HTC is the low-hanging fruilt. Both Apple and Microsoft have been throwing their weight around to force HTC into unfavorable agreements. That's why they're having trouble getting traction against Samsung. Microsoft isn't HTC's savior, they're the ones who helped put HTC in the poor market position they're currently in. Microsoft asking HTC to make Windows Phone phones is akin to the bully who steals your lunch money asking you to also do his homework for him.
Mastercard and the other credit card companies have pulled off one of the greatest scams of modern times. They've convinced everyone that they care about security. They don't. They've gamed the system so the merchant bears all the cost of fraud and theft. If your credit card is stolen, the thief uses it to buy gas, and you report it stolen, Mastercard tells the gas station "prove that it was the card owner who actually used the card." Of course the gas station can't (because the credit card companies got states to pass laws making it illegal for merchants to ask for ID to use a credit card), so Mastercard simply denies payment for that transaction. So in the end, it's the gas station which pays for the stolen gas.
Master card doesn't pay a cent except for the customer service rep who talks to you and the gas station, and the cost of issuing you a new credit card. So what do those ruinous 23.99% interest rates pay for? Most of it's profit, but some of it does pay for theft. Theft by credit card holders from Mastercard when they default on payment.
So in all likelihood, Mastercard probably doesn't have security folks to tell them how dumb fingerprints are as verification of ID, or if they do they're being overruled by marketers who are drooling at the positive PR they'd score with their customers with fingerprint security. If it propagates the myth that they are fighting fraud, and makes the card easier for the card holder to use, they are all for it even if actually increases fraud. They're not paying for the fraud, why should they care?
I actually like how open and forthcoming Tesla has been about this. In contrast, the other automakers seem intent on covering up any negative publicity and denying it ever happened. (And I say this despite thinking EVs are a dead end, and eventually biofuels will pass them up as the transportation fuel of choice.)
Except many settlements are essentially a contract between two private parties, enforced and accepted by the court. Often time, the settlement is made to allow anybody admitting any legal responsibility while making the issue go away -- like Michael Jackson't settlement with the kids he allegedly molested.
In general I agree with you. Two parties should be allowed to come up with whatever agreement they want to, including keeping it out of the eyes of the public.
However, patent and copyright issues are not "natural". They're artificial property constructs imposed upon society by the government ostensibly to serve a greater public good. Consequently, in the interest of making sure they are serving a greater public good, I believe their licensing terms should be mandated to be open and public.
In other words, any time a patent or copyright is licensed or transferred, it's not strictly between two parties. It's between three - the licensor, the licensee, and the general public. If a license or transfer of one of these artificial properties is not in the best interest of the public, the public has a right to know about it.
Samsung are one of the least ethical companies around. Do your research. Bribery, corruption..
Unfortunately, those are required to survive in business in Asia. Many other places too (e.g. Mexico, Chicago), but it's particularly bad in Asia. If you take a "I will never give nor accept bribes" stance and try to run a business in Asia, you will be bankrupt within a week.
When I was in jr. high (1981), one day the girls were passing around a polaroid of the naked lower torso of one of the guys (no face so you couldn't identify him). I never got the story straight if he did it willingly for the thrill of publicly exposing himself while being able to hide his identity, or if the other guys had pulled down his pants and underwear and snapped a picture before he could react.
In a modern context, I suppose all the girls in my class would've been busted for distributing child porn.
It's worth pointing out that this sort of dislocation of people from their homes is hardly unique to nuclear plants. Construction of Three Gorges Dam included forcefully relocating 1.3 million people. Itaipu required relocating 59,000 people. About 3000 were relocated for Grand Coulee. And the failure of the Banqiao series of hydroelectric dams resulted in 11 million people losing their homes (in addition to ~170,000 being killed).
At least with Fukushima, these people were dislocated only because of an accident, and will eventually be able to reclaim their homes. With hydroelectric dams, those homes and towns are gone for as long as the dam is operational. But that doesn't fit the narrative that renewable energy is harmless while nuclear is evil, so nobody thinks of it that way.
Having the visa eventually approved does not make everything that happened before magically disappear. US INS is notoriously thorough in their record-keeping. If there's anything on your record to indicate you ever had visa problems, even if they've been resolved, it will stay in your record forever. Every immigration officer reviewing your application or entry can see it, and it can sway his decision on whether to let you into the country under the visa waiver program.
A German friend of mine got stuck at US immigration one time because they thought he might be illegally working in the country. He was not, and they eventually let him through. But every time he has tried to enter the U.S. again, he's been pulled out of the regular immigration line for an hour of additional questioning before they let him in.
Samsung... the good guys" You must be kidding. They copy and they clone. Apple does gold so Samsung does gold.
Oooh! Oooh! Can I play too? LG makes a completely touchscreen interface phone, so Apple does too. Samsung offers phones with replaceable colored backs, so Apple does too. Android phones tended to have bigger screens than the iPhone, so Apple made the iPhone screen bigger. All the Android tablet makers offered a higher DPI than the original iPad, so Apple did too.
There are revolutionary changes, and there are evolutionary changes. Making evolutionary changes (like a thinner device, or a higher resolution screen, or going from 32-bit to 64-bit) is not copying. I'm not even sure offering different color phones qualifies as either revolutionary or evolutionary, but it's so damn obvious that there's no way it goes into the revolutionary category. If that's what you're relying on to base your accusations of copying, you're grasping at straws.
Apple sells a 64-bit phone with a 64 bit operating system and conversion tools to take advantage of it. Samsung announces that they'll be building 64 bit phones too, one day.
