really worried about this stuff will replace their drives with new ones after 3 years, when the failure rates start climbing again. If you're using your drives past that time, you are not the intended target audience of the article.
And no the failure rate isn't that low. But it's acceptable if you're storing your data on a RAID like the intended target audience does.
The brand doesn't really matter. Storage Review has a user-submitted hard drive reliability database. Unfortunately you have to submit a HDD report to gain access to it, and the site's popularity has waned resulting in most modern drives being listed as insufficient sample size. But the older drives showed enormous variance within a brand name's lineup. e.g. The IBM Deskstar 75GXP (aka Deathstar) drive model had one of the highest failure rates in the survey. But the model which succeeded it had one of the lowest failure rates in the survey.
In other words, the model of the drive matters more than the brand.
Or easier yet, use one browser just for logging into gmail, another browser for other stuff.
In this case it's not the corporations. It's the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which puts on the games. They sell everything - exclusive coverage, exclusive food rights, exclusive t-shirt sales, etc. The corporations are as much a victim as the press and public. You pay lots of money for the privilege of covering/attending the Olympics, and in exchange the IOC makes damn sure nobody else infringes on the privilege they've sold you. Including local merchants who've been selling in the area long before the Olympics ever came. Have a store named "Olympic Sporting Goods" which is so named because it's on Olympic St? Gotta cover up your name during the Olympics.
Yeah it sucks that only McDonalds can sell fast food on the Olympics venue, but can you really blame them for kicking out Joe the hot dog stand vendor? They paid the IOC huge bucks to become the official exclusive food sponsor. The IOC makes every right it sells exclusive if they can, because it makes a bidding war where they can extract the most money possible from the corporate sponsors. If you want to stop it, you need to put a leash on the IOC. Don't give them rights that infringe on the rights of pre-existing businesses. But cities are so desperate to host the Olympics they'll service the IOC like a $2 whore and and give the IOC anything it asks for.
When Pierre de Coubertin came up with the idea of the modern Olympics, he prohibited professional athletes because he didn't want money to get in the way of a competition where each individual was simply trying to do his/her best. Unfortunately he didn't foresee that the athletes weren't the only ones who could be corrupted by money.