Apple's patent on this dates back to the early 1990s. Back then, Archie indexed and let you search a single ftp site. Veronica did a similar thing for multiple gopher sites, but only the menus (categories, probably most analogous to directories in today's GUI-centric model). "But those are all remote servers!" you say. Well, if the Unix system you were using to conduct your Veronica search also ran a gopher site, it was simultaneously a local search as well.
A group of companies, including Apple, got together and took the next obvious step of combining the two - indexing and letting you search the files on multiple gopher sites, not just their menus. I think that's where the patent comes from. I and I think most reasonable people would say it's obvious, but apparently the USPTO is not staffed by reasonable people.
Instead of cutting where its needed (gross government pay and military), they cut everything else instead.
The problem with the Federal budget isn't military spending. Yes defense can be cut, but it's already the one budget item which has been cut the most in the last 50 years. Right now, our annual budget deficit exceeds the defense budget, so we could drop defense spending to zero and we'd still have a budget crisis. And FWIW, defense spending is on the chopping block as well if the Budget Control Act kicks in.
Likewise, the U.S. spends pretty close to the most of any country on public education per student. So our education problems aren't because of lack of funding. The "lack of money" for education is an illusion created by school administrators, either to cover up their own incompetence or to attempt to carve a bigger piece of the budget pie for themselves. Cutting defense and shifting the money to education is just swapping one form of wasteful spending for another.
What needs to be cut are the social programs - primarily Medicare and Medicaid. Social Security was a problem too, but its growth was mitigated with some of the reforms passed some years ago. Don't believe me? Go read the CBO reports. They've been saying this for over a decade now - Medicare and Medicaid projected to grow to consume 100% of tax revenue by 2050-2070 (the doomsday date changes from year to year). The notes on the NPR graph mention the same thing too - that the social programs are the parts of the budget which have grown the most. Unfortunately some people refuse to acknowledge that this is the real problem, and jealously guard these programs against any and all cuts - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all exempt from the Budget Control Act's mandatory budget cuts. And instead insist that everything can be fixed by cutting defense when simple math ($budget_deficit > $defense_budget) says it can't.
Don't trust what I tell you, don't trust what your friends in your political circles tell you. Read the CBO reports and decide for yourself. They're very enlightening.
No, it's "The original estimate was 30 feet. But after we got to 30 feet, we looked ahead and it looked like there was at least 10 more feet of pier. So we went to 40 feet." Likewise, if it's extended to 80 feet, it's going to be by peeking ahead to see if there seem to be 80 more feet of pier before going on. Not by running blind.
The safety margins are estimated based upon what is known at that time and can also be too small. That's why these things have been watched like hawks and many portions replaced.
SONGS has been offline since January due to premature wear detected in pipes installed in 2010-2011. They've vowed not to restart it until they know exactly what caused the problem. The inspection regimen caught the problem. Fairly early too.
People always talk about how unsafe nuclear plants are due to human failings. But if you look at their safety record, we'd be a lot better off worrying more about other power sources rather than nuclear power. More people were killed in the U.S. by commercial wind power just last year (1 maintenance worker, 2 members of the public) than have been killed by commercial nuclear power in 54 years (zero). Statistically, nuclear power is actually the safest power source man has ever harnessed.
You should be taxed based on the percentage of income/wealth that you have.
Income taxes make perfect sense.
Wealth taxes make no sense, unless it's a once-in-a-lifetime tax (e.g. inheritance tax). The reason is that wealth has already been taxed. Wealth is just the accumulation of income and durable goods you've bought with that income. In the case of appreciated stocks, it's just pending income that will be taxed when you cash out on it. You already taxed that income (presumably). Taxing wealth then means you're double-taxing the same income.
