The only acceptable standard for sharing personal data is strictly opt-in, and defaulting to do-not-track creates such a standard.
Therein is the conundrum. What you say is true if it has the force of law. If everyone must abide by the standard, then clearly the consumer-friendly choice is opt-in for tracking.
Unfortunately this particular standard doesn't have the force of law. It's also opt-in for the advertisers. The choice here isn't a simple binary track/don't track. It's a 2x2 grid with consumers wanting/not wanting tracking on one axis, and advertisers respecting/not respecting consumers' wishes on the other. And the advertisers' choice is dominant. If they choose not to respect the standard, then the consumers' choice is irrelevant - they're going to be tracked either way. i.e. the only way consumers are not going to be tracked is if they choose not to be tracked and advertisers choose to respect the do-not-track flag. Pissing off advertisers to the point where they choose not to respect the standard has the same results as not having the standard at all.
Microsoft has made the politically expedient choice here. They've staked out a position where they can claim to be protecting consumers, while simultaneously almost guaranteeing do-not-track will fail thus in actuality protecting advertisers.
Or perhaps a lot of little, benign microquakes that lead to a Fukushima
C'mon people, this is slashdot. Conservation of energy still applies. A bunch of microquakes cannot cause a Fukushima. A Fukushima can only happen when sufficient energy for a Fukushima-level quake has already built up in the rock. A microquake may then trigger the Fukushima quake, but it did not in itself cause the Fukushima quake. The cause is the Fukushima-level energy that's already been stored in the rock. If the microquake had not happened, the energy for the Fukushima quake would still be there, still waiting to be released due to some other event. The only way to prevent it is to release it before it reaches Fukushima-levels.
You're literally trying to blame the straw that broke the camel's back, while completely ignoring everything else that was loaded atop before.
The best analogy is probably with avalanches. If you let the snow pack build up naturally, it results in a huge avalanche when it gives way naturally. One of the options to prevent that is to fire artillery at it. The concussion loosens the snowpack and causes a small avalanche, dispersing the potential energy that's been built up while it's still small, before it can build up into a huge devastating avalanche.
Same thing is going on with fracking. The fracking itself isn't creating the earthquakes. It injects nowhere near enough energy to actually create an earthquake (indeed if it were injecting that much energy, it would defeat the whole purpose of fracking since they're trying to extract energy in the form of oil and gas). The earthquake energy is coming from natural tectonic forces within the earth. The fracking just triggers an already-pending earthquake while it's still small.
So the earthquakes clustered around fracking sites is actually a good thing. We should be doing more fracking - especially in earthquake-prone areas like the U.S. West coast. It's only considered bad due to our perverted legal culture where people are penalized for blame, but not rewarded for prevention. If you leave everything alone and there's a huge earthquake/avalanche, it's a natural event and nobody is to blame. But if someone tries to mitigate the earthquake/avalanche by deliberately triggering it before it can become massive, they are to blame and legally liable for all resulting damage.
The same problem (legal liability for earthquakes) killed deep well geothermal, which was probably our best bet for 100% renewable and 100% clean energy. It angered me at first, but I decided if we as a species are not mature enough to see why there shouldn't be legal liability for these earthquakes, then we as a species do not deserve 100% renewable and clean energy. We deserve to breathe in, eat, and die in the crap we produce from other energy sources.
All the crap pc makers lost my trust a long time ago
Virtually none of the notebook brands (Apple included) actually design and make their notebooks. They're made by ODMs - original design manufacturers. The brand then slaps on their label (or in Apple's case, has their logo cut into the design) before reselling it to you. The only brands which make their own product are Asus (which spun off their manufacturing division as Pegatron in 2007) and Acer (which spun off their manufacturing division as Wistron in 2000 so probably aren't as closely tied anymore). Aside from those two, I know Sony usually designs and manufactures its top tier notebooks in Japan, and Lenovo may still design and manufacture the Thinkpad line on its own.
The ODM which makes the Macbooks is Quanta, who also happens to make most of HPs and some of Dell's notebooks. Ever wonder why some of HP's and Dell's notebooks look like Macbooks? They weren't copying - they were probably designed and manufactured by the exact same Quanta employees. You thought Apple's huge profit margins were due to superior manufacturing? They're huge because they've figured out a way to sell essentially the same product they receive from Quanta at a much higher price than HP and Dell have been able to.
So the only thing the brand label really tells you is how good the post-sale support and warranty service will be. It tells you almost nothing about build quality. To categorize build quality, you need to know which ODM made which model, and the entire industry is very hush-hush about that info.