Anyone old enough to have gone through the 32-bit to 64-bit Windows transition should know that except for some specialized applications, 64-bit doesn't really get you much additional performance. Yes it'll dramatically speed up double long int operations (2x), though I think the only place those are used are on infinite precision calculators. And it'll improve hardcore math calculations (finding primes sped up about 35%). But with byte-wise applications like data compression, there's no speedup. The other main advantage of 64-bit - flat memory space - isn't a pressing need for smartphones at present. So the only common smartphone apps I can see benefiting from 64-bit are maybe some games. Smartphones simply aren't the platform of choice for the heavy number-crunching applications where 64-bit processors really help.
The only reason Apple went with 64-bit so early is marketing. They have a history of discontinuing support for technologies while they still have a lot of life in them, in favor of new technologies which haven't yet been established. Sometimes this works (replacing the 5.25" floppy with 3.5" floppies, dropping floppy drives in favor of optical) and they end up leading the industry. Other times it backfires (Firewire, Lightning) and leaves them stuck with a standard different from the rest of the industry (USB). Because they dive into these new technologies head-first, they try to give their users and developers years of advance warning so they can prepare. The introduction of 64-bit processors in smartphones is clearly premature, but they're doing it as a heads up to their users and for the marketing buzz that comes with being first.
Anyway, 64-bit ARM has been available for over a year now. Just that nobody (aside from AMD) went with it prior to Apple because there was no pressing need for it. Samsung saying they'd go to 64-bit as well isn't copying Apple. It's their way of saying it's no big deal and they were scheduled to transition to it too eventually.
. Consumer Reports and other customer satisfaction survey's I've seen don't rate Samsung all that highly. Apple leads the pack in every survey I've seen.
Consumer reports rates the Samsung S4 #1 well above the iPhone. Prior to that, LG was #1. The iPhone hasn't been #1 in their rankings for a couple years now.
Another reason for picking the Surface tablet is that Delta's training software also runs on the same Windows operating system as the tablets, reducing the need to redo that software for another device, Dickson said."
Considering they bought the ARM version of the tablet, someone's going to be very disappointed (and probably in a lot of trouble) when they discover that it does not run the same operating system as their training software. At least not unless their training software only runs on an extremely limited number of low-power computers.
Good news is, Microsoft's deception campaign to trick people expecting to run Windows apps into buying their ARM OS is working.
instead, people have bought the line that teachers are "overpaid" and don't bother to realize that teachers earn incredibly low salaries for the education and professional level of their work. that is insane.
You're both right. Teacher salaries are low, yet the U.S. spends more per student on education than any other country on the planet.
People think teacher salary = education spending. It isn't. Far from it. If you look at the latest educational expenditure stats (page 8 of the state level tables), you see that our schools spend $8649 per student on salaries, wages, and benefits. If the average class size is a modest 25, that's $216,255/yr per class being paid to educators. If the average teacher salary is $50k (call it $70k with benefits), who is the rest of the money going to?.
Obviously some of the extra is necessary (bus drivers, janitors, basic administration, etc). But from the research I've done, the bulk of the extra $145k goes to administrators. They've managed to worm their way into a position where they're in charge of how the money is allocated. If the budget is ever increased, they allocate most of it to themselves. If the budget is ever cut, they pass on the cuts to the teachers and rely on the teacher's union to stir up a firestorm about how we aren't spending enough money on education, when in fact we're spending more than any other country. Both you and OP have been suckered in by their ruse - thinking that teacher salary = education spending. When in fact teacher salary = education spending - administration overhead and other costs.
Incidentally, I should point out that the "teachers aren't paid enough" argument runs counter to the interest of current teachers. If your reasoning is that higher salaries will attract better teachers, then the logical course of action is to fire the current teachers and hire completely different teachers at the higher salaries. Retaining the current batch of teachers and simply increasing their salary won't change anything (other than improving the teachers' standard of living).
I'm certainly not going to defend everything they've done as awesome -- but before the iPod came about, you probably couldn't explain to most people what an MP3 player was or why you'd want one.
Everyone who used Napster and had MP3s on their computer knew what an MP3 player was. What held back early MP3 players was the inability to easily sync your music collection and playlists on your PC to the MP3 player. All the other MP3 players were competing on features. Apple correctly surmised that how you used it was equally if not more important than what you could use it for. The first iPod was non-competitive in terms of features ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."). But by incorporating it with iTunes they "solved" the sync problem, and turned the MP3 player into a device the 95% of people who aren't tech geeks could use. And that's when MP3 player sales took off.
And before the iPad came out, I doubt many people had ever even seen tablets because they were extremely specialized niche products. I know for a fact I'd never seen one, and you certainly couldn't walk into Best Buy and get one.
Actually you could. I bought and set up a Thinkpad X60 tablet for a client who'd seen one and wanted to use it as a portable monitor and data entry computer around his veterinary clinc. It was 3.5 lbs, about an inch thick, and could take both pen and finger input. It was bulky by modern tablet standards, but still very usable in the intended application. The client was very happy with it, and it led to me getting a tablet PC as well.
The catch was it cost $2500. Microsoft and Intel knew from the early 2000s that there was a tablet market. But Microsoft being heavily vested in Windows and Intel being heavily vested in high-end CPUs, they tried to shape the tablet market in their image - one where tablets ran Windows and used high-end CPUs. Consequently they were ridiculously expensive (which was kinda the whole point - more profit for Microsoft and Intel). You saw a similar thing when netbooks showed up. Microsoft/Intel panicked at people buying these cheap computers which didn't use Windows nor Intel CPUs. In response Microsoft came out with Windows Starter, and Intel came out with Atom CPUs, and successfully brought the netbook market back into their fold.
The problem is, when the market is demanding a low-price tablet, and you are working your ass off to prevent a low-priced tablet from entering the market, that pent-up demand creates a huge opportunity. Which is what Apple tapped into with the iPad. It wasn't that there was this huge untapped market nobody knew about that Apple was smart enough to see. It was that Microsoft and Intel had been actively steering manufacturers away from that direction for a decade. Apple (which was no stranger to non-Microsoft OSes and non-Intel CPUs) wasn't as easily dissuaded and put out a (relatively) cheap tablet which didn't rely on Microsoft or Intel. If the iPad hadn't been released, Archos probably would've stumbled into the same tablet market. They made a Linux-based portable hard drive with a screen and touch interface for storage, but the screen kept getting bigger, and they kept adding more apps to increase its functionality.
Most people have no grounds of reference for sound underwater, which can mislead one to wayward conclusions. dB in water is not the same as dB in air. dB is always given relative to a reference pressure and distance, usually re 1 uPa 1 meter. The higher density of water means an equivalent sound volume (in terms of loudness, or amplitude) will have a much higher dB in water.
Typical sonars are about 160-200 dB re 1 uPa 1 m. The US Navy sonar which caused all the controversy years ago was 226 dB if I remember right. Yes these are loud, but remember it's measured at 1 meter. At 100 meters, it will have attenuated by -40 dB.
Yes those are loud, but I'm a little skeptical of all these claims of sonar harming whales because as most of you know, whales and dolphins use sonar themselves. It's typically 170-190 dB re 1 uPa 1m, with peaks over 220 dB. They're at different frequencies though (100+ kHz for dolphins, 10-25 kHz for most depth finders, 3 kHz for the Navy sonar), and higher frequencies attenuate more quickly in the water.
1. "120 decibels" is meaningless. Sound waves vary with the type of medium, and attenuates with distance. dB are always measured with respect to a certain pressure and distance, usually 1 uPa and 1 meter from the sound source. Further than that, the dB will be lower (-40 dB at 100 meters).
2. A typical sonar will be about 180-200 dB re 1 uPa 1 m, with the powerful one the US Navy was using being about 226 dB. That isn't because the sound is louder (measured as how much your eardrum moves). It's because water is a denser medium than air, and thus requires more energy to create a wave of the same pressure as in air. The sonar the whales themselves emit is about 170-190 dB re 1 uPa 1 m, with peaks exceeding 220 dB .
3. Dead whales float. The same bacteria which decompose human bodies and make them float do the same in whales. In a body as large as a whale, the buildup of these gases can be so great it causes the corpse to explode. It will eventually sink, but usually only after scavengers like sharks have stripped away most of the low-density tissue, leaving mostly high-density bones.
Pretty much all cameras can already see IR. Unlike our eyes, the CCD or CMOS sensor are sensitive to infrared. Manufacturers just put in an IR-blocking filter so it doesn't mess up the colors displayed on the screen (the sensor will encode invisible IR as red). Very bright IR sources can still get through the filter - point a remote control at a video camera and push a button some time. So if the casinos wanted to see IR, all they'd have to do is instruct the manufacturer not to put in an IR filter. They'd lose color accuracy, but would be able to see IR.
The same thing is true to a lesser extent with UV. That's what the ubiquitous skylight filter for your SLR is - a UV blocker.
While the sensor measures the vector direction of sound, it measures the *SUM* of all sounds impinging on that point. With a single point sensor, you can't separate the direction of a particular one.
That's true for a single snapshot of sound in any given instant. But if you collecting acoustic data over a period of time, transient sounds (noise) average out, and the loud peak (gunshot) or cyclical nature (engine) of certain sounds of interest should ease their extraction, with sufficient processing.
Now, a reasonably small array of these sensors (maybe as small as 30cm across) might be able to accurately localize the source, in the same way that your brain can tell what direction a sound is coming from with just two ears.
That was my impression too (one of my grad school courses was on acoustics and sonar design). That's what they do in submarines - make a great big phased array microphone. But if you follow the link in TFA to the company's site, they have a PDF which gives a bit more info on how their sensors work:
The Microflown sensor is based upon MEMS technology , and uses the temperature difference in the cross section of two
extremely sensitive heated wires to determine acoustic particle velocity . Assembling three
orthogonally placed Microflown sensors in one single point, a very compact Acoustic Vector
Sensor can be produced.
So whereas a phased array sensor works by comparing the arrival times of a wavefront at different locations to determine the direction the wavefront is traveling, it sounds like their gizmo is measuring in 3 dimensions the actual movement of air molecules caused by the sound wave, and deriving the wavefront travel direction from that.
However Apple did have good reason to develop the lighting port - it's much more than a charging port. This is slashdot and we talk about Apple enough that I am sure enough of you understand what makes the lighting port leaps and and bounds more advanced the micro usb.
There is no EU directive that phones can only have one port. The Android phones which do video and audio out like the Lightning port simply use two ports. MicroUSB for charging and data, microHDMI for video and audio (newer HDMI implementations also support ethernet, though I haven't seen that supported on a phone yet).
So really, what you're saying is just a poor excuse concocted by Apple. If Apple really wanted to comply with the EU regulations, they could've simply put in a microUSB port for charging, and used the Lightning port for everything else. Heck, they could've made it so you could charge from either.
Charging larger devices like tablets is a problem for microUSB because it barely carries enough power (2.5 W) to run the tablet with little left over for charging. But unless there's a huge advance in battery tech, the power requirements for phones will remain within the capacity of microUSB chargers for the foreseeable future.
Snopes actually has a pretty good summary of the situation. The guy supports gay rights and gay marriage. He is, however, against adoption by gay parents (because it involves a person who has no choice in the matter). He wants advertisements for his pasta to focus on families, and since his beliefs (and biology) prohibit gay parents from having kids, they cannot appear in his ads.
We've been seeing this with health insurance in past decades: ineligible if you have a pre-existing condition, or get dropped if you develop a condition, or get charged more for smoking or being older.
This makes sense from a business perspective, so don't bother saying "what did you expect a business to do?" I'm saying that it makes progressively less sense from the customer's point of view. As these metrics get better, the companies will know exactly how much you will cost them as a customer, and charge the appropriate rates. Why bother with insurance if they know beforehand how much you will need it?
You've gone completely to the opposite extreme from the one the insurance companies are trying to get to.
There are two types factors at play here: Luck (randomness), and various behaviors under your control.
Insurance is for distributing the cost of bad luck over the entire population. People agree that anyone could, randomly and through no fault of their own, get cancer or get hit by a drunk driver. And while the cost of dealing with the aftermath may be exorbitant for an individual, it's reasonable if a bunch of people get together and agree to cover the costs together for anyone in the group who happens to be unlucky.
Insurance is not for distributing the cost of risky behaviors that an individual willingly engages in. In health insurance, it makes no sense to require non-smokers to cover the extra cost smokers incur due to the additional health risks caused by smoking. Likewise, if you choose to speed or make a lot of sharp turns, it makes no sense to force safer drivers to subsidize the cost of your risky behavior.
The insurance industry would like to go to one extreme and drop coverage or deny claims for people suffering from bad luck. You want the other extreme where insurance covers everything including willingly partaking in risky behavior. The logical balance is to force insurance companies to cover bad luck cases, while allowing them to distinguish and assign different rates based on riskiness of behavior. (Note that this also "solves" the DNA profiling problem. You do not control your DNA, so any problems you're genetically predisposed to are due to bad luck, and should be covered.)
Ten years from now this will be a problem: insurance companies siphoning money from customers for no benefit.
In states which require auto insurance, there is usually a government insurance commission which limits the amount of profit the insurance companies can make. They cannot siphon off additional money. If they get into that situation, the state will force them to reduce rates to bring their profit margin back down.
Or at least that's what's supposed to happen. If that's not happening in your state, you need to figure out why (usually it's due to corruption because politicians know they'll always be re-elected because the state always votes for one particular party), and do something to fix it. The mechanism for regulating insurance rates is already in place for most people, no need to complain as if we're completely at the insurance companies' mercy.
Yeah, this is the subtle change that's behind all this IMHO. It used to be that the state needed permission to intercept communication, and if the communication they wanted wasn't among those intercepted, tough luck.
This has shifted to intercepting all communication, then looking for the one you want. Under ideal cases for both, they arrive at the same result. It's the non-ideal cases which are very different. One errs on the side of the privacy of the citizens. The other errs on the side of state surveillance.
This is backwards. The entire way email is handled and transmitted means anyone can eavesdrop, not just Google. It's ridiculous to build a communications system which is completely transparent, then expect your privacy to be protected by laws. You are implicitly giving consent for unknown others to be able to read your email the moment you send it over the Internet. It's been stated over and over, your email is not like a sealed envelope, it's like a postcard and your message is readable by anyone who happens to glance at it.
If you want privacy, use an encrypted email system. If enough people who seem to want privacy would do this, one of these encrypted email systems might just reach critical mass and become a globally accepted standard thus solving this problem once and for all. But if you're just using regular email and complaining that NSA or Google is reading it, that's like talking with your friend over unencrypted VHF radio and getting upset that other people are listening in on your conversation.
The cellular phone companies already went down this road. Early cell phones used analog RF transmissions which anyone with an appropriate radio could tune to and listen in on. The FCC allocated some of the amateur radio bands to cellular and made it illegal to tune in to those bands, which was laughable because anyone with an older radio could switch to those channels and listen all day. As long as they didn't transmit, no one would know. The cellular companies fixed this the right way - modern digital transmissions are encrypted.
Until you are caught, you typically have only your perspective on what you're doing. There's no one else out there telling you that you've made a mistake.
Thing is, extortion isn't something you do alone. There's always the victim you're extorting. And the fact that you're extorting them means you fully understand what you're doing is against their wishes.
Maybe he didn't fully comprehend the full extent of the emotional distress he was causing in his vicitms. But he damn well knew that "their perspective" of it was that they didn't want it to happen. Otherwise he would've just sent them an email asking them to pose nude, no extortion attempt.
Solar electricity will never be economical, even if the cells are free and operate at maximum efficiency.
We already have free solar cells. They're called plants. When you burn wood, or make ethanol from cane sugar, you're using solar energy.
That's why IMHO the holy grail of power generation (other than fusion) is cellulosic ethanol. The vast majority of the solar energy plants collect goes into making cellulose. CO2 + H2O + energy => O2 + (CH2O)n. The (CH2O)n is sugar, which plants then string together into (C6H10O5)n which is cellulose. If we can figure out a cheap, scalable way to convert cellulose back to sugar, then ferment it to produce ethanol, we will have effectively turned every plant out there into an ethanol production factory. That solves almost every energy problem we have. It's cheap, abundant, renewable, has high energy density (nearly as much as gasoline, an order of magnitude better than batteries), we already have massive infrastructure in place for transporting and burning liquid fuel, as well as over a century of R&D into engines which combust liquid fuel.
Capacity factor for PV solar in the U.S. is about 0.145. That is, if you plop down a 1000 Watt panel angled at your latitude, and measure its power generation for a year, it'll average out to 145 Watts. It incorporates everything - weather, angle of the sun, night, etc. Across the country, it ranges from about 0.185 in the desert southwest, to 0.11 in New England.
From the Wikipedia article, in 2012 Germany had 32.6 GW of installed PV solar capacity, and it generated 28 GWh of electricity. A year is 8766 hours, so that's an average generation rate of 28000 GWh / 8766 h = 3.19 GW. So their PV solar capacity factor is 0.098 (Numerous hits on Google reporting instantaneous generation and generation over 24 hours notwithstanding - those don't matter, only the long-term cyclical average does, a natural cycle of seasons being one year.)
Basically, Germany is a terrible place to install PV solar. The only reason it's viable there is because their green energy initiatives have driven up the cost of their electricity to about $0.34/kWh (vs about $0.20/kWh for France and the UK). Numerous studies put the cost of electricity from PV solar at about 2x-5x the cost from other sources. So normally it wouldn't be cost-effective. But if you raise electricity prices to 3x what it is in the U.S., suddenly PV solar becomes financially viable.
You're missing what I'm saying. The bounce behavior is completely natural, ordinary, obvious, and should not be patentable.
If Apple wants to patent a specific algorithm which generates a bouncing behavior, then they should be able to as long as it's a novel method and nobody's done it that way before. What they should not be able to do is get a patent which prohibits anyone else from implementing any bouncing, which is exactly what's happened. At that point, the fact that this behavior is a natural consequence of some simple mathematical laws and has been known about for centuries becomes prior art.
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HTC is the low-hanging fruilt. Both Apple and Microsoft have been throwing their weight around to force HTC into unfavorable agreements. That's why they're having trouble getting traction against Samsung. Microsoft isn't HTC's savior, they're the ones who helped put HTC in the poor market position they're currently in. Microsoft asking HTC to make Windows Phone phones is akin to the bully who steals your lunch money asking you to also do his homework for him.
Mastercard and the other credit card companies have pulled off one of the greatest scams of modern times. They've convinced everyone that they care about security. They don't. They've gamed the system so the merchant bears all the cost of fraud and theft. If your credit card is stolen, the thief uses it to buy gas, and you report it stolen, Mastercard tells the gas station "prove that it was the card owner who actually used the card." Of course the gas station can't (because the credit card companies got states to pass laws making it illegal for merchants to ask for ID to use a credit card), so Mastercard simply denies payment for that transaction. So in the end, it's the gas station which pays for the stolen gas.
Master card doesn't pay a cent except for the customer service rep who talks to you and the gas station, and the cost of issuing you a new credit card. So what do those ruinous 23.99% interest rates pay for? Most of it's profit, but some of it does pay for theft. Theft by credit card holders from Mastercard when they default on payment.
So in all likelihood, Mastercard probably doesn't have security folks to tell them how dumb fingerprints are as verification of ID, or if they do they're being overruled by marketers who are drooling at the positive PR they'd score with their customers with fingerprint security. If it propagates the myth that they are fighting fraud, and makes the card easier for the card holder to use, they are all for it even if actually increases fraud. They're not paying for the fraud, why should they care?
I actually like how open and forthcoming Tesla has been about this. In contrast, the other automakers seem intent on covering up any negative publicity and denying it ever happened. (And I say this despite thinking EVs are a dead end, and eventually biofuels will pass them up as the transportation fuel of choice.)
In general I agree with you. Two parties should be allowed to come up with whatever agreement they want to, including keeping it out of the eyes of the public.
However, patent and copyright issues are not "natural". They're artificial property constructs imposed upon society by the government ostensibly to serve a greater public good. Consequently, in the interest of making sure they are serving a greater public good, I believe their licensing terms should be mandated to be open and public.
In other words, any time a patent or copyright is licensed or transferred, it's not strictly between two parties. It's between three - the licensor, the licensee, and the general public. If a license or transfer of one of these artificial properties is not in the best interest of the public, the public has a right to know about it.
Unfortunately, those are required to survive in business in Asia. Many other places too (e.g. Mexico, Chicago), but it's particularly bad in Asia. If you take a "I will never give nor accept bribes" stance and try to run a business in Asia, you will be bankrupt within a week.
When I was in jr. high (1981), one day the girls were passing around a polaroid of the naked lower torso of one of the guys (no face so you couldn't identify him). I never got the story straight if he did it willingly for the thrill of publicly exposing himself while being able to hide his identity, or if the other guys had pulled down his pants and underwear and snapped a picture before he could react.
In a modern context, I suppose all the girls in my class would've been busted for distributing child porn.
It's worth pointing out that this sort of dislocation of people from their homes is hardly unique to nuclear plants. Construction of Three Gorges Dam included forcefully relocating 1.3 million people. Itaipu required relocating 59,000 people. About 3000 were relocated for Grand Coulee. And the failure of the Banqiao series of hydroelectric dams resulted in 11 million people losing their homes (in addition to ~170,000 being killed).
At least with Fukushima, these people were dislocated only because of an accident, and will eventually be able to reclaim their homes. With hydroelectric dams, those homes and towns are gone for as long as the dam is operational. But that doesn't fit the narrative that renewable energy is harmless while nuclear is evil, so nobody thinks of it that way.
Having the visa eventually approved does not make everything that happened before magically disappear. US INS is notoriously thorough in their record-keeping. If there's anything on your record to indicate you ever had visa problems, even if they've been resolved, it will stay in your record forever. Every immigration officer reviewing your application or entry can see it, and it can sway his decision on whether to let you into the country under the visa waiver program.
A German friend of mine got stuck at US immigration one time because they thought he might be illegally working in the country. He was not, and they eventually let him through. But every time he has tried to enter the U.S. again, he's been pulled out of the regular immigration line for an hour of additional questioning before they let him in.
Oooh! Oooh! Can I play too? LG makes a completely touchscreen interface phone, so Apple does too. Samsung offers phones with replaceable colored backs, so Apple does too. Android phones tended to have bigger screens than the iPhone, so Apple made the iPhone screen bigger. All the Android tablet makers offered a higher DPI than the original iPad, so Apple did too.
There are revolutionary changes, and there are evolutionary changes. Making evolutionary changes (like a thinner device, or a higher resolution screen, or going from 32-bit to 64-bit) is not copying. I'm not even sure offering different color phones qualifies as either revolutionary or evolutionary, but it's so damn obvious that there's no way it goes into the revolutionary category. If that's what you're relying on to base your accusations of copying, you're grasping at straws.
Anyone old enough to have gone through the 32-bit to 64-bit Windows transition should know that except for some specialized applications, 64-bit doesn't really get you much additional performance. Yes it'll dramatically speed up double long int operations (2x), though I think the only place those are used are on infinite precision calculators. And it'll improve hardcore math calculations (finding primes sped up about 35%). But with byte-wise applications like data compression, there's no speedup. The other main advantage of 64-bit - flat memory space - isn't a pressing need for smartphones at present. So the only common smartphone apps I can see benefiting from 64-bit are maybe some games. Smartphones simply aren't the platform of choice for the heavy number-crunching applications where 64-bit processors really help.
The only reason Apple went with 64-bit so early is marketing. They have a history of discontinuing support for technologies while they still have a lot of life in them, in favor of new technologies which haven't yet been established. Sometimes this works (replacing the 5.25" floppy with 3.5" floppies, dropping floppy drives in favor of optical) and they end up leading the industry. Other times it backfires (Firewire, Lightning) and leaves them stuck with a standard different from the rest of the industry (USB). Because they dive into these new technologies head-first, they try to give their users and developers years of advance warning so they can prepare. The introduction of 64-bit processors in smartphones is clearly premature, but they're doing it as a heads up to their users and for the marketing buzz that comes with being first.
Anyway, 64-bit ARM has been available for over a year now. Just that nobody (aside from AMD) went with it prior to Apple because there was no pressing need for it. Samsung saying they'd go to 64-bit as well isn't copying Apple. It's their way of saying it's no big deal and they were scheduled to transition to it too eventually.
Consumer reports rates the Samsung S4 #1 well above the iPhone. Prior to that, LG was #1. The iPhone hasn't been #1 in their rankings for a couple years now.
Samsung topped Apple in the latest smartphone customer satisfaction survey.
Considering they bought the ARM version of the tablet, someone's going to be very disappointed (and probably in a lot of trouble) when they discover that it does not run the same operating system as their training software. At least not unless their training software only runs on an extremely limited number of low-power computers.
Good news is, Microsoft's deception campaign to trick people expecting to run Windows apps into buying their ARM OS is working.
You're both right. Teacher salaries are low, yet the U.S. spends more per student on education than any other country on the planet.
People think teacher salary = education spending. It isn't. Far from it. If you look at the latest educational expenditure stats (page 8 of the state level tables), you see that our schools spend $8649 per student on salaries, wages, and benefits. If the average class size is a modest 25, that's $216,255/yr per class being paid to educators. If the average teacher salary is $50k (call it $70k with benefits), who is the rest of the money going to?.
Obviously some of the extra is necessary (bus drivers, janitors, basic administration, etc). But from the research I've done, the bulk of the extra $145k goes to administrators. They've managed to worm their way into a position where they're in charge of how the money is allocated. If the budget is ever increased, they allocate most of it to themselves. If the budget is ever cut, they pass on the cuts to the teachers and rely on the teacher's union to stir up a firestorm about how we aren't spending enough money on education, when in fact we're spending more than any other country. Both you and OP have been suckered in by their ruse - thinking that teacher salary = education spending. When in fact teacher salary = education spending - administration overhead and other costs.
Incidentally, I should point out that the "teachers aren't paid enough" argument runs counter to the interest of current teachers. If your reasoning is that higher salaries will attract better teachers, then the logical course of action is to fire the current teachers and hire completely different teachers at the higher salaries. Retaining the current batch of teachers and simply increasing their salary won't change anything (other than improving the teachers' standard of living).
Everyone who used Napster and had MP3s on their computer knew what an MP3 player was. What held back early MP3 players was the inability to easily sync your music collection and playlists on your PC to the MP3 player. All the other MP3 players were competing on features. Apple correctly surmised that how you used it was equally if not more important than what you could use it for. The first iPod was non-competitive in terms of features ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."). But by incorporating it with iTunes they "solved" the sync problem, and turned the MP3 player into a device the 95% of people who aren't tech geeks could use. And that's when MP3 player sales took off.
Actually you could. I bought and set up a Thinkpad X60 tablet for a client who'd seen one and wanted to use it as a portable monitor and data entry computer around his veterinary clinc. It was 3.5 lbs, about an inch thick, and could take both pen and finger input. It was bulky by modern tablet standards, but still very usable in the intended application. The client was very happy with it, and it led to me getting a tablet PC as well.
The catch was it cost $2500. Microsoft and Intel knew from the early 2000s that there was a tablet market. But Microsoft being heavily vested in Windows and Intel being heavily vested in high-end CPUs, they tried to shape the tablet market in their image - one where tablets ran Windows and used high-end CPUs. Consequently they were ridiculously expensive (which was kinda the whole point - more profit for Microsoft and Intel). You saw a similar thing when netbooks showed up. Microsoft/Intel panicked at people buying these cheap computers which didn't use Windows nor Intel CPUs. In response Microsoft came out with Windows Starter, and Intel came out with Atom CPUs, and successfully brought the netbook market back into their fold.
The problem is, when the market is demanding a low-price tablet, and you are working your ass off to prevent a low-priced tablet from entering the market, that pent-up demand creates a huge opportunity. Which is what Apple tapped into with the iPad. It wasn't that there was this huge untapped market nobody knew about that Apple was smart enough to see. It was that Microsoft and Intel had been actively steering manufacturers away from that direction for a decade. Apple (which was no stranger to non-Microsoft OSes and non-Intel CPUs) wasn't as easily dissuaded and put out a (relatively) cheap tablet which didn't rely on Microsoft or Intel. If the iPad hadn't been released, Archos probably would've stumbled into the same tablet market. They made a Linux-based portable hard drive with a screen and touch interface for storage, but the screen kept getting bigger, and they kept adding more apps to increase its functionality.
Most people have no grounds of reference for sound underwater, which can mislead one to wayward conclusions. dB in water is not the same as dB in air. dB is always given relative to a reference pressure and distance, usually re 1 uPa 1 meter. The higher density of water means an equivalent sound volume (in terms of loudness, or amplitude) will have a much higher dB in water.
Typical sonars are about 160-200 dB re 1 uPa 1 m. The US Navy sonar which caused all the controversy years ago was 226 dB if I remember right. Yes these are loud, but remember it's measured at 1 meter. At 100 meters, it will have attenuated by -40 dB.
Yes those are loud, but I'm a little skeptical of all these claims of sonar harming whales because as most of you know, whales and dolphins use sonar themselves. It's typically 170-190 dB re 1 uPa 1m, with peaks over 220 dB. They're at different frequencies though (100+ kHz for dolphins, 10-25 kHz for most depth finders, 3 kHz for the Navy sonar), and higher frequencies attenuate more quickly in the water.
1. "120 decibels" is meaningless. Sound waves vary with the type of medium, and attenuates with distance. dB are always measured with respect to a certain pressure and distance, usually 1 uPa and 1 meter from the sound source. Further than that, the dB will be lower (-40 dB at 100 meters).
2. A typical sonar will be about 180-200 dB re 1 uPa 1 m, with the powerful one the US Navy was using being about 226 dB. That isn't because the sound is louder (measured as how much your eardrum moves). It's because water is a denser medium than air, and thus requires more energy to create a wave of the same pressure as in air. The sonar the whales themselves emit is about 170-190 dB re 1 uPa 1 m, with peaks exceeding 220 dB .
3. Dead whales float. The same bacteria which decompose human bodies and make them float do the same in whales. In a body as large as a whale, the buildup of these gases can be so great it causes the corpse to explode. It will eventually sink, but usually only after scavengers like sharks have stripped away most of the low-density tissue, leaving mostly high-density bones.
Pretty much all cameras can already see IR. Unlike our eyes, the CCD or CMOS sensor are sensitive to infrared. Manufacturers just put in an IR-blocking filter so it doesn't mess up the colors displayed on the screen (the sensor will encode invisible IR as red). Very bright IR sources can still get through the filter - point a remote control at a video camera and push a button some time. So if the casinos wanted to see IR, all they'd have to do is instruct the manufacturer not to put in an IR filter. They'd lose color accuracy, but would be able to see IR.
The same thing is true to a lesser extent with UV. That's what the ubiquitous skylight filter for your SLR is - a UV blocker.
That's true for a single snapshot of sound in any given instant. But if you collecting acoustic data over a period of time, transient sounds (noise) average out, and the loud peak (gunshot) or cyclical nature (engine) of certain sounds of interest should ease their extraction, with sufficient processing.
That was my impression too (one of my grad school courses was on acoustics and sonar design). That's what they do in submarines - make a great big phased array microphone. But if you follow the link in TFA to the company's site, they have a PDF which gives a bit more info on how their sensors work:
So whereas a phased array sensor works by comparing the arrival times of a wavefront at different locations to determine the direction the wavefront is traveling, it sounds like their gizmo is measuring in 3 dimensions the actual movement of air molecules caused by the sound wave, and deriving the wavefront travel direction from that.
There is no EU directive that phones can only have one port. The Android phones which do video and audio out like the Lightning port simply use two ports. MicroUSB for charging and data, microHDMI for video and audio (newer HDMI implementations also support ethernet, though I haven't seen that supported on a phone yet).
So really, what you're saying is just a poor excuse concocted by Apple. If Apple really wanted to comply with the EU regulations, they could've simply put in a microUSB port for charging, and used the Lightning port for everything else. Heck, they could've made it so you could charge from either.
Charging larger devices like tablets is a problem for microUSB because it barely carries enough power (2.5 W) to run the tablet with little left over for charging. But unless there's a huge advance in battery tech, the power requirements for phones will remain within the capacity of microUSB chargers for the foreseeable future.
Snopes actually has a pretty good summary of the situation. The guy supports gay rights and gay marriage. He is, however, against adoption by gay parents (because it involves a person who has no choice in the matter). He wants advertisements for his pasta to focus on families, and since his beliefs (and biology) prohibit gay parents from having kids, they cannot appear in his ads.
You've gone completely to the opposite extreme from the one the insurance companies are trying to get to.
There are two types factors at play here: Luck (randomness), and various behaviors under your control.
Insurance is for distributing the cost of bad luck over the entire population. People agree that anyone could, randomly and through no fault of their own, get cancer or get hit by a drunk driver. And while the cost of dealing with the aftermath may be exorbitant for an individual, it's reasonable if a bunch of people get together and agree to cover the costs together for anyone in the group who happens to be unlucky.
Insurance is not for distributing the cost of risky behaviors that an individual willingly engages in. In health insurance, it makes no sense to require non-smokers to cover the extra cost smokers incur due to the additional health risks caused by smoking. Likewise, if you choose to speed or make a lot of sharp turns, it makes no sense to force safer drivers to subsidize the cost of your risky behavior.
The insurance industry would like to go to one extreme and drop coverage or deny claims for people suffering from bad luck. You want the other extreme where insurance covers everything including willingly partaking in risky behavior. The logical balance is to force insurance companies to cover bad luck cases, while allowing them to distinguish and assign different rates based on riskiness of behavior. (Note that this also "solves" the DNA profiling problem. You do not control your DNA, so any problems you're genetically predisposed to are due to bad luck, and should be covered.)
In states which require auto insurance, there is usually a government insurance commission which limits the amount of profit the insurance companies can make. They cannot siphon off additional money. If they get into that situation, the state will force them to reduce rates to bring their profit margin back down.
Or at least that's what's supposed to happen. If that's not happening in your state, you need to figure out why (usually it's due to corruption because politicians know they'll always be re-elected because the state always votes for one particular party), and do something to fix it. The mechanism for regulating insurance rates is already in place for most people, no need to complain as if we're completely at the insurance companies' mercy.
Yeah, this is the subtle change that's behind all this IMHO. It used to be that the state needed permission to intercept communication, and if the communication they wanted wasn't among those intercepted, tough luck.
This has shifted to intercepting all communication, then looking for the one you want. Under ideal cases for both, they arrive at the same result. It's the non-ideal cases which are very different. One errs on the side of the privacy of the citizens. The other errs on the side of state surveillance.
This is backwards. The entire way email is handled and transmitted means anyone can eavesdrop, not just Google. It's ridiculous to build a communications system which is completely transparent, then expect your privacy to be protected by laws. You are implicitly giving consent for unknown others to be able to read your email the moment you send it over the Internet. It's been stated over and over, your email is not like a sealed envelope, it's like a postcard and your message is readable by anyone who happens to glance at it.
If you want privacy, use an encrypted email system. If enough people who seem to want privacy would do this, one of these encrypted email systems might just reach critical mass and become a globally accepted standard thus solving this problem once and for all. But if you're just using regular email and complaining that NSA or Google is reading it, that's like talking with your friend over unencrypted VHF radio and getting upset that other people are listening in on your conversation.
The cellular phone companies already went down this road. Early cell phones used analog RF transmissions which anyone with an appropriate radio could tune to and listen in on. The FCC allocated some of the amateur radio bands to cellular and made it illegal to tune in to those bands, which was laughable because anyone with an older radio could switch to those channels and listen all day. As long as they didn't transmit, no one would know. The cellular companies fixed this the right way - modern digital transmissions are encrypted.
Thing is, extortion isn't something you do alone. There's always the victim you're extorting. And the fact that you're extorting them means you fully understand what you're doing is against their wishes.
Maybe he didn't fully comprehend the full extent of the emotional distress he was causing in his vicitms. But he damn well knew that "their perspective" of it was that they didn't want it to happen. Otherwise he would've just sent them an email asking them to pose nude, no extortion attempt.
We already have free solar cells. They're called plants. When you burn wood, or make ethanol from cane sugar, you're using solar energy.
That's why IMHO the holy grail of power generation (other than fusion) is cellulosic ethanol. The vast majority of the solar energy plants collect goes into making cellulose. CO2 + H2O + energy => O2 + (CH2O)n. The (CH2O)n is sugar, which plants then string together into (C6H10O5)n which is cellulose. If we can figure out a cheap, scalable way to convert cellulose back to sugar, then ferment it to produce ethanol, we will have effectively turned every plant out there into an ethanol production factory. That solves almost every energy problem we have. It's cheap, abundant, renewable, has high energy density (nearly as much as gasoline, an order of magnitude better than batteries), we already have massive infrastructure in place for transporting and burning liquid fuel, as well as over a century of R&D into engines which combust liquid fuel.
Capacity factor for PV solar in the U.S. is about 0.145. That is, if you plop down a 1000 Watt panel angled at your latitude, and measure its power generation for a year, it'll average out to 145 Watts. It incorporates everything - weather, angle of the sun, night, etc. Across the country, it ranges from about 0.185 in the desert southwest, to 0.11 in New England.
From the Wikipedia article, in 2012 Germany had 32.6 GW of installed PV solar capacity, and it generated 28 GWh of electricity. A year is 8766 hours, so that's an average generation rate of 28000 GWh / 8766 h = 3.19 GW. So their PV solar capacity factor is 0.098 (Numerous hits on Google reporting instantaneous generation and generation over 24 hours notwithstanding - those don't matter, only the long-term cyclical average does, a natural cycle of seasons being one year.)
Basically, Germany is a terrible place to install PV solar. The only reason it's viable there is because their green energy initiatives have driven up the cost of their electricity to about $0.34/kWh (vs about $0.20/kWh for France and the UK). Numerous studies put the cost of electricity from PV solar at about 2x-5x the cost from other sources. So normally it wouldn't be cost-effective. But if you raise electricity prices to 3x what it is in the U.S., suddenly PV solar becomes financially viable.
You're missing what I'm saying. The bounce behavior is completely natural, ordinary, obvious, and should not be patentable.
If Apple wants to patent a specific algorithm which generates a bouncing behavior, then they should be able to as long as it's a novel method and nobody's done it that way before. What they should not be able to do is get a patent which prohibits anyone else from implementing any bouncing, which is exactly what's happened. At that point, the fact that this behavior is a natural consequence of some simple mathematical laws and has been known about for centuries becomes prior art.