Taking away the obvious implication of "You don't program differential equations
In my grad-level partial differential equations for engineers course at MIT, the prof told us up-front on the first day of class: "During your professional career, you will never have to use 99% of what you learn in this class. This course will be the first and last time you ever see these PDE solutions. But when you run into that 1%, you'll be thanking your lucky stars that you took this course."
Back to the topic: the stable system of rain=>aquifer is disrupted to greater or lesser degrees by human activity. That's obvious. The amount of rain remains constant (more or less), which means the amount of water removed from the aquifer is gone.
Global warming => higher evaporation rate from the oceans => greater precipitation => more water entering the aquifers. Problem solved!
I jest, but it's half serious. Just because something is undesired overall does not mean it cannot have some desirable effects.
we have made great strides in atmospheric water extraction to the point where a plant in the middle of a desert can turn sand into golf course.
Unless that extraction happens just before the air moves over a large body of water, it will have no net effect. All you're doing is removing moisture before it can turn into natural rain elsewhere. e.g. If California started extracting water from the air, it would mean more fresh water for California. But the states to the East (downwind) would experience a proportional decrease in natural precipitation as a result.
None of your examples are shared resources. A better analogy would be a toll road which advertises a 100 mph speed limit. If so many people flock to it that it creates a traffic jam moving at 25 mph, that's just the way it is.
If you want a guaranteed 100 mph or 10 Mbps (or whatever your ISP advertises as max speeds) at any time you want, then pay for a dedicated line. They typically cost about 10-20x more than a shared connection specifically for the bandwidth guarantee. But if you're paying the much lower shared bandwidth rate, then it's completely ridiculous for you to expect max bandwidth any time, all the time.
Now, if the ISP has plenty of excess bandwidth (i.e. instantaneous use has not reached their bandwidth capacity) but is throttling anyway, then yes you have a legitimate complaint. That'd be like a toll road advertising a 100 mph speed limit, there's no traffic jam, but they decide to pull you over for going over 65 mph just because your car is red.
DC has pretty much ignored the Heller decision. Last I heard there is still no licensed dealer in the city and it is still illegal to import one from elsewhere. So good luck exercising your newly reinstated 2nd Amendment RTKBA and it won't change until we get a different Senate and POTUS.
So Amazon is just proactively trying to correct the situation. Free rifle with every HDTV purchase for DC residents!
This seems pretty simple to me. If freedom of speech protects Rogers lying in their ads, then freedom of speech protects millions of disgruntled customers lying by saying Rogers kills kittens and eats puppies. If Rogers wants protection from slander and libel, then by corollary they accept false advertising statutes. All are restrictions on free speech if what you're saying is false and could potentially negatively impact other people.
As I understand it, the fact that Samsung is denied the right to present the evidence is because their legal team was so dumb fuck stupid not to present the evidence in the legal phase where evidence is supposed to be presented. Call it a technicality if you must. Nevertheless, the judge is 100% right to suppress said evidence on the grounds it wasn't presented on time.
I disagree. The law is not some perfect, absolute pinnacle of civilization. You have to think about why the law exists, and what purpose it serves.
The point of having a deadline like this is to help insure the cost of the trial does not exceed the financial impact of the outcome. Otherwise you'd have defendants delaying trials for so long and it no longer becomes cost-effective to sue.
In this case however, the financial impact of the outcome far, far outweighs the cost of the delay. An exception should have been granted. Suppressing the evidence was using the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law. This is why we have judges overseeing trials, and not computer programs. Being human, they're supposed to spot flaws in the letter of the law like this, and make exceptions.
Actually, AFAIK Samsung was the first company to produce an electronics product with a completely flat glass front face with only touch-sensitive controls. There was an earlier thinner prototype which was leaked around 2005, and eventually became the YP-K3, but I can't find the video. I remember because I was shopping for an MP3 player around then, saw it, and loved the idea of an MP3 player which became a nondescript black glass rectangle when the display turned off. A bunch of us were complaining for months about how long it was taking them to actually get it to market. The upper half was a (non-touch-sensitive) OLED display, while the bottom half was touch-sensitive OLED buttons. But AFAIK this was the first time I saw a product with no moving buttons (other than on/off and volume).
So I would completely disagree with the hypothesis that they had to have stolen the idea of a completely touchscreen phone from parts they were supplying to Apple. It would've been a natural and obvious evolution of their MP3 player design.
OTOH, like the SSD crackwhore bitch that I am; once I tasted the speed of SSDs, I'll never go back. I just schedule daily backups to a standard HDD. Windows 7 Backup or Apple Time Machine for you Mac heads.
If you're worried about SSD reliability, don't do a backup. Do a partition clone. When I first got an SSD, I did what everyone else did - shrink my existing Windows partition to where it fit on the SSD, then clone it to the SSD. I was then about to delete the boot partition on the HDD and use the entire drive for data, when I had an epiphany. Just leave the boot partition on the HDD, and clone the SSD's sole partition to it once a day as a backup.