Most not-useful geeky and cool projects do not cost ~20% of geeks' gross annual salary. When you start getting to that level of expenditure, it's not surprising that people start to question the cost effectiveness of the project compared to off-the-shelf alternatives.
When the SCotUS declines to hear a case, they don't give a reason why. The reasons can range anywhere from "Well duh, obviously the lower court was right" as you claim, to "We really don't know, but would like it and other similar lawsuits to kick around the lower courts some more to build up more opinions before we take a look at it." It's highly unusual for the SCotUS to take up the first case of its type to reach them - that usually only happens when there's a blatant violation of the Constitution in a law. They don't like working in a vacuum, and having multiple lower courts from all over the country weighing in on an issue before they tackle it helps them be sure that the issue has been thoroughly explored before they give their weighty and final say on the matter.
This is what we really need to be looking out for on the copyright front. The law is currently being made to deal with stuff like books, music, movies, and software. But long term it's also going to apply to real, physical objects. The issue first cropped up with copyrights for weaving design patterns. Soon we're going to have 3D printers. Eventually we'll probably have Star Trek-like molecular replicators. It means someone is going to "own" the shapes you might print on your 3D printer.
Eventually there will be a huge cost drop as we transition from manufacturing a part via a custom manufacturing process to just creating it with generic 3D printing equipment. Much like switching from movable type and typewriters to dot-matrix, ink, and laser printers reduced cost, while dramatically increasing flexibility in what you could print (different fonts and even graphics). If we're not careful, or approach copyright as if it's only about intangibles like music or software, we're going to be setting ourselves up for a century where this huge drop in the cost to manufacture could have been used to greatly improve mankind (e.g. people in 3rd world countries printing their own hammers, saws, and nails; replacement gears for motors, etc). But instead most of the benefit of that cost drop is going to end up lining the pockets of copyright holders because of our ridiculous life + 70 years copyright terms.
That's what I see being most important in the next 20-50 years. If copyright reform fails (which is a good bet), we need an early database of open source 3D CAD drawings for all sorts of generic household and commercial items. Tools, motors, plumbing, fixtures, basic electronics, gears and transmissions, etc. So when the day comes, some ratfink bastard company can't go around suing anyone trying to distribute 3D print models for hammers because they claim to own the copyright on all 3D drawings of bludgeoning implements. (That's the problem with Apple's victory based on its iPhone design patent. Rather than clearly define what shapes it owns so other companies can steer clear when making their own designs, the courts are doing it backwards. Other companies are left to blindly make products, then a court decides based on nebulous and impossible to describe criteria if its too close to Apple's design. It's an incredibly wasteful process, and the only sure defense is to have a documented older design.)
"At bottom, this case is a private dispute under Washington state contract law between two U.S. corporations," the court ruled.
The legal drinking age in Germany is 14 (for undistilled drinks given by a parent or guardian). By this court's reasoning, if a family went on vacation in Germany for Octoberfest and dad gave his 14 yo son a beer to drink, then it's a Washington State parent giving alcohol to an underage Washington State child, and he would be subject to fines and jail under the drinking laws of Washington State.
The solution is simple. Change the laws so you can sue lawyers for malpractice. They're always talking about how important malpractice lawsuits are for preserving public safety and keeping other professions honest. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
On the er, other foot, Holy cow, did not know that you cannot copyright a font. That explains all those $10 CDs with 5000 fonts on them and the like.
Yup. That's the reason a lot of early computer systems came with Arial as their default font. Arial = Helvetica clone, but apparently the copyright holder charged less for licenses than Helvetica's copyright holder. Later, Microsoft commissioned Verdana (Helvetica almost-clone) and Georgia (Times New Roman almost-clone) so they wouldn't have to get licenses for Windows' default fonts. (Macs were used widely in the publishing industry, so Apple pretty much had to pay for licenses to Helvetica and Times New Roman.)
The fact that female faculty had similar salary valuation disparity as male faculty would suggest there's no misogynistic bias going on here. Rather, that all faculty are weighing in other factors which on their own may be legitimate, but the factors themselves have a built-in gender bias.
e.g. What are the statistics on male researchers who start off in a field, get married, have kids, then retire to stay at home to take care of the kids; versus women who do the same? Maybe the faculty are automatically factoring in the likelihood that the hired lab manager will quit the job at some point in the future, forcing them to expend additional resources hiring and training a new manager. And this is deemed more likely to happen with female hirees than with male.
That's not to say it has to be this way. For the disabled, we've already decided as a society that the additional cost of giving the disabled equal access to job opportunities (handicap access, assistance equipment, etc) is worth paying. Yes treating them equally will cost us more, but it's a cost we're willing to pay for the results it generates. I don't see a problem with that. But it's something society should knowingly choose to implement, not something snuck in under the pretense of preventing "unjustified" discrimination.
You miss the point. Most Android phones have Google Maps preinstalled.
Admittedly my phone is 2 years old, but when did this change? When I got my phone (Android 2.2), it did not come with Google Maps preinstalled. The default mapping app was some Sprint Navigation thing which got 1 fps while sucking up battery life because it didn't use 3D hardware acceleration. I tried a bunch of GPS mapping apps before settling two. One for offline use, and Google Maps for online use.
"And then how he tried to muddy the waters by adding the iPad numbers to claim iOS' superiority? "
How so? When Google talks about "Android activations" do they leave out tablets?
Generally when one makes a prediction, one sets out the conditions by which the prediction will be measured at the time the prediction is made. e.g. If you make a prediction about phone OS share, then it's a prediction about phone OS share. If the prediction turns out wrong, you don't get to retroactively change it to include other data to make it arrive at the result you want.
Within those confines, you're free to compare and predict whatever you want. If you want to make a prediction about phones, you make it about phones. If you want to make a prediction about phones + tablets, that's what you predict. If you want to make a prediction about iOS taking over the world and displacing Windows, that's what you predict.
"After even that failed, he(and his chums like Siegler) resorted to calling the Apple winner over Android because it takes 80% of the mobile profits! "
As a profit seeking entity, isn't profit the most important measure of success? How can a money losing company - i.e. every Android manufacturer except for Samsung and HTC (barely) be considered "successfully"?
There are thousands of different metrics which one could use to measure success. If you're free to pick and choose which one to use after the fact, it's almost a statistical certainty that there will be some metric which supports your hypothesis. That's why all the investment firms advertising their "top-performing funds" are bunk. Whether or not they have some funds which out-performed the market by 40% last year is irrelevant. What matters is how likely a customer was to have picked one of those funds before they out-performed the market.
That's why you need to set the conditions of a prediction at the time of the prediction. e.g. Investment firm predicts that their funds A, B, and C will outperform the market by 40% the following year. If you don't establish these conditions ahead of time, you're just cherry-picking data which fits your hypothesis.
That's the criticism being leveled against Apple supporters. First it was all about the UI. Then when that was matched it suddenly became about size (screen size and thinness of the iPad). When those were surpassed, it suddenly became about market share. Since iOS is a distant second now, it's suddenly about profits. At this point it's obvious to pretty much all unbiased observers that Apple supporters are just cherry-picking whatever stats support their argument that iOS is superior.
This has nothing to do with the conclusion of the argument - Apple products could very well be the best thing since sliced bread. But if the arguments supporting that assertion are this mutable and fickle, their reliability as an indicator of the strength of the conclusion is highly suspect. Statisticians, scientists, and people trying to be unbiased do not simply morph their argument every time it's disproven. They first question the validity of the hypothesis around which the argument was based. Failure to question the initial hypothesis is a pretty strong indicator of bias. Which was OP's point.
The key difference here is that Apple's App Store is your only way to get binaries onto an iOS device. If you don't like Google's Market/Play policies, you can use any of the countless other markets for Android. Heck, you don't even need a market. Just put your Android app binary on any old web page and give people the URL.
The entire rationale of a reusable spacecraft was predicated on the assumption that we'd have weekly launches. The initial concept of the program foresaw 50+ launches a year. That was the only way to justify the cost of the massive support organization needed to inspect and refurbish the orbiters after each flight, vs. ordinary single-use rockets. Unfortunately, we never came close to that, averaging 4.5 launches per year. Consequently, the Shuttle became the cadillac of launch vehicles. Its lifetime per-launch cost works out to just over $10,000 per kg of payload, vs. $3000-$5000 per kg for other launch vehicles, with Falcon X approaching $2000/kg.
They are a marvel of engineering, and the iconic face of space travel for over a quarter century. But they were also white elephants which consumed half or more of NASA's budget, harming multiple other missions whose primary goal was science instead of putting people into orbit. Don't blame the politicians for killing the program. Blame them for not funding a replacement as soon as it became obvious we weren't going to get anywhere close to 50 launches/yr. Instead they hemmed and hawed, until the Shuttles were forced into retirement because their components began exceeding their lifetime expectancy certification. And the politicians still haven't decided on a replacement.
The Shuttles were built with U.S. taxpayer dollars. Hence it's technically already owned by U.S. citizens. The auction is more to decide which citizen should get each piece, not to make back the cost of building the things.
And they don't work on Earth (except underwater if you strategically attach floats). The actuators don't have enough torque for the arm to lift its own weight. Weight not being a factor in orbit.
Think about it, if your text book has 750 pictures in it, and you have to wrap a dollar bill around each image for licensing, your book in now $750 above your cost to publish it.
Standard rate to license a quarter-page photo for publications of 10,000 or fewer is about $200-$400. So you'd need a really small run of textbooks for each photo to cost $1 per book.
No one out side of these classes will buy the book at $180 if it has no images, so why not just cut the blank spots, and have an all text textbook that has footnotes or side-notes with links to the art the text is talking about?
My guess would be it's a ploy to "encourage" students to by the digital version which has the photos hotlinked. If my hunch is right, it'll cost the publisher nothing to "print" the digital version, but they'll still charge ~$180 for it. And the students can't sell it used to next year's students.
Anyone serious about the visual arts will have their monitor calibrated. The Macs which seem to be ubiquitous among art students even come with their screens pre-calibrated (one of the reasons they're popular among artists). For years Safari was the only browser which used color profiles embedded in JPEGs.
1) The major Iodine isotope from fission of Uranium-235 is Iodine-131. It has a half-life of 8 days. Of all the I-131 which was dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, 0.00000000000000000024% of it remains today.
2) Unless you live in certain areas with high natural background radiation (like Colorado), your largest annual dose of radiation comes from Potassium-40. It's a naturally occurring isotope of Potassium. About 0.01% of all Potassium is K-40. Our nerves need Potassium to function so you cannot reduce your Potassium intake to avoid it. Foods high in K-40 include potatoes, grapes/raisins, lima beans, spinach, tomatoes, oranges, bananas, and chocolate. Enjoy the rest of your paranoid life.
It's sad, but we have limited amounts of fields and only so many resources(in dollar equivalents).
We have plenty of fields. The U.S. produces an oversupply of food each year, and has to figure out ways to get rid of the excess (foreign aid, high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed, corn ethanol). The reason is because we implemented policies to ensure overproduction, to avoid a repeat of the food shortages which followed the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. And population growth in Canada and the U.S. is less than one percent a year, trending towards zero growth. There is no need to maximize yield per acre here, just a profit incentive to do so.
The vast majority of the world's population growth is in third world countries. Developed nations all have population growth rates near zero or even negative. There's something about living in a modern post-industrialized economy which makes people want to have fewer kids. So the solution to feeding the burgeoning world population isn't to maximize yield per acre. It's to assist those third world countries in developing their economies so they too can become post-industrialized nations. If you instead concentrate on making more food, that population growth will just continue a vicious cycle of poverty and high population growth, until starvation and fighting over food finally caps it.
The other funny part is its use will be a footnote in history "soon". Too many resistant weeds are spreading.
That's incredibly ironic. Monsanto's earliest court victory for patent infringement on Roundup-Ready GM crops was in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court bought Monsanto's argument that even if the farmer didn't know why the crop he found on his fields was resistant to Roundup, he "should have known" the only possible reason was that it contained Monsanto's patented gene. And thus they found him guilty of patent infringement.
So it's nice to know now that Monsanto's argument in court was complete bunk, and the Canadian courts erred in finding in their favor. Is it too much to hope for compensation for the farmers for this gross miscarriage of justice? The original farmer was only fined $1 since he didn't use Roundup on his crop and thus didn't benefit from the GM crop (which was another huge problem with the case - how can someone be guilty of something for which he has no motive?). But thousands of other farmers were forced to pay Monsanto's licensing fees because the GM crop somehow managed to find its way onto their fields.
a) iPhone's never had turn-by-turn direction built-in, this is a new feature which the Google Maps app never had.
WTF? The iPhone was missing a major feature which Android has had for over two years, and which my regular phone has had since 2004? Navigation was one of my reasons for upgrading to a smartphone - so I wouldn't have to pay for a dedicated in-car GPS and map updates, and I was tired of squinting at a map on a 1.5" screen.
Wait a sec. Double-WTF? You mean all those in-car stands and dash mounts for the iPhone I see are for nothing more than playing music and hands-free calls?
Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. It was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into a morass of misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly for families sharing a single AOL account. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly taken up by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things the best balance is probably somewhere in between.
You do know that inflation is set by the CPI, which is (wait for it) a basket of commodity prices. The basket contents change periodically, but are relatively stable. If inflation were going up 11-15% per year, I would have seen my real purchasing power go down by half in the past 6 years, and yet it hasn't been anywhere close to that. Most of the stuff I buy is probably averaging 20% higher than it was 5-6 years ago which is (surprise!) about 3.5%. If you just look at gold and gasoline, you're going to get a mighty skewed picture of what "inflation" is.
Compared to 2005-2006 (before the financial meltdown - change the first date on the chart to 2005) the US dollar weighted against other currencies is down about 10%-15%. In reality it's probably down more since the dollar index fund is weighted heavily with the Euro, and the EU has been nearly as bad off as the U.S. (If you go as far back as the late 1990s, it's down even more, but I would argue the late 1990s the USD was overvalued due to the tech bubble.)
So yes you're not seeing much annual inflation via the CPI. But that's because over 90% of the U.S. economy is based on domestic trade. If the dollar declines in value, 90% of what you buy stays the same price. Measured against the rest of the world, inflation in the U.S. has been running at a higher clip than is indicated by the CPI. It's just been mostly disguised in devaluation of the US Dollar.
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Therein is the conundrum. What you say is true if it has the force of law. If everyone must abide by the standard, then clearly the consumer-friendly choice is opt-in for tracking.
Unfortunately this particular standard doesn't have the force of law. It's also opt-in for the advertisers. The choice here isn't a simple binary track/don't track. It's a 2x2 grid with consumers wanting/not wanting tracking on one axis, and advertisers respecting/not respecting consumers' wishes on the other. And the advertisers' choice is dominant. If they choose not to respect the standard, then the consumers' choice is irrelevant - they're going to be tracked either way. i.e. the only way consumers are not going to be tracked is if they choose not to be tracked and advertisers choose to respect the do-not-track flag. Pissing off advertisers to the point where they choose not to respect the standard has the same results as not having the standard at all.
Microsoft has made the politically expedient choice here. They've staked out a position where they can claim to be protecting consumers, while simultaneously almost guaranteeing do-not-track will fail thus in actuality protecting advertisers.
C'mon people, this is slashdot. Conservation of energy still applies. A bunch of microquakes cannot cause a Fukushima. A Fukushima can only happen when sufficient energy for a Fukushima-level quake has already built up in the rock. A microquake may then trigger the Fukushima quake, but it did not in itself cause the Fukushima quake. The cause is the Fukushima-level energy that's already been stored in the rock. If the microquake had not happened, the energy for the Fukushima quake would still be there, still waiting to be released due to some other event. The only way to prevent it is to release it before it reaches Fukushima-levels.
You're literally trying to blame the straw that broke the camel's back, while completely ignoring everything else that was loaded atop before.
The best analogy is probably with avalanches. If you let the snow pack build up naturally, it results in a huge avalanche when it gives way naturally. One of the options to prevent that is to fire artillery at it. The concussion loosens the snowpack and causes a small avalanche, dispersing the potential energy that's been built up while it's still small, before it can build up into a huge devastating avalanche.
Same thing is going on with fracking. The fracking itself isn't creating the earthquakes. It injects nowhere near enough energy to actually create an earthquake (indeed if it were injecting that much energy, it would defeat the whole purpose of fracking since they're trying to extract energy in the form of oil and gas). The earthquake energy is coming from natural tectonic forces within the earth. The fracking just triggers an already-pending earthquake while it's still small.
So the earthquakes clustered around fracking sites is actually a good thing. We should be doing more fracking - especially in earthquake-prone areas like the U.S. West coast. It's only considered bad due to our perverted legal culture where people are penalized for blame, but not rewarded for prevention. If you leave everything alone and there's a huge earthquake/avalanche, it's a natural event and nobody is to blame. But if someone tries to mitigate the earthquake/avalanche by deliberately triggering it before it can become massive, they are to blame and legally liable for all resulting damage.
The same problem (legal liability for earthquakes) killed deep well geothermal, which was probably our best bet for 100% renewable and 100% clean energy. It angered me at first, but I decided if we as a species are not mature enough to see why there shouldn't be legal liability for these earthquakes, then we as a species do not deserve 100% renewable and clean energy. We deserve to breathe in, eat, and die in the crap we produce from other energy sources.
Virtually none of the notebook brands (Apple included) actually design and make their notebooks. They're made by ODMs - original design manufacturers. The brand then slaps on their label (or in Apple's case, has their logo cut into the design) before reselling it to you. The only brands which make their own product are Asus (which spun off their manufacturing division as Pegatron in 2007) and Acer (which spun off their manufacturing division as Wistron in 2000 so probably aren't as closely tied anymore). Aside from those two, I know Sony usually designs and manufactures its top tier notebooks in Japan, and Lenovo may still design and manufacture the Thinkpad line on its own.
The ODM which makes the Macbooks is Quanta, who also happens to make most of HPs and some of Dell's notebooks. Ever wonder why some of HP's and Dell's notebooks look like Macbooks? They weren't copying - they were probably designed and manufactured by the exact same Quanta employees. You thought Apple's huge profit margins were due to superior manufacturing? They're huge because they've figured out a way to sell essentially the same product they receive from Quanta at a much higher price than HP and Dell have been able to.
So the only thing the brand label really tells you is how good the post-sale support and warranty service will be. It tells you almost nothing about build quality. To categorize build quality, you need to know which ODM made which model, and the entire industry is very hush-hush about that info.
Most not-useful geeky and cool projects do not cost ~20% of geeks' gross annual salary. When you start getting to that level of expenditure, it's not surprising that people start to question the cost effectiveness of the project compared to off-the-shelf alternatives.
When the SCotUS declines to hear a case, they don't give a reason why. The reasons can range anywhere from "Well duh, obviously the lower court was right" as you claim, to "We really don't know, but would like it and other similar lawsuits to kick around the lower courts some more to build up more opinions before we take a look at it." It's highly unusual for the SCotUS to take up the first case of its type to reach them - that usually only happens when there's a blatant violation of the Constitution in a law. They don't like working in a vacuum, and having multiple lower courts from all over the country weighing in on an issue before they tackle it helps them be sure that the issue has been thoroughly explored before they give their weighty and final say on the matter.
This is what we really need to be looking out for on the copyright front. The law is currently being made to deal with stuff like books, music, movies, and software. But long term it's also going to apply to real, physical objects. The issue first cropped up with copyrights for weaving design patterns. Soon we're going to have 3D printers. Eventually we'll probably have Star Trek-like molecular replicators. It means someone is going to "own" the shapes you might print on your 3D printer.
Eventually there will be a huge cost drop as we transition from manufacturing a part via a custom manufacturing process to just creating it with generic 3D printing equipment. Much like switching from movable type and typewriters to dot-matrix, ink, and laser printers reduced cost, while dramatically increasing flexibility in what you could print (different fonts and even graphics). If we're not careful, or approach copyright as if it's only about intangibles like music or software, we're going to be setting ourselves up for a century where this huge drop in the cost to manufacture could have been used to greatly improve mankind (e.g. people in 3rd world countries printing their own hammers, saws, and nails; replacement gears for motors, etc). But instead most of the benefit of that cost drop is going to end up lining the pockets of copyright holders because of our ridiculous life + 70 years copyright terms.
That's what I see being most important in the next 20-50 years. If copyright reform fails (which is a good bet), we need an early database of open source 3D CAD drawings for all sorts of generic household and commercial items. Tools, motors, plumbing, fixtures, basic electronics, gears and transmissions, etc. So when the day comes, some ratfink bastard company can't go around suing anyone trying to distribute 3D print models for hammers because they claim to own the copyright on all 3D drawings of bludgeoning implements. (That's the problem with Apple's victory based on its iPhone design patent. Rather than clearly define what shapes it owns so other companies can steer clear when making their own designs, the courts are doing it backwards. Other companies are left to blindly make products, then a court decides based on nebulous and impossible to describe criteria if its too close to Apple's design. It's an incredibly wasteful process, and the only sure defense is to have a documented older design.)
The legal drinking age in Germany is 14 (for undistilled drinks given by a parent or guardian). By this court's reasoning, if a family went on vacation in Germany for Octoberfest and dad gave his 14 yo son a beer to drink, then it's a Washington State parent giving alcohol to an underage Washington State child, and he would be subject to fines and jail under the drinking laws of Washington State.
The solution is simple. Change the laws so you can sue lawyers for malpractice. They're always talking about how important malpractice lawsuits are for preserving public safety and keeping other professions honest. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Yup. That's the reason a lot of early computer systems came with Arial as their default font. Arial = Helvetica clone, but apparently the copyright holder charged less for licenses than Helvetica's copyright holder. Later, Microsoft commissioned Verdana (Helvetica almost-clone) and Georgia (Times New Roman almost-clone) so they wouldn't have to get licenses for Windows' default fonts. (Macs were used widely in the publishing industry, so Apple pretty much had to pay for licenses to Helvetica and Times New Roman.)
The fact that female faculty had similar salary valuation disparity as male faculty would suggest there's no misogynistic bias going on here. Rather, that all faculty are weighing in other factors which on their own may be legitimate, but the factors themselves have a built-in gender bias.
e.g. What are the statistics on male researchers who start off in a field, get married, have kids, then retire to stay at home to take care of the kids; versus women who do the same? Maybe the faculty are automatically factoring in the likelihood that the hired lab manager will quit the job at some point in the future, forcing them to expend additional resources hiring and training a new manager. And this is deemed more likely to happen with female hirees than with male.
That's not to say it has to be this way. For the disabled, we've already decided as a society that the additional cost of giving the disabled equal access to job opportunities (handicap access, assistance equipment, etc) is worth paying. Yes treating them equally will cost us more, but it's a cost we're willing to pay for the results it generates. I don't see a problem with that. But it's something society should knowingly choose to implement, not something snuck in under the pretense of preventing "unjustified" discrimination.
Admittedly my phone is 2 years old, but when did this change? When I got my phone (Android 2.2), it did not come with Google Maps preinstalled. The default mapping app was some Sprint Navigation thing which got 1 fps while sucking up battery life because it didn't use 3D hardware acceleration. I tried a bunch of GPS mapping apps before settling two. One for offline use, and Google Maps for online use.
Generally when one makes a prediction, one sets out the conditions by which the prediction will be measured at the time the prediction is made. e.g. If you make a prediction about phone OS share, then it's a prediction about phone OS share. If the prediction turns out wrong, you don't get to retroactively change it to include other data to make it arrive at the result you want.
Within those confines, you're free to compare and predict whatever you want. If you want to make a prediction about phones, you make it about phones. If you want to make a prediction about phones + tablets, that's what you predict. If you want to make a prediction about iOS taking over the world and displacing Windows, that's what you predict.
There are thousands of different metrics which one could use to measure success. If you're free to pick and choose which one to use after the fact, it's almost a statistical certainty that there will be some metric which supports your hypothesis. That's why all the investment firms advertising their "top-performing funds" are bunk. Whether or not they have some funds which out-performed the market by 40% last year is irrelevant. What matters is how likely a customer was to have picked one of those funds before they out-performed the market.
That's why you need to set the conditions of a prediction at the time of the prediction. e.g. Investment firm predicts that their funds A, B, and C will outperform the market by 40% the following year. If you don't establish these conditions ahead of time, you're just cherry-picking data which fits your hypothesis.
That's the criticism being leveled against Apple supporters. First it was all about the UI. Then when that was matched it suddenly became about size (screen size and thinness of the iPad). When those were surpassed, it suddenly became about market share. Since iOS is a distant second now, it's suddenly about profits. At this point it's obvious to pretty much all unbiased observers that Apple supporters are just cherry-picking whatever stats support their argument that iOS is superior.
This has nothing to do with the conclusion of the argument - Apple products could very well be the best thing since sliced bread. But if the arguments supporting that assertion are this mutable and fickle, their reliability as an indicator of the strength of the conclusion is highly suspect. Statisticians, scientists, and people trying to be unbiased do not simply morph their argument every time it's disproven. They first question the validity of the hypothesis around which the argument was based. Failure to question the initial hypothesis is a pretty strong indicator of bias. Which was OP's point.
The key difference here is that Apple's App Store is your only way to get binaries onto an iOS device. If you don't like Google's Market/Play policies, you can use any of the countless other markets for Android. Heck, you don't even need a market. Just put your Android app binary on any old web page and give people the URL.
The entire rationale of a reusable spacecraft was predicated on the assumption that we'd have weekly launches. The initial concept of the program foresaw 50+ launches a year. That was the only way to justify the cost of the massive support organization needed to inspect and refurbish the orbiters after each flight, vs. ordinary single-use rockets. Unfortunately, we never came close to that, averaging 4.5 launches per year. Consequently, the Shuttle became the cadillac of launch vehicles. Its lifetime per-launch cost works out to just over $10,000 per kg of payload, vs. $3000-$5000 per kg for other launch vehicles, with Falcon X approaching $2000/kg.
They are a marvel of engineering, and the iconic face of space travel for over a quarter century. But they were also white elephants which consumed half or more of NASA's budget, harming multiple other missions whose primary goal was science instead of putting people into orbit. Don't blame the politicians for killing the program. Blame them for not funding a replacement as soon as it became obvious we weren't going to get anywhere close to 50 launches/yr. Instead they hemmed and hawed, until the Shuttles were forced into retirement because their components began exceeding their lifetime expectancy certification. And the politicians still haven't decided on a replacement.
The Shuttles were built with U.S. taxpayer dollars. Hence it's technically already owned by U.S. citizens. The auction is more to decide which citizen should get each piece, not to make back the cost of building the things.
And they don't work on Earth (except underwater if you strategically attach floats). The actuators don't have enough torque for the arm to lift its own weight. Weight not being a factor in orbit.
Standard rate to license a quarter-page photo for publications of 10,000 or fewer is about $200-$400. So you'd need a really small run of textbooks for each photo to cost $1 per book.
My guess would be it's a ploy to "encourage" students to by the digital version which has the photos hotlinked. If my hunch is right, it'll cost the publisher nothing to "print" the digital version, but they'll still charge ~$180 for it. And the students can't sell it used to next year's students.
Anyone serious about the visual arts will have their monitor calibrated. The Macs which seem to be ubiquitous among art students even come with their screens pre-calibrated (one of the reasons they're popular among artists). For years Safari was the only browser which used color profiles embedded in JPEGs.
1) The major Iodine isotope from fission of Uranium-235 is Iodine-131. It has a half-life of 8 days. Of all the I-131 which was dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, 0.00000000000000000024% of it remains today.
2) Unless you live in certain areas with high natural background radiation (like Colorado), your largest annual dose of radiation comes from Potassium-40. It's a naturally occurring isotope of Potassium. About 0.01% of all Potassium is K-40. Our nerves need Potassium to function so you cannot reduce your Potassium intake to avoid it. Foods high in K-40 include potatoes, grapes/raisins, lima beans, spinach, tomatoes, oranges, bananas, and chocolate. Enjoy the rest of your paranoid life.
We have plenty of fields. The U.S. produces an oversupply of food each year, and has to figure out ways to get rid of the excess (foreign aid, high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed, corn ethanol). The reason is because we implemented policies to ensure overproduction, to avoid a repeat of the food shortages which followed the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. And population growth in Canada and the U.S. is less than one percent a year, trending towards zero growth. There is no need to maximize yield per acre here, just a profit incentive to do so.
The vast majority of the world's population growth is in third world countries. Developed nations all have population growth rates near zero or even negative. There's something about living in a modern post-industrialized economy which makes people want to have fewer kids. So the solution to feeding the burgeoning world population isn't to maximize yield per acre. It's to assist those third world countries in developing their economies so they too can become post-industrialized nations. If you instead concentrate on making more food, that population growth will just continue a vicious cycle of poverty and high population growth, until starvation and fighting over food finally caps it.
That's incredibly ironic. Monsanto's earliest court victory for patent infringement on Roundup-Ready GM crops was in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court bought Monsanto's argument that even if the farmer didn't know why the crop he found on his fields was resistant to Roundup, he "should have known" the only possible reason was that it contained Monsanto's patented gene. And thus they found him guilty of patent infringement.
So it's nice to know now that Monsanto's argument in court was complete bunk, and the Canadian courts erred in finding in their favor. Is it too much to hope for compensation for the farmers for this gross miscarriage of justice? The original farmer was only fined $1 since he didn't use Roundup on his crop and thus didn't benefit from the GM crop (which was another huge problem with the case - how can someone be guilty of something for which he has no motive?). But thousands of other farmers were forced to pay Monsanto's licensing fees because the GM crop somehow managed to find its way onto their fields.
WTF? The iPhone was missing a major feature which Android has had for over two years, and which my regular phone has had since 2004? Navigation was one of my reasons for upgrading to a smartphone - so I wouldn't have to pay for a dedicated in-car GPS and map updates, and I was tired of squinting at a map on a 1.5" screen.
Wait a sec. Double-WTF? You mean all those in-car stands and dash mounts for the iPhone I see are for nothing more than playing music and hands-free calls?
Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. It was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into a morass of misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly for families sharing a single AOL account. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly taken up by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things the best balance is probably somewhere in between.
Compared to 2005-2006 (before the financial meltdown - change the first date on the chart to 2005) the US dollar weighted against other currencies is down about 10%-15%. In reality it's probably down more since the dollar index fund is weighted heavily with the Euro, and the EU has been nearly as bad off as the U.S. (If you go as far back as the late 1990s, it's down even more, but I would argue the late 1990s the USD was overvalued due to the tech bubble.)
So yes you're not seeing much annual inflation via the CPI. But that's because over 90% of the U.S. economy is based on domestic trade. If the dollar declines in value, 90% of what you buy stays the same price. Measured against the rest of the world, inflation in the U.S. has been running at a higher clip than is indicated by the CPI. It's just been mostly disguised in devaluation of the US Dollar.