You guys are missing the most important point. It's like you sell your house to your neighbor, but you only want him using the front door so you give him only the key to the front door.
The neighbor (now owner) thinks that's pretty stupid since it's his house now, and he wants to be able to use the other doors. He manages to pick the lock on the back door to open it, and gets the lock changed so he can use the back door. Next time you drop by to visit and fix some things which were broken when you sold him the house, you notice he's managed to use the back door of his house, so you change the back door lock to a better one to stop him from using it.
The neighbor/owner can't figure out how to pick it, so he picks the side door lock instead and replaces that so at least he can use the side door. Next time you drop by for another fixit visit, you change his side door lock so he can't use it again. And so on.
I know the common reply here is simply, "Find another job if you don't like it." And that's one possibility, but not feasible for many people. Do you know what fixed unreasonable working conditions in the past? Collective bargaining. If you're afraid of sticking your neck out there by talking to HR and your boss about how you're being treated, get together a group of your coworkers and do it together.
There's a third option - start your own company. If you think an existing company is unfairly underpaying employees, then it should be trivial to start a competing company and scoop up the cream of those employees for a fairer wage. If you immediately jump for the union option, then you just solidify in the managers' minds that it's unions which are the cause of their woes. And come next election they'll be voting for and donating money to candidates who try to stifle unions. OTOH if you start a competing company and put them out of business, then they have to face up that it was their management policies and uncompetitive wages which led to their failure.
"But starting a company is so hard..." No it's not. My entire extended family is made up of immigrants. Most of them stepped off the plane with just a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in their name. About half of them started and now run their own business. The most successful runs a company worth about $6 million. If people who can barely speak the language can start a successful business, so can you.
There are always options. But if you don't try, then it's guaranteed to be impossible.
The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes.
How in the world can someone check their smartphone that often? You'd have calluses from sliding the unlock icon surely.
If a quarter of all smartphone users are teens who check their smartphone 500 times a day, then the rest of the users only have to check 33 times a day (about twice an hour while awake) for the average (mean) to be 150 times per day.
This is one of those cases where you want to be using the median, not the mean. But the median would be boringly infrequent, so the press likes to use the mean even when inappropriate.
As the Daily Show put it the other day, "The laws that allow for off-shore tax havens were not invented by poor people".
Actually, they were. Off-shore tax havens don't happen because some Caribbean country set its tax rates lower than other countries'. They happen because a country raises its tax rates to where it's higher than offshore. Like water wants to flow downhill, people want to hang on to as much of their money as they can.
Then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole trying to plug up every way someone could move money out of the high-tax country into a low-tax country. The "tax loopholes" which allow offshoring weren't inserted into the tax code by people wanting to avoid taxes. They're simply things you can do that the tax code failed to conceive of as a way to move money offshore.
People need to stop thinking of this in terms of what they think should be happening (e.g. everyone should pay their taxes). They need to think of it in terms of thermodynamics. The more complex and organized you make a system, the greater the tendency of entropy to break it down. KISS.
Except nobody's feet are exactly 1 foot. Nor is anyone's 1000 paces exactly 1 mile. If those were truly universal measurements, you'd have some point. As they're not, you don't.
The units were more convenient back in the day before the advent of widespread calibrated measuring tools and interchangeable parts (about the 19th-20th century). In those days, for purposes of construction and manufacturing, it didn't matter if your measurements were universally consistent. As long as they were locally consistent you were ok. If the castle walls were supposed to be quarter mile square, a surveyor could pace out 250 steps along one wall. As long as the same surveyor paced out the 3 other walls, you were good. (That's just an example. In reality there are other things you'd have to do to make sure the corners were right angles which obviate the need to actually pace out wall lengths multiple times.)
idiocies like NASA Orbiter problem
The Mars Climate Orbiter wasn't really lost because of a botched imperial to metric conversion. It was lost because (1) someone didn't write down the units on a number. And (2) the person(s) who received the number didn't make a phone call asking what the units were, and instead assumed what they were. The exact same failure can happen even if all your numbers are metric. There's just a higher chance that error (2) will accidentally cancel out error (1) if both numbers are using the same unit system.
That's what was drilled into me while studying as an engineer - who cares if the numbers are imperial or metric? You're usually going to be doing a lot of complex math with the numbers, so an extra multiplication for a unit conversion is trivial. Knowing what the units for a number are, however, is crucial. If we ever turned in a homework problem or answered a test question with a number but no units, it was automatically marked wrong (dimensionless numbers excepted).
This. I think most folks have the wrong idea about how a society actually changes. The people themselves don't change. Once someone is about in their mid-20s or 30s, their habits and preferences become ingrained and are highly unlikely to ever change for the rest of their lives. You're not going to be able to convince them to use metric, so don't even bother trying. Instead, you take advantage of the fact that people grow old and die, and are constantly replaced by younger people.
You introduce a new system in a way that it doesn't upset the older generation while giving the younger generation a chance to get used to it. Then you wait for the older generation to die off. Then you abandon the old system. So introduce signage in both metric and English. Wait a generation or two until the bulk of the population is used to both systems. Then you phase out the English system.
Two can play that game. Unless their terms specifically stipulate some percentage of max bandwidth as a limit, your service is for up to 35 Mbps * 3600 sec/hr * 24 hr/day * 30 day/month = 10.8 TB per month up/down.
If they want to claim that the service isn't advertised as being unlimited, then I can likewise claim the fact that they didn't advertise a limit means I'm free to use their advertised speeds to their full extent.
Yes I know this contradicts the conventional wisdom that HFCS is bad, while sucrose (which your body breaks down into 50% fructose / 50% glucose) is good. But the people pushing that agenda aren't really the types who took chemistry in school. It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger fraction of fructose than regular syrup, which is mostly glucose.
To be fair to the submitter and editor, I use an ad blocker and didn't know ibtimes.com had intrusive ads until your post. On second thought, I guess this is one of the things an editor should be checking, so I'll only excuse the submitter.
I think your case highlights where patent law needs to be changed. The patent is to grant you exclusive marketability for an invention for a limited time. If you are not marketing any product using the patent, you should not qualify for patent protection.
In other words, if you are manufacturing and selling a product which is covered by your patent, then you should be able to license it to others. If you stop selling significant quantities of the product however, you should not be allowed to license it anymore. You can however sell the patent entirely (giving up all rights, except maybe a reverse licensing deal should you ever decide to make the product again). i.e. Either use the patent yourself to make money, or sell it to someone who will. Eliminate the case where you aren't using the patent but are still making money off of it.
I've seen the same thing. Accountant got a bill looking like a subscription renewal to some expensive magazine. Since it as a renewal, he just paid it. Turned out nobody subscribed to the magazine, nor could remember ever receiving a copy of it.
Another common one is an official-looking letter sent by a company whose name makes it sound like a government office. The letter says your company needs to file its annual statement of information and includes a form and an invoice for $100. The company has nothing to do with the government, and filing your statement of information costs $20. So these scammers were making $80 off of each company taken in by their ruse.
After my dad retired, I found out he'd been paying these guys for 25 years. Around the 1990s, the government cracked down on these scams and required them to include "THIS IS NOT A BILL" and "THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT NOTICE" somewhere in the letter. But my dad is an immigrant with ok but not great English skills. So he would just read the beginning of the letter, decide it was a bill, and skip reading the rest.
Something like this was already tried 10 (15?) years ago. It was a bunch of crystals embedded into a plastic base. You shone a light onto it and depending on the angle, the pattern of crystal faces which reflected back would change. The inventors were marketing it as a replacement for the magnetic stripe on your credit card. The magnetic stripe on your card can easily be scanned and duplicated. The crystals were easy to scan, but near impossible to duplicate if you're comparing the reflection from multiple angles. So slap one on a credit card and you have a physically uncopyable unique identifier. They'd gotten as far as some credit card companies doing limited trials with it. I haven't heard about it since so I guess that means it failed for some reason.
Unlike Cape Canaveral which launches into an equatorial orbit to the east, Vandenberg launches into polar orbits to the south, and tests to the Marshall Islands to the west. That means the vapor trail is in prime position to be backlit by sunlight in the upper atmosphere just after sunset, making for very dramatic sights and photos as you describe. If the timing is right, on a clear day it's visible from most of Southern California. A friend of mine has a spectacular photo he took of such a launch from Joshua Tree, which is about 250 miles away.
Yes, that's the one. While it originated at Vandenberg, technically it wasn't launched from Vandenberg. It was launched from a modified L-1011 in mid-flight.