This means if the SSD ever fails, you don't have to do anything. The computer can boot off the HDD as if you'd never installed the SSD. When you get the warranty replacement SSD in the mail, you can install it and clone the HDD's boot sectors and boot partition to the SSD again, and you're back in business. Testing the backup becomes a simple matter of holding down F9 (or whatever key your motherboard uses to select boot device), and booting off the HDD.
Once I realized this, I started buying the fast but cheap-because-of-bad-reputation Sandforce SSDs for customers. I set up their computers like this, and an SSD failure becomes a non-event. It just means their computer slows down to HDD speeds for about a week until the warranty replacement SSD arrives.
A better solution, I think, would be to require stock exchanges to operate on a once-per-second clock. Any trade orders that arrive within each timeslice would be executed in a random order, so as to defeat any advantage the high-frequency traders would get by being fast.
I'm not sure that would help. On the face of it, it seems like it would level the playing field. But I think it would end up just shifting the competition from frequency/time to volume. Knowing ahead of time that the trade which completes an order will be randomly selected, it becomes a contest to stuff the ballot box. Whose computer can put in the most bids on an offer before that 1 sec is up, knowing that all bids which fail will automatically be canceled? You can't prevent it by IP address or trading account either - a brokerage firm's computer may service multiple traders. And a trader may own multiple accounts.
This may be like the whack-a-mole game against spam, where all sorts of solutions look good at first glance. But once you think them through, all they do is morph the problem into a different shape which still results in spam. And the only solutions which would work (charging per email sent) carry a greater cost than that imposed by the problem you're trying to solve.
Same with typing. If you take qwerty typists and teach them Dvorak, their qwerty typing speed decreases a bit.
But yeah, I'm bilingual, semi-trilingual as well, and the confusion is very minor. Most of the time you can "switch gears" between the languages without problem (cross-language homophones and the occasional grammatical equivalent can cause a little confusion). But the benefits (allows you to see things missing in the language which mono-linguists take for granted, forces you to recognize there's more than one way to think about things) far outweigh the drawbacks.
Several years ago, we found out some of our employees were illegal immigrants who had applied using fake SSNs and IDs. When I thought of the consequences, I realized the IRS collected FICA taxes from these people (social security, medicare) which would never be paid back to them. And if they were due a refund on their income tax withholdings, they were unlikely to ever claim them.
You must write very quickly if the words are going in your ears and out your fingers. I'm a slower writer than you so I'm forced to listen, understand, and think of a way to summarize what the professor is lecturing about so I can record it in my notes quickly enough to keep up. I find that the process forces me to pay attention instead of becoming distracted, and helps tremendously with learning and retention. In fact I'm frequently able to recall exactly how I wrote something in my notes years or even decades later, while the actual lecture is a distant faded memory (different people remember better differently).
I find sitting and paying attention works better with videos, and is about the worst option for lectures. If there's something you don't quite understand, you can pause to mull it over, or rewind to hear it again. In a lecture if I just sit there and listen and there's something I don't understand, that point is lost forever since I don't have any notes to review later.
You're touching on the unspoken assumption underlying all this. They're all people. We could just set up an Olympics where all the competitors are people rather than men or women.
It's our desire for gender equality which creates this arbitrary (with respect to the capabilities of the human body) distinction between men's and women's events. From what I understand, if you took a developing genetically female fetus, and artificially injected it with appropriate amounts of male hormones through her development and lifetime, her athletic potential would be the same as if she had male chromosomes. It's just that she lost the genetic XY lottery for getting those hormones naturally. Why should we stop at male/female? Shouldn't we have a category for people genetically predisposed for obesity? Or superior musculature? (There are human examples of the latter, but the mother is trying to keep her kid out of the spotlight so I won't link to it. Google for myostatin deficiency.)
Since the distinction is arbitrary, there's no need to fret over how we categorize hermaphrodites and similar people for these events. Just set a rule and that's it. This isn't a matter of right or wrong.
No, the problem with "saving energy" is that historically it has resulted in increased overall energy use. A legitimate energy savings will result in a drop in demand, which leads to corresponding drop in price, which leads to increased consumption.
That's not to say it will happen now if we institute an energy conservation program (there are exceptions to almost every rule), but historically that's what's happened most of the time. If a conservation measure truly results in energy savings (i.e. it's more cost-efficient over the long term), then it will tend to drive energy prices down, resulting in pressure for overall energy consumption to go up. If a conservation measure is fake and just makes everyone spend more money to implement it (i.e. is not cost-efficient), then money which could potentially be used elsewhere is wasted, and our standard of living goes down (or more concisely, the rate at which our standard of living is increasing slows down, potentially becoming negative).
