I would actually chalk this up as a Google win (while simultaneously being a Motorola loss). The reason Motorola was seeking $4 billion was because they were asking a flat 2.25% of the [i]device price[/i]. Products like the Xbox use H.264 as a small subset of their total features, but the norm in the industry seems to be that patent royalties are based on the total device price. This paper on patent royalty rates in the cellular industry puts the total royalty burden of a GSM handset at 10%-40% of the device price.
The judge here decided that, for FRAND patents at least, basing the percentage off the device price was silly, and reduced it accordingly. Arguably that's a much more sane way to do it, considering that devices are becoming more and more multifunctional. Motorola still gets 2.25%, just of the part of the Xbox which uses H.264 instead of the entire Xbox price. If that becomes the norm in the industry, that would be much better for Google and anyone actually making stuff. The losers would be patent trolls and companies which make most of their money licensing their patents instead of building products which use them.
The only issue that remains is the discrepancy between FRAND and regular patents. This decision only covered FRAND patents. If FRAND patent royalties get reduced to a percentage of specific features, while regular patent royalties remain a percentage of the device price, then we will have the backwards situation where a patent on bouncy scrolling and rounded rectangles is worth more than a technical H.264 patent. But that should sort itself out in a few years. If regular patents become worth more than FRAND patents, nobody in their right mind will submit their patent for FRAND anymore and there will be compatibility chaos in all industries. Either regular patents will be reduced to a percentage of specific features as well, or this judge's decision will be overturned and FRAND royalties will return to a percentage of the device price.
Amazon the company could be amazon.com. Amazon the environmental organization could be amazon.org (if it weren't parked and likely squatted). Amazon the ISP (if there was one) coupld be amazon.net. etc.
But noooo, some bozos in charge decided that increasing the number of namespace collisions will somehow be better for their bank accou^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe Internet.
For the study, Yager recruited people who were familiar with sending and receiving texts, and some of them already were using voice-to-text applications.
"One of the common comments was that they felt an inclination to look down at the screen to see if it heard them correctly, so that could be one possible explanation of why they were not looking at the roadway more frequently," Yager said.
If only there existed some way to send voice messages directly. That way you wouldn't be distracted by having to look down to see if the voice-to-text app parsed your speech correctly. You could send a recording of your spoken message directly to the recipient. We could call it, oh I dunno, "voicemail."
The difference is that from what I've seen of Asian corporate culture (I worked there for a couple years), it is not taboo to steal IP from competitors. In fact it's more or less considered normal albeit unspoken. It's not unusual for an employee who refuses to do it to be let go for other unspecified reasons.
You've seen the stories over and over. Like how the Chinese government required Siemens to contract with Chinese companies to manufacture high speed trains, then once the companies had "acquired" enough technical knowledge to do it themselves they dumped Siemens. It makes me facepalm every time I read about some naive Western tech company eager to do business in China bending over backwards to please the Chinese government, like lambs to the slaughter, thinking that a few pieces of paper promising their IP is safe will protect them.
In the late 20th century, this behavior was pretty much localized to the region. But now with the Internet, the behavior can reach around the globe. Those of you who think Western companies are the epitome of evil are in for a rude shock, once you see the no-holds-barred style of capitalism practiced in the East.
Now, if we have this '100watt USB', what are devices going to do? is your next laptop going to ship with a 265 watt brick, so that it has the same 65 watts for itself as your current one does, and can handle both its ports being used?
On top of that, power supply efficiency starts to drop off steeply when power draw is only a small fraction of the power supply's capacity.
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
You're missing the point. There were probably dozens of people standing nearby who saw the same thing - a guy putting a bag/backpack down and walking away. The guy who got his legs blown off was AFAIK the only one who thought it was an unusual enough event to remember details about the guy who did it. That's why he's being lauded; not because he was injured. If he had been completely unharmed by the explosion and given police the exact same suspect description, the media would still be calling him a hero.
The problem isn't private vs. public healthcare. The U.S. government spent more per capita on health care in 2012 (second chart) than most OECD countries with universal coverage. Looking at the chart, the U.S. government spent more on health care per capita than the UK's public + private spending combined. If a universal health care system were the answer, our government already spends more than enough on health care to implement one.
The problem is the health care system here and people's expectations from it are screwed up, government's attempts to manage it are akin to a blindfolded elephant trying to navigate a china shop, and the methodology used by private insurers encourages people and providers to do everything they can to loot the system.
The EU tends to take a "big brother knows best" approach. The U.S. tends to take a "let the market decide" approach. Sometimes the EU way ends up better, sometimes the U.S. way ends up better. A good counterexample to privacy is GSM. The EU mandated GSM which unfortunately was based on dead-end technology (TDMA - which allocates data bandwidth even to phones which aren't transmitting any data). The U.S. approach resulted in CDMA and TDMA competing, with CDMA coming out as the eventual winner. (Yes CDMA won. If your GSM phone uses HSDPA, it's using CDMA. That's why you can talk and browse the web at the same time on GSM phones - it has a TDMA radio for talking, and a CDMA radio for data.) If the U.S. had just played along and adopted GSM, phones worldwide would probably still be stuck at 2.5G or 2G data speeds right now. (4G is finally supplanting CDMA because low-power CPUs have become fast enough to decode OFDMA without draining your battery in 30 minutes.)
People can bicker about which method is better. But I would argue it's more useful to have both present in the world. That way if one approach arrives at a better conclusion than the other (e.g. EU on privacy, or US on GSM/CDMA), you have an empirical example which can serve as a data point showing people using the other approach why they should change for that particular topic.
There needs to be some sort of restriction on the collection and dissemination of information for purposes unrelated to the reason the person gave the information in the first place.
Paradoxically, this is the reason why I use Google Checkout from time to time. Google already knows a bunch of stuff about me. If I'm buying an item on some website which looks like it's run by some guy operating out of his garage, a lot of times I'd prefer not giving him my credit card info and just have Google handle it. Giving the site my info increases my risk exposure. Giving it to Google (who already knows it) does not.
A law putting restrictions on collection and dissemination wouldn't change this for me. I'd still opt for the zero damage of giving Google info it already knows (it probably even knows about my interest in the item I'm buying because of my searches for reviews), over the small chance the seller is a front to harvest credit card data. In fact IIRC there's already a law prohibiting companies from storing your credit card number without your permission. But lots of companies do so anyway out of sheer laziness.
The avalanche will be a problem at the start. Once business practices become transparent enough, people will have no need to request the information that is already available (automatically).
Not quite. If the cost to request the information is less than the cost to provide it, then ad agency1 could conceivably bankrupt ad agency2 by submitting lots of bogus info requests. The avalanche would then continue until there was only one company remaining, which would then a monopoly on the entire info collecting business. Having the law allow a modest processing fee takes care of this problem (dunno if the bill has this provision), as well as takes away the expense argument.
The fear of lawsuits part I'm guessing is because some of the info is inaccurate. This isn't an exact science. A lot of info is inferred, with some ads being switched on at rather low thresholds of certainty. If you browse a lot of sites about prenatal care, they may guess that you're expecting and start showing you ads for baby stuff. If you happen to be a teenage girl (who is not pregnant) and your parents guess this means you're pregnant and trying to hide it from them, that may be rather inconvenient for you. It's going to be interesting watching how this part unfolds because to a limited extent it's something everyone does to everything they encounter in real life - infer qualities based on other hints or clues. But take it too far with a specific individual and it is considered creepy and stalker-ish.
Kinetic energy of water is 0.5*mv^2. For 1 ton of water moving 1 m/s, that's 500 joules per ton. If it's moving at 5 m/s (about the max you'll see in tidal areas), that's 12.5 kJ/ton.
Water has a specific heat of 4.2 kJ/kg*C. If there's a 1 degree temperature differential, that's 4.2 MJ per ton. You have to go a bit deep to get to colder water, but by about 1km down it's around 4 C. So relative to tropical surface water, you're talking about a 25 degree difference, or an energy potential of 100 MJ per ton. Nearly 5 orders of magnitude more per ton than the kinetic energy in tidal currents.
The catch being that it's much more difficult to extract power from temperature differentials than it is from kinetic energy. If it were easy, every car engine would have a stirling engine alongside it to extract energy from the waste heat. But stirling engines generate so little power per mass of the engine that it's more efficient just to forgo the additional weight and dump the waste heat via a radiator.
Get on Twitter, say some stuff that sounds legit. Sit back and watch it retweeted, then it'll hit the blogs and finally the 'news.' And all they have to do is try to track down the original source (you) but they seldom do. And that's what "crowdsourced" news has come to.
That's pretty much how gossip works. In their rush to embrace "social media" and incorporate crowdsourcing into their reporting process, the news organizations have lost sight of what distinguished their profession from mere gossip - a bona fide effort to confirm what you're hearing before you run off repeating it. Instead they've degenerated into repeating it, but pretending adding the magic words "we have an unconfirmed report..." makes it all ok.
The article is about semi-automated cars, not fully automated ones. Semi-automated cars are iffy. We already have this problem with aircraft, where the control systems and the pilot share control. Problems with being in the wrong mode, or incorrectly dealing with some error, come up regularly in accident reports.
I can't help but think we're going about this the wrong way. Automating transportation in 3D is really hard. Automating it in 2D is a lot easier. Automating it in 1D is dirt simple.
Perhaps what we should be doing is building a rail system to replace the highway system. People can still drive the shorter, more complicated routes. But if you're going on a trip from the suburbs where you live to the city where you work, once you get on the highway the car (and all others) get put on a rail. While on the highway it drives itself and you're free to read the paper, put on your makeup, eat breakfast, whatever.
But the ideas aren't stolen. They were freely available for everyone to use because they were developed before we reached the level of intellectual property idiocy that allows rounded corners and other moronically simple design elements to be patented and copyrighted.
Actually, Apple does get credit for one type of rounded corner. They came up with a very fast way to draw rounded rectangles in the early 1980s when computing power was very limited. (The same guy came up with regions - a way to quickly display overlapping arbitrary shapes.)
The difference is back then, Apple didn't try to do something stupid like claim nobody else was allowed to draw rounded rectangles on a computer.
That's an interesting way to look at it. But honestly, I don't see the value of that point of view.
What is the point of subsidy? If the point were to benefit consumers, they would give us a tax credit for consumption, or at least drop the fuel taxes. It seems clear to me that subsidies exist to distort the market in favor of producers.
If the argument is that the subsidies for fossil fuels are distorting the market, then $ per megawatt-hour is the correct way to compare it. If you and I are both selling lemonade, and I get a subsidy of $0.01 per glass, and you get a subsidy of $1 per glass it's pretty clear which way the market is distorted.
That I happen to sell 10,000 glasses for a total subsidy of $100, while you sell just 10 glasses for a total subsidy of $10, is beside the point from a market distortion standpoint.
Why is a single taxpayer penny going to such a mature, profitable, and global industry?
You are assuming the fossil fuel industry is a monolithic and static entity. There are new methods of extracting fossil fuels and more efficient ways of combusting them constantly being researched and developed. They get a large share of the subsidy dollars because most of our energy infrastructure is designed to run off of fossil fuels. So decreasing their cost has a proportionally larger benefit for our overall economy than decreasing the cost of a little-used technology (putting aside the issue of externalized costs due to pollution). Once renewables drop in price to the point where they're providing the bulk of our energy, they will get the bulk of the subsidy dollars. The point of the subsidies isn't to try to be "fair" to the little guy. It's to accelerate development of promising new technologies which will most benefit the economy.
Speaking of which, I don't see a problem with renewables currently having a poorer return per subsidy dollar than fossil fuels. The petroleum and coal industries were probably subsidized up the wazoo when they were first starting out. Nuclear certainly was. We are investing heavily in renewables now not because we're expecting an immediate return on that investment. Rather we see a long-term benefit of switching to these technologies, and wish to accelerate their development into an economically viable alternative. So there's nothing wrong with renewables getting more $subsidy/MWh. In fact if you look only at new fossil fuel technologies like clean coal (which I think is a terrible idea), the $subsidy/MWh is probably similar to that of renewables.
It' prevent the sales people from getting to technical.
Once that happens, the costumer will ask more technical question he can't answer.
Sort of, but not quite. Salesmanship is very similar to being a con man (confidence man). Your job isn't necessarily to find the buyer the best product is best for his needs. Your job is to convince him that regardless of which product he chooses, it's the right choice so he'll hurry up and buy it. i.e. You're not trying to get him to buy the better product, you're trying to get him to feel more confident about buying a product so he's more likely to buy it and he'll buy it quicker.
Dropping some technical details can help this process. But if you know too much about the products, you start to really know whether product A or B is better. Then it's nothing but work, work, work. It's more time-effective to be able to lie convincingly to the person that the better product is the one in their hand, or the one with the bigger profit margin, or the one you're trying to get rid of from inventory.
For example: If you go to buy a car and the sales man talks about horsepower and torque: Ask him what the difference is.
Incidentally, horsepower = torque * rpm * constant. In other words, the horsepower curve is just the torque curve multiplied by a ramp function.
I don't disagree with the problems the H1B causes for citizens that you cite. However, the secondary intent of the program is to entice bright foreigners to come work in the U.S., and eventually become U.S. citizens. i.e. The reverse of brain drain - bring the best and brightest in the world into the U.S. and put them on the path of becoming citizens. Once they're citizens, they'll raise the productivity of the country more than an average citizen, and increase the tax base (so everyone benefits from their presence).
So it's not simply a matter of whether or not people here on a H1B take away jobs from current citizens. Its whether the long-term good they could do by becoming citizens outweighs the short-term harm they do by taking jobs away from current citizens. If you have no H1Bs, you'll actually be harming the country by losing bright, talented citizens to other countries with H1B-like incentive visas. OTOH, too many H1Bs and the lingering effects of the short-term harm outweigh the good long-term effects.
Somewhere in between is a happy medium where the long-term good most outweighs the short-term harm. What's under debate is where exactly that maximum lies. Unfortunately, if the government only listens to the immediate beneficiaries of the H1B program (the companies which are getting cheap foreign skilled labor) and not enough to unemployed citizen professionals, it will tend to err on the side of issuing too many H1Bs.
It's also a hallmark of a population that's being manipulated. So why the tribes squabble over these territorial trivialities, the people who actually have power are cleaning out the vaults.
This part I agree with. A characteristic of a plurality voting system like that in the U.S. is that optimization tends to drive it towards two parties. In terms of the simplistic left-right spectrum, one party will be right of the average of the electorate, the other party will be to the left. If you take a bell curve and lop it in half, the median of each half will fall a fair distance outside the center of the aggregate bell curve. Meaning that representation never truly reflects the average (mean or median) of the electorate, and those with more extreme positions get more influence in government than they should have/would have with a runoff voting system. Representatives who are successful at the party level in a two-party system are rarely representative of the actual center of the electorate.
Does anyone actually believe that we are an exactly 50/50 split country? And yet, that's how it's been working out for decades now. It just smells wrong.
This part I disagree with. Parties aren't static. As the prevailing opinion of the electorate gradually shifts to favor one party, the more extreme members of that party become emboldened and work to shift the party even further from center, tending to lower its popularity back to down 50%. Likewise the other party will shift its platform back towards center to pick up enough undecideds to bring its popularity back to up 50%. This results in a stable system tending towards a 50/50 split all the time.
When it comes to tablets, too many people are confusing form factor with functionality. What we're seeing isn't some revolutionary new form factor being introduced, Apple's hype notwithstanding. We're simply seeing an evolutionary shrinkage in the size of the PC. The corporate PC market already transitioned from workstations to desktops to laptops as components shrank. The components are continuing to shrink, allowing PCs to become tablet-sized, eventually phone-sized (the Raspberry Pi is already there, and is faster than my desktop 15 years ago), and possibly wristwatch/bracelet sized after that.
Yes the form factor restricts functionality. But that's easily corrected with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and an external display. In the future, your phone will house the CPU, RAM, and storage. Your "tablet" will simply be a touchscreen which wirelessly connects to the phone and acts as a display. Your "laptop" will be your "tablet" combined with a wireless mouse and keyboard.
How do you associate your cancer to the airplane rides you took 20 years previously?
Why bother? Since the risk here is directly proportional to the time spent flying, just compare cancer rates among pilots and stewardesses vs. the general population.
At the time, the Compuserve and AOL models of the internet were the dominant ones, i.e. walled gardens where you didn't really ever venture out into the wild internet. It would have been natural for Microsoft to think they could provide an alternative version of this,
CompuServe and AOL and GEnie were dominant among home dialup users. The Internet was dominant in colleges and universities. The walled gardens began getting aboard this Internet thing in the early 1990s. By 1994 it was pretty obvious the Internet would prevail. I started seeing website URLs in ads in 1994 (though admittedly I was in the tech hub in Boston).
Gates meanwhile was in denial about all this and stubbornly refused to release a TCP/IP stack for Windows 3.1 throughout the early 1990s. Those of us fresh out of college and missing our daily Internet fix had to struggle with getting Trumpet Winsock configured and running. He finally relented and added a TCP/IP stack to Win95 (Aug 1995), but he was still betting on the walled gardens since MSN was released as a subscription service at the same time. It wasn't until late 1996 that he finally threw in the towel and converted MSN to a free website. By then the dot-com bubble was starting to roll.
It wasn't at all natural for Microsoft to think a walled garden would work. That was entirely Gates thinking that nothing good could be free. He let his preconceived biases blind him to what was going on in the market.
There's an apocryphal story that after the end of the Cold War, some members of the CIA and KGB got together for dinner and a chat. The CIA folks complained about how difficult it had been to get information out of the USSR. All the border checks, the security, the secrecy, the restrictions on freedom were so difficult to overcome. They lamented how much easier it must've been for the KGB folks to conduct espionage.
The KGB folks said that on the contrary, it was actually harder for them. Yes they had an easier time acquiring and extracting information from the U.S. But it was mixed in with an ocean of conspiracy theories, entertainment, hoaxes, marketing exaggerations, gossip, etc. Separating the signal from the noise was a daunting and sometimes impossible task. They couldn't be sure if a report of a new top secret plasma energy canon was real, or if it was just someone spilling the plot of a new sci-fi movie secretly being produced. And they had to waste a tremendous amount of resources vetting out stories in the National Enquirer in case they were true.
Obscurity isn't the only way to enhance security. Seems to me something like wikipedia, where anonymous people all over the world can edit entries, would be a great way to sow misinformation.
converting plant matter into electricity or hydrogen wouldn't be efficient : photosynthesis converts 3-6% of solar energy and converting this chemical energy into hydrogen and theninto electricity won't improve on this; while a decent solar panel reaches at least 10% (more like 14-19%), into electricity.
True in terms of conversion efficiency. But once you look at cost efficiency, the balance flips the other way. You can cover the entire planet in plants for less than the cost of a single solar panel, because plants grow and spread by themselves.
In fact there's millions of tons of plant matter we already gather (weeds and unused portions of food crops like corn stalks) which we currently burn or bury. All that could be converted into hydrogen essentially for free via a process like this. In that case the conversion efficiency becomes meaningless because the opportunity cost is negative: Right now it costs you to get rid of the waste plant matter. If you convert it into hydrogen instead, that means you get both the benefit of the hydrogen as a fuel and you don't have to pay to dispose of the plant matter.
Detaining the person whose bag you just searched because s/he asked if you're looking for "a bomb or something" is not "being thorough"; it is "being a thug."
I suspect the agents have very little say in the matter. It's probably TSA policy that any statement about a bomb, even if perceived to be in jest, is supposed to be treated as if serious. The point isn't really to single out people who make jokes about a bomb. It's to single out people who aren't behaving normally. And joking about a bomb in your bag simply isn't normal behavior (as witnessed by how few cases have been recorded). It wouldn't be the first time a terrorist used social engineering to get a bomb aboard. And TSA policy is probably to detain anyone who might be using social engineering.
Disclaimer: I think airport security is security theater which provides no benefit aside from keeping the masses calm, and the TSA is led by people who don't realize this and take their jobs way too seriously. But if you accept that they're going to take their jobs seriously, then treating jokes about bombs as a potential threat is consistent behavior.
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I would actually chalk this up as a Google win (while simultaneously being a Motorola loss). The reason Motorola was seeking $4 billion was because they were asking a flat 2.25% of the [i]device price[/i]. Products like the Xbox use H.264 as a small subset of their total features, but the norm in the industry seems to be that patent royalties are based on the total device price. This paper on patent royalty rates in the cellular industry puts the total royalty burden of a GSM handset at 10%-40% of the device price.
The judge here decided that, for FRAND patents at least, basing the percentage off the device price was silly, and reduced it accordingly. Arguably that's a much more sane way to do it, considering that devices are becoming more and more multifunctional. Motorola still gets 2.25%, just of the part of the Xbox which uses H.264 instead of the entire Xbox price. If that becomes the norm in the industry, that would be much better for Google and anyone actually making stuff. The losers would be patent trolls and companies which make most of their money licensing their patents instead of building products which use them.
The only issue that remains is the discrepancy between FRAND and regular patents. This decision only covered FRAND patents. If FRAND patent royalties get reduced to a percentage of specific features, while regular patent royalties remain a percentage of the device price, then we will have the backwards situation where a patent on bouncy scrolling and rounded rectangles is worth more than a technical H.264 patent. But that should sort itself out in a few years. If regular patents become worth more than FRAND patents, nobody in their right mind will submit their patent for FRAND anymore and there will be compatibility chaos in all industries. Either regular patents will be reduced to a percentage of specific features as well, or this judge's decision will be overturned and FRAND royalties will return to a percentage of the device price.
Amazon the company could be amazon.com. Amazon the environmental organization could be amazon.org (if it weren't parked and likely squatted). Amazon the ISP (if there was one) coupld be amazon.net. etc.
But noooo, some bozos in charge decided that increasing the number of namespace collisions will somehow be better for their bank accou^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe Internet.
If only there existed some way to send voice messages directly. That way you wouldn't be distracted by having to look down to see if the voice-to-text app parsed your speech correctly. You could send a recording of your spoken message directly to the recipient. We could call it, oh I dunno, "voicemail."
The difference is that from what I've seen of Asian corporate culture (I worked there for a couple years), it is not taboo to steal IP from competitors. In fact it's more or less considered normal albeit unspoken. It's not unusual for an employee who refuses to do it to be let go for other unspecified reasons.
You've seen the stories over and over. Like how the Chinese government required Siemens to contract with Chinese companies to manufacture high speed trains, then once the companies had "acquired" enough technical knowledge to do it themselves they dumped Siemens. It makes me facepalm every time I read about some naive Western tech company eager to do business in China bending over backwards to please the Chinese government, like lambs to the slaughter, thinking that a few pieces of paper promising their IP is safe will protect them.
In the late 20th century, this behavior was pretty much localized to the region. But now with the Internet, the behavior can reach around the globe. Those of you who think Western companies are the epitome of evil are in for a rude shock, once you see the no-holds-barred style of capitalism practiced in the East.
On top of that, power supply efficiency starts to drop off steeply when power draw is only a small fraction of the power supply's capacity.
You're missing the point. There were probably dozens of people standing nearby who saw the same thing - a guy putting a bag/backpack down and walking away. The guy who got his legs blown off was AFAIK the only one who thought it was an unusual enough event to remember details about the guy who did it. That's why he's being lauded; not because he was injured. If he had been completely unharmed by the explosion and given police the exact same suspect description, the media would still be calling him a hero.
The problem isn't private vs. public healthcare. The U.S. government spent more per capita on health care in 2012 (second chart) than most OECD countries with universal coverage. Looking at the chart, the U.S. government spent more on health care per capita than the UK's public + private spending combined. If a universal health care system were the answer, our government already spends more than enough on health care to implement one.
The problem is the health care system here and people's expectations from it are screwed up, government's attempts to manage it are akin to a blindfolded elephant trying to navigate a china shop, and the methodology used by private insurers encourages people and providers to do everything they can to loot the system.
The EU tends to take a "big brother knows best" approach. The U.S. tends to take a "let the market decide" approach. Sometimes the EU way ends up better, sometimes the U.S. way ends up better. A good counterexample to privacy is GSM. The EU mandated GSM which unfortunately was based on dead-end technology (TDMA - which allocates data bandwidth even to phones which aren't transmitting any data). The U.S. approach resulted in CDMA and TDMA competing, with CDMA coming out as the eventual winner. (Yes CDMA won. If your GSM phone uses HSDPA, it's using CDMA. That's why you can talk and browse the web at the same time on GSM phones - it has a TDMA radio for talking, and a CDMA radio for data.) If the U.S. had just played along and adopted GSM, phones worldwide would probably still be stuck at 2.5G or 2G data speeds right now. (4G is finally supplanting CDMA because low-power CPUs have become fast enough to decode OFDMA without draining your battery in 30 minutes.)
People can bicker about which method is better. But I would argue it's more useful to have both present in the world. That way if one approach arrives at a better conclusion than the other (e.g. EU on privacy, or US on GSM/CDMA), you have an empirical example which can serve as a data point showing people using the other approach why they should change for that particular topic.
Paradoxically, this is the reason why I use Google Checkout from time to time. Google already knows a bunch of stuff about me. If I'm buying an item on some website which looks like it's run by some guy operating out of his garage, a lot of times I'd prefer not giving him my credit card info and just have Google handle it. Giving the site my info increases my risk exposure. Giving it to Google (who already knows it) does not.
A law putting restrictions on collection and dissemination wouldn't change this for me. I'd still opt for the zero damage of giving Google info it already knows (it probably even knows about my interest in the item I'm buying because of my searches for reviews), over the small chance the seller is a front to harvest credit card data. In fact IIRC there's already a law prohibiting companies from storing your credit card number without your permission. But lots of companies do so anyway out of sheer laziness.
Not quite. If the cost to request the information is less than the cost to provide it, then ad agency1 could conceivably bankrupt ad agency2 by submitting lots of bogus info requests. The avalanche would then continue until there was only one company remaining, which would then a monopoly on the entire info collecting business. Having the law allow a modest processing fee takes care of this problem (dunno if the bill has this provision), as well as takes away the expense argument.
The fear of lawsuits part I'm guessing is because some of the info is inaccurate. This isn't an exact science. A lot of info is inferred, with some ads being switched on at rather low thresholds of certainty. If you browse a lot of sites about prenatal care, they may guess that you're expecting and start showing you ads for baby stuff. If you happen to be a teenage girl (who is not pregnant) and your parents guess this means you're pregnant and trying to hide it from them, that may be rather inconvenient for you. It's going to be interesting watching how this part unfolds because to a limited extent it's something everyone does to everything they encounter in real life - infer qualities based on other hints or clues. But take it too far with a specific individual and it is considered creepy and stalker-ish.
Just a slippery surface while wearing slippery shoes. The idea has been around since at least the 1990s.
Real omnidirectional treadmills exist, first started as a DoD project. You can walk naturally on them, as demonstrated here and here.
It's still debatable which method is superior or more practical.
Kinetic energy of water is 0.5*mv^2. For 1 ton of water moving 1 m/s, that's 500 joules per ton. If it's moving at 5 m/s (about the max you'll see in tidal areas), that's 12.5 kJ/ton.
Water has a specific heat of 4.2 kJ/kg*C. If there's a 1 degree temperature differential, that's 4.2 MJ per ton. You have to go a bit deep to get to colder water, but by about 1km down it's around 4 C. So relative to tropical surface water, you're talking about a 25 degree difference, or an energy potential of 100 MJ per ton. Nearly 5 orders of magnitude more per ton than the kinetic energy in tidal currents.
The catch being that it's much more difficult to extract power from temperature differentials than it is from kinetic energy. If it were easy, every car engine would have a stirling engine alongside it to extract energy from the waste heat. But stirling engines generate so little power per mass of the engine that it's more efficient just to forgo the additional weight and dump the waste heat via a radiator.
That's pretty much how gossip works. In their rush to embrace "social media" and incorporate crowdsourcing into their reporting process, the news organizations have lost sight of what distinguished their profession from mere gossip - a bona fide effort to confirm what you're hearing before you run off repeating it. Instead they've degenerated into repeating it, but pretending adding the magic words "we have an unconfirmed report..." makes it all ok.
