You might want to reassess your definition of poverty then. Cooking food yourself doesn't just involve purchasing ingredients. There is a substantial upfront cost of buying the equipment and infrastructure to turn ingredients into food. At the very least you'll need to heat water and have a surface that can be sterilized and used to cook on. You'll need utensils and pots/pans. The energy required will be either gas or electric which costs money. I suppose you could burn wood but that isn't free either and is illegal/impractical most places.
So that $1 burger costs quite a bit more to cook yourself. If you have no equipment and no access to infrastructure then it's actually cheaper to buy fast food. The "total cost of ownership" of the food you make yourself is deceptive because much of the cost isn't directly related to the superficially cheaper ingredients.
$500 stove with 10 year lifespan, assuming 2 meals cooked per day = 6.8 cents per meal.
$100 of pots and pans with a 20 year lifespan, assuming 2 meals cooked per day = 0.7 cents per meal.
$50 set of plates and utensils with a 20 year lifespan, assuming 3 meals eaten per day = 0.23 cents per meal.
Energy required to boil 1 liters of water from 20 C = 80*4.186 kJ + 2260 kJ = 2595 kJ (I'll assume this is close to cooking one burger)
Electricity required to do that at 50% transfer efficiency = 1.44 kWh.
Price at the U.S. average of $0.12/kWh = 17.3 cents.
Grand total cost per meal = 25.03 cents per meal.
This country badly needs to teach basic accounting and home economics (real economics, not just sewing and cooking) as mandatory courses in high school. So people don't believe silly arguments to justify eating fast food all the time. Most people don't realize how much money they're throwing away leasing cars, carrying a balance on their credit cards, paying a 1% higher interest rate on their car loan because they didn't budget to save up a bigger down payment, and eating fast food.
The best argument for fast food is that if you're single and living alone, it can be difficult to use up even a small amount of groceries before the meat and vegetables go bad. The portions you eat are so small that even a single head of lettuce might have to last more than a week. And most people hate eating the same thing over and over, so the ingredients you use for one meal might not be needed again for 2-3 more days. So you end up throwing a lot of groceries out vs. buying fast food which is made from fresh ingredients every day. You end up buying a lot of prepackaged and frozen dinner type groceries instead, which on a cost per meal basis is pretty much the same as fast food.
For Android, LBE Privacy Guard will let you assign whether apps have access to the network, and various other private info (e.g. location, contacts, phone ID, etc).
That makes it trivial enough to block something like Angry Birds from getting my location and communicating it to their home server. The problem is with apps which have to be online and which need access to that info to function. e.g. Navigation with Google Maps requires network access and my location. I'd like to think providing navigation is all they're doing with my location info, but I suspect they're doing a lot more with it like building movement pattern profiles.
I imagine that's what the 60 million Euro are for. To hire consultants to tell these newspaper companies about robots.txt, or to implement it for them if they really don't want their articles showing up on news.google.com
It's just the way these investigations happen and the press/public is reading too much into it. Aircraft accident inspectors are very systematic. They'll examine the easy/most likely suspects first and cross them off the list, before moving on to more difficult suspects. So they'll examine the battery. Then the charging/loading system. Then the plane's electrical system. Then if none of those turn out to have independently caused the fire, they'll go looking for interactions between these systems.
Unfortunately the media is incredibly impatient, and is interpreting a negative result on step #1 as if it means a positive result were obtained in step #2, #3, or #4, even though the investigators haven't even gotten to steps #2, #3, and #4 yet.
The "subsidy" is just an excuse the U.S. carriers drag out whenever it's convenient to them. If they truly believed the phone was subsidized by the monthly fee, then after you'd paid off the subsidy (your contract was up), the monthly service fee would drop since it's no longer subsidizing your phone. T-Mobile is the only carrier which does this. The others continue to charge you the rate which supposedly includes subsidy, even if you're out of contract and presumably have already paid for the phone in its entirety.
The FTC needs to step in and force the carriers to turn this into a loan like with cars. If you want to buy the phone outright, you can. If you want it subsidized, you pay less up front but a separate loan/subsidy charge will show up on your bill until you've paid it off. None of this hide it inside your regular service charge BS that the carriers currently do.
1- Multiplayer gaming is an endless tirade of gay-this, faggot-that. It's nice to play games and socialise with people who aren't jerks. (Yes yes, harden the fuck up, etc - but it is annoying.)
As a member of the general multiplayer gaming population, I'm offended you would group me with those idiots. And that you would cut off any opportunity for contact with me because of them. Too often people complain about being typecast with stereotypes, yet will willingly stereotype others.
The solution to this problem isn't self-ostracization, seceding the general community to the people who shovel out that kind of vitrol. It's ostracizing them from the general community. Granted I play mostly RPGs, not FPS, but all of them have terms of service regarding online behavior. If enough people report the foul-mouthed jerks, they'll get banned. (And for the companies who don't ban for this type of behavior: If you allow things like this to persist, it teaches kids playing your games that it's acceptable behavior, and you help the social problem persist.)