The argument for conservation always needs to be made taking into account opportunity costs. Saying "If we conserved, we could do what we do now using 25% less energy, and thus save money," is an illegitimate argument. You cannot compare to a vacuum. If you put it that way, conservation always sounds like a good idea, which should tell you right off that there's something wrong wit the argument.
The correct comparison you need to make is against the next best alternative. "If we spent $x on conservation, how much money would we save? If we instead spent $x on developing cheaper energy, how much money would we save?" In this case, sometimes conservation will win, sometimes the alternative will win.
The exclusion of the evidence is justified, you are correct.
Actually, I think this has pointed out a flaw in the legal process. We're not talking about Joe's dog peeing on his neighbor's freshly painted picket fence causing $100 in damages. We're talking about a decision which will impact billions if not tens of billions of dollars in sales. The whole point of having a court system is to determine the truth. The whole point of having deadlines is to make sure that determination happens in timely manner, so the cost of the delays do not exceed the cost of the judgment.
Here we clearly have a case where the potential cost of the judgement will far, far exceed the cost of a delay. So as unusual or unorthodox as it may have been, an extension should have been granted and the evidence allowed. Otherwise you're using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. If things proceed as they look like they are, Apple will win in court and get Samsung products banned, but the public (with access to evidence the court disallowed) will know that it's a bogus decision and a failure of the legal system. Like the guy who gets locked up for life for murder even though a videotape later surfaced clearly showing someone else killing the victim.
Don't blindly insist that we have to follow the rules. As any programmer knows, rules are only made to cover the situations you've thought of. It's always possible for new situations you haven't thought of to pop up which make the rules not work anymore. And in those cases you have to bend or modify those rules to make the system work better in the future. That's the whole point of having judges - they're human and are supposed to recognize these exceptional situations when they happen. Otherwise we could just get rid of all judges and have trials moderated by a computer determining whether or not rules and procedures are being followed.
It's a cost. Browse through some of the stats on normalized energy cost by source. Be mindful of numbers which include government subsidies - most of the wiki source articles include tables of actual cost - i.e. without subsidies. Several of the tables quoted in the wiki are with subsidies (which make renewables seem considerably cheaper than they really are). So you do have to dig a little to get at the truth, rather than just believe whomever last edited the wiki.
PV solar is pretty much the worst way to generate electricity per dollar. So opting for PV solar instead of wind or nuclear or (even) coal is indeed an additional cost. You have to argue that the intangible costs of other sources (e.g. middle-east oil dependency, air pollution, dealing with nuclear waste, damming up rivers, etc) outweigh the additional monetary cost of PV solar. Or that the R&D fueled by the additional spending will result in net lower costs long-term.
2. Hot water was actually not that big a problem. Put a large jug in the garage and it'll be 110F in a day. Locally, solar experts actually recommend roof-mounted solar water heaters as the #1 way to save on energy costs, since hot water is one of the biggest consumers of energy.
When I evaluated a variety of renewable energy choices for a resort, this one came in at #1 in terms of cost-effectiveness (money saved / money spent). If you're going to be heating that quantity of water anyway, then it's absolutely the easiest way to harness solar energy. It doesn't have to heat the water to 110F. Any amount of heating it does to the water from your cold water tap represents energy you don't have to burn via an electric or gas water heater. It can be built for a few hundred dollars (basically a shallow insulated tank painted black on the inside with glass/plexiglass on the top), and it can capture >90% of the solar energy which strikes it. Compare that to PV panels which cost ~ten thousand dollars for similar coverage, but only capture about 16% of the solar energy.
We're letting our decisions about renewables to be driven by pie-in-the-sky imagery we've seen in movies and TV shows, not by what actually works. PV solar is pretty much the worst energy generation technology we have right now (without subsidies it costs about 7-8x as much as coal per kWh), making it really only cost-effective if you're completely off the grid (e.g. mountain weather stations which need power for electronics inside). But solar water heaters aren't as sexy so people never consider them. The only real drawback is that mounting all that water on your roof can be problematic in terms of weight and insurance premiums (though it helps reduce cooling bills), so mounting it in or over the backyard frequently works better.
Correlation of data and movement patterns is also somewhat of a concern, but moreso for people who prefer to be anonymous in their daily lives.
I disagree. Long-term, I think this is going to be the bigger problem. If the government is retaining data on people's movements, it's pretty easy to find out. Suspicious behavior by certain officials as if they're hiding something, a boy scout or whistleblower, leads to a FOIA request and the data is out there for the voters to see. It's then pretty obvious to the public what the government is up to. That helps keep it in check.
But correlation of data and movement patterns... Have you read up on how the Kinect works? They didn't teach the Kinect how to recognize your body parts. They used a machine learning algorithm and fed it lots of images of people's bodies in different positions. It basically taught itself how to recognize where your body parts are. Nobody really knows exactly how it's doing it at the instruction-by-instruction level. It's just been trained to rummage through a mishmash of probability tables and decision trees, and the end result is that it does it.
Now, if you didn't know what the Kinect was supposed to do, and you were given the code for it from a FOIA request, how would you ever figure out that its purpose is to recognize body parts? Basically it'd be like trying to figure out who was a serial killer by looking at MRI scans and dissected brains. The data, the code making up the Kinect (or your brain) is pretty useless. You need the actual hardware and some time to play around with its inputs and outputs to figure out what it's supposed to do.
For a more relevant example, consider the face recognition techniques they've been trying out in airports to pick out terrorists (putting aside whether it's right or wrong). Say we don't want to do racial profiling. If you do it the human way, the training material may say "terrorists tend to be young Arab males 90% of the time" (made-up number). That comes out in a FOIA request, and it's immediately obvious that they're profiling. The civil liberties people get all upset about that, politicians lose votes, and the system is changed.
Now say they used machine learning to train a computer to recognize terrorists. It's been trained with a bunch of faces of terrorists, and if most of them happen to be young Arab males then the system has essentially been trained to profile for young Arab males. But if they're careful and never mention this in any documents, could you ever figure out from FOIA requests or even people working closely with the system that it is basically profiling based on race and gender?
It's security through complexity. If a system is so complex that regular people can't grok it (e.g. the planet's climate), then no matter how much evidence you have many people will still doubt what your evidence points to because the sheer complexity of the system makes it difficult to evaluate the validity of the evidence.
I can see that argument working for Google's Android Play store, since they allow you to install any other marketplace app onto your Android device.
OTOH, Apple prohibits any other market except their own. So your analogy would have to be modified to a religious bookstore which doesn't carry those books, and prevents you from shopping at any other bookstore if you should choose to shop there.
I think a lot of people are picking either extreme here. Either Apple is to be damned for (purportedly) blocking the book, or it's completely OK. The truth I think lies somewhere in the middle. They're not a monopoly so you can't completely condemn them for this. But at the same time they control a majority of the tablet market and a significant fraction of the phone market, and exert a tremendous amount of control over the "shelf space" their customers see. So I don't think it's really fair to give them a complete pass on this either. With great market share comes great responsibility - to be fair to your customers.
Got any evidence to back that up? I looked into some numbers during the CAFE debate. While it's just a correlation, it really does seem like people switched because the cars got smaller / less substantial in response to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, and to meet stricter CAFE standards (which began in 1978).
Here's the breakdown of car sales vs. truck sales. You can see that from the 1930s to 1972, the percentage of trucks sold is pretty consistent between 13%-20%. Then in 1973 (Arab Oil Embargo) it starts taking off, to where it's over 50% trucks today. It's rather confounding because it's the opposite of what you'd expect if all other factors remained the same. Gas prices go up, and people should buy more fuel-efficient cars to save money. But instead what happened is people started preferentially buying trucks instead of cars. The data better seems to fit the hypothesis that people want bigger cars, not that they're buying SUVs to compensate for penis size. (The trend pre-dates the SUV craze of the 1990s, though it peaked just before the 2007 financial crisis. I assume penis size hasn't changed appreciably in the last 40 years.)
Year - trucks as % of all vehicle sales - CAFE standard for cars
1931 - 14.70%
1941 - 19.34%
1951 - 17.71%
1961 - 13.64%
1971 - 16.99%
Piracy is also what made the Apple II the juggernaut it was. At least none of my friends and I (young teens at the time) would've talked our parents into buying an Apple ][ if we know we wouldn't be able to get hundreds of pirated games for it.
Sometimes a drive would stop responding during recovery and require a break. Trips to the freezer helped on about 30% of the drives. Some drives required numerous trips to the freezer, using rsync to resume copying where it left off last time, a process which could take days but could result in a complete recovery. I pondered ways to cool a drive during the recovery such as using a peltier, but never got anything implemented.
The first problem drive I had where the freezer trick worked, I stuck in a ziplock bag with a (slightly) long IDE and power cable. Taped that shut, then stuck it inside a mini-fridge. The cables are mostly flat or thin enough that the magnetic foam on the refrigerator makes a good enough seal.
The second problem drive I had, I was going to do the same thing. Then I realized it was winter and below freezing outside. So I just put the entire computer into an unused bedroom in the house, opened the window, and closed the door. Even with the freezer trick it took about 2 weeks to copy nearly all the data to a new drive. A garage would probably work too, but my house at the time didn't have one.
There is a firmware chip on the PCB that also needs to be transplanted, and this is tricky even with a Surface mount electronics soldering station
Just to be clear, the HDD manufacturers didn't stick it on there just to make it harder for users to fix their own hard drives. It contains mappings of bad sectors which the drive swapped out with reserve sectors through the normal course of operation. Older drives had smaller capacity so proportionately fewer bad sectors and could get away with just mapping them out (reducing capacity) or storing the mapping on the drive itself. The high capacity of modern drives makes it a virtual certainty that it's going to develop multiple bad sectors through its usage life. So you need a more systematic and reliable method of dealing with them. The norm is to set aside some reserve space, and when the drive detects a sector going bad, map it out and replace it with a sector in the reserve space, and note the new mapping in the nonvolatile memory of the firmware chip.
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Also Viking 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander
In my grad-level partial differential equations for engineers course at MIT, the prof told us up-front on the first day of class: "During your professional career, you will never have to use 99% of what you learn in this class. This course will be the first and last time you ever see these PDE solutions. But when you run into that 1%, you'll be thanking your lucky stars that you took this course."
Global warming => higher evaporation rate from the oceans => greater precipitation => more water entering the aquifers. Problem solved!
I jest, but it's half serious. Just because something is undesired overall does not mean it cannot have some desirable effects.
Unless that extraction happens just before the air moves over a large body of water, it will have no net effect. All you're doing is removing moisture before it can turn into natural rain elsewhere. e.g. If California started extracting water from the air, it would mean more fresh water for California. But the states to the East (downwind) would experience a proportional decrease in natural precipitation as a result.
None of your examples are shared resources. A better analogy would be a toll road which advertises a 100 mph speed limit. If so many people flock to it that it creates a traffic jam moving at 25 mph, that's just the way it is.
If you want a guaranteed 100 mph or 10 Mbps (or whatever your ISP advertises as max speeds) at any time you want, then pay for a dedicated line. They typically cost about 10-20x more than a shared connection specifically for the bandwidth guarantee. But if you're paying the much lower shared bandwidth rate, then it's completely ridiculous for you to expect max bandwidth any time, all the time.
Now, if the ISP has plenty of excess bandwidth (i.e. instantaneous use has not reached their bandwidth capacity) but is throttling anyway, then yes you have a legitimate complaint. That'd be like a toll road advertising a 100 mph speed limit, there's no traffic jam, but they decide to pull you over for going over 65 mph just because your car is red.
So Amazon is just proactively trying to correct the situation. Free rifle with every HDTV purchase for DC residents!
This seems pretty simple to me. If freedom of speech protects Rogers lying in their ads, then freedom of speech protects millions of disgruntled customers lying by saying Rogers kills kittens and eats puppies. If Rogers wants protection from slander and libel, then by corollary they accept false advertising statutes. All are restrictions on free speech if what you're saying is false and could potentially negatively impact other people.
I disagree. The law is not some perfect, absolute pinnacle of civilization. You have to think about why the law exists, and what purpose it serves.
The point of having a deadline like this is to help insure the cost of the trial does not exceed the financial impact of the outcome. Otherwise you'd have defendants delaying trials for so long and it no longer becomes cost-effective to sue.
In this case however, the financial impact of the outcome far, far outweighs the cost of the delay. An exception should have been granted. Suppressing the evidence was using the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law. This is why we have judges overseeing trials, and not computer programs. Being human, they're supposed to spot flaws in the letter of the law like this, and make exceptions.
Actually, AFAIK Samsung was the first company to produce an electronics product with a completely flat glass front face with only touch-sensitive controls. There was an earlier thinner prototype which was leaked around 2005, and eventually became the YP-K3, but I can't find the video. I remember because I was shopping for an MP3 player around then, saw it, and loved the idea of an MP3 player which became a nondescript black glass rectangle when the display turned off. A bunch of us were complaining for months about how long it was taking them to actually get it to market. The upper half was a (non-touch-sensitive) OLED display, while the bottom half was touch-sensitive OLED buttons. But AFAIK this was the first time I saw a product with no moving buttons (other than on/off and volume).
So I would completely disagree with the hypothesis that they had to have stolen the idea of a completely touchscreen phone from parts they were supplying to Apple. It would've been a natural and obvious evolution of their MP3 player design.
If you're worried about SSD reliability, don't do a backup. Do a partition clone. When I first got an SSD, I did what everyone else did - shrink my existing Windows partition to where it fit on the SSD, then clone it to the SSD. I was then about to delete the boot partition on the HDD and use the entire drive for data, when I had an epiphany. Just leave the boot partition on the HDD, and clone the SSD's sole partition to it once a day as a backup.
This means if the SSD ever fails, you don't have to do anything. The computer can boot off the HDD as if you'd never installed the SSD. When you get the warranty replacement SSD in the mail, you can install it and clone the HDD's boot sectors and boot partition to the SSD again, and you're back in business. Testing the backup becomes a simple matter of holding down F9 (or whatever key your motherboard uses to select boot device), and booting off the HDD.
Once I realized this, I started buying the fast but cheap-because-of-bad-reputation Sandforce SSDs for customers. I set up their computers like this, and an SSD failure becomes a non-event. It just means their computer slows down to HDD speeds for about a week until the warranty replacement SSD arrives.
I'm not sure that would help. On the face of it, it seems like it would level the playing field. But I think it would end up just shifting the competition from frequency/time to volume. Knowing ahead of time that the trade which completes an order will be randomly selected, it becomes a contest to stuff the ballot box. Whose computer can put in the most bids on an offer before that 1 sec is up, knowing that all bids which fail will automatically be canceled? You can't prevent it by IP address or trading account either - a brokerage firm's computer may service multiple traders. And a trader may own multiple accounts.
This may be like the whack-a-mole game against spam, where all sorts of solutions look good at first glance. But once you think them through, all they do is morph the problem into a different shape which still results in spam. And the only solutions which would work (charging per email sent) carry a greater cost than that imposed by the problem you're trying to solve.
Same with typing. If you take qwerty typists and teach them Dvorak, their qwerty typing speed decreases a bit.
But yeah, I'm bilingual, semi-trilingual as well, and the confusion is very minor. Most of the time you can "switch gears" between the languages without problem (cross-language homophones and the occasional grammatical equivalent can cause a little confusion). But the benefits (allows you to see things missing in the language which mono-linguists take for granted, forces you to recognize there's more than one way to think about things) far outweigh the drawbacks.
Be careful what you wish for.
Several years ago, we found out some of our employees were illegal immigrants who had applied using fake SSNs and IDs. When I thought of the consequences, I realized the IRS collected FICA taxes from these people (social security, medicare) which would never be paid back to them. And if they were due a refund on their income tax withholdings, they were unlikely to ever claim them.
You must write very quickly if the words are going in your ears and out your fingers. I'm a slower writer than you so I'm forced to listen, understand, and think of a way to summarize what the professor is lecturing about so I can record it in my notes quickly enough to keep up. I find that the process forces me to pay attention instead of becoming distracted, and helps tremendously with learning and retention. In fact I'm frequently able to recall exactly how I wrote something in my notes years or even decades later, while the actual lecture is a distant faded memory (different people remember better differently).
I find sitting and paying attention works better with videos, and is about the worst option for lectures. If there's something you don't quite understand, you can pause to mull it over, or rewind to hear it again. In a lecture if I just sit there and listen and there's something I don't understand, that point is lost forever since I don't have any notes to review later.
You're touching on the unspoken assumption underlying all this. They're all people. We could just set up an Olympics where all the competitors are people rather than men or women.
It's our desire for gender equality which creates this arbitrary (with respect to the capabilities of the human body) distinction between men's and women's events. From what I understand, if you took a developing genetically female fetus, and artificially injected it with appropriate amounts of male hormones through her development and lifetime, her athletic potential would be the same as if she had male chromosomes. It's just that she lost the genetic XY lottery for getting those hormones naturally. Why should we stop at male/female? Shouldn't we have a category for people genetically predisposed for obesity? Or superior musculature? (There are human examples of the latter, but the mother is trying to keep her kid out of the spotlight so I won't link to it. Google for myostatin deficiency.)
Since the distinction is arbitrary, there's no need to fret over how we categorize hermaphrodites and similar people for these events. Just set a rule and that's it. This isn't a matter of right or wrong.
No, the problem with "saving energy" is that historically it has resulted in increased overall energy use. A legitimate energy savings will result in a drop in demand, which leads to corresponding drop in price, which leads to increased consumption.
That's not to say it will happen now if we institute an energy conservation program (there are exceptions to almost every rule), but historically that's what's happened most of the time. If a conservation measure truly results in energy savings (i.e. it's more cost-efficient over the long term), then it will tend to drive energy prices down, resulting in pressure for overall energy consumption to go up. If a conservation measure is fake and just makes everyone spend more money to implement it (i.e. is not cost-efficient), then money which could potentially be used elsewhere is wasted, and our standard of living goes down (or more concisely, the rate at which our standard of living is increasing slows down, potentially becoming negative).
The argument for conservation always needs to be made taking into account opportunity costs. Saying "If we conserved, we could do what we do now using 25% less energy, and thus save money," is an illegitimate argument. You cannot compare to a vacuum. If you put it that way, conservation always sounds like a good idea, which should tell you right off that there's something wrong wit the argument.
The correct comparison you need to make is against the next best alternative. "If we spent $x on conservation, how much money would we save? If we instead spent $x on developing cheaper energy, how much money would we save?" In this case, sometimes conservation will win, sometimes the alternative will win.
Actually, I think this has pointed out a flaw in the legal process. We're not talking about Joe's dog peeing on his neighbor's freshly painted picket fence causing $100 in damages. We're talking about a decision which will impact billions if not tens of billions of dollars in sales. The whole point of having a court system is to determine the truth. The whole point of having deadlines is to make sure that determination happens in timely manner, so the cost of the delays do not exceed the cost of the judgment.
