Enshrine the separation of hardware and software in all electronics, and enshrine that owners cannot be locked out of their own devices.
Actually, in this case, I think it's simpler than that. The owner of a pipe should not own what's transmitted over the pipe. This is true for electricity, gas, water, etc. It's slowly becoming true for cable TV and phone service. And it needs to become true cellular phone service. The cellular service providers should be prohibited from owning the towers. The companies which own the towers should contract out access to the service providers, and the service providers sell monthly plans to you and me. That way the tower owners compete directly based on the quality of their tower connections. And the service providers compete directly based on the cost-effectiveness of their plans. None of this stupid "I hate Verizon's plans, but they have the best coverage so I subscribe to them" BS.
This caused consumers to pay for redundant towers everywhere which is one of the reasons why most of Europe has faster and cheaper cell service than the US.
Actually Europe had slower cell service because the EU mandated GSM. GSM is a TDMA technology. In TDMA, the phones basically take turns talking with the tower. The tower divides each 1/20th of a sec into timeslices. Each phone gets one timeslice per 1/20th sec, regardless of whether or not it has anything to say. If I'm talking with my mom and there's a 10 second pause while she looks for something, my GSM phone still takes up all its timeslice of the tower's time, wasting the bandwidth. Same if I was using a data connection to browse the web and paused to read the slashdot comments I just downloaded. The phone was still connected to the tower, so it still got its timeslice, wasting the bandwidth.
But the U.S. decided to take a hands-off approach and let the technologies compete. Half the carriers went with GSM, the other half went with CDMA. And when data services started to become important, CDMA completely wiped the floor with GSM. CDMA is based on orthogonal codes, like one person writing on a chalkboard horizontally while another writes on it rotated 90 degrees. They're overwriting each other, but because the letters have enough distinguishing marks, you can read what both have written. The key here is that CDMA doesn't waste bandwidth. As you approach capacity, the noise floor (from codes overwriting each other) increases until the error correction can't cope. But if someone has an active voice or data connection, but isn't saying or transmitting anything, then there's no noise added, and no bandwidth used.
This is why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data service more than a year sooner than GSM carriers. CDMA won. There was simply no way for GSM technology to compete as a data service because it wasted so much bandwidth. GSM was forced to take an extra year to design completely new (non-TDMA) data protocols, and add a second radio to GSM phones for data (since the GSM voice radio was TDMA-only). Many if not most of the data protocols were based on CDMA or wideband CDMA, they just disguised the fact by adding it to the GSM standard. So even if you have a GSM phone, there's a good chance you used CDMA for data prior to 4G. (Incidentally, this is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM networks. It wasn't because GSM was better. It was because it was worse, and they were forced to add a second radio to GSM phones just for data. CDMA uses the same radio for voice and 3G data. The limitation is gone with 4G, since LTE requires a different radio than GSM voice or CDMA voice. Unless you do a stupid design like the iPhone.)
So you can thank the U.S.' free-market approach and the CDMA carriers for the high-speed cellular data network speeds you enjoy today. If the entire world had standardized on GSM, it would've taken years longer for data speeds to reach what they are today because there would've been no competing high-speed data service to shame GSM into improving. (LTE is based on orthogonal frequencies - similar concept to CDMA except the orthogonality is in the frequencies used by each device instead of the coded signals. It requires more CPU cycles to untangle the different signals, CPU cycles which consumed too much power previously, but which is now within reach of a mobile device which has to last a day on battery.)
As for your number of towers argument, the TDMA for GSM voice (yes, voice transmissions still use TDMA in GSM) artificially limits the range of the tower. For the phone to communicate with the tower during its timeslice, its signals traveling at the speed of light have to reach the tower before the majority of its timeslice is over. This artificially limits the range of a GSM tower to about 20 miles. If you want to cover
My household insurance included phone cover (I didn't buy it for that reason) so my phone is insured; however I wouldn't have bought a separate policy if it wasn't.
The same thing came up in the photo forums when people pointed out that many homeowners' insurance policies also covered camera gear. But then others pointed out the drawback: Do you really want to risk having your home's insurance renewal be denied because you made a claim for a broken lens?
Your home insurance policy is for covering something you cannot possibly afford to replace if it burns down or is otherwise destroyed. Don't put it at risk over something whose cost is so trivial you can fix it by not eating out a few times. If you want to protect your trinkets with insurance, get a separate policy.
Most manufacturers do not have direct access to the retail market. The manufacturer is in the business of making products, not the business of transporting them or estimating market demand. So they sell to (or contract with) a distributor, who sells to the retail stores. Consequently, they don't have access to units sold figures.
The way they get around this is to track units shipped. If products sit on the shelf a certain time (or is returned as defective), the retailer then sends them back (or sometimes the manufacturer authorizes a price cut, as with the HP Touchpad). The units shipped figure is then modified to remove these returns. Now, if you think about it, I'm sure you can figure out what number you get when you take the number of units sent out, and subtract the number of units sent back. C'mon. You can do it. It's not that hard. That's right! Units sold! It's a miracle! Behold the power of math!
Apple is different. They have their own retail stores, and they negotiate directly with retailers. Consequently, they have direct access to units sold figures. But the elementary-school level math used to convert units shipped to units sold means units shipped is just as good as units sold except for short-term sales figures.
Most of Android marketshare comes from prepaid and free-after-subsidy low end phones with no margin.
This argument is undercut by the post above. Apple sells older versions of its phones at lower price points. Currently iPhones range from top tier (5) to free with plan (formerly 3GS, now will be 4). Same as Android phones. So no you can't argue that Android's greater market share is because they're giving the phones away for free. They give iPhones away for free too.
Both types of phones now compete across the entire price spectrum. If iPhones are disproportionately newer model phones, that tells you that iPhone buyers disproportionately are the type of people who must have the latest and greatest, instead of trying to get the most bang for their buck.