Mathematically, income and income taxes are rates - dollars/yr. Wealth is an amount - dollars. So a wealth tax has to also be an amount, which is why a once-in-a-lifetime wealth tax works. If you try to make a wealth tax something it's not - a rate - it creates all sorts of inequitable situations. e.g. Nancy and Jane both work jobs making $50k/yr, and pay $10k/yr in taxes. Nancy blows all her money on parties, fancy clothes and jewelry, and flashy cars and thus has no savings. Jane lives frugally and saves $25k for her retirement.
Now throw in a 20% wealth tax. Nancy has no wealth so doesn't pay it. Jane has $25k in savings, so ends up paying an extra $5k. Essentially, both made $50k in income that year. But Nancy paid $10 in taxes while Jane had to pay $15k in taxes because she had the temerity to save. It gets worse the following year. Nancy still pays no tax. Jane now has $45k in savings, so ends up paying $9k in wealth taxes. Despite having the exact same income as Nancy, Jane is now paying almost twice as much in taxes - $19k vs $10k, all because she's trying to save for her future. By 10 years Nancy has paid $100k in taxes, Jane has paid $261k. By 25 years Nancy has paid $250k in taxes (20% of her cumulative income), Jane has paid $775k in taxes (62% of her cumulative income).
Just don't go there. Wealth taxes are stupid and don't make sense, and there's no fair way to implement them. Stick with income taxes. (Excise taxes like property taxes may seem to be a wealth tax. But they're designed more to offset the fixed cost of the government regulating something like vehicle registration, or to discourage sitting on property while it appreciates like a vegetable field in the middle of a city.)
rademarks are used to protect a brand's image. They are issued to prevent brand dilution (the brand becoming a generic term, as happened with Kleenex)
Kleenex narrowly avoided becoming a generic term (as did Xerox and Band-Aid). The list of brand names which became generic include: aspirin, thermos, escalator, zipper, heroin, videotape, laundromat. You probably thought those were just regular words, not words invented by some company to sell a product. That's what happens when your trademark becomes genericized.
Actually, that suggests the right had a qualitative failure, and the left had a quantitative failure. Wrong magnitude of prediction is a lesser error than complete failure to predict the occurrence of some event.
Ugh. Is this the level of scientific education our schools are churning out today? And modded to +5 insightful? This is the reason why there's so much debate about AGW - because of nonsensical and politically-charged arguments like yours.
Errors in magnitude don't care about sign. If you predict temperatures will go down by 0.3 degrees, and I predict temperatures will go up by 4 degrees, and what actually happens is that temperatures go up by 0.5 degrees, your prediction was considerably more accurate and had a much smaller error in magnitude than my prediction (0.8 degree error vs 3.5 degree error), despite me falling on the correct side of zero while you fell on the wrong side. (There's a small gotcha here with positive feedback mechanisms, since they flip their driving direction depending on which side of the zero you're at. But positive feedback mechanisms are by definition unstable, and the fact that our climate has been variable but stable for billions of years is an indication the negative feedback mechanisms far outweigh the positive feedback mechanisms.)
Qualitative errors are ones which misunderstand the mechanics of what's going on. If I claim temperatures will go up because Gaia is angry that we've stopped caring about her, and temperatures go up, I may be quantitatively correct, but qualitatively completely off my rocker.
Yeah, you can use the studios' own argument against them here. If piracy was costing them umpteen bajillion dollars in revenue, and the 3-strikes law hasn't resulted in an increase in revenue of at least a few bajillion dollars, then by their own measure it hasn't reduced piracy. It's either driven it underground, probably to sneakernet. Or the anti-*IAA forces were right and most of those pirated songs never would've been sales in the first place, and so wasn't costing them anything.
They coated the outside of the laptop with it, giving it a slightly rubbery/felt-like texture. Whereas regular plastic laptop lids picked up scratches from being slid in and out of cases, on the Thinkpad you could simply rub these scratches out. Dunno of Lenovo still uses it. I first learned of it when I complained to a friend that my Thinkpad had picked up a lot of scratches over the years. He told me about the coating, so I spent about 15 minutes rubbing and it looked nearly as good as new.