Here we clearly have a case where the potential cost of the judgement will far, far exceed the cost of a delay. So as unusual or unorthodox as it may have been, an extension should have been granted and the evidence allowed. Otherwise you're using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. If things proceed as they look like they are, Apple will win in court and get Samsung products banned, but the public (with access to evidence the court disallowed) will know that it's a bogus decision and a failure of the legal system. Like the guy who gets locked up for life for murder even though a videotape later surfaced clearly showing someone else killing the victim.
Don't blindly insist that we have to follow the rules. As any programmer knows, rules are only made to cover the situations you've thought of. It's always possible for new situations you haven't thought of to pop up which make the rules not work anymore. And in those cases you have to bend or modify those rules to make the system work better in the future. That's the whole point of having judges - they're human and are supposed to recognize these exceptional situations when they happen. Otherwise we could just get rid of all judges and have trials moderated by a computer determining whether or not rules and procedures are being followed.
It's a cost. Browse through some of the stats on normalized energy cost by source. Be mindful of numbers which include government subsidies - most of the wiki source articles include tables of actual cost - i.e. without subsidies. Several of the tables quoted in the wiki are with subsidies (which make renewables seem considerably cheaper than they really are). So you do have to dig a little to get at the truth, rather than just believe whomever last edited the wiki.
PV solar is pretty much the worst way to generate electricity per dollar. So opting for PV solar instead of wind or nuclear or (even) coal is indeed an additional cost. You have to argue that the intangible costs of other sources (e.g. middle-east oil dependency, air pollution, dealing with nuclear waste, damming up rivers, etc) outweigh the additional monetary cost of PV solar. Or that the R&D fueled by the additional spending will result in net lower costs long-term.
When I evaluated a variety of renewable energy choices for a resort, this one came in at #1 in terms of cost-effectiveness (money saved / money spent). If you're going to be heating that quantity of water anyway, then it's absolutely the easiest way to harness solar energy. It doesn't have to heat the water to 110F. Any amount of heating it does to the water from your cold water tap represents energy you don't have to burn via an electric or gas water heater. It can be built for a few hundred dollars (basically a shallow insulated tank painted black on the inside with glass/plexiglass on the top), and it can capture >90% of the solar energy which strikes it. Compare that to PV panels which cost ~ten thousand dollars for similar coverage, but only capture about 16% of the solar energy.
We're letting our decisions about renewables to be driven by pie-in-the-sky imagery we've seen in movies and TV shows, not by what actually works. PV solar is pretty much the worst energy generation technology we have right now (without subsidies it costs about 7-8x as much as coal per kWh), making it really only cost-effective if you're completely off the grid (e.g. mountain weather stations which need power for electronics inside). But solar water heaters aren't as sexy so people never consider them. The only real drawback is that mounting all that water on your roof can be problematic in terms of weight and insurance premiums (though it helps reduce cooling bills), so mounting it in or over the backyard frequently works better.
I disagree. Long-term, I think this is going to be the bigger problem. If the government is retaining data on people's movements, it's pretty easy to find out. Suspicious behavior by certain officials as if they're hiding something, a boy scout or whistleblower, leads to a FOIA request and the data is out there for the voters to see. It's then pretty obvious to the public what the government is up to. That helps keep it in check.
But correlation of data and movement patterns... Have you read up on how the Kinect works? They didn't teach the Kinect how to recognize your body parts. They used a machine learning algorithm and fed it lots of images of people's bodies in different positions. It basically taught itself how to recognize where your body parts are. Nobody really knows exactly how it's doing it at the instruction-by-instruction level. It's just been trained to rummage through a mishmash of probability tables and decision trees, and the end result is that it does it.
Now, if you didn't know what the Kinect was supposed to do, and you were given the code for it from a FOIA request, how would you ever figure out that its purpose is to recognize body parts? Basically it'd be like trying to figure out who was a serial killer by looking at MRI scans and dissected brains. The data, the code making up the Kinect (or your brain) is pretty useless. You need the actual hardware and some time to play around with its inputs and outputs to figure out what it's supposed to do.
For a more relevant example, consider the face recognition techniques they've been trying out in airports to pick out terrorists (putting aside whether it's right or wrong). Say we don't want to do racial profiling. If you do it the human way, the training material may say "terrorists tend to be young Arab males 90% of the time" (made-up number). That comes out in a FOIA request, and it's immediately obvious that they're profiling. The civil liberties people get all upset about that, politicians lose votes, and the system is changed.
Now say they used machine learning to train a computer to recognize terrorists. It's been trained with a bunch of faces of terrorists, and if most of them happen to be young Arab males then the system has essentially been trained to profile for young Arab males. But if they're careful and never mention this in any documents, could you ever figure out from FOIA requests or even people working closely with the system that it is basically profiling based on race and gender?
It's security through complexity. If a system is so complex that regular people can't grok it (e.g. the planet's climate), then no matter how much evidence you have many people will still doubt what your evidence points to because the sheer complexity of the system makes it difficult to evaluate the validity of the evidence.