This is why every Android manufacturer combined times 4 doesn't equal only Apple's profit.
Which is what all the Android fans have been trying to tell you all this time - the iPhone is ridiculously overpriced. Apple demands substantially more money for it from carriers than Android phones. So much that the carriers either make no money or lose money on it. In essence, iPhone buyers are being subsidized by Android phone buyers. If Apple got its wish and Android were banned from the market, the iPhone and phone plans would be considerably more expensive.
Or another way to put it - iPhone sales are inflated because carriers are letting you have a $900 phone (their cost) for $600 (your cost without subsidies). If market prices actually reflected reality (i.e. the industry scrapped this stupid subsidy model and went to a standard loan/financing model), iPhone sales would be considerably worse than they currently are. The current market shares and profit margins you see for the iPhone are inflated due to a masterful marketing machine and inefficient industry practices (your monthly plan costs the same regardless of the cost of your "subsidized" phone).
(This isn't a dig at iPhone users. They are doing the smart thing getting an $900 phone for $600, even if the price differential is simply cachet and pure profit for Apple. I'm just pointing out that the market share and profit figures are distorted in Apple's favor due to inefficient industry practices. The "subsidy" model worked for fleecing customers because carriers could charge you $480 in "subsidies" for a $200 phone because you never got to see the math behind the subsidy. But as always happens when you deliberately create a market inefficiency, someone else figured out a way to leverage that inefficiency to fleece the carriers.)
This. Many of my older computers became useless when running a virus scan. The hard drive is constantly busy reading files, vastly slowing down hard drive accesses for other tasks. With my current SSD system, I can run a virus scan and two anti-spyware scans simultaneously, and continue using the computer like normal.
In 2005, physicist Jorge Hurst suggested the h-index, a quantitative way to measure the success of scientists via their publication record. This score takes into account both the number and the quality of papers a researcher has published, with quality measured as the number of times each paper has been cited in peer-reviewed journals.
That sounds like exactly what Google does with its pagerank search algorithms. Though I suspect Google is much, much further along in thwarting people's attempts to game the system.
Hourly workers face more scrutiny when it comes to meal and break times because they automatically qualify for overtime after 40 hours a week (and 8 hrs/day in some states). Certain employees, most notably executives and administrative workers, are exempt from these overtime requirements, so they don't get paid extra for working beyond 40 hours/week. So it's not really that management has it better. There is just less legal need to monitor management's work hours as closely.
Federal law does not require time off for meals and breaks, but many states do. e.g. California labor law when I ran a business a few years ago was that employees were entitled to a 30 min unpaid meal break for every 8 hours worked, as well as a 15 minute paid break every 4 hours. This cuts both ways. The employee can get in trouble with the company if they exceed their break allowance. But likewise the company can get in trouble with the state if they're not giving you your full break time every day. In California's case, if you refused to take your breaks, I was forced to send you home after 7.5 hours (excluding lunch) but still pay you for 8. The reason being I'd have to pay overtime if you exceeded 8 hours of work in a day (7.5 hours work, 0.5 hours breaks). (There's all sorts of other fun things too like split shifts. I did my best to educate my employees on the legal requirements, so they could notify us if the way we scheduled them was illegal. The requirements are specific and complex enough that it's inevitable that managers will make scheduling mistakes.)
I highly recommend reading up on the labor laws for your state, and discussing any concerns you may have with your coworkers (so you're not fired on the spot as a "troublemaker") and bringing it up with management. They're not monitoring bathroom break time just for the hell of it, they're being very literal in their interpretation of labor laws. But two can play at that game.
Yes, it is insane to pay those who are teaching the children well.
The U.S. already has the second-highest spending per student of any OECD country. And Illinois spends about 10% more than the national average (Table 8). If there's a problem with our education system, it's not due to lack of funds. Schools are already being paid plenty relative to other developed countries. Saying we should just throw more money at the problem is silly.
He's talking about real world inflation, like how much the cost of living has increased, commodity prices that are relevant to the median person, etc. Price of food, price of gasoline, price of real estate/rent, price of sickcare insurance, etc.
You're talking about the completely imaginary govt figure which is a statement of how much the govt has decided to increase CPI indexed transfer payments, social security,.mil pay and pensions, federal pay, etc.
FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).
Each month, BLS data collectors called economic assistants visit or call thousands of retail stores, service establishments, rental units, and doctors' offices, all over the United States, to obtain information on the prices of the thousands of items used to track and measure price changes in the CPI. These economic assistants record the prices of about 80,000 items each month, representing a scientifically selected sample of the prices paid by consumers for goods and services purchased.
He's absolutely correct that inflation as a measure of cost of living has been around 2.5% the last few years as measured by the CPI. Long-term it's closer to 4%-5%. So the operative question is: are the teachers' salary increases keyed to current inflation, or average inflation? That is, is a 2.5% pay raise adequate now, but a 8% pay raise warranted if the CPI jumps 8% in a year? Or are they going to demand a 4.5% pay raise now when inflation is 2.5%, but not complain about a 4.5% pay raise if the CPI jumps 8%?
Much as I like NASA, if that's what it takes to get the deficit under control, then that's what needs to happen.
This won't do squat about getting the deficit under control. The cause of the deficit is Medicare/Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office has been telling us this for over a dozen years. Left as it is, Medicare/Medicaid will consume all tax revenue in 50-70 years. All the savings from cutting defense since the 1960s (when it consumed over 10% of GDP - half the federal budget) has been counteracted by growth in Medicare/Medicaid.
Unfortunately, (1) The most powerful voting block is retired people, who are the primary beneficiaries of Medicaid/Medicare. They vote against anyone suggesting it be cut or restructured to slow its growth. And (2) most members of one of the major political parties absolutely refuse to believe social programs are the cause of our budget woes (they're excluded from the automatic cuts if sequestration hits). They think everything can be fixed by cutting defense spending, even though we'd still be running a budget deficit if we dropped military spending to zero. And no, FICA taxes do not cover Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Medicare/Medicaid outlays have exceeded Medicare/Medicaid tax revenue for over a decade, and Social Security outlays began exceeding Social Security tax revenue in 2010. We've known for 3 Presidents exactly what the problem is. We've just refused to do anything about it.
Switching to just a micro-USB would have been stupid as you can't get analog audio or HD video through USB 2.0.
So putting in an industry-standard micro-USB port, an industry-standard micro-HDMI port, and an industry-standard 3.5mm analog audio jack like other phones do is stupid. But combining them all into a proprietary port makes perfect sense?
Meanwhile, Sharp has a solar panel that is 43% efficient. Lets contrast that with the theoretical maximum of 59% for wind mills. there's a 16 percent advantage.
Once you factor in night, that 43% efficiency drops to 21.5%. The wind turbine still works at night. The solar panel doesn't.
You need to take into account capacity factor. Overall average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is 0.14. That is, if your solar panels have a nominal generating capacity of 100 Watts, their output averaged over a year after you factor in night, bad weather, angle of the sun, and maintenance is about 14 Watts. 14 Watts in real-world use per 100 Watts of rated capacity. The desert Southwest can get up to 0.18-0.19, but for the country overall it's 0.14.
Wind's capacity factor on land is about 0.20-0.25. Ideal locations (certain areas of Scotland, Spain, Portugul, and offshore) can hit 0.40-0.50. So multiply your max conversion efficiencies with capacity factor and you get solar = 6% best case, wind = 12% worst case.
I'm a strong nuclear proponent, but even I've been saying that wind has been on the cusp of becoming cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. Solar OTOH is still over 5x more expensive.
Thirty years of UI interface design where the obvious thing was to stop abruptly when you came to the beginning/end say: WHAT?
Try 25 years of UI interface design when computers didn't have power to spare to do anything more profligate than stop abruptly when you got to the end of a scroll. Smooth scrolling is relatively new too. Do you think it's worthy of a patent just because nobody had the spare CPU cycles to do it before?
Naw, the mistake here is assuming the cause of the problem is people whacking the cameras. They're not the cause. Frustration at the cameras is the cause. Adding a second camera doesn't address the cause, it just escalates the situation. Which means people whacking the cameras will escalate as well - they'll shoot them from range.
Any engineer worth his salt was taught about the time response of second order linear systems - spring, mass, damper. The scroll bounce is just the transient response of such a system to a step function when tuned to be slightly underdamped (light blue line in the figure).
It's obvious as hell and the only reason I can fathom why it's being upheld is because its merits are being judged by people who are clueless about math or engineering. This is as bad as the XOR cursor patent, which was also a patent on the graphical representation of a function widely known and commonly used in the respective industry.
The company hiring you will likely require you to meet several conditions, including incorporation, to protect themselves. Remember that guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Texas a couple years back? His beef with the IRS was a section of tax code which will affect you if you get laid off or quit from your primary job.
Basically, the IRS makes it hard for a company to justify hiring a programmer as an independent consultant. If they hire you like that and the IRS determines that you're actually employed by them, they're liable for the employer's share of all your back taxes even if you've been diligently paying your self employment taxes. (Yes, your employer pays part of your FICA taxes. That's what the "self employment" tax is - when you're self-employed you get to pay both your share and the employer's share of the FICA taxes.) To avoid this possibility, most companies require contracting programmers to be employees of a hiring agency, or self incorporated with multiple sources of income. If you're not employed by someone else, or the consulting you do for them is your only job, the IRS could still find that you're an employee. And they get to pay half of your FICA back taxes.
Right now you're spared from all this because you have another job. But if you should be laid off or quit to concentrate on this contracting work, you will become subject to this section of tax code. HR and Accounting at the company you're working for will want nothing to do with you unless you (A) find another job, or (B) incorporate and have more than one simultaneous consulting gig, or (C) incorporate with another person to form your own 2+ person "hiring agency". (The NYT article is a bit ambiguous - staffing firms are only a problem if they're only acting as job hunter for you. If you're employed by them and they're paying your employment taxes, then it's not a problem.
The relevant terms for you to google if you want to research this more are irs section 1706 530.
I'm an avid fisherman and amateur ichthyologist. Tuna mature in 3-5 years. The average lifespan of most tuna species is estimated to be about 8-15 years old. Counting the rings in the otoliths (ear bones) showed world record yellowfin tuna in the 400 lb range to be about 13-15 years old. The vast majority of yellowfin, bigeye, and bluefin tuna (the bigger ones) harvested commercially are in the 50-150 pound range (roughly 4-7 years). The older ones build up too much mercury (thanks to everyone who blocks nuclear so we can continue burning coal) and are legally only usable as pet food. Except for the Japanese who don't seem to care when it comes to raw bluefin tuna.
And dispersant is soap. Yeah some formulations are more toxic than others - boaters are encouraged to use biodegradable marine soaps at sea. But they're not all some potent chemical cocktail which will cause life to wither and die on contact. It's soap.
The bacteria digested the oil, but what did they excrete. If they multiplied and now have no meal, they starve, and their carcasses in turn become something else. There was a process applied to the spilled oil by the bacteria. Is the remainder environmentally tenable? None of that seems to have been addressed.
Most oil spills aren't man-made. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release an estimated 1 million barrels of oil per year (one ton of oil is about 6-8 barrels). The Deepwater Horizon spill was estimated to be just shy of 5 million barrels. So it was a substantial increase over natural oil seeps for the year. But in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a substantial deviation from the amount of bacteria which digest oil, excrete whatever it is they excrete, and decompose.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was a local disaster with large transient effects. But its long-term effects on the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico will be minimal if not negligible because the ecosystem has already been dealing with similarly large quantities of oil being released naturally every year for millions of years. The key was to disperse the oil so it could be broken down naturally (if at an artificially accelerated rate for a few years) by already-existing natural mechanisms, rather than allowed to clump up at the surface in an unnatural manner. The only question is what the long-term effects of the dispersants (soap) will be.
Apple's view is that an app should be hand-customized to support the resolution and screen size of the device, not shoehorned in by an automated scaling routine.
If the pixels are too small to distinguish with the eye, then who cares if the UI is scaled?
Remember, CRTs were essentially resolution scaled. The phosphors were too small to distinguish with the eye, so you could project any resolution on top of them. (LCDs were "sharper" only because they introduced high-frequency noise in the form of straight pixel edges. You needed to turn on ClearType to make non-bitmapped text look as smooth and clear on an LCD as it appeared on a CRT. And given that Apple was at the forefront of pushing non-bitmapped fonts via Postscript and Adobe Type Manager, it's highly ironic that they're now pushing for what's essentially bitmapped fonts and UIs.)
And arrogant people, (and companies, and banks), who crow about how secure their systems are, are just asking for it. Serves the fuckers right; but it's too bad that credit card holders are paying the price for their creditors' arrogance.
If it came out of the pockets of the credit card holders, it probably would've been fixed long ago. The problem is that the credit card companies have gamed it so that it comes out the pockets of the merchants. And no merchant can realistically refuse to accept credit cards if he's serious about running a business. The credit card companies have even managed to trick most card holders into thinking that they're doing the noble thing and paying for fraud, when in most cases it's the merchant who pays. After all, those high interest rates and annual fees have to be paying for something, not going straight into their pocket, right?
The analogy between labor and employers works here. Merchants need a union so they can negotiate on an even footing with the 3 credit card companies which control the vast majority of the electronic transaction market.
I can think of few flaws with the superheated steam idea off the top of my head.
1) The ambient temperature is below freezing. Seawater has a freezing temperature of about -2 C. The ice is fresh water - freezing forces out most of the impurities like salt (which is why people have suggested towing icebergs to lower latitudes as sources of fresh water). Consequently, any ice which gets melted would simply re-freeze solid again when it contacted the surrounding ocean water. It'd be like trying to cut your way through a metal floor over a meter thick using a blowtorch. The metal you manage to melt would simply flow and resolidify as it reached the bottom. Any advantage of ice being brittle is lost when you're introducing liquid water which will flow into and seal any cracks you manage to make the moment the crack reaches the ocean underneath.
2) Steam is uncontained. It flows and spreads out when it encounters resistance, thus decreasing the force at any point. The beauty of moving your ship on top of an ice sheet is that the weight of the ship is borne by the singular point of ice which is highest. That's what causes it to fracture even though the sheet as a whole may be able to support the weight of the ship. A similar strategy is used for the pilings of offshore oil rigs in areas which get iced over. If you try to build them to just resist the ice, they will be crushed and fail. Instead, they're designed with a curvature which lifts the ice. A flat ice sheet resting on a curved surface means all the weight of the ice is borne by a single point, easily causing it to fracture and move around the piling.
3) Water has a fairly high heat capacity and heat of vaporization (it takes a lot of energy to heat it up and to convert it to steam). The Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers I find on Google are listed as 21,000 tons with a draft of 9 meters (the bottom of the ship extends 9 meters below the waterline). So raising the front half of it above 1.5 meters of ice requires mgh = (21,000/2 tons)(9.8 m/s^2)(10.5 meters) = 9.8x10^8 joules of energy. Water has a heat capacity of 4.2 J/g*K and a heat of vaporization of 2260 J/g. So taking freezing ocean water and heating it to steam requires 420+2260 = 2680 J/g. 9.8x10^8 joules will let you convert only 367 liters of water to steam. Less if you want to raise it above 100C, and less if you want to pressurize it above 1 atmosphere. And I suspect the icebreakers are designed with a shallower draft at the bow, to ease lifting it above the ice.
My 2-year old laptop has an nVidia GT 330M. At the time it was a mid-range dedicated mobile 3D video card.
Ivy Bridge's HD4000 comes very close to matching its performance while burning a helluva lot less power. So the delta between mid-grade dedicated video and integrated video performance is down to a little over 2 years now. Intel claims Haswell's 3D video is twice as fast as HD4000. If true, that would put it near the performance of the GT 640M, and lower the delta to a bit over 1 year.
This is all the more impressive if you remember that integrated video is hobbled by having to mooch off of system memory. If there were some way to give the HD4000 dedicated VRAM, then you'd have a fairer apples to apples comparison of just how good the chipset's engineering and design are compared to the dedicated offerings of nVidia and AMD.
I used to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but life and work have caught up and I only game casually now. If Haswell pans out, its integrated 3D should be plenty enough for my needs. It may be "crap" to the hardcore gamer, but they haven't figured out yet that in the grand scheme of things, being able to play video games with all the graphics on max is a pretty low priority.
Punitive damages are designed to deter a law breaker whereas the statutory damages written into copyright law are designed to compensate the copyright holder as a proxy for actual damages in the case where they are unable to accurately prove actual damages.
Which is precisely why the "making available" argument is ludicrous. Say 1 person buys a song and shares it with 5000 people via bittorrent. The actual damages suffered by the copyright holder are 5000 illegal copies.
But by the "making available" argument, the copyright holder could sue the 1st filesharer for making available 5000 copies, and collect statutory damages for 5000 copies. Then they could sue the 2nd filesharer and collect for 5000 copies. Then the 3rd filesharer, and so on. By the time they finish suing all 5000 filesharers, they've been awarded statutory damages for 25,000,000 copies of the song, when only 5000 copies were ever made.
It just doesn't add up. If 5000 people make 5000 copies, that's 1 copy per person. The correct statutory damages are therefore 1 copy per person. If you want to go nuts with punitive awards to discourage filesharing, then go ahead. But charging *one* filesharer with statutory damages caused by other filesharers is nonsense.
The only way it makes sense is if suing the one person for making available 5000 copies results in the other 5000 filesharers being indemnified from being sued. Which is precisely what happens when a commercial bootleg CD maker is sued for statutory damages. Y'know, the situation the law was actually written for, not peer to peer filehsaring.
Secondly, I've caught the cord of my phone multiple times and pulled it off the desk onto the floor - and my cats/dogs have probably done it more times than I have.
Actually this is a different problem. If you or your pets are repeatedly tripping on and pulling the power cord from the phone, then moving to a wireless charger won't help -- you/your pets will simply trip on and pull the power cord from the wireless charger. (And if you say "But I'd never move my wireless charger so I could tuck the cable away," then stop being a cheapskate and buy an extra USB adapter and microUSB cable just for charging your phone and tuck that away. The whole reason the EU mandated all manufacturers standardize on microUSB for chargers was to reduce cost for consumers.)
The real solution is to stop putting all power outlets at shin-level. Put a few at desktop level when building the house, or start building desks with a spot to mount a power strip tucked underneath or along the side/back.
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Actually, in this case, I think it's simpler than that. The owner of a pipe should not own what's transmitted over the pipe. This is true for electricity, gas, water, etc. It's slowly becoming true for cable TV and phone service. And it needs to become true cellular phone service. The cellular service providers should be prohibited from owning the towers. The companies which own the towers should contract out access to the service providers, and the service providers sell monthly plans to you and me. That way the tower owners compete directly based on the quality of their tower connections. And the service providers compete directly based on the cost-effectiveness of their plans. None of this stupid "I hate Verizon's plans, but they have the best coverage so I subscribe to them" BS.
Actually Europe had slower cell service because the EU mandated GSM. GSM is a TDMA technology. In TDMA, the phones basically take turns talking with the tower. The tower divides each 1/20th of a sec into timeslices. Each phone gets one timeslice per 1/20th sec, regardless of whether or not it has anything to say. If I'm talking with my mom and there's a 10 second pause while she looks for something, my GSM phone still takes up all its timeslice of the tower's time, wasting the bandwidth. Same if I was using a data connection to browse the web and paused to read the slashdot comments I just downloaded. The phone was still connected to the tower, so it still got its timeslice, wasting the bandwidth.
But the U.S. decided to take a hands-off approach and let the technologies compete. Half the carriers went with GSM, the other half went with CDMA. And when data services started to become important, CDMA completely wiped the floor with GSM. CDMA is based on orthogonal codes, like one person writing on a chalkboard horizontally while another writes on it rotated 90 degrees. They're overwriting each other, but because the letters have enough distinguishing marks, you can read what both have written. The key here is that CDMA doesn't waste bandwidth. As you approach capacity, the noise floor (from codes overwriting each other) increases until the error correction can't cope. But if someone has an active voice or data connection, but isn't saying or transmitting anything, then there's no noise added, and no bandwidth used.
This is why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data service more than a year sooner than GSM carriers. CDMA won. There was simply no way for GSM technology to compete as a data service because it wasted so much bandwidth. GSM was forced to take an extra year to design completely new (non-TDMA) data protocols, and add a second radio to GSM phones for data (since the GSM voice radio was TDMA-only). Many if not most of the data protocols were based on CDMA or wideband CDMA, they just disguised the fact by adding it to the GSM standard. So even if you have a GSM phone, there's a good chance you used CDMA for data prior to 4G. (Incidentally, this is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM networks. It wasn't because GSM was better. It was because it was worse, and they were forced to add a second radio to GSM phones just for data. CDMA uses the same radio for voice and 3G data. The limitation is gone with 4G, since LTE requires a different radio than GSM voice or CDMA voice. Unless you do a stupid design like the iPhone.)
So you can thank the U.S.' free-market approach and the CDMA carriers for the high-speed cellular data network speeds you enjoy today. If the entire world had standardized on GSM, it would've taken years longer for data speeds to reach what they are today because there would've been no competing high-speed data service to shame GSM into improving. (LTE is based on orthogonal frequencies - similar concept to CDMA except the orthogonality is in the frequencies used by each device instead of the coded signals. It requires more CPU cycles to untangle the different signals, CPU cycles which consumed too much power previously, but which is now within reach of a mobile device which has to last a day on battery.)
As for your number of towers argument, the TDMA for GSM voice (yes, voice transmissions still use TDMA in GSM) artificially limits the range of the tower. For the phone to communicate with the tower during its timeslice, its signals traveling at the speed of light have to reach the tower before the majority of its timeslice is over. This artificially limits the range of a GSM tower to about 20 miles. If you want to cover
The same thing came up in the photo forums when people pointed out that many homeowners' insurance policies also covered camera gear. But then others pointed out the drawback: Do you really want to risk having your home's insurance renewal be denied because you made a claim for a broken lens?
Your home insurance policy is for covering something you cannot possibly afford to replace if it burns down or is otherwise destroyed. Don't put it at risk over something whose cost is so trivial you can fix it by not eating out a few times. If you want to protect your trinkets with insurance, get a separate policy.
Most manufacturers do not have direct access to the retail market. The manufacturer is in the business of making products, not the business of transporting them or estimating market demand. So they sell to (or contract with) a distributor, who sells to the retail stores. Consequently, they don't have access to units sold figures.
The way they get around this is to track units shipped. If products sit on the shelf a certain time (or is returned as defective), the retailer then sends them back (or sometimes the manufacturer authorizes a price cut, as with the HP Touchpad). The units shipped figure is then modified to remove these returns. Now, if you think about it, I'm sure you can figure out what number you get when you take the number of units sent out, and subtract the number of units sent back. C'mon. You can do it. It's not that hard. That's right! Units sold! It's a miracle! Behold the power of math!
Apple is different. They have their own retail stores, and they negotiate directly with retailers. Consequently, they have direct access to units sold figures. But the elementary-school level math used to convert units shipped to units sold means units shipped is just as good as units sold except for short-term sales figures.
This argument is undercut by the post above. Apple sells older versions of its phones at lower price points. Currently iPhones range from top tier (5) to free with plan (formerly 3GS, now will be 4). Same as Android phones. So no you can't argue that Android's greater market share is because they're giving the phones away for free. They give iPhones away for free too.
Both types of phones now compete across the entire price spectrum. If iPhones are disproportionately newer model phones, that tells you that iPhone buyers disproportionately are the type of people who must have the latest and greatest, instead of trying to get the most bang for their buck.
Which is what all the Android fans have been trying to tell you all this time - the iPhone is ridiculously overpriced. Apple demands substantially more money for it from carriers than Android phones. So much that the carriers either make no money or lose money on it. In essence, iPhone buyers are being subsidized by Android phone buyers. If Apple got its wish and Android were banned from the market, the iPhone and phone plans would be considerably more expensive.
Or another way to put it - iPhone sales are inflated because carriers are letting you have a $900 phone (their cost) for $600 (your cost without subsidies). If market prices actually reflected reality (i.e. the industry scrapped this stupid subsidy model and went to a standard loan/financing model), iPhone sales would be considerably worse than they currently are. The current market shares and profit margins you see for the iPhone are inflated due to a masterful marketing machine and inefficient industry practices (your monthly plan costs the same regardless of the cost of your "subsidized" phone).
(This isn't a dig at iPhone users. They are doing the smart thing getting an $900 phone for $600, even if the price differential is simply cachet and pure profit for Apple. I'm just pointing out that the market share and profit figures are distorted in Apple's favor due to inefficient industry practices. The "subsidy" model worked for fleecing customers because carriers could charge you $480 in "subsidies" for a $200 phone because you never got to see the math behind the subsidy. But as always happens when you deliberately create a market inefficiency, someone else figured out a way to leverage that inefficiency to fleece the carriers.)
This. Many of my older computers became useless when running a virus scan. The hard drive is constantly busy reading files, vastly slowing down hard drive accesses for other tasks. With my current SSD system, I can run a virus scan and two anti-spyware scans simultaneously, and continue using the computer like normal.
That sounds like exactly what Google does with its pagerank search algorithms. Though I suspect Google is much, much further along in thwarting people's attempts to game the system.
Hourly workers face more scrutiny when it comes to meal and break times because they automatically qualify for overtime after 40 hours a week (and 8 hrs/day in some states). Certain employees, most notably executives and administrative workers, are exempt from these overtime requirements, so they don't get paid extra for working beyond 40 hours/week. So it's not really that management has it better. There is just less legal need to monitor management's work hours as closely.
Federal law does not require time off for meals and breaks, but many states do. e.g. California labor law when I ran a business a few years ago was that employees were entitled to a 30 min unpaid meal break for every 8 hours worked, as well as a 15 minute paid break every 4 hours. This cuts both ways. The employee can get in trouble with the company if they exceed their break allowance. But likewise the company can get in trouble with the state if they're not giving you your full break time every day. In California's case, if you refused to take your breaks, I was forced to send you home after 7.5 hours (excluding lunch) but still pay you for 8. The reason being I'd have to pay overtime if you exceeded 8 hours of work in a day (7.5 hours work, 0.5 hours breaks). (There's all sorts of other fun things too like split shifts. I did my best to educate my employees on the legal requirements, so they could notify us if the way we scheduled them was illegal. The requirements are specific and complex enough that it's inevitable that managers will make scheduling mistakes.)
I highly recommend reading up on the labor laws for your state, and discussing any concerns you may have with your coworkers (so you're not fired on the spot as a "troublemaker") and bringing it up with management. They're not monitoring bathroom break time just for the hell of it, they're being very literal in their interpretation of labor laws. But two can play at that game.
The U.S. already has the second-highest spending per student of any OECD country. And Illinois spends about 10% more than the national average (Table 8). If there's a problem with our education system, it's not due to lack of funds. Schools are already being paid plenty relative to other developed countries. Saying we should just throw more money at the problem is silly.
Completely imaginary? CPI is based on the cost of real goods:
FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).
Each month, BLS data collectors called economic assistants visit or call thousands of retail stores, service establishments, rental units, and doctors' offices, all over the United States, to obtain information on the prices of the thousands of items used to track and measure price changes in the CPI. These economic assistants record the prices of about 80,000 items each month, representing a scientifically selected sample of the prices paid by consumers for goods and services purchased.
He's absolutely correct that inflation as a measure of cost of living has been around 2.5% the last few years as measured by the CPI. Long-term it's closer to 4%-5%. So the operative question is: are the teachers' salary increases keyed to current inflation, or average inflation? That is, is a 2.5% pay raise adequate now, but a 8% pay raise warranted if the CPI jumps 8% in a year? Or are they going to demand a 4.5% pay raise now when inflation is 2.5%, but not complain about a 4.5% pay raise if the CPI jumps 8%?
This won't do squat about getting the deficit under control. The cause of the deficit is Medicare/Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office has been telling us this for over a dozen years. Left as it is, Medicare/Medicaid will consume all tax revenue in 50-70 years. All the savings from cutting defense since the 1960s (when it consumed over 10% of GDP - half the federal budget) has been counteracted by growth in Medicare/Medicaid.
Unfortunately, (1) The most powerful voting block is retired people, who are the primary beneficiaries of Medicaid/Medicare. They vote against anyone suggesting it be cut or restructured to slow its growth. And (2) most members of one of the major political parties absolutely refuse to believe social programs are the cause of our budget woes (they're excluded from the automatic cuts if sequestration hits). They think everything can be fixed by cutting defense spending, even though we'd still be running a budget deficit if we dropped military spending to zero. And no, FICA taxes do not cover Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Medicare/Medicaid outlays have exceeded Medicare/Medicaid tax revenue for over a decade, and Social Security outlays began exceeding Social Security tax revenue in 2010. We've known for 3 Presidents exactly what the problem is. We've just refused to do anything about it.
Don't take my word for it, don't take some pundit's word against it. Read the CBO reports. Read their older reports if you like. Then decide for yourself.
So putting in an industry-standard micro-USB port, an industry-standard micro-HDMI port, and an industry-standard 3.5mm analog audio jack like other phones do is stupid. But combining them all into a proprietary port makes perfect sense?
Once you factor in night, that 43% efficiency drops to 21.5%. The wind turbine still works at night. The solar panel doesn't.
You need to take into account capacity factor. Overall average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is 0.14. That is, if your solar panels have a nominal generating capacity of 100 Watts, their output averaged over a year after you factor in night, bad weather, angle of the sun, and maintenance is about 14 Watts. 14 Watts in real-world use per 100 Watts of rated capacity. The desert Southwest can get up to 0.18-0.19, but for the country overall it's 0.14.
Wind's capacity factor on land is about 0.20-0.25. Ideal locations (certain areas of Scotland, Spain, Portugul, and offshore) can hit 0.40-0.50. So multiply your max conversion efficiencies with capacity factor and you get solar = 6% best case, wind = 12% worst case.
I'm a strong nuclear proponent, but even I've been saying that wind has been on the cusp of becoming cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. Solar OTOH is still over 5x more expensive.
Try 25 years of UI interface design when computers didn't have power to spare to do anything more profligate than stop abruptly when you got to the end of a scroll. Smooth scrolling is relatively new too. Do you think it's worthy of a patent just because nobody had the spare CPU cycles to do it before?
Naw, the mistake here is assuming the cause of the problem is people whacking the cameras. They're not the cause. Frustration at the cameras is the cause. Adding a second camera doesn't address the cause, it just escalates the situation. Which means people whacking the cameras will escalate as well - they'll shoot them from range.
Any engineer worth his salt was taught about the time response of second order linear systems - spring, mass, damper. The scroll bounce is just the transient response of such a system to a step function when tuned to be slightly underdamped (light blue line in the figure).
It's obvious as hell and the only reason I can fathom why it's being upheld is because its merits are being judged by people who are clueless about math or engineering. This is as bad as the XOR cursor patent, which was also a patent on the graphical representation of a function widely known and commonly used in the respective industry.
The company hiring you will likely require you to meet several conditions, including incorporation, to protect themselves. Remember that guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Texas a couple years back? His beef with the IRS was a section of tax code which will affect you if you get laid off or quit from your primary job.
Basically, the IRS makes it hard for a company to justify hiring a programmer as an independent consultant. If they hire you like that and the IRS determines that you're actually employed by them, they're liable for the employer's share of all your back taxes even if you've been diligently paying your self employment taxes. (Yes, your employer pays part of your FICA taxes. That's what the "self employment" tax is - when you're self-employed you get to pay both your share and the employer's share of the FICA taxes.) To avoid this possibility, most companies require contracting programmers to be employees of a hiring agency, or self incorporated with multiple sources of income. If you're not employed by someone else, or the consulting you do for them is your only job, the IRS could still find that you're an employee. And they get to pay half of your FICA back taxes.
Right now you're spared from all this because you have another job. But if you should be laid off or quit to concentrate on this contracting work, you will become subject to this section of tax code. HR and Accounting at the company you're working for will want nothing to do with you unless you (A) find another job, or (B) incorporate and have more than one simultaneous consulting gig, or (C) incorporate with another person to form your own 2+ person "hiring agency". (The NYT article is a bit ambiguous - staffing firms are only a problem if they're only acting as job hunter for you. If you're employed by them and they're paying your employment taxes, then it's not a problem.
The relevant terms for you to google if you want to research this more are irs section 1706 530.
I'm an avid fisherman and amateur ichthyologist. Tuna mature in 3-5 years. The average lifespan of most tuna species is estimated to be about 8-15 years old. Counting the rings in the otoliths (ear bones) showed world record yellowfin tuna in the 400 lb range to be about 13-15 years old. The vast majority of yellowfin, bigeye, and bluefin tuna (the bigger ones) harvested commercially are in the 50-150 pound range (roughly 4-7 years). The older ones build up too much mercury (thanks to everyone who blocks nuclear so we can continue burning coal) and are legally only usable as pet food. Except for the Japanese who don't seem to care when it comes to raw bluefin tuna.
And dispersant is soap. Yeah some formulations are more toxic than others - boaters are encouraged to use biodegradable marine soaps at sea. But they're not all some potent chemical cocktail which will cause life to wither and die on contact. It's soap.
Most oil spills aren't man-made. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release an estimated 1 million barrels of oil per year (one ton of oil is about 6-8 barrels). The Deepwater Horizon spill was estimated to be just shy of 5 million barrels. So it was a substantial increase over natural oil seeps for the year. But in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a substantial deviation from the amount of bacteria which digest oil, excrete whatever it is they excrete, and decompose.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was a local disaster with large transient effects. But its long-term effects on the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico will be minimal if not negligible because the ecosystem has already been dealing with similarly large quantities of oil being released naturally every year for millions of years. The key was to disperse the oil so it could be broken down naturally (if at an artificially accelerated rate for a few years) by already-existing natural mechanisms, rather than allowed to clump up at the surface in an unnatural manner. The only question is what the long-term effects of the dispersants (soap) will be.
If the pixels are too small to distinguish with the eye, then who cares if the UI is scaled?
Remember, CRTs were essentially resolution scaled. The phosphors were too small to distinguish with the eye, so you could project any resolution on top of them. (LCDs were "sharper" only because they introduced high-frequency noise in the form of straight pixel edges. You needed to turn on ClearType to make non-bitmapped text look as smooth and clear on an LCD as it appeared on a CRT. And given that Apple was at the forefront of pushing non-bitmapped fonts via Postscript and Adobe Type Manager, it's highly ironic that they're now pushing for what's essentially bitmapped fonts and UIs.)
If it came out of the pockets of the credit card holders, it probably would've been fixed long ago. The problem is that the credit card companies have gamed it so that it comes out the pockets of the merchants. And no merchant can realistically refuse to accept credit cards if he's serious about running a business. The credit card companies have even managed to trick most card holders into thinking that they're doing the noble thing and paying for fraud, when in most cases it's the merchant who pays. After all, those high interest rates and annual fees have to be paying for something, not going straight into their pocket, right?
The analogy between labor and employers works here. Merchants need a union so they can negotiate on an even footing with the 3 credit card companies which control the vast majority of the electronic transaction market.
I can think of few flaws with the superheated steam idea off the top of my head.
1) The ambient temperature is below freezing. Seawater has a freezing temperature of about -2 C. The ice is fresh water - freezing forces out most of the impurities like salt (which is why people have suggested towing icebergs to lower latitudes as sources of fresh water). Consequently, any ice which gets melted would simply re-freeze solid again when it contacted the surrounding ocean water. It'd be like trying to cut your way through a metal floor over a meter thick using a blowtorch. The metal you manage to melt would simply flow and resolidify as it reached the bottom. Any advantage of ice being brittle is lost when you're introducing liquid water which will flow into and seal any cracks you manage to make the moment the crack reaches the ocean underneath.
2) Steam is uncontained. It flows and spreads out when it encounters resistance, thus decreasing the force at any point. The beauty of moving your ship on top of an ice sheet is that the weight of the ship is borne by the singular point of ice which is highest. That's what causes it to fracture even though the sheet as a whole may be able to support the weight of the ship. A similar strategy is used for the pilings of offshore oil rigs in areas which get iced over. If you try to build them to just resist the ice, they will be crushed and fail. Instead, they're designed with a curvature which lifts the ice. A flat ice sheet resting on a curved surface means all the weight of the ice is borne by a single point, easily causing it to fracture and move around the piling.
3) Water has a fairly high heat capacity and heat of vaporization (it takes a lot of energy to heat it up and to convert it to steam). The Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers I find on Google are listed as 21,000 tons with a draft of 9 meters (the bottom of the ship extends 9 meters below the waterline). So raising the front half of it above 1.5 meters of ice requires mgh = (21,000/2 tons)(9.8 m/s^2)(10.5 meters) = 9.8x10^8 joules of energy. Water has a heat capacity of 4.2 J/g*K and a heat of vaporization of 2260 J/g. So taking freezing ocean water and heating it to steam requires 420+2260 = 2680 J/g. 9.8x10^8 joules will let you convert only 367 liters of water to steam. Less if you want to raise it above 100C, and less if you want to pressurize it above 1 atmosphere. And I suspect the icebreakers are designed with a shallower draft at the bow, to ease lifting it above the ice.
My 2-year old laptop has an nVidia GT 330M. At the time it was a mid-range dedicated mobile 3D video card.
Ivy Bridge's HD4000 comes very close to matching its performance while burning a helluva lot less power. So the delta between mid-grade dedicated video and integrated video performance is down to a little over 2 years now. Intel claims Haswell's 3D video is twice as fast as HD4000. If true, that would put it near the performance of the GT 640M, and lower the delta to a bit over 1 year.
This is all the more impressive if you remember that integrated video is hobbled by having to mooch off of system memory. If there were some way to give the HD4000 dedicated VRAM, then you'd have a fairer apples to apples comparison of just how good the chipset's engineering and design are compared to the dedicated offerings of nVidia and AMD.
I used to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but life and work have caught up and I only game casually now. If Haswell pans out, its integrated 3D should be plenty enough for my needs. It may be "crap" to the hardcore gamer, but they haven't figured out yet that in the grand scheme of things, being able to play video games with all the graphics on max is a pretty low priority.
Which is precisely why the "making available" argument is ludicrous. Say 1 person buys a song and shares it with 5000 people via bittorrent. The actual damages suffered by the copyright holder are 5000 illegal copies.
But by the "making available" argument, the copyright holder could sue the 1st filesharer for making available 5000 copies, and collect statutory damages for 5000 copies. Then they could sue the 2nd filesharer and collect for 5000 copies. Then the 3rd filesharer, and so on. By the time they finish suing all 5000 filesharers, they've been awarded statutory damages for 25,000,000 copies of the song, when only 5000 copies were ever made.
It just doesn't add up. If 5000 people make 5000 copies, that's 1 copy per person. The correct statutory damages are therefore 1 copy per person. If you want to go nuts with punitive awards to discourage filesharing, then go ahead. But charging *one* filesharer with statutory damages caused by other filesharers is nonsense.
The only way it makes sense is if suing the one person for making available 5000 copies results in the other 5000 filesharers being indemnified from being sued. Which is precisely what happens when a commercial bootleg CD maker is sued for statutory damages. Y'know, the situation the law was actually written for, not peer to peer filehsaring.
Actually this is a different problem. If you or your pets are repeatedly tripping on and pulling the power cord from the phone, then moving to a wireless charger won't help -- you/your pets will simply trip on and pull the power cord from the wireless charger. (And if you say "But I'd never move my wireless charger so I could tuck the cable away," then stop being a cheapskate and buy an extra USB adapter and microUSB cable just for charging your phone and tuck that away. The whole reason the EU mandated all manufacturers standardize on microUSB for chargers was to reduce cost for consumers.)
The real solution is to stop putting all power outlets at shin-level. Put a few at desktop level when building the house, or start building desks with a spot to mount a power strip tucked underneath or along the side/back.