I can't help but think we're going about this the wrong way. Automating transportation in 3D is really hard. Automating it in 2D is a lot easier. Automating it in 1D is dirt simple.
Perhaps what we should be doing is building a rail system to replace the highway system. People can still drive the shorter, more complicated routes. But if you're going on a trip from the suburbs where you live to the city where you work, once you get on the highway the car (and all others) get put on a rail. While on the highway it drives itself and you're free to read the paper, put on your makeup, eat breakfast, whatever.
Actually, Apple does get credit for one type of rounded corner. They came up with a very fast way to draw rounded rectangles in the early 1980s when computing power was very limited. (The same guy came up with regions - a way to quickly display overlapping arbitrary shapes.)
The difference is back then, Apple didn't try to do something stupid like claim nobody else was allowed to draw rounded rectangles on a computer.
If the argument is that the subsidies for fossil fuels are distorting the market, then $ per megawatt-hour is the correct way to compare it. If you and I are both selling lemonade, and I get a subsidy of $0.01 per glass, and you get a subsidy of $1 per glass it's pretty clear which way the market is distorted.
That I happen to sell 10,000 glasses for a total subsidy of $100, while you sell just 10 glasses for a total subsidy of $10, is beside the point from a market distortion standpoint.
You are assuming the fossil fuel industry is a monolithic and static entity. There are new methods of extracting fossil fuels and more efficient ways of combusting them constantly being researched and developed. They get a large share of the subsidy dollars because most of our energy infrastructure is designed to run off of fossil fuels. So decreasing their cost has a proportionally larger benefit for our overall economy than decreasing the cost of a little-used technology (putting aside the issue of externalized costs due to pollution). Once renewables drop in price to the point where they're providing the bulk of our energy, they will get the bulk of the subsidy dollars. The point of the subsidies isn't to try to be "fair" to the little guy. It's to accelerate development of promising new technologies which will most benefit the economy.
Speaking of which, I don't see a problem with renewables currently having a poorer return per subsidy dollar than fossil fuels. The petroleum and coal industries were probably subsidized up the wazoo when they were first starting out. Nuclear certainly was. We are investing heavily in renewables now not because we're expecting an immediate return on that investment. Rather we see a long-term benefit of switching to these technologies, and wish to accelerate their development into an economically viable alternative. So there's nothing wrong with renewables getting more $subsidy/MWh. In fact if you look only at new fossil fuel technologies like clean coal (which I think is a terrible idea), the $subsidy/MWh is probably similar to that of renewables.
Sort of, but not quite. Salesmanship is very similar to being a con man (confidence man). Your job isn't necessarily to find the buyer the best product is best for his needs. Your job is to convince him that regardless of which product he chooses, it's the right choice so he'll hurry up and buy it. i.e. You're not trying to get him to buy the better product, you're trying to get him to feel more confident about buying a product so he's more likely to buy it and he'll buy it quicker.
Dropping some technical details can help this process. But if you know too much about the products, you start to really know whether product A or B is better. Then it's nothing but work, work, work. It's more time-effective to be able to lie convincingly to the person that the better product is the one in their hand, or the one with the bigger profit margin, or the one you're trying to get rid of from inventory.
Incidentally, horsepower = torque * rpm * constant. In other words, the horsepower curve is just the torque curve multiplied by a ramp function.
I don't disagree with the problems the H1B causes for citizens that you cite. However, the secondary intent of the program is to entice bright foreigners to come work in the U.S., and eventually become U.S. citizens. i.e. The reverse of brain drain - bring the best and brightest in the world into the U.S. and put them on the path of becoming citizens. Once they're citizens, they'll raise the productivity of the country more than an average citizen, and increase the tax base (so everyone benefits from their presence).
So it's not simply a matter of whether or not people here on a H1B take away jobs from current citizens. Its whether the long-term good they could do by becoming citizens outweighs the short-term harm they do by taking jobs away from current citizens. If you have no H1Bs, you'll actually be harming the country by losing bright, talented citizens to other countries with H1B-like incentive visas. OTOH, too many H1Bs and the lingering effects of the short-term harm outweigh the good long-term effects.
Somewhere in between is a happy medium where the long-term good most outweighs the short-term harm. What's under debate is where exactly that maximum lies. Unfortunately, if the government only listens to the immediate beneficiaries of the H1B program (the companies which are getting cheap foreign skilled labor) and not enough to unemployed citizen professionals, it will tend to err on the side of issuing too many H1Bs.
This part I agree with. A characteristic of a plurality voting system like that in the U.S. is that optimization tends to drive it towards two parties. In terms of the simplistic left-right spectrum, one party will be right of the average of the electorate, the other party will be to the left. If you take a bell curve and lop it in half, the median of each half will fall a fair distance outside the center of the aggregate bell curve. Meaning that representation never truly reflects the average (mean or median) of the electorate, and those with more extreme positions get more influence in government than they should have/would have with a runoff voting system. Representatives who are successful at the party level in a two-party system are rarely representative of the actual center of the electorate.
This part I disagree with. Parties aren't static. As the prevailing opinion of the electorate gradually shifts to favor one party, the more extreme members of that party become emboldened and work to shift the party even further from center, tending to lower its popularity back to down 50%. Likewise the other party will shift its platform back towards center to pick up enough undecideds to bring its popularity back to up 50%. This results in a stable system tending towards a 50/50 split all the time.
When it comes to tablets, too many people are confusing form factor with functionality. What we're seeing isn't some revolutionary new form factor being introduced, Apple's hype notwithstanding. We're simply seeing an evolutionary shrinkage in the size of the PC. The corporate PC market already transitioned from workstations to desktops to laptops as components shrank. The components are continuing to shrink, allowing PCs to become tablet-sized, eventually phone-sized (the Raspberry Pi is already there, and is faster than my desktop 15 years ago), and possibly wristwatch/bracelet sized after that.
Yes the form factor restricts functionality. But that's easily corrected with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and an external display. In the future, your phone will house the CPU, RAM, and storage. Your "tablet" will simply be a touchscreen which wirelessly connects to the phone and acts as a display. Your "laptop" will be your "tablet" combined with a wireless mouse and keyboard.
Why bother? Since the risk here is directly proportional to the time spent flying, just compare cancer rates among pilots and stewardesses vs. the general population.
CompuServe and AOL and GEnie were dominant among home dialup users. The Internet was dominant in colleges and universities. The walled gardens began getting aboard this Internet thing in the early 1990s. By 1994 it was pretty obvious the Internet would prevail. I started seeing website URLs in ads in 1994 (though admittedly I was in the tech hub in Boston).
Gates meanwhile was in denial about all this and stubbornly refused to release a TCP/IP stack for Windows 3.1 throughout the early 1990s. Those of us fresh out of college and missing our daily Internet fix had to struggle with getting Trumpet Winsock configured and running. He finally relented and added a TCP/IP stack to Win95 (Aug 1995), but he was still betting on the walled gardens since MSN was released as a subscription service at the same time. It wasn't until late 1996 that he finally threw in the towel and converted MSN to a free website. By then the dot-com bubble was starting to roll.
It wasn't at all natural for Microsoft to think a walled garden would work. That was entirely Gates thinking that nothing good could be free. He let his preconceived biases blind him to what was going on in the market.
There's an apocryphal story that after the end of the Cold War, some members of the CIA and KGB got together for dinner and a chat. The CIA folks complained about how difficult it had been to get information out of the USSR. All the border checks, the security, the secrecy, the restrictions on freedom were so difficult to overcome. They lamented how much easier it must've been for the KGB folks to conduct espionage.
The KGB folks said that on the contrary, it was actually harder for them. Yes they had an easier time acquiring and extracting information from the U.S. But it was mixed in with an ocean of conspiracy theories, entertainment, hoaxes, marketing exaggerations, gossip, etc. Separating the signal from the noise was a daunting and sometimes impossible task. They couldn't be sure if a report of a new top secret plasma energy canon was real, or if it was just someone spilling the plot of a new sci-fi movie secretly being produced. And they had to waste a tremendous amount of resources vetting out stories in the National Enquirer in case they were true.
Obscurity isn't the only way to enhance security. Seems to me something like wikipedia, where anonymous people all over the world can edit entries, would be a great way to sow misinformation.
True in terms of conversion efficiency. But once you look at cost efficiency, the balance flips the other way. You can cover the entire planet in plants for less than the cost of a single solar panel, because plants grow and spread by themselves.
In fact there's millions of tons of plant matter we already gather (weeds and unused portions of food crops like corn stalks) which we currently burn or bury. All that could be converted into hydrogen essentially for free via a process like this. In that case the conversion efficiency becomes meaningless because the opportunity cost is negative: Right now it costs you to get rid of the waste plant matter. If you convert it into hydrogen instead, that means you get both the benefit of the hydrogen as a fuel and you don't have to pay to dispose of the plant matter.
I suspect the agents have very little say in the matter. It's probably TSA policy that any statement about a bomb, even if perceived to be in jest, is supposed to be treated as if serious. The point isn't really to single out people who make jokes about a bomb. It's to single out people who aren't behaving normally. And joking about a bomb in your bag simply isn't normal behavior (as witnessed by how few cases have been recorded). It wouldn't be the first time a terrorist used social engineering to get a bomb aboard. And TSA policy is probably to detain anyone who might be using social engineering.
Disclaimer: I think airport security is security theater which provides no benefit aside from keeping the masses calm, and the TSA is led by people who don't realize this and take their jobs way too seriously. But if you accept that they're going to take their jobs seriously, then treating jokes about bombs as a potential threat is consistent behavior.