The whole thing reminds me of the unspoken issue I see with illegal immigration. Yes they're coming to the U.S. just to try to make a better life for themselves. But that's not a long-term solution. If all the people who want to work to make a better life for themselves take the easy way out and flee their native countries for the U.S., there will be nobody left to fight to improve life in their native countries.
Neither side wants a war there, NK has a pretty good memory of how the civil war went.. so NK, SK, China, Japan, US... all are quite aware that actual hostilities would be a bad idea. Symbolic gestures on the other hand have value... not on the international scale, but on the local one.
That's what one would hope. But with NK you can never be sure. Anyone old enough to have been an adult during the Korean War is well past the average life expectancy. You think it's bad that the U.S. labeled them as part of the axis of evil? For 60 years now, everyone growing up there has been indoctrinated into a system that pounds into them from childhood that the U.S. is the great evil which must be fought and destroyed. They have children's books which advocate shooting Americans. Cartoons which make games of killing Americans. Everything they tell their citizens is predicated around the notion that the U.S. is evil, and that they are merely struggling against it. They've essentially been brainwashing their entire population with this since childhood for 60 years (i.e. anyone there is not elderly has known only this their entire lives).
Now, one hopes that the those in power realize this is all just BS made up to control their masses. But there's no way to know that for sure. The most dangerous thing that could happen is someone coming into power who grew up in NK who actually believes what they've been teaching their people, and those in the West dismissing his actions as mere posturing. And even if it is just posturing on Kim Jong-Un's part, bear in mind that most of the generals and other military leadership there grew up being taught these same things. A situation may develop where he knows a nuke launched at the U.S. is silly, but he may be unable to convince the military that it's silly.
The military in NK is very powerful.. while people like to talk about the place like it is a simple dictatorship, the political reality is the Leader needs the backing of the generals, otherwise his power-base dissolves. One way to do that is build up the internal public image of military streght and show that he is willing to snub the world in favor of the generals. In essence, it is the Leader demonstrating his allegiance to his military and reasserting their primacy within the country.
That would be my interpretation of what's happening too. But prudence dictates we take precautions in case that's not what's going on. Hope for the best case. Plan for the worst case.
Incidentally, the first legal change I would suggest to fix the situation with journals would be to make it illegal for research paper authors to assign copyright to the journal. They can give the journal a license to publish and redistribute their paper. But they retain the copyright and can reproduce their paper in any other journals or even a website if they wish.
But/. fans need to get this in their thick, stupid, avant-garde-wannabe skulls. He was not on the right, nor what he did - in this specific issue - constituted something positive or promoting of individual rights.
That depends on at what level of abstraction you view the situation. The irony behind all this is that Swartz was targeted because certain organizations were afraid he was going to redistribute their publications without compensating them. Yet those organizations are doing the very same thing - redistributing papers (for profit even) without compensating the original authors. Yes the authors gave consent while JSTOR did not. But given the state of academic publishing in journals, I think most of the authors would agree they had to give that consent under duress - "publish or die." Under normal contract law, that would invalidate the contract. But it persists in journals because "that's the way it's always been."
At that point, you get into a "is it wrong to steal back property obtained via an extortion scheme?" conundrum. While within my personal view of law and ethics I don't condone his actions (I believe normalizing the situation with journals needs to happen with changes in the law, not vigilante action), I can certainly understand how in other people's view (primarily those in the civil disobedience camp) he was in the right.
The US is a playground bully that embargoes countries that don't play by its terms.
While I agree the Cuba embargo is silly, it does not make the U.S. a bully. International trade by definition happens when both countries consent to the transaction. If one country doesn't want to trade with another country for whatever reason, it is their right not to. Exercising that right does not make them a bully. What next, calling a woman a bully because she refuses to have sex with you?
Actually, there is a legitimate argument here for fairness. If they're charging each customer $50/mo, and one customer is using 1 GB/mo while another is slurping 500 GB/mo, yes there's a fairness issue.
But the problem with the fairness argument as they're making it is that their reaction does not indicate they're actually worried about fairness. If you're charging each customer $50/mo and see an inequality is use, you make it fair by raising your price on the guy slurping 500 GB/mo, and lowering your price on the guy using just 1 GB/mo. Your overall revenue/profit is the same, and now the prices are fairer.
But that's not what's happening. They're trying to keep the price on the 1 GB/mo guy at $50/mo while raising prices on the guy using 500 GB/mo. That makes it a pure money grab.
Both the DC-10 and 747 had to solve the same problem. The cargo hold door was too big for the "plug and let air pressure keep it in place" idea to work. The force on a door due to air pressure scales with surface area (size^2), while the strength of its attachment scales with perimeter (size). So the bigger you make the door the harder it is to keep it in place. Warping of the door and structure around the door as the plane experienced lateral forces/torsions and bent/twisted would cause gaps to open, compromising the airtight seal around the plug.
So they switched to a latching mechanism, which allowed the door's joint with the airframe to withstand tension as well as compression (the plug types only withstand only compression). It's a solid engineering decision - by latching the door and airframe together, you create a more robust transfer of forces between the two. GP is just wrong to suggest that it was somehow fundamentally unsafe. If anything it is safer than a simple plug-type door.
The problem was with the latches. On the 747 the circuitry closing the latches shorted and released during flight. On the DC-10, the latches were too thin and bent when the door didn't mate properly and cargo handlers tried to force the door shut. The 747 cargo door was fixed by making it so locking the cargo door from outside physically disconnected the electricity to the motors locking the door latches once they were locked. The DC-10 was fixed by making the latches thicker, and adding a viewport so cargo handlers could visually see that the door had mated properly. The cargo door itself on current versions of both planes is the same as the ones which failed.
assuming 100% efficiency and no fuckups in my orders of magnitude.
Pump efficiency is typically around 70%-80% for large industrial pumps. Theoretically they can hit about 90%, but that's only for a single pressure and flowrate. Deviate and efficiency drops. A pump driven by a wind turbine is highly unlikely to stay at that sweet spot for any significant amount of time.
Hydroelectric turbine efficiency is the same, except the situation is more controlled (keep the reservoir close to full) so you can get closer to 90%.
So pumped storage has about a 0.75*0.9 = 0.67 overall efficiency. The cost for being able to time-shift your energy production is the loss of about 1/3rd of the energy produced.
Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal prosecution standard. It's used for deciding whether to deprive someone of their personal liberties and lock them up.
In civil litigation where deprivation of liberties is not at stake (mostly financial matters), the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Basically if you can surpass 50% certainty.
In private matters, a private chess tournament can throw someone out for whatever reason they damn well please. If I don't like that someone is barefoot at my tournament, I can throw him out. It might have consequences later, where other players refuse to participate in my tournament because they think he was thrown out unfairly. But I was still well within my rights to throw him out.
That brings up catch #2... if you swap to microSD (because it's cheaply replaceable should you end up damaging it), you really need class 6 or better. Swapping to class 2 flash will leave you running more slowly than if you left Android to its default behavior. Guess what class of flash invariably comes with the free microSD card shipped with the phone? Class 2.
This is a common misconception. The class of the SD card is a rating for sequential write speed, nothing more. It's important for cameras and camcorders - in fact it was developed for camcorders because some memory cards simply couldn't write the video data as quickly as the device was sending it to the card.
For an Android device you're more interested in its 4k random read/write performance. It's basically a computer reading/writing lots of small files, so it'll be most impacted by 4k read/write speeds.
As it turns out, manufacturers can tune a flash card for a certain type of performance. If you tune it for faster sequential speeds, random speeds suffer. Likewise if you tune it for random speed, sequential speeds suffer. The class 10 cards I've benchmarked typically hit 10-20 MB/s on sequential writes, but will bog down to as slow as 0.004 MB/s on random writes (yes, 4 kB/s - it was the card I bought before I learned all this. It took 4 hours to copy 4 GB of sheet music and MP3s to that class 10 card - a blissful 0.28 MB/s). Here are the CrystalDiskMark scores I got for a 32 GB class 4 card I have:
So yeah it's 3x faster at sequential writes. But it's slower at 512k writes, and more than 160x slower at 4k writes. It's definitely a very bad choice for an Android device despite being class 10.
The sweet spot for Android is around class 4 or 6. That gets you good 4k write speeds without punishingly poor sequential write speeds (which are important if you're doing something like copying a movie to the card). That said, not all cards are created equal. The "class 2" Samsung card which came with my phone is hands down the best card I've tested overall. It peaked at 11 MB/s sequential writes (meaning it could've been rated class 10), while 4k random writes were still above 1 MB/s. Sandisk is another company which seems to underrate their cards (and their class 10 cards have better if not stellar 4k random write speeds), which is why they're usually highly recommended for Android devices.
tl;dr - You want a class 4 or 6 card, or a good class 2 card for your Android device. Not a class 10 card.
Have you actually visited Greece? 2-3 hour lunches, end of work at 4pm even if the job isn't yet finished (a friend got stranded on his way to the airport because the bus driver quit driving at 4pm).
That's what caused Greece's financial problems, not socialism or some lending market conspiracy. Having a modern economy doesn't magically give you a higher standard of living. Higher productivity per person is what gives you a higher standard of living. If you have a poorly developed economy, great income inequality, or a widespread poor work ethic, then the people aren't productive, and the only way to have a higher standard of living is to borrow money against the future. That can't last forever.
If you have 200 kids and teachers all armed with RFID tags then you can simply lock the doors for the day and not let anyone else in, why is this a good idea? Simple school shooters, they can't get in the school so potentially you create a safer environment.
Contrary to the media hype, schools are already plenty safe from shooters. You're more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a school shooting. If you pull your kids out of school because you think it's unsafe, you're actually increasing their chances of getting shot. More kids are shot outside of school than while at school.
Like airliner crashes and nuclear power accidents, you're letting the news hysteria over a rare large incident color your perception, and consequently mischaracterizing the magnitude of the problem. Yes you could do all you suggest to make schools safer. But you'll save more lives if you instead devote that money and brainpower towards tackling bigger safety problems. Like the approx 150x more high school drivers killed in car accidents each year than murdered while at school (by any means).
If you open up a modern tablet, most of the electronics are crammed into a sliver of PCB. Most of the remaining space is taken up by the battery. Presumably if the battery requirements can be reduced (or battery tech improves), you could put the electronics and battery into a thin bar along one edge of the screen.
My prediction is we're going to have "scroll" tablets - the electronics and battery will be housed in a cylindrical tube, and the screen is rolled around it for storage. When you want to use it, simply unroll the screen. This can also give you multiple screen sizes in one. e.g. If the tube is 6" long, you can unroll 3.5" of the screen to get something about the size of a modern 7" tablet. Unroll it 10" to get something equivalent to a 11.6" tablet. And unroll it 14" for a 2.35:1 widescreen display for viewing movies in completely native format.
* They market your app, putting them in "most recent" list, as well as in the "people who bought this also bought" list of other apps. This marketing alone is well worth the cost.
* They handle international payments. I don't have to worry about the dollar conversion, I get to focus in what I am good at: game development.
* I don't have to deal with PCI compliance, which I would have to do with my own store
* I don't have to deal with refunds, they take care of it.
* I don't have to deal with credit card processing. Huge nightmare
* I don't have to deal with bandwidth. When my free app is downloaded 300K times, this is an issue.
* I don't have to deal with updates. I publish my update, and they take care of notifying users, and installing the updates
They charge 30%? you know what, they earned it.
Most of this is stuff that can be automated and thus while it adds value, doesn't really cost much to provide. Long-term, competition will drive its price down closer to what it costs to provide (just a few percent). Unless there's a monopoly or industry collusion like has happened in banking/credit cards.
Right now though, I agree it's worth it. You have to compare to what a physical publisher would charge you. Typically 60%-75% of published software's retail price went to the publisher/marketer/store, the developer was lucky to get more than 25%. So compared to that, 70% is a veritable fortune. It'll just take the market a while to adjust to the huge disruption online sales have created.
There's nothing special about the meter. The "special" part is meter and liter are related, as are kg and liter, so everything is related.
Originally they were, but not anymore. Originally they were all defined around water. The meter is now defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. So as the speed of light is refined further, the definition of a meter (and hence liter, since 1000 liters are defined as fitting in one cubic meter) will change.
The kg was defined as the mass one of liter of distilled water. But early measurements were slightly inaccurate and the platinum/iridium cylinder they made to represent it was losing weight. Consequently there are about 0.999975 kg of water in a liter. There are plans to redefine the kg in terms of Planck's constant, which will completely eliminate the relationship between the kg and liter (and consequently the liter).
So as GP said, these units are all arbitrary. If you want non-arbitrary units, you have to go to physical constants. Which actually isn't a bad idea in higher level math and physics since it cleans up some of the formulae, converting some seemingly arbitrary numbers into things like e and pi.
Not to disagree with your point. But I would say that the main problem with units like foot and inches is not the base per se, but the inconsistent bases across the spectrum.
They're consistent. You just have to think about how the units were used back in the days before widespread uniform measuring tools.
Linear units are divisible by 3 and 4. Usually base 12 (e.g. 12 inches in a foot). Sometimes an extra factor of 3 is thrown in (yards). This is actually better than metric where you will pull your hair out if you're asked to build three identical objects to fit into a space exactly 10 cm across (each object needs to be 3.333333333... cm wide).
Fractional units are powers of 1/2. If you don't have a measuring tool handy, how can you measure something smaller than the smallest thing you can measure? Divide it in half, divide that in half, divide that in half, etc. That's where you get 1/32 inch.
The same is true for liquid measures, where if you have a balance scale handy you can divide things in half all day long. Those also go by powers of 2. 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 32 gills. Same for dry volume. 1 boll = 4 firlots = 16 pecks = 64 bushels = 128 gallons.
Basically, the pre-industrial era was very big on dividing things in half, except in cases where you might frequently need to divide things in thirds. The units reflect that. The modern metric system reflects the widespread availability of standardized measuring tools and the use of calculators. Form follows function.
The problem is it misses the point. The problem isn't labeling Jews. I'm Asian, and you don't even have to label me. My appearance immediately tells you I'm Asian. But it's not a problem because there is no negative stigma associated with Asians.
The problem isn't the label. It's the negative stigma associated with Jews. Fixing the problem involves correcting the negative stigma - teaching kids that there's nothing wrong with being Jewish - they're just people like everyone else, and that they've been unfairly targeted in their past just because of their race.
The same goes for GMO foods. The problem isn't the label, it's the negative stigma they've picked up. Fixing the problem means openly engaging and educating people on what GMO is, and what dangers are real and fake. Hiding behind a ban on labels just fuels the conspiracy that they have something they to hide.
There are two different things at odds here. Comments so far have only focused on the first - innate ability (call it intelligence, knowledge, whatever).
The other is social acuity (call it teamwork, getting along with others, ass-kissing, whatever).
Both are required to get ahead in life. Sure there are exceptions, and those with a lack of one will want to point to half of these exceptions as evidence that what they lack is unneeded. But on average having a good amount of both will get you further than having a lot of one and little of the other.
That's all that's going on. We can argue about whether or not grades should reflect the social aspect. But in the end, the school's job is to prepare you for life in the workforce. And since being able to work with other people is a requirement for 99.5% of jobs, having it being reflected in a student's GPA is not a bad thing.
I was one of those smart kids in school who was bored by the lessons and thought it included a lot of useless busy work. I also thought sports were a pointless endeavor at an educational institution, and the school was wasting resources promoting them. But after a few decades in the Real World, I see now that the sports taught teamwork. That most of the time it isn't about how well just one guy does by himself; most of the time it's about how well everyone can do when they work on something together. As a manager, I quickly learned that having two people who are pretty good at what they do and can supplement each other so one is always available, is vastly preferable to having one guy who is really good at what he does but frequently isn't available or "can't be bothered" and is paired with a trainee who wasn't able to learn anything because he thinks it's beneath him to teach someone what he knows. Social skills matter.
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$500 stove with 10 year lifespan, assuming 2 meals cooked per day = 6.8 cents per meal.
$100 of pots and pans with a 20 year lifespan, assuming 2 meals cooked per day = 0.7 cents per meal.
$50 set of plates and utensils with a 20 year lifespan, assuming 3 meals eaten per day = 0.23 cents per meal.
Energy required to boil 1 liters of water from 20 C = 80*4.186 kJ + 2260 kJ = 2595 kJ (I'll assume this is close to cooking one burger)
Electricity required to do that at 50% transfer efficiency = 1.44 kWh.
Price at the U.S. average of $0.12/kWh = 17.3 cents.
Grand total cost per meal = 25.03 cents per meal.
This country badly needs to teach basic accounting and home economics (real economics, not just sewing and cooking) as mandatory courses in high school. So people don't believe silly arguments to justify eating fast food all the time. Most people don't realize how much money they're throwing away leasing cars, carrying a balance on their credit cards, paying a 1% higher interest rate on their car loan because they didn't budget to save up a bigger down payment, and eating fast food.
The best argument for fast food is that if you're single and living alone, it can be difficult to use up even a small amount of groceries before the meat and vegetables go bad. The portions you eat are so small that even a single head of lettuce might have to last more than a week. And most people hate eating the same thing over and over, so the ingredients you use for one meal might not be needed again for 2-3 more days. So you end up throwing a lot of groceries out vs. buying fast food which is made from fresh ingredients every day. You end up buying a lot of prepackaged and frozen dinner type groceries instead, which on a cost per meal basis is pretty much the same as fast food.
For Android, LBE Privacy Guard will let you assign whether apps have access to the network, and various other private info (e.g. location, contacts, phone ID, etc).
That makes it trivial enough to block something like Angry Birds from getting my location and communicating it to their home server. The problem is with apps which have to be online and which need access to that info to function. e.g. Navigation with Google Maps requires network access and my location. I'd like to think providing navigation is all they're doing with my location info, but I suspect they're doing a lot more with it like building movement pattern profiles.
I imagine that's what the 60 million Euro are for. To hire consultants to tell these newspaper companies about robots.txt, or to implement it for them if they really don't want their articles showing up on news.google.com
It's just the way these investigations happen and the press/public is reading too much into it. Aircraft accident inspectors are very systematic. They'll examine the easy/most likely suspects first and cross them off the list, before moving on to more difficult suspects. So they'll examine the battery. Then the charging/loading system. Then the plane's electrical system. Then if none of those turn out to have independently caused the fire, they'll go looking for interactions between these systems.
Unfortunately the media is incredibly impatient, and is interpreting a negative result on step #1 as if it means a positive result were obtained in step #2, #3, or #4, even though the investigators haven't even gotten to steps #2, #3, and #4 yet.
Which later became Microsoft Flight Simulator. Granddaddy of all the 3D games we have today.
The "subsidy" is just an excuse the U.S. carriers drag out whenever it's convenient to them. If they truly believed the phone was subsidized by the monthly fee, then after you'd paid off the subsidy (your contract was up), the monthly service fee would drop since it's no longer subsidizing your phone. T-Mobile is the only carrier which does this. The others continue to charge you the rate which supposedly includes subsidy, even if you're out of contract and presumably have already paid for the phone in its entirety.
The FTC needs to step in and force the carriers to turn this into a loan like with cars. If you want to buy the phone outright, you can. If you want it subsidized, you pay less up front but a separate loan/subsidy charge will show up on your bill until you've paid it off. None of this hide it inside your regular service charge BS that the carriers currently do.
As a member of the general multiplayer gaming population, I'm offended you would group me with those idiots. And that you would cut off any opportunity for contact with me because of them. Too often people complain about being typecast with stereotypes, yet will willingly stereotype others.