SpaceX has its first west coast launch scheduled for July 9, launching a Canadian communications and research satellite from Vandenberg. That's been pushed back from April, then June, to its current July 9 date. Word is it may slip again to July 20. Elon Musk has said they're going to try to execute a powered soft landing of the first stage into the ocean so they can recover it and reuse it.
After that is an NRO spy satellite currently scheduled to go up on Aug 28 on a Delta IV Heavy, which with the retirement of the Shuttles is now the biggest rocket in service in the U.S.
Because the long-term goal (dream) of every software company is not to sell software, but to sell subscriptions. They're just getting you used to what it'll be like to have a monthly/annual subscription to a game. Then like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, you won't be bothered by the change when they drop sales and offer games only by subscription. After all, it doesn't have any disadvantages over when you used to buy games, right?
Their problem is (1) active suspension, and (2) lack of directional stability.
(1) If your car is stopped at a red light and its hybrid engine shuts off, you're burning no energy. A hovercraft stopped at a red light is still burning energy to maintain the air cushion. Same thing is true at speed - the car's suspension keeps the chassis off the ground at (close to) zero energy cost. A hovercraft is always burning energy to stay off the ground.
(2) When you drive a car on a road, the wheels are physically locked (up to the coefficient of static friction) with the road. You have to exert a significant amount of torque to the car before the wheels unlock from the road and the car starts to spin/skid. So a car is pointed in the direction it's traveling nearly all the time. This reduces directional control to a simple one degree of freedom problem - the more you turn the steering wheel, the faster you change direction.
With a hovercraft, the slightest torque on it will change its orientation. Even an airplane does better - its high forward velocity generates a stabilizing aerodynamic force on the tail to keep it pointed somewhat in the direction of travel. OTOH, a hovercraft's slower forward velocity means it needs to rely on vectored thrust for orientation stability. So now you've got a direction of desired travel which is mostly uncoupled from the direction the hovercraft is pointing (yaw). And if you do get turned away from the direction you're traveling, a righting moment to yaw it in the right direction again will also impart a small translation, thus changing your direction of travel slightly.
It's actually more akin to piloting a spacecraft in 2D than it is driving a car. You can do tricks like spinning 360 degrees without changing your direction of travel (much). Which is fun in theory, and perhaps useful if you're in combat. But it's added complexity which makes piloting one more dangerous that driving a car for the average layperson.
Also, the advantage that it can travel over water is a bit of a misnomer. At low velocities, a hovercraft on water acts pretty much the same as a displacement hull. The air cushion sinks down until it's displacing the hovercraft's weight in water. Moving forward then involves pushing the hovercraft uphill over the front lip of the depression in the water it creates, just like a displacement hull. You're only slightly better off than if you were in an amphibious car. As you pick up speed, the wave resistance begins to decrease. The tradeoff point where it becomes more efficient than a planing hull varies with size, but it's typically around 30-50 knots, which is why they haven't displaced planing boats as the recreational watercraft of choice - there's little to no advantage at these speeds. For it to be nearly as efficient as traveling on a solid surface, you have to be moving at close to 100 knots over the water.
The answer is pretty simple. It's because contrary to convention wisdom, the U.S. economy is very unreliant on imports and exports. Relative to the size of its economy, there is very little foreign trade, and most of what there is is with Canada which for the most part speaks English. The vast majority of U.S. economic activity (85%-90%) is domestic.
This is in stark contrast to other OECD nations. If you subtract the U.S. and Japan from the average, their international trade is about a third to half their GDP. It's much more important to know a foreign language in these countries if you want to get somewhere with your career. People in the U.S. and Japan OTOH can for the most part ignore other countries and still have a very successful career knowing only their native language.
Who actually holds the copyright? When my structural engineering prof wanted to make copies of a textbook for us (which the publisher hadn't reprinted in a decade because they said it wasn't worth it for them), he just called up the author who was a colleague of his. The publisher didn't have exclusive rights, so he got permission from the author to copy it, and had the copy center run off a few dozen copies for us.
Ok, let's take a look here: Tumblr, pre-aquisition, made $13 million in income with reported costs of $25 million. So, they are losing money, surprise, surprise...
I think this deal is stupid, but "income" generally is synonymous with "profit" (for varying definitions of profit). So the $13 million is after subtracting the $25 million in costs.
The number you're mistaking it for is called "revenue". If they had had $13 million in revenue, then yes they'd be losing money.
1260W @ 3.3 V = 382 Amps. More than enough to melt a typical microUSB charging connector (not that the spec allows 1260W in the first place).
Back when I was working on autonomous robots in grad school, another lab member came up with an interesting way to put all this into perspective. At 12 cents per kWh, we're fretting about how to better charge a cell phone battery with 0.08 cents worth of electricity.
In Europe you pay the sticker price. That must include all taxes.
Europe generally has national taxes so prices are consistent throughout a country. The U.S. and to a lesser extent Canada have a hodgepodge of state/province and local taxes. If we required stores to post after-tax prices, it would make comparison shopping impossibly complicated. A widget would be $10.77 at one Best Buy and $10.45 at another, while someone else would post saying they got it at Frys for $10.55. By adding the tax on afterward, everyone knows that Best Buy's price for the widget is $9.95, and you can compare it to Frys' price of $9.75 without being confused by the different tax rates in the different counties/cities.
European-style advertisement (with post-tax prices) is also impossible here for the same reason. Best Buy would have to put out a TV ad saying a laptop was on sale this weekend for $1067.14, $1069.63, $1072.11, $1074.60, $1077.09, $1079.58, and $1082.06 for California alone, depending on your county/city's taxes. It makes more sense for them just to advertise $995, and let the viewer add on the tax depending on where they live.
This is also the case for restaurants and bars. So no tipping in many places (or minimal tipping) as people get payed by their boss for the work that they do.
The waiter/waitress here still gets paid and are subject to minimum wage laws. The tip is just extra (tips are more a cultural phenomenon anyway - in some places it's actually an insult to leave a tip). The only jobs not subject to minimum wage laws are contract jobs (where you're being paid a fixed amount to deliver an end product) and commission jobs (e.g. car salesmen who get paid a commission per sale).
On a philosophical level, I think it's better to list the tax separately. That way the citizens can see exactly how much of what they paid went to buying the product, and how much went to government-mandated taxes. That's not to say the U.S. way is better - you can do the same thing with the European system. On the receipt you just have to break down the advertised 9.95 Euro price into merchandise and taxes.
Next time you call a plumber or electrician, take some time to chat with them. They're usually pretty eager to talk about their trade. It's fascinating how much more complicated their jobs really are than simply unclogging pipes and stringing up wire. And you may learn a thing or two about how everyday stuff you take for granted really works. Unlike CompSci, there's centuries of accumulated human knowledge, trial and error, and experimentation that's gone into making our water, sewage, and power infrastructure what it is today.
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You guys are missing the most important point. It's like you sell your house to your neighbor, but you only want him using the front door so you give him only the key to the front door.
The neighbor (now owner) thinks that's pretty stupid since it's his house now, and he wants to be able to use the other doors. He manages to pick the lock on the back door to open it, and gets the lock changed so he can use the back door. Next time you drop by to visit and fix some things which were broken when you sold him the house, you notice he's managed to use the back door of his house, so you change the back door lock to a better one to stop him from using it.
The neighbor/owner can't figure out how to pick it, so he picks the side door lock instead and replaces that so at least he can use the side door. Next time you drop by for another fixit visit, you change his side door lock so he can't use it again. And so on.
There's a third option - start your own company. If you think an existing company is unfairly underpaying employees, then it should be trivial to start a competing company and scoop up the cream of those employees for a fairer wage. If you immediately jump for the union option, then you just solidify in the managers' minds that it's unions which are the cause of their woes. And come next election they'll be voting for and donating money to candidates who try to stifle unions. OTOH if you start a competing company and put them out of business, then they have to face up that it was their management policies and uncompetitive wages which led to their failure.
"But starting a company is so hard..." No it's not. My entire extended family is made up of immigrants. Most of them stepped off the plane with just a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in their name. About half of them started and now run their own business. The most successful runs a company worth about $6 million. If people who can barely speak the language can start a successful business, so can you.
There are always options. But if you don't try, then it's guaranteed to be impossible.
If a quarter of all smartphone users are teens who check their smartphone 500 times a day, then the rest of the users only have to check 33 times a day (about twice an hour while awake) for the average (mean) to be 150 times per day.
This is one of those cases where you want to be using the median, not the mean. But the median would be boringly infrequent, so the press likes to use the mean even when inappropriate.
Actually, they were. Off-shore tax havens don't happen because some Caribbean country set its tax rates lower than other countries'. They happen because a country raises its tax rates to where it's higher than offshore. Like water wants to flow downhill, people want to hang on to as much of their money as they can.
Then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole trying to plug up every way someone could move money out of the high-tax country into a low-tax country. The "tax loopholes" which allow offshoring weren't inserted into the tax code by people wanting to avoid taxes. They're simply things you can do that the tax code failed to conceive of as a way to move money offshore.
People need to stop thinking of this in terms of what they think should be happening (e.g. everyone should pay their taxes). They need to think of it in terms of thermodynamics. The more complex and organized you make a system, the greater the tendency of entropy to break it down. KISS.
The units were more convenient back in the day before the advent of widespread calibrated measuring tools and interchangeable parts (about the 19th-20th century). In those days, for purposes of construction and manufacturing, it didn't matter if your measurements were universally consistent. As long as they were locally consistent you were ok. If the castle walls were supposed to be quarter mile square, a surveyor could pace out 250 steps along one wall. As long as the same surveyor paced out the 3 other walls, you were good. (That's just an example. In reality there are other things you'd have to do to make sure the corners were right angles which obviate the need to actually pace out wall lengths multiple times.)
The Mars Climate Orbiter wasn't really lost because of a botched imperial to metric conversion. It was lost because (1) someone didn't write down the units on a number. And (2) the person(s) who received the number didn't make a phone call asking what the units were, and instead assumed what they were. The exact same failure can happen even if all your numbers are metric. There's just a higher chance that error (2) will accidentally cancel out error (1) if both numbers are using the same unit system.
That's what was drilled into me while studying as an engineer - who cares if the numbers are imperial or metric? You're usually going to be doing a lot of complex math with the numbers, so an extra multiplication for a unit conversion is trivial. Knowing what the units for a number are, however, is crucial. If we ever turned in a homework problem or answered a test question with a number but no units, it was automatically marked wrong (dimensionless numbers excepted).
Oh great. Now you've started the never-ending flame war about engineering notation vs scientific notation.
This. I think most folks have the wrong idea about how a society actually changes. The people themselves don't change. Once someone is about in their mid-20s or 30s, their habits and preferences become ingrained and are highly unlikely to ever change for the rest of their lives. You're not going to be able to convince them to use metric, so don't even bother trying. Instead, you take advantage of the fact that people grow old and die, and are constantly replaced by younger people.
You introduce a new system in a way that it doesn't upset the older generation while giving the younger generation a chance to get used to it. Then you wait for the older generation to die off. Then you abandon the old system. So introduce signage in both metric and English. Wait a generation or two until the bulk of the population is used to both systems. Then you phase out the English system.
Two can play that game. Unless their terms specifically stipulate some percentage of max bandwidth as a limit, your service is for up to 35 Mbps * 3600 sec/hr * 24 hr/day * 30 day/month = 10.8 TB per month up/down.
If they want to claim that the service isn't advertised as being unlimited, then I can likewise claim the fact that they didn't advertise a limit means I'm free to use their advertised speeds to their full extent.
Most high fructose corn syrup is 42%-53% glucose.
Yes I know this contradicts the conventional wisdom that HFCS is bad, while sucrose (which your body breaks down into 50% fructose / 50% glucose) is good. But the people pushing that agenda aren't really the types who took chemistry in school. It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger fraction of fructose than regular syrup, which is mostly glucose.
To be fair to the submitter and editor, I use an ad blocker and didn't know ibtimes.com had intrusive ads until your post. On second thought, I guess this is one of the things an editor should be checking, so I'll only excuse the submitter.
I think your case highlights where patent law needs to be changed. The patent is to grant you exclusive marketability for an invention for a limited time. If you are not marketing any product using the patent, you should not qualify for patent protection.
In other words, if you are manufacturing and selling a product which is covered by your patent, then you should be able to license it to others. If you stop selling significant quantities of the product however, you should not be allowed to license it anymore. You can however sell the patent entirely (giving up all rights, except maybe a reverse licensing deal should you ever decide to make the product again). i.e. Either use the patent yourself to make money, or sell it to someone who will. Eliminate the case where you aren't using the patent but are still making money off of it.
I've seen the same thing. Accountant got a bill looking like a subscription renewal to some expensive magazine. Since it as a renewal, he just paid it. Turned out nobody subscribed to the magazine, nor could remember ever receiving a copy of it.
Another common one is an official-looking letter sent by a company whose name makes it sound like a government office. The letter says your company needs to file its annual statement of information and includes a form and an invoice for $100. The company has nothing to do with the government, and filing your statement of information costs $20. So these scammers were making $80 off of each company taken in by their ruse.
After my dad retired, I found out he'd been paying these guys for 25 years. Around the 1990s, the government cracked down on these scams and required them to include "THIS IS NOT A BILL" and "THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT NOTICE" somewhere in the letter. But my dad is an immigrant with ok but not great English skills. So he would just read the beginning of the letter, decide it was a bill, and skip reading the rest.
Something like this was already tried 10 (15?) years ago. It was a bunch of crystals embedded into a plastic base. You shone a light onto it and depending on the angle, the pattern of crystal faces which reflected back would change. The inventors were marketing it as a replacement for the magnetic stripe on your credit card. The magnetic stripe on your card can easily be scanned and duplicated. The crystals were easy to scan, but near impossible to duplicate if you're comparing the reflection from multiple angles. So slap one on a credit card and you have a physically uncopyable unique identifier. They'd gotten as far as some credit card companies doing limited trials with it. I haven't heard about it since so I guess that means it failed for some reason.
Unlike Cape Canaveral which launches into an equatorial orbit to the east, Vandenberg launches into polar orbits to the south, and tests to the Marshall Islands to the west. That means the vapor trail is in prime position to be backlit by sunlight in the upper atmosphere just after sunset, making for very dramatic sights and photos as you describe. If the timing is right, on a clear day it's visible from most of Southern California. A friend of mine has a spectacular photo he took of such a launch from Joshua Tree, which is about 250 miles away.
Doh, mixed up the Minuteman with the Pegasus. My apologies. The Pegasus is the one launched from the L-1011, and there's one scheduled for late June.
Yes, that's the one. While it originated at Vandenberg, technically it wasn't launched from Vandenberg. It was launched from a modified L-1011 in mid-flight.
SpaceX has its first west coast launch scheduled for July 9, launching a Canadian communications and research satellite from Vandenberg. That's been pushed back from April, then June, to its current July 9 date. Word is it may slip again to July 20. Elon Musk has said they're going to try to execute a powered soft landing of the first stage into the ocean so they can recover it and reuse it.
After that is an NRO spy satellite currently scheduled to go up on Aug 28 on a Delta IV Heavy, which with the retirement of the Shuttles is now the biggest rocket in service in the U.S.
Because the long-term goal (dream) of every software company is not to sell software, but to sell subscriptions. They're just getting you used to what it'll be like to have a monthly/annual subscription to a game. Then like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, you won't be bothered by the change when they drop sales and offer games only by subscription. After all, it doesn't have any disadvantages over when you used to buy games, right?
Their problem is (1) active suspension, and (2) lack of directional stability.
(1) If your car is stopped at a red light and its hybrid engine shuts off, you're burning no energy. A hovercraft stopped at a red light is still burning energy to maintain the air cushion. Same thing is true at speed - the car's suspension keeps the chassis off the ground at (close to) zero energy cost. A hovercraft is always burning energy to stay off the ground.
(2) When you drive a car on a road, the wheels are physically locked (up to the coefficient of static friction) with the road. You have to exert a significant amount of torque to the car before the wheels unlock from the road and the car starts to spin/skid. So a car is pointed in the direction it's traveling nearly all the time. This reduces directional control to a simple one degree of freedom problem - the more you turn the steering wheel, the faster you change direction.
With a hovercraft, the slightest torque on it will change its orientation. Even an airplane does better - its high forward velocity generates a stabilizing aerodynamic force on the tail to keep it pointed somewhat in the direction of travel. OTOH, a hovercraft's slower forward velocity means it needs to rely on vectored thrust for orientation stability. So now you've got a direction of desired travel which is mostly uncoupled from the direction the hovercraft is pointing (yaw). And if you do get turned away from the direction you're traveling, a righting moment to yaw it in the right direction again will also impart a small translation, thus changing your direction of travel slightly.
It's actually more akin to piloting a spacecraft in 2D than it is driving a car. You can do tricks like spinning 360 degrees without changing your direction of travel (much). Which is fun in theory, and perhaps useful if you're in combat. But it's added complexity which makes piloting one more dangerous that driving a car for the average layperson.
Also, the advantage that it can travel over water is a bit of a misnomer. At low velocities, a hovercraft on water acts pretty much the same as a displacement hull. The air cushion sinks down until it's displacing the hovercraft's weight in water. Moving forward then involves pushing the hovercraft uphill over the front lip of the depression in the water it creates, just like a displacement hull. You're only slightly better off than if you were in an amphibious car. As you pick up speed, the wave resistance begins to decrease. The tradeoff point where it becomes more efficient than a planing hull varies with size, but it's typically around 30-50 knots, which is why they haven't displaced planing boats as the recreational watercraft of choice - there's little to no advantage at these speeds. For it to be nearly as efficient as traveling on a solid surface, you have to be moving at close to 100 knots over the water.
The answer is pretty simple. It's because contrary to convention wisdom, the U.S. economy is very unreliant on imports and exports. Relative to the size of its economy, there is very little foreign trade, and most of what there is is with Canada which for the most part speaks English. The vast majority of U.S. economic activity (85%-90%) is domestic.
This is in stark contrast to other OECD nations. If you subtract the U.S. and Japan from the average, their international trade is about a third to half their GDP. It's much more important to know a foreign language in these countries if you want to get somewhere with your career. People in the U.S. and Japan OTOH can for the most part ignore other countries and still have a very successful career knowing only their native language.
Who actually holds the copyright? When my structural engineering prof wanted to make copies of a textbook for us (which the publisher hadn't reprinted in a decade because they said it wasn't worth it for them), he just called up the author who was a colleague of his. The publisher didn't have exclusive rights, so he got permission from the author to copy it, and had the copy center run off a few dozen copies for us.
I think this deal is stupid, but "income" generally is synonymous with "profit" (for varying definitions of profit). So the $13 million is after subtracting the $25 million in costs.
The number you're mistaking it for is called "revenue". If they had had $13 million in revenue, then yes they'd be losing money.
Also known as the tragedy of the commons.
1260W @ 3.3 V = 382 Amps. More than enough to melt a typical microUSB charging connector (not that the spec allows 1260W in the first place).
Back when I was working on autonomous robots in grad school, another lab member came up with an interesting way to put all this into perspective. At 12 cents per kWh, we're fretting about how to better charge a cell phone battery with 0.08 cents worth of electricity.
Europe generally has national taxes so prices are consistent throughout a country. The U.S. and to a lesser extent Canada have a hodgepodge of state/province and local taxes. If we required stores to post after-tax prices, it would make comparison shopping impossibly complicated. A widget would be $10.77 at one Best Buy and $10.45 at another, while someone else would post saying they got it at Frys for $10.55. By adding the tax on afterward, everyone knows that Best Buy's price for the widget is $9.95, and you can compare it to Frys' price of $9.75 without being confused by the different tax rates in the different counties/cities.
European-style advertisement (with post-tax prices) is also impossible here for the same reason. Best Buy would have to put out a TV ad saying a laptop was on sale this weekend for $1067.14, $1069.63, $1072.11, $1074.60, $1077.09, $1079.58, and $1082.06 for California alone, depending on your county/city's taxes. It makes more sense for them just to advertise $995, and let the viewer add on the tax depending on where they live.
The waiter/waitress here still gets paid and are subject to minimum wage laws. The tip is just extra (tips are more a cultural phenomenon anyway - in some places it's actually an insult to leave a tip). The only jobs not subject to minimum wage laws are contract jobs (where you're being paid a fixed amount to deliver an end product) and commission jobs (e.g. car salesmen who get paid a commission per sale).
On a philosophical level, I think it's better to list the tax separately. That way the citizens can see exactly how much of what they paid went to buying the product, and how much went to government-mandated taxes. That's not to say the U.S. way is better - you can do the same thing with the European system. On the receipt you just have to break down the advertised 9.95 Euro price into merchandise and taxes.
Next time you call a plumber or electrician, take some time to chat with them. They're usually pretty eager to talk about their trade. It's fascinating how much more complicated their jobs really are than simply unclogging pipes and stringing up wire. And you may learn a thing or two about how everyday stuff you take for granted really works. Unlike CompSci, there's centuries of accumulated human knowledge, trial and error, and experimentation that's gone into making our water, sewage, and power infrastructure what it is today.