I can see that argument working for Google's Android Play store, since they allow you to install any other marketplace app onto your Android device.
OTOH, Apple prohibits any other market except their own. So your analogy would have to be modified to a religious bookstore which doesn't carry those books, and prevents you from shopping at any other bookstore if you should choose to shop there.
I think a lot of people are picking either extreme here. Either Apple is to be damned for (purportedly) blocking the book, or it's completely OK. The truth I think lies somewhere in the middle. They're not a monopoly so you can't completely condemn them for this. But at the same time they control a majority of the tablet market and a significant fraction of the phone market, and exert a tremendous amount of control over the "shelf space" their customers see. So I don't think it's really fair to give them a complete pass on this either. With great market share comes great responsibility - to be fair to your customers.
Got any evidence to back that up? I looked into some numbers during the CAFE debate. While it's just a correlation, it really does seem like people switched because the cars got smaller / less substantial in response to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, and to meet stricter CAFE standards (which began in 1978).
Here's the breakdown of car sales vs. truck sales. You can see that from the 1930s to 1972, the percentage of trucks sold is pretty consistent between 13%-20%. Then in 1973 (Arab Oil Embargo) it starts taking off, to where it's over 50% trucks today. It's rather confounding because it's the opposite of what you'd expect if all other factors remained the same. Gas prices go up, and people should buy more fuel-efficient cars to save money. But instead what happened is people started preferentially buying trucks instead of cars. The data better seems to fit the hypothesis that people want bigger cars, not that they're buying SUVs to compensate for penis size. (The trend pre-dates the SUV craze of the 1990s, though it peaked just before the 2007 financial crisis. I assume penis size hasn't changed appreciably in the last 40 years.)
Year - trucks as % of all vehicle sales - CAFE standard for cars
1931 - 14.70%
1941 - 19.34%
1951 - 17.71%
1961 - 13.64%
1971 - 16.99%
1972 - 19.38%
1973 - 21.60% - Arab oil embargo
1974 - 23.29%
1975 - 23.32%
1976 - 23.93%
1977 - 24.73%
1978 - 26.64% - 18.0 MPG
1979 - 24.59% - 19.0
1980 - 21.80% - 20.0
1981 - 21.24% - 22.0
1982 - 24.50% - 24.0
1983 - 25.70% - 26.0
1984 - 28.72% - 27.0
1985 - 30.18% - 27.5
1986 - 30.13% - 26.0
1987 - 32.92% - 26.0
1988 - 33.21% - 26.0
1989 - 34.13% - 26.5
1990 - 34.25% - 27.5
1991 - 34.78% - 27.5
1992 - 37.39% - 27.5
1993 - 40.01% - 27.5
1994 - 41.66% - 27.5
1995 - 42.97% - 27.5
1996 - 45.14% - 27.5
1997 - 46.98% - 27.5
1998 - 49.37% - 27.5
1999 - 50.40% - 27.5
2000 - 50.72% - 27.5
2001 - 52.20% - 27.5
2002 - 53.08% - 27.5
2003 - 55.47% - 27.5
2004 - 56.74% - 27.5
2005 - 56.09% - 27.5
2006 - 54.47% - 27.5
2007 - 54.06% - 27.5
2008 - 49.83% - 27.5
2009 - 49.05% - 27.5
2010 - 52.13% - 27.5
2011 - 53.30% - 30.2
Piracy is also what made the Apple II the juggernaut it was. At least none of my friends and I (young teens at the time) would've talked our parents into buying an Apple ][ if we know we wouldn't be able to get hundreds of pirated games for it.
The first problem drive I had where the freezer trick worked, I stuck in a ziplock bag with a (slightly) long IDE and power cable. Taped that shut, then stuck it inside a mini-fridge. The cables are mostly flat or thin enough that the magnetic foam on the refrigerator makes a good enough seal.
The second problem drive I had, I was going to do the same thing. Then I realized it was winter and below freezing outside. So I just put the entire computer into an unused bedroom in the house, opened the window, and closed the door. Even with the freezer trick it took about 2 weeks to copy nearly all the data to a new drive. A garage would probably work too, but my house at the time didn't have one.
Just to be clear, the HDD manufacturers didn't stick it on there just to make it harder for users to fix their own hard drives. It contains mappings of bad sectors which the drive swapped out with reserve sectors through the normal course of operation. Older drives had smaller capacity so proportionately fewer bad sectors and could get away with just mapping them out (reducing capacity) or storing the mapping on the drive itself. The high capacity of modern drives makes it a virtual certainty that it's going to develop multiple bad sectors through its usage life. So you need a more systematic and reliable method of dealing with them. The norm is to set aside some reserve space, and when the drive detects a sector going bad, map it out and replace it with a sector in the reserve space, and note the new mapping in the nonvolatile memory of the firmware chip.