The solution to this problem isn't self-ostracization, seceding the general community to the people who shovel out that kind of vitrol. It's ostracizing them from the general community. Granted I play mostly RPGs, not FPS, but all of them have terms of service regarding online behavior. If enough people report the foul-mouthed jerks, they'll get banned. (And for the companies who don't ban for this type of behavior: If you allow things like this to persist, it teaches kids playing your games that it's acceptable behavior, and you help the social problem persist.)
The whole thing reminds me of the unspoken issue I see with illegal immigration. Yes they're coming to the U.S. just to try to make a better life for themselves. But that's not a long-term solution. If all the people who want to work to make a better life for themselves take the easy way out and flee their native countries for the U.S., there will be nobody left to fight to improve life in their native countries.
That's what one would hope. But with NK you can never be sure. Anyone old enough to have been an adult during the Korean War is well past the average life expectancy. You think it's bad that the U.S. labeled them as part of the axis of evil? For 60 years now, everyone growing up there has been indoctrinated into a system that pounds into them from childhood that the U.S. is the great evil which must be fought and destroyed. They have children's books which advocate shooting Americans. Cartoons which make games of killing Americans. Everything they tell their citizens is predicated around the notion that the U.S. is evil, and that they are merely struggling against it. They've essentially been brainwashing their entire population with this since childhood for 60 years (i.e. anyone there is not elderly has known only this their entire lives).
Now, one hopes that the those in power realize this is all just BS made up to control their masses. But there's no way to know that for sure. The most dangerous thing that could happen is someone coming into power who grew up in NK who actually believes what they've been teaching their people, and those in the West dismissing his actions as mere posturing. And even if it is just posturing on Kim Jong-Un's part, bear in mind that most of the generals and other military leadership there grew up being taught these same things. A situation may develop where he knows a nuke launched at the U.S. is silly, but he may be unable to convince the military that it's silly.
That would be my interpretation of what's happening too. But prudence dictates we take precautions in case that's not what's going on. Hope for the best case. Plan for the worst case.
Incidentally, the first legal change I would suggest to fix the situation with journals would be to make it illegal for research paper authors to assign copyright to the journal. They can give the journal a license to publish and redistribute their paper. But they retain the copyright and can reproduce their paper in any other journals or even a website if they wish.
That depends on at what level of abstraction you view the situation. The irony behind all this is that Swartz was targeted because certain organizations were afraid he was going to redistribute their publications without compensating them. Yet those organizations are doing the very same thing - redistributing papers (for profit even) without compensating the original authors. Yes the authors gave consent while JSTOR did not. But given the state of academic publishing in journals, I think most of the authors would agree they had to give that consent under duress - "publish or die." Under normal contract law, that would invalidate the contract. But it persists in journals because "that's the way it's always been."
At that point, you get into a "is it wrong to steal back property obtained via an extortion scheme?" conundrum. While within my personal view of law and ethics I don't condone his actions (I believe normalizing the situation with journals needs to happen with changes in the law, not vigilante action), I can certainly understand how in other people's view (primarily those in the civil disobedience camp) he was in the right.
While I agree the Cuba embargo is silly, it does not make the U.S. a bully. International trade by definition happens when both countries consent to the transaction. If one country doesn't want to trade with another country for whatever reason, it is their right not to. Exercising that right does not make them a bully. What next, calling a woman a bully because she refuses to have sex with you?
Actually, there is a legitimate argument here for fairness. If they're charging each customer $50/mo, and one customer is using 1 GB/mo while another is slurping 500 GB/mo, yes there's a fairness issue.
But the problem with the fairness argument as they're making it is that their reaction does not indicate they're actually worried about fairness. If you're charging each customer $50/mo and see an inequality is use, you make it fair by raising your price on the guy slurping 500 GB/mo, and lowering your price on the guy using just 1 GB/mo. Your overall revenue/profit is the same, and now the prices are fairer.
But that's not what's happening. They're trying to keep the price on the 1 GB/mo guy at $50/mo while raising prices on the guy using 500 GB/mo. That makes it a pure money grab.
Both the DC-10 and 747 had to solve the same problem. The cargo hold door was too big for the "plug and let air pressure keep it in place" idea to work. The force on a door due to air pressure scales with surface area (size^2), while the strength of its attachment scales with perimeter (size). So the bigger you make the door the harder it is to keep it in place. Warping of the door and structure around the door as the plane experienced lateral forces/torsions and bent/twisted would cause gaps to open, compromising the airtight seal around the plug.
So they switched to a latching mechanism, which allowed the door's joint with the airframe to withstand tension as well as compression (the plug types only withstand only compression). It's a solid engineering decision - by latching the door and airframe together, you create a more robust transfer of forces between the two. GP is just wrong to suggest that it was somehow fundamentally unsafe. If anything it is safer than a simple plug-type door.
The problem was with the latches. On the 747 the circuitry closing the latches shorted and released during flight. On the DC-10, the latches were too thin and bent when the door didn't mate properly and cargo handlers tried to force the door shut. The 747 cargo door was fixed by making it so locking the cargo door from outside physically disconnected the electricity to the motors locking the door latches once they were locked. The DC-10 was fixed by making the latches thicker, and adding a viewport so cargo handlers could visually see that the door had mated properly. The cargo door itself on current versions of both planes is the same as the ones which failed.
Pump efficiency is typically around 70%-80% for large industrial pumps. Theoretically they can hit about 90%, but that's only for a single pressure and flowrate. Deviate and efficiency drops. A pump driven by a wind turbine is highly unlikely to stay at that sweet spot for any significant amount of time.
Hydroelectric turbine efficiency is the same, except the situation is more controlled (keep the reservoir close to full) so you can get closer to 90%.
So pumped storage has about a 0.75*0.9 = 0.67 overall efficiency. The cost for being able to time-shift your energy production is the loss of about 1/3rd of the energy produced.
Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal prosecution standard. It's used for deciding whether to deprive someone of their personal liberties and lock them up.
In civil litigation where deprivation of liberties is not at stake (mostly financial matters), the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Basically if you can surpass 50% certainty.
In private matters, a private chess tournament can throw someone out for whatever reason they damn well please. If I don't like that someone is barefoot at my tournament, I can throw him out. It might have consequences later, where other players refuse to participate in my tournament because they think he was thrown out unfairly. But I was still well within my rights to throw him out.
This is a common misconception. The class of the SD card is a rating for sequential write speed, nothing more. It's important for cameras and camcorders - in fact it was developed for camcorders because some memory cards simply couldn't write the video data as quickly as the device was sending it to the card.
For an Android device you're more interested in its 4k random read/write performance. It's basically a computer reading/writing lots of small files, so it'll be most impacted by 4k read/write speeds.
As it turns out, manufacturers can tune a flash card for a certain type of performance. If you tune it for faster sequential speeds, random speeds suffer. Likewise if you tune it for random speed, sequential speeds suffer. The class 10 cards I've benchmarked typically hit 10-20 MB/s on sequential writes, but will bog down to as slow as 0.004 MB/s on random writes (yes, 4 kB/s - it was the card I bought before I learned all this. It took 4 hours to copy 4 GB of sheet music and MP3s to that class 10 card - a blissful 0.28 MB/s). Here are the CrystalDiskMark scores I got for a 32 GB class 4 card I have:
seq: 22.9 MB/s read, 4.3 MB/s write
512k: 22.0 MB/s read, 1.3 MB/s write
4k: 3.3 MB/s read, 1.3 MB/s write
Yikes! Only 4.3 MB/s write speed. Who would ever want that? Well look at the benchmarks for a 16 GB class 10 card I have:
seq: 21.8 MB/s read, 12.0 MB/s write
512k: 21.5 MB/s read, 0.9 MB/s write
4k: 5.7 MB/s read, 0.008 MB/s write (not a typo)
So yeah it's 3x faster at sequential writes. But it's slower at 512k writes, and more than 160x slower at 4k writes. It's definitely a very bad choice for an Android device despite being class 10.
The sweet spot for Android is around class 4 or 6. That gets you good 4k write speeds without punishingly poor sequential write speeds (which are important if you're doing something like copying a movie to the card). That said, not all cards are created equal. The "class 2" Samsung card which came with my phone is hands down the best card I've tested overall. It peaked at 11 MB/s sequential writes (meaning it could've been rated class 10), while 4k random writes were still above 1 MB/s. Sandisk is another company which seems to underrate their cards (and their class 10 cards have better if not stellar 4k random write speeds), which is why they're usually highly recommended for Android devices.
tl;dr - You want a class 4 or 6 card, or a good class 2 card for your Android device. Not a class 10 card.
Have you actually visited Greece? 2-3 hour lunches, end of work at 4pm even if the job isn't yet finished (a friend got stranded on his way to the airport because the bus driver quit driving at 4pm).
That's what caused Greece's financial problems, not socialism or some lending market conspiracy. Having a modern economy doesn't magically give you a higher standard of living. Higher productivity per person is what gives you a higher standard of living. If you have a poorly developed economy, great income inequality, or a widespread poor work ethic, then the people aren't productive, and the only way to have a higher standard of living is to borrow money against the future. That can't last forever.
Contrary to the media hype, schools are already plenty safe from shooters. You're more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a school shooting. If you pull your kids out of school because you think it's unsafe, you're actually increasing their chances of getting shot. More kids are shot outside of school than while at school.
Like airliner crashes and nuclear power accidents, you're letting the news hysteria over a rare large incident color your perception, and consequently mischaracterizing the magnitude of the problem. Yes you could do all you suggest to make schools safer. But you'll save more lives if you instead devote that money and brainpower towards tackling bigger safety problems. Like the approx 150x more high school drivers killed in car accidents each year than murdered while at school (by any means).
If you open up a modern tablet, most of the electronics are crammed into a sliver of PCB. Most of the remaining space is taken up by the battery. Presumably if the battery requirements can be reduced (or battery tech improves), you could put the electronics and battery into a thin bar along one edge of the screen.
My prediction is we're going to have "scroll" tablets - the electronics and battery will be housed in a cylindrical tube, and the screen is rolled around it for storage. When you want to use it, simply unroll the screen. This can also give you multiple screen sizes in one. e.g. If the tube is 6" long, you can unroll 3.5" of the screen to get something about the size of a modern 7" tablet. Unroll it 10" to get something equivalent to a 11.6" tablet. And unroll it 14" for a 2.35:1 widescreen display for viewing movies in completely native format.
Most of this is stuff that can be automated and thus while it adds value, doesn't really cost much to provide. Long-term, competition will drive its price down closer to what it costs to provide (just a few percent). Unless there's a monopoly or industry collusion like has happened in banking/credit cards.
Right now though, I agree it's worth it. You have to compare to what a physical publisher would charge you. Typically 60%-75% of published software's retail price went to the publisher/marketer/store, the developer was lucky to get more than 25%. So compared to that, 70% is a veritable fortune. It'll just take the market a while to adjust to the huge disruption online sales have created.
Originally they were, but not anymore. Originally they were all defined around water. The meter is now defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. So as the speed of light is refined further, the definition of a meter (and hence liter, since 1000 liters are defined as fitting in one cubic meter) will change.
The kg was defined as the mass one of liter of distilled water. But early measurements were slightly inaccurate and the platinum/iridium cylinder they made to represent it was losing weight. Consequently there are about 0.999975 kg of water in a liter. There are plans to redefine the kg in terms of Planck's constant, which will completely eliminate the relationship between the kg and liter (and consequently the liter).
So as GP said, these units are all arbitrary. If you want non-arbitrary units, you have to go to physical constants. Which actually isn't a bad idea in higher level math and physics since it cleans up some of the formulae, converting some seemingly arbitrary numbers into things like e and pi.
They're consistent. You just have to think about how the units were used back in the days before widespread uniform measuring tools.
Linear units are divisible by 3 and 4. Usually base 12 (e.g. 12 inches in a foot). Sometimes an extra factor of 3 is thrown in (yards). This is actually better than metric where you will pull your hair out if you're asked to build three identical objects to fit into a space exactly 10 cm across (each object needs to be 3.333333333... cm wide).
Fractional units are powers of 1/2. If you don't have a measuring tool handy, how can you measure something smaller than the smallest thing you can measure? Divide it in half, divide that in half, divide that in half, etc. That's where you get 1/32 inch.
The same is true for liquid measures, where if you have a balance scale handy you can divide things in half all day long. Those also go by powers of 2. 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 32 gills. Same for dry volume. 1 boll = 4 firlots = 16 pecks = 64 bushels = 128 gallons.
Basically, the pre-industrial era was very big on dividing things in half, except in cases where you might frequently need to divide things in thirds. The units reflect that. The modern metric system reflects the widespread availability of standardized measuring tools and the use of calculators. Form follows function.
Losing Facebook access is merely an inconvenience. But in other contexts being erroneously declared dead can have serious consequences.
The problem is it misses the point. The problem isn't labeling Jews. I'm Asian, and you don't even have to label me. My appearance immediately tells you I'm Asian. But it's not a problem because there is no negative stigma associated with Asians.
The problem isn't the label. It's the negative stigma associated with Jews. Fixing the problem involves correcting the negative stigma - teaching kids that there's nothing wrong with being Jewish - they're just people like everyone else, and that they've been unfairly targeted in their past just because of their race.
The same goes for GMO foods. The problem isn't the label, it's the negative stigma they've picked up. Fixing the problem means openly engaging and educating people on what GMO is, and what dangers are real and fake. Hiding behind a ban on labels just fuels the conspiracy that they have something they to hide.
There are two different things at odds here. Comments so far have only focused on the first - innate ability (call it intelligence, knowledge, whatever).
The other is social acuity (call it teamwork, getting along with others, ass-kissing, whatever).
Both are required to get ahead in life. Sure there are exceptions, and those with a lack of one will want to point to half of these exceptions as evidence that what they lack is unneeded. But on average having a good amount of both will get you further than having a lot of one and little of the other.
That's all that's going on. We can argue about whether or not grades should reflect the social aspect. But in the end, the school's job is to prepare you for life in the workforce. And since being able to work with other people is a requirement for 99.5% of jobs, having it being reflected in a student's GPA is not a bad thing.
I was one of those smart kids in school who was bored by the lessons and thought it included a lot of useless busy work. I also thought sports were a pointless endeavor at an educational institution, and the school was wasting resources promoting them. But after a few decades in the Real World, I see now that the sports taught teamwork. That most of the time it isn't about how well just one guy does by himself; most of the time it's about how well everyone can do when they work on something together. As a manager, I quickly learned that having two people who are pretty good at what they do and can supplement each other so one is always available, is vastly preferable to having one guy who is really good at what he does but frequently isn't available or "can't be bothered" and is paired with a trainee who wasn't able to learn anything because he thinks it's beneath him to teach someone what he knows. Social skills matter.