I mention this before the Apple fans start claiming Apple "pioneered" the use of such coatings in computers.
Even today, almost none of the connections between Internet nodes are ethernet. Your home broadband connection is not ethernet - it's DSL, cable modem, or fiber. Back in the day when most Internet nodes didn't have dedicated connections, they used dialup modems over POTS, not ethernet. Most dedicated connections used the X.25 network provided by the phone companies for dedicated data lines.
What enabled the Internet was the idea of layering communications. That way your applications saw the same packets coming from the network regardless of whatever software or hardware lay underneath. That is, rather than try to translate TCP/IP packet data into ethernet packet data, then translate that into DSL packet data, etc. for this post submission to get to slashdot, each layer just encapsulates the higher layer's data. So the TCP/IP packets never know they've been split up into 1542 byte chunks to be transmitted along ethernet to reach my DSL modem. They don't know they've been converted into whatever tortured protocol DSL uses, and so on all the way to slashdot's servers.
You just have underlying layers treat the above layers are data streams. Then the higher levels (e.g. apps) can interoperate completely agnostic to what underlying layers are used. Ethernet was one of those underlying layers, so had nothing to do with it. Ethernet's simplicity and versatility had a lot to do with it being adopted at the hardware level for LANs (as opposed to, say, Token Ring), but it had nothing to do with the Internet.
It's so obviously collusion. In my neck of the woods, no two cable companies compete. You can get one if you live HERE and the other if you live THERE. This is not capitalism and they should be forced through legislation to compete.
It was legislation, not collusion, which gave you just once choice in cable companies (unless you're talking about collusion between the government and the cable company). To lay down cables in the U.S. normally requires crossing private property. To avoid having to get permission from every homeowner along the path of a line, the government allows laying down cables in/along streets and easements (small portions of private property which the government has obtained cable-laying rights to via eminent domain). In other words, if you want to run a business which involves laying down cables, you need the government's permission to do it.
Unfortunately, they didn't let any cable company to lay down cable and allow the market to do its job. The municipal governments made demands such as x% coverage of a city, or payments to the city to help offset the cost of maintaining roads. The phone/cable companies only agreed on the condition that they get a monopoly. And so for the vast majority of the country, we only have a single choice of cable company and local phone company (though VoIP is making the latter less of an issue). There is no second cable company or second phone company because your local government made it illegal for there to be a second one.
In the suburb of Boston I used to live in, the city tore up its agreement with the cable company and allowed a second cable company to offer service. The first cable company immediately lowered my monthly bill $10 (to match the second company's price) without me even having to do anything. If you're going to give a company a monopoly on some sort of wired service, it should be under the eye of the public utilities commission, and should only be for the cables - i.e. providing the physical pipes. They should be prohibited from selling content which travels through those pipes. Their job should be maintain the pipe and sell access to it to cable/phone/internet providers. Those providers would then provide the content, and should then be free to offer you whatever you like at whatever prices they want to set.
The real problem here is NOT that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea has become so popular that they should be forced to allow other companies to license the patent. The real problem here is that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea should not have been patentable in the first place. Apple was the first to implement the idea, so they got a head start in the market, and that should have been enough.
Agreed that it shouldn't have been patentable. But Apple was second with the idea. Their slide to unlock patent was overturned in the UK based on prior art - Neonode patented slide to unlock 3 years before Apple.
They were not "classified" as FRAND by some random group of people. Motorola chose to submit their patents to a standard body and agreed to license them under FRAND so they would be part of the standard.
And therein lies the problem with the current patent mess. If the value of licensing your patent under FRAND is less than the value of licensing it yourself, then nobody will license their patents under FRAND anymore. You're going to have dozens of companies in each industry reinventing the wheel a dozen different ways for every feature just to avoid having injunctions filed preventing them from selling their product.
Remember, the whole point of patents isn't to financially award the patent-holder. It's to promote progress in science and the useful arts. If FRAND patents become worth less than self-licensed patents, then it discourages progress in science and useful arