There's nothing strange about it at all. You're assuming a straight-line supply/demand curve, and a 45 degree one at that. Real-world supply/demand curves are almost never straight lines, and almost never 45 degrees.
Commodities like DRAM chips are extremely low margin, so a small decrease in costs can represent a large increase in profit. i.e. a 0.1% drop in cost to produce may not sound like much, but if your profit margin is 0.5%, it's a big increase in profit. Consequently these plants (and the wholesale computer industry in general) operates on very thin margins and practice just-in-time manufacturing to keep inventory costs to a minimum. You know how you can custom-order a system on Dell's or Lenovo's website? That's not for your convenience; that's so the company can keep its costs down by shipping a system to you as soon as they receive the components from China.
When there's a shortage in a primary component like memory, it becomes a game of musical chairs. No vendor wants to be the one left stuck without enough memory - that'll mean they need to warehouse tens if not hundreds of thousands of computers until they can find memory to install in them. Warehouse space they probably don't have and will have to rent. Consequently they all rapidly bid up the price of the remaining memory, up to the price where renting warehouse space would be cheaper.
In other words, the price increase isn't proportional to the price of memory, it's proportional to the price of warehouse space. So it makes no sense to expect a 5% drop in supply to correspond to a 5% increase in the price of memory. The price increase will be the cost to warehouse 5% of the computers that are queued up to be built, which may be a lot more than 5% the price of memory.
To anyone saying that the workers just want to fraudulently sign in for someone else and abuse the system needs to try again and come up with a real argument. The assumption that workers just want to screw over employers is elitist and is a part of the same poor logic of "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
It's not elitist and it's not an assumption. It happens at every workplace I've been at which had hourly workers. If you'd never do it, then congratulations you're one of the honest ones. But as hard as it is to believe, there are a lot of dishonest people out there.
We actually considered a fingerprint time clock at one of my previous workplaces. We (the management) discussed the merits and disadvantages - whether the decrease in fraud would be worth the loss of respect from the honest employees (because they'd think management didn't trust them). In the end we decided to stick with time cards, and simply instructed the managers to give out warnings if an employee consistently didn't show up on time. Limit the repercussions to the problem people, rather than upset the honest ones by painting them as dishonest with too wide a brush. The dishonest ones would eventually get warnings on their permanent records, and/or wouldn't get a raise or would get a smaller raise at the next performance review. (We considered swipe cards too, but the employees rightfully pointed out that with a time card printing out the times, they could immediately spot any errors and bring the card to us for correction.)
It's also worth pointing out that time cards are not only for the business' convenience. They are also evidence which can be used in insurance and legal disputes (both civil like unemployment fraud, and criminal where it can be used as an alibi). And if the company does government contacts, the government usually requires time cards as proof that the billed hours were in fact worked (even salaried employees need to clock in in this situation).
Depending on where you live, there are a few business activities which require fingerprinting by the state. The ones I've run across are authorizations to administer medication to children (epi-pens for camp counselors), alcohol licenses, and real estate transactions. The business has no say in this - it is a government requirement. More than likely the business didn't send the prints to the state just to tick you off - the state was probably the entity which required them in the first place.
So your position is that it's better to not fight such extortion schemes?
That's not how I read OP. I read it as a roundabout way of saying that we've reached them point where... "extrajudicial" justice would be more cost-effective than seeking justice through the court system.
You joke, but I really think there is something to this.
When I was in first or second grade (1970s), the U.S. was in the middle of its metric conversion program. We were taught the size of a cm vs an inch, the weight of a gram vs. an ounce, etc. I came up with some equivalencies on my own to help me remember everything. A cm was about the width of my thumb at the time. An inch was the length of of my folded middle finger. A foot was about the length of of my fist to my elbow... (Obviously none of these work anymore because I was a lot smaller back then.)
Then we got to time. How long is a second? I tried counting "one one-thousand, two one-thousand" in my head like my teacher had suggested. It was too fast. I eventually came up with a "one (pause) and a two (pause) and a..." chant which (for me) accurately measured out each second.
I'm in my 40s now and if I try my old timing chant, it's too slow. Each second I count takes nearly 2 seconds real-time. The "one one-thousand, two one-thousand" mnemonic now works for me. This also matches my memories of staring at the second hand on the clock in class, waiting for the time to pass so school would end. I watch a clock (with a second hand) today and it seems to move almost twice as fast as I remember it moving back then.
My timing hasn't changed. I started playing piano in second grade. When I listen to old tape recordings of songs I still play, my tempo hasn't changed. The only explanation I can come up with is that my verbal and visual processing has slowed down with age. My piano playing has had the tempo reinforced every time I hear a recording of a piece, so it gradually (to my brain) sped up over the years to keep pace with my slower processing.
How can pseudonymity â" one of the key foundations of early internet communities â" be saved?"
No it wasn't one of the key foundations of early internet communities. Quite the opposite in fact - it was seen as a great threat to Internet communities. Lemme cut and paste a post I made last year...
Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. (Also notice that all the people in those old USENET posts are using their real names.) This system was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into chaos and rampant misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly so family members sharing a single AOL account could each have their own ID. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly used to make pseudonyms by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from complete anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things in life the best balance is probably somewhere in between.
The problem is the global-warming deniers trumpet the low temperature outliers, and the global warming proponents trumpet the high temperature outliers. Last year, one side made a big deal about the least ice in the Arctic in recorded history. This year the other side is making a big deal about the ice pack rebounding. Same thing with hurricanes. In 2005 it was all about the worst Atlantic hurricane season in history being caused by global warming. Then 2006 was one of the mildest hurricane seasons in history and the other side got to crow.
It's stupid trying to use outliers as evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate are guilty of this. The average trend is what everyone should be looking at. The same goes for pretty much everything. e.g. People get their panties in a bunch about plane crashes or nuclear reactor accidents, when statistically they are the safest forms of transportation and power generation respectively. People are convinced schools are becoming more dangerous because of recent mass shootings on the news, when in fact they're the safest they've ever been in spite of those shooting incidents. We give up our rights and freedoms because of a single hugely successful terrorist attack, when once you remove that single incident you're statistically more likely (in the U.S.) to be killed by lightning than a terrorist attack. All these incidents are outliers and they should be assumed to be non-representative of the long-term average.
This is precisely what copyright laws are supposed to prevent - the bootlegger making money by illegally selling multiple copies of someone else's content.
The problem with Copyright is the *AA has been trying to use these laws to penalize the filesharer (who makes a single copy for themselves) as if they were full-blown bootleggers. The "making available" argument is bunk because if you take the number of illegal copies made via filesharing, and divide by the number of people doing the sharing, the math says there's one illegal copy made per offender. Ergo each offender is responsible for one illegal copy. Totally different from the bootlegger case where the single bootlegger is making thousands of copies available (the buyers are not guilty of anything because they paid for what they thought was a legal copy).
That's why copyright fines are so high - to discourage bootleggers who are trying to sell thousands of copies for profit. Not to bankrupt for life someone trying to make a single illegal copy for himself. The law really needs to distinguish between these cases.
They don't expect 6 figures and to run the company in 2 years, they expect to be able to find a living wage job. Unfortunately because of cheapskates like you, for a lot of them making 6 figures is what it's going to take to pay off college and buy a house in a reasonable period of time.
In 1950, the average home cost $14,500, the average income was $3,216. So the average home cost 4.5 years worth of income.
In 2012 the average income was $51,000, the average home was $211,000. Or 4.1 years worth of income.
If you think you need to make 6 figures to buy a house, clearly your expectations are too high.
The high student loan debt is a direct result of decades of student loan assistance inflating the price of college tuitions. Unfortunately, schools are not a perfectly elastic market - which school you go to matters to a lot of people, so you cannot simply substitute a degree from a newly-founded college with one from Princeton or MIT. Consequently the supply is constrained. If you then dump a bunch of cheap money onto the people wanting to go to these schools, the schools will simply raise their prices to suck up that extra money. (And before those on the left go nuts over this, the correct solution is to instead dump that money into low-tuition public universities which compete with private colleges. That'll generate downward pressure on tuitions at private universities.)
But the question that still hasn't been properly answered (at least in my opinion) is why the use of these weapons on a small number of victims relative to the total number killed in the conflict should suddenly lead the international community to "need to act".
The bullets are being fired at (presumably) chosen targets who are fighting back. The chemical weapons aren't so precise (at least one hopes they weren't fired to deliberately kill massive numbers of non-combatants).
To de-politicize it, it's the distinction between two people trying to kill each other by firing guns at each other, and maybe a civilian gets hit in the crossfire. Versus someone spraying his gun indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians in hopes of hitting the one guy he wants to kill in the crowd. I'm not saying this is sufficient to justify international intervention, but it should be clear the latter is higher up on the "wrongness" scale.
If two people (or two groups of people) want to kill each other, there is generally not much the international community can do about it. They can try to broker a peace, but whether or not the conflict persists is ultimately up to the two parties at each others' throats. If they really want to kill each other, they're going to figure out a way to do it regardless of what the international community says or does. The best we can do is try to reduce the possibility of people who are not part of those groups being caught in the crossfire. Due to the indiscriminate and uncontrollable nature, chemical weapons represent a huge increase in the amount and scope of the crossfire.
The spot price for NAND right now is about $5 for 8 GB (64 Gb). So 4 TB of NAND costs $2560. Which is pretty close to 10x the cost of a $200 4 TB hard drive.
When you buy a 4 TB SSD, you're not paying $29k for the NAND. You're paying for someone to go through the trouble of amassing 4 TB of flash, design an arrangement with controllers which can address that huge amount, and produce it in bulk. Very few people are demanding that much capacity in an SSD, so the cost of that engineering and tooling work gets amortized over fewer customers. About $2.5k for the NAND, about $26.5k for the engineering and tooling.
With the lower capacity SSDs, those production costs are amortized over much larger volumes, and a much greater fraction of the drive cost is the NAND. A 128 GB Crucial M4 drive contains $80 worth of NAND (actually probably a bit more since there's some overprovisioning to substitute for cells which die early), and sells for $100.
The problem with religion is that there isn't a lot of evidence one way or the other about the core questions of religion -- the origin of the universe and of life, what purpose we have in life, and what awaits us after death.
Likewise, the problem with atheism is the belief that everything that's true can be proven with evidence. That's simply not the case. The universe doesn't resolve into True and False. It resolves into True, False, and Cannot be Determined. That indeterminate state arises even in purely logical constructs.
So requiring evidence before you'll believe something is fine if you can eliminate the Cannot be Determined state beforehand (e.g. you set up an experiment to produce either a positive or a negative result). But it's a logical error to disbelieve something merely because of a lack of evidence. Some people theorize that black holes lead to a separate universe. They can't produce any evidence to prove it, but that's not sufficient for me to say with certainty that they're wrong. It simply Cannot be Determined, at least not while we're operating within the confines of our universe's laws.
People (both the religious and atheists) need to get over themselves and realize that there are some things which can never be determined with certainty to be true or false.
Yeah, when I get into a political discussion with someone who is obstinate in their beliefs (this happens with both liberals and conservatives) I usually ask, "is there anything you're wrong about?" Then, "Now what do you think the chances are that you're right about everything?"
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates
Thing is it's already been tried on a phone. And as most people recognized, this is just tech from the laptop fingerprint scanner company that Apple bought, then unceremoniously dropped support for all the laptop manufacturers who had originally bought the tech from Authentec.
That's not to say Apple won't figure out a way to make this tech "easier" or more useful. But this isn't an open-ended problem like user interfaces - all you can really do with this is slide a finger across it. The best use I could think of for it was an idea that's already been done on laptops - scroll the display without blocking the display with your finger, by sliding your finger along the scanner.
I stopped using RAID in any of my systems after I started using WHSv1. WHS2011 has the same feature -- live system backups. If a drive fails, I pop in a new one (of any type/size), boot a CD that came with WHS (essentially a WinPE environment with a recovery software baked in), select my backup (I save 7-10 days -- I forget what it's set to), and in about an hour my system is back to the state of the last backup.
There's the operative phrase. RAID is for systems where you can't have or don't want an hour of downtime while restoring from a backup. The R in RAID stands for redundant. As in you can have a failure and keep going.
Note that this is the converse of "RAID is not a backup!" Just like RAID is not a replacement for a backup, a backup is not a replacement for RAID either. They do different things (and if you're smart, you will also backup your RAID). From your own description, you wanted a backup. RAID was never the correct solution for your needs.
Why does plastic make things so much cheaper? (I'm in software. With mechanical things, my IQ drops to 50. The answer is likely so obvious that will make me look even dumber.)
It doesn't necessarily have to be. Yes plastic is cheaper in terms of cost, but its material properties are significantly different from metal. Primarily, it has a much lower Young's modulus, meaning for a given stress it deflects a lot more. On the face of it that sounds like a bad thing, but you have to remember that when absorbing an impact, deceleration forces are inversely proportional to the time it takes to decelerate. Consequently a metal body which stops an impact quickly generates much higher forces than a plastic body which bends and spreads the deceleration over a greater distance (and thus time). The old HP office laser printers were a great example of this. They had a "cheap" plastic outer shell, but if you pushed them off a table they'd bounce off the floor and not suffer any damage. If you did the same thing with a metal frame, it'd probably deform and the printer wouldn't work anymore because the parts would be out of alignment.
Another way to absorb impacts is to fail in a pre-engineered manner. The reinforcing metal tubes which make up the crumple zones in your car are designed to fail in an accordion-like fashion which maximizes the amount of energy absorbed for the weight of the metal. (If a student ever asks why they need to study multi-variable partial differential equations, it's so they can do things like calculate and design the failure modes in the picture.) Unfortunately, due to metal's stiffness, that's the primary way to get metal to absorb energy - by permanently deforming.
Plastics can survive greater deflections so a common way to increase their survivability is to design them as snap-together parts which absorb energy by breaking apart. If when dropping a plastic phone, the back and some of the interior parts break apart, that's a good thing so long as you can snap them back together again. This is the same strategy used in race cars. The huge kinetic energies involved would mean a simple cage surrounded by crumple zones would be overwhelmed. So instead they design the non-essential parts to break apart upon impact. The breaking absorbs energy, as well as reduces the mass connected to the part they're trying to protect (passenger cage) thus reducing the energy the cage has to absorb. When you see a race car (or even a regular car) hit a wall and splinter into a thousand tiny pieces, that too is by design.
This is not to say that plastic phones are superior to metal phones. I haven't tested them so don't know. All I'm saying that just because it's plastic doesn't necessarily mean it's worse than metal. A plastic body can actually be made superior to a metal body. My candy-bar phone 10 years ago fell out of my pocket as I was closing the car door and was crushed. The plastic exterior survived it just fine - it deformed to absorb the energy of door closing, and bounced back to shape. Unfortunately it deformed so much the display inside it cracked making the phone useless. The electronics however were protected and still worked (I could make and receive calls, I just couldn't see anything on the display).
Five years ago I invested in a Samsung television. It's been great and I don't want to replace it. It has the features (120hz) and size (52") I want plus looks nice on the wall.
Congratulations, but your situation is the exception. It is exceedingly rare for people to be able to buy exactly what they want at the price they want. Usually they want something, but are price-constrained into getting something else not as good because that's all they can afford.
Who looks for an excuse to replace their main television frequently? Not me. If you bought something with the intention of replacing or demoting it after a few years of ownership, by all means spend your money.
The main reason I see for people replacing their HDTVs is size. 7 years ago they really wanted that 55" TV, but it cost $2000 so they settled for the $600 42" TV.
Today the 55" TV costs $600. Things like lower power consumption due to LED backlighting, better contrast ratio, 240 Hz refresh, and 3D capability just help them justify in their minds plunking down another $600.
Actually, I think it's also an inadvertent liberal construction as well. First everyone agrees on "no taxation without representation." Then you decide to tax corporations. But you don't let them vote. Consequently the Supreme Court decides that corporations can make campaign contributions as their form of representation.
Eliminate this inconsistency and you can remove corporate (and foreign) influence from politics. Get rid of corporate income taxes. For an individual to benefit from that corporate income, at some point it has to become their income. So whether you tax the corporation or tax individuals is immaterial - the net result is the same.
Then you make it illegal for anyone/anything who can't vote to contribute to campaigns or run political ads. They can still hire lobbyists, but without the carrot of campaign donations they'd be reduced to an amicus curiae advisory role. If a company/organization has a political issue they care deeply about, they can pitch it to their employees/members. If the pitch is effective, those voters will make the campaign donations on the company's or organization's behalf.
Oh there's another really good reason to line up. You can sell your spot in line for big bucks. If you're out of work and are just going to bum around for a few days anyway, why not do it outside an Apple store so you can make a few hundred bucks off a stup^H^H^H^Henthusiastic Apple fan.
In my experience, you get better government when there are more opinions at the table. The occasional election of people from minor parties (Greens, Pirates, Libertarians, etc...) makes it more likely for there to be objections to the really awful policies that the mainstream politicos try to force through
1) Australia practices compulsory voting. If you are eligible to vote and fail to do so, you are fined. From eyeballing the turnout numbers of the 2008 and 2010 elections in the U.S., my impression is that the people didn't really "decide" the Democrats were better in 2008, and the Republicans better in 2010. What happened was the Republican voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2008, and Democrat voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2010.
2) Australia uses preferential voting. You rank the candidates in the order you like them. That means you don't get situations where two candidates with similar political ideologies split the vote, resulting in a minor candidate with the opposite ideology winning because votes for that ideology weren't split. Most Australians just use the simplified version (rank their choice #1, leave the rest blank) which has the same result as the plurality voting system used in the U.S. (greatest vote recipient wins). But having the option to rank the candidates means the system is protected from splitting the vote.
Another voting option used in some parliamentary elections (not sure about Australia) is to vote for a party, not for individuals. This means if there are 100 members in parliament and the Green party gets 1% of the vote nationwide, they get 1 member in parliament. This system is incompatible with the representative system used in the U.S. (the idea being that if a Congressman or Senator represents a district or state, s/he will be more responsive to the wishes of the his/her electorate). In a representative system, the 1% Green party vote gets spread out over all the representative areas, and no Green party member ever gets voted to office.
The combination of the representative system with plurality voting in the U.S. virtually guarantees there will only be two political parties - if there are three parties, the two whose ideologies are closest improve their odds of winning elections by merging into one party. Good luck explaining all this to regular people though. I've been trying to explain the benefits of a preferential voting system ("instant run-off") since the 1990s. Most people don't understand or don't care.
Through most of human history, being plump was considered attractive. Food was hard enough to come by that most people were thin. Being fat meant you were well fed, and thus affluent. So people considered obesity to be attractive, thinness to be unattractive. The reversal came about only when average productivity increased to where nearly everyone could afford all they wanted to eat, and affluence was exhibited via other ways - like luxury cars, designer suits/dresses, rolex watches, Apple products, and current-gen 3D video cards. Well ok, maybe not the last one quite yet.
Doing the math on the rotor blades,.325kg * 175m/s * 0.5 = ~28.4 the tips carry approximately 28 joules of energy assuming they don't separate from the rotor head.
Kinetic energy is (1/2)(m)(v^2), not v. So it works out to 4977 Joules. More than twice the energy of an AK-47 round.
That's actually not that paranoid. The FAA has been working on guidelines for unmanned aircraft for the last year. The things people call r/c aircraft when you do it for fun, drones when the government does it for tracking/blowing up people. So far the rules they've come up with have been pretty lax (no rules or limitation on flights under 400 feet as long as it's kept away from populated areas and regular aircraft). But some people are opposed to the current rules and want greater restrictions or outright bans. Fatalities from r/c aircraft are nothing new, but this is the first time I've seen one get this much press. I haven't seen anything unusual or notable about this particular death compared to previous r/c accidents, yet for some reason the story has gone national.
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There's nothing strange about it at all. You're assuming a straight-line supply/demand curve, and a 45 degree one at that. Real-world supply/demand curves are almost never straight lines, and almost never 45 degrees.
Commodities like DRAM chips are extremely low margin, so a small decrease in costs can represent a large increase in profit. i.e. a 0.1% drop in cost to produce may not sound like much, but if your profit margin is 0.5%, it's a big increase in profit. Consequently these plants (and the wholesale computer industry in general) operates on very thin margins and practice just-in-time manufacturing to keep inventory costs to a minimum. You know how you can custom-order a system on Dell's or Lenovo's website? That's not for your convenience; that's so the company can keep its costs down by shipping a system to you as soon as they receive the components from China.
When there's a shortage in a primary component like memory, it becomes a game of musical chairs. No vendor wants to be the one left stuck without enough memory - that'll mean they need to warehouse tens if not hundreds of thousands of computers until they can find memory to install in them. Warehouse space they probably don't have and will have to rent. Consequently they all rapidly bid up the price of the remaining memory, up to the price where renting warehouse space would be cheaper.
In other words, the price increase isn't proportional to the price of memory, it's proportional to the price of warehouse space. So it makes no sense to expect a 5% drop in supply to correspond to a 5% increase in the price of memory. The price increase will be the cost to warehouse 5% of the computers that are queued up to be built, which may be a lot more than 5% the price of memory.
It's not elitist and it's not an assumption. It happens at every workplace I've been at which had hourly workers. If you'd never do it, then congratulations you're one of the honest ones. But as hard as it is to believe, there are a lot of dishonest people out there.
We actually considered a fingerprint time clock at one of my previous workplaces. We (the management) discussed the merits and disadvantages - whether the decrease in fraud would be worth the loss of respect from the honest employees (because they'd think management didn't trust them). In the end we decided to stick with time cards, and simply instructed the managers to give out warnings if an employee consistently didn't show up on time. Limit the repercussions to the problem people, rather than upset the honest ones by painting them as dishonest with too wide a brush. The dishonest ones would eventually get warnings on their permanent records, and/or wouldn't get a raise or would get a smaller raise at the next performance review. (We considered swipe cards too, but the employees rightfully pointed out that with a time card printing out the times, they could immediately spot any errors and bring the card to us for correction.)
It's also worth pointing out that time cards are not only for the business' convenience. They are also evidence which can be used in insurance and legal disputes (both civil like unemployment fraud, and criminal where it can be used as an alibi). And if the company does government contacts, the government usually requires time cards as proof that the billed hours were in fact worked (even salaried employees need to clock in in this situation).
Depending on where you live, there are a few business activities which require fingerprinting by the state. The ones I've run across are authorizations to administer medication to children (epi-pens for camp counselors), alcohol licenses, and real estate transactions. The business has no say in this - it is a government requirement. More than likely the business didn't send the prints to the state just to tick you off - the state was probably the entity which required them in the first place.
That's not how I read OP. I read it as a roundabout way of saying that we've reached them point where... "extrajudicial" justice would be more cost-effective than seeking justice through the court system.
You joke, but I really think there is something to this.
When I was in first or second grade (1970s), the U.S. was in the middle of its metric conversion program. We were taught the size of a cm vs an inch, the weight of a gram vs. an ounce, etc. I came up with some equivalencies on my own to help me remember everything. A cm was about the width of my thumb at the time. An inch was the length of of my folded middle finger. A foot was about the length of of my fist to my elbow... (Obviously none of these work anymore because I was a lot smaller back then.)
Then we got to time. How long is a second? I tried counting "one one-thousand, two one-thousand" in my head like my teacher had suggested. It was too fast. I eventually came up with a "one (pause) and a two (pause) and a..." chant which (for me) accurately measured out each second.
I'm in my 40s now and if I try my old timing chant, it's too slow. Each second I count takes nearly 2 seconds real-time. The "one one-thousand, two one-thousand" mnemonic now works for me. This also matches my memories of staring at the second hand on the clock in class, waiting for the time to pass so school would end. I watch a clock (with a second hand) today and it seems to move almost twice as fast as I remember it moving back then.
My timing hasn't changed. I started playing piano in second grade. When I listen to old tape recordings of songs I still play, my tempo hasn't changed. The only explanation I can come up with is that my verbal and visual processing has slowed down with age. My piano playing has had the tempo reinforced every time I hear a recording of a piece, so it gradually (to my brain) sped up over the years to keep pace with my slower processing.
No it wasn't one of the key foundations of early internet communities. Quite the opposite in fact - it was seen as a great threat to Internet communities. Lemme cut and paste a post I made last year...
Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. (Also notice that all the people in those old USENET posts are using their real names.) This system was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into chaos and rampant misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly so family members sharing a single AOL account could each have their own ID. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly used to make pseudonyms by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from complete anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things in life the best balance is probably somewhere in between.
The problem is the global-warming deniers trumpet the low temperature outliers, and the global warming proponents trumpet the high temperature outliers. Last year, one side made a big deal about the least ice in the Arctic in recorded history. This year the other side is making a big deal about the ice pack rebounding. Same thing with hurricanes. In 2005 it was all about the worst Atlantic hurricane season in history being caused by global warming. Then 2006 was one of the mildest hurricane seasons in history and the other side got to crow.
It's stupid trying to use outliers as evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate are guilty of this. The average trend is what everyone should be looking at. The same goes for pretty much everything. e.g. People get their panties in a bunch about plane crashes or nuclear reactor accidents, when statistically they are the safest forms of transportation and power generation respectively. People are convinced schools are becoming more dangerous because of recent mass shootings on the news, when in fact they're the safest they've ever been in spite of those shooting incidents. We give up our rights and freedoms because of a single hugely successful terrorist attack, when once you remove that single incident you're statistically more likely (in the U.S.) to be killed by lightning than a terrorist attack. All these incidents are outliers and they should be assumed to be non-representative of the long-term average.
This is precisely what copyright laws are supposed to prevent - the bootlegger making money by illegally selling multiple copies of someone else's content.
The problem with Copyright is the *AA has been trying to use these laws to penalize the filesharer (who makes a single copy for themselves) as if they were full-blown bootleggers. The "making available" argument is bunk because if you take the number of illegal copies made via filesharing, and divide by the number of people doing the sharing, the math says there's one illegal copy made per offender. Ergo each offender is responsible for one illegal copy. Totally different from the bootlegger case where the single bootlegger is making thousands of copies available (the buyers are not guilty of anything because they paid for what they thought was a legal copy).
That's why copyright fines are so high - to discourage bootleggers who are trying to sell thousands of copies for profit. Not to bankrupt for life someone trying to make a single illegal copy for himself. The law really needs to distinguish between these cases.
In 1950, the average home cost $14,500, the average income was $3,216. So the average home cost 4.5 years worth of income.
In 2012 the average income was $51,000, the average home was $211,000. Or 4.1 years worth of income.
If you think you need to make 6 figures to buy a house, clearly your expectations are too high.
The high student loan debt is a direct result of decades of student loan assistance inflating the price of college tuitions. Unfortunately, schools are not a perfectly elastic market - which school you go to matters to a lot of people, so you cannot simply substitute a degree from a newly-founded college with one from Princeton or MIT. Consequently the supply is constrained. If you then dump a bunch of cheap money onto the people wanting to go to these schools, the schools will simply raise their prices to suck up that extra money. (And before those on the left go nuts over this, the correct solution is to instead dump that money into low-tuition public universities which compete with private colleges. That'll generate downward pressure on tuitions at private universities.)
The bullets are being fired at (presumably) chosen targets who are fighting back. The chemical weapons aren't so precise (at least one hopes they weren't fired to deliberately kill massive numbers of non-combatants).
To de-politicize it, it's the distinction between two people trying to kill each other by firing guns at each other, and maybe a civilian gets hit in the crossfire. Versus someone spraying his gun indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians in hopes of hitting the one guy he wants to kill in the crowd. I'm not saying this is sufficient to justify international intervention, but it should be clear the latter is higher up on the "wrongness" scale.
If two people (or two groups of people) want to kill each other, there is generally not much the international community can do about it. They can try to broker a peace, but whether or not the conflict persists is ultimately up to the two parties at each others' throats. If they really want to kill each other, they're going to figure out a way to do it regardless of what the international community says or does. The best we can do is try to reduce the possibility of people who are not part of those groups being caught in the crossfire. Due to the indiscriminate and uncontrollable nature, chemical weapons represent a huge increase in the amount and scope of the crossfire.
The spot price for NAND right now is about $5 for 8 GB (64 Gb). So 4 TB of NAND costs $2560. Which is pretty close to 10x the cost of a $200 4 TB hard drive.
When you buy a 4 TB SSD, you're not paying $29k for the NAND. You're paying for someone to go through the trouble of amassing 4 TB of flash, design an arrangement with controllers which can address that huge amount, and produce it in bulk. Very few people are demanding that much capacity in an SSD, so the cost of that engineering and tooling work gets amortized over fewer customers. About $2.5k for the NAND, about $26.5k for the engineering and tooling.
With the lower capacity SSDs, those production costs are amortized over much larger volumes, and a much greater fraction of the drive cost is the NAND. A 128 GB Crucial M4 drive contains $80 worth of NAND (actually probably a bit more since there's some overprovisioning to substitute for cells which die early), and sells for $100.
Likewise, the problem with atheism is the belief that everything that's true can be proven with evidence. That's simply not the case. The universe doesn't resolve into True and False. It resolves into True, False, and Cannot be Determined. That indeterminate state arises even in purely logical constructs.
So requiring evidence before you'll believe something is fine if you can eliminate the Cannot be Determined state beforehand (e.g. you set up an experiment to produce either a positive or a negative result). But it's a logical error to disbelieve something merely because of a lack of evidence. Some people theorize that black holes lead to a separate universe. They can't produce any evidence to prove it, but that's not sufficient for me to say with certainty that they're wrong. It simply Cannot be Determined, at least not while we're operating within the confines of our universe's laws.
People (both the religious and atheists) need to get over themselves and realize that there are some things which can never be determined with certainty to be true or false.
Yeah, when I get into a political discussion with someone who is obstinate in their beliefs (this happens with both liberals and conservatives) I usually ask, "is there anything you're wrong about?" Then, "Now what do you think the chances are that you're right about everything?"
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates
This story has already appeared on Slashdot multiple times:
March 2013
December 2011
December 2010
May 2005
November 2003
Is it too much to ask that the editors do their jobs and search for dupes before approving a submission?
Site ate my first link. The phone it was tried on before was the Motorol ATRIX
Thing is it's already been tried on a phone. And as most people recognized, this is just tech from the laptop fingerprint scanner company that Apple bought, then unceremoniously dropped support for all the laptop manufacturers who had originally bought the tech from Authentec.
That's not to say Apple won't figure out a way to make this tech "easier" or more useful. But this isn't an open-ended problem like user interfaces - all you can really do with this is slide a finger across it. The best use I could think of for it was an idea that's already been done on laptops - scroll the display without blocking the display with your finger, by sliding your finger along the scanner.
There's the operative phrase. RAID is for systems where you can't have or don't want an hour of downtime while restoring from a backup. The R in RAID stands for redundant. As in you can have a failure and keep going.
Note that this is the converse of "RAID is not a backup!" Just like RAID is not a replacement for a backup, a backup is not a replacement for RAID either. They do different things (and if you're smart, you will also backup your RAID). From your own description, you wanted a backup. RAID was never the correct solution for your needs.
It doesn't necessarily have to be. Yes plastic is cheaper in terms of cost, but its material properties are significantly different from metal. Primarily, it has a much lower Young's modulus, meaning for a given stress it deflects a lot more. On the face of it that sounds like a bad thing, but you have to remember that when absorbing an impact, deceleration forces are inversely proportional to the time it takes to decelerate. Consequently a metal body which stops an impact quickly generates much higher forces than a plastic body which bends and spreads the deceleration over a greater distance (and thus time). The old HP office laser printers were a great example of this. They had a "cheap" plastic outer shell, but if you pushed them off a table they'd bounce off the floor and not suffer any damage. If you did the same thing with a metal frame, it'd probably deform and the printer wouldn't work anymore because the parts would be out of alignment.
Another way to absorb impacts is to fail in a pre-engineered manner. The reinforcing metal tubes which make up the crumple zones in your car are designed to fail in an accordion-like fashion which maximizes the amount of energy absorbed for the weight of the metal. (If a student ever asks why they need to study multi-variable partial differential equations, it's so they can do things like calculate and design the failure modes in the picture.) Unfortunately, due to metal's stiffness, that's the primary way to get metal to absorb energy - by permanently deforming.
Plastics can survive greater deflections so a common way to increase their survivability is to design them as snap-together parts which absorb energy by breaking apart. If when dropping a plastic phone, the back and some of the interior parts break apart, that's a good thing so long as you can snap them back together again. This is the same strategy used in race cars. The huge kinetic energies involved would mean a simple cage surrounded by crumple zones would be overwhelmed. So instead they design the non-essential parts to break apart upon impact. The breaking absorbs energy, as well as reduces the mass connected to the part they're trying to protect (passenger cage) thus reducing the energy the cage has to absorb. When you see a race car (or even a regular car) hit a wall and splinter into a thousand tiny pieces, that too is by design.
This is not to say that plastic phones are superior to metal phones. I haven't tested them so don't know. All I'm saying that just because it's plastic doesn't necessarily mean it's worse than metal. A plastic body can actually be made superior to a metal body. My candy-bar phone 10 years ago fell out of my pocket as I was closing the car door and was crushed. The plastic exterior survived it just fine - it deformed to absorb the energy of door closing, and bounced back to shape. Unfortunately it deformed so much the display inside it cracked making the phone useless. The electronics however were protected and still worked (I could make and receive calls, I just couldn't see anything on the display).
Congratulations, but your situation is the exception. It is exceedingly rare for people to be able to buy exactly what they want at the price they want. Usually they want something, but are price-constrained into getting something else not as good because that's all they can afford.
The main reason I see for people replacing their HDTVs is size. 7 years ago they really wanted that 55" TV, but it cost $2000 so they settled for the $600 42" TV.
Today the 55" TV costs $600. Things like lower power consumption due to LED backlighting, better contrast ratio, 240 Hz refresh, and 3D capability just help them justify in their minds plunking down another $600.
Actually, I think it's also an inadvertent liberal construction as well. First everyone agrees on "no taxation without representation." Then you decide to tax corporations. But you don't let them vote. Consequently the Supreme Court decides that corporations can make campaign contributions as their form of representation.
Eliminate this inconsistency and you can remove corporate (and foreign) influence from politics. Get rid of corporate income taxes. For an individual to benefit from that corporate income, at some point it has to become their income. So whether you tax the corporation or tax individuals is immaterial - the net result is the same.
Then you make it illegal for anyone/anything who can't vote to contribute to campaigns or run political ads. They can still hire lobbyists, but without the carrot of campaign donations they'd be reduced to an amicus curiae advisory role. If a company/organization has a political issue they care deeply about, they can pitch it to their employees/members. If the pitch is effective, those voters will make the campaign donations on the company's or organization's behalf.
Oh there's another really good reason to line up. You can sell your spot in line for big bucks. If you're out of work and are just going to bum around for a few days anyway, why not do it outside an Apple store so you can make a few hundred bucks off a stup^H^H^H^Henthusiastic Apple fan.
1) Australia practices compulsory voting. If you are eligible to vote and fail to do so, you are fined. From eyeballing the turnout numbers of the 2008 and 2010 elections in the U.S., my impression is that the people didn't really "decide" the Democrats were better in 2008, and the Republicans better in 2010. What happened was the Republican voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2008, and Democrat voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2010.
2) Australia uses preferential voting. You rank the candidates in the order you like them. That means you don't get situations where two candidates with similar political ideologies split the vote, resulting in a minor candidate with the opposite ideology winning because votes for that ideology weren't split. Most Australians just use the simplified version (rank their choice #1, leave the rest blank) which has the same result as the plurality voting system used in the U.S. (greatest vote recipient wins). But having the option to rank the candidates means the system is protected from splitting the vote.
Another voting option used in some parliamentary elections (not sure about Australia) is to vote for a party, not for individuals. This means if there are 100 members in parliament and the Green party gets 1% of the vote nationwide, they get 1 member in parliament. This system is incompatible with the representative system used in the U.S. (the idea being that if a Congressman or Senator represents a district or state, s/he will be more responsive to the wishes of the his/her electorate). In a representative system, the 1% Green party vote gets spread out over all the representative areas, and no Green party member ever gets voted to office.
The combination of the representative system with plurality voting in the U.S. virtually guarantees there will only be two political parties - if there are three parties, the two whose ideologies are closest improve their odds of winning elections by merging into one party. Good luck explaining all this to regular people though. I've been trying to explain the benefits of a preferential voting system ("instant run-off") since the 1990s. Most people don't understand or don't care.
Through most of human history, being plump was considered attractive. Food was hard enough to come by that most people were thin. Being fat meant you were well fed, and thus affluent. So people considered obesity to be attractive, thinness to be unattractive. The reversal came about only when average productivity increased to where nearly everyone could afford all they wanted to eat, and affluence was exhibited via other ways - like luxury cars, designer suits/dresses, rolex watches, Apple products, and current-gen 3D video cards. Well ok, maybe not the last one quite yet.
Kinetic energy is (1/2)(m)(v^2), not v. So it works out to 4977 Joules. More than twice the energy of an AK-47 round.
That's actually not that paranoid. The FAA has been working on guidelines for unmanned aircraft for the last year. The things people call r/c aircraft when you do it for fun, drones when the government does it for tracking/blowing up people. So far the rules they've come up with have been pretty lax (no rules or limitation on flights under 400 feet as long as it's kept away from populated areas and regular aircraft). But some people are opposed to the current rules and want greater restrictions or outright bans. Fatalities from r/c aircraft are nothing new, but this is the first time I've seen one get this much press. I haven't seen anything unusual or notable about this particular death compared to previous r/c accidents, yet for some reason the story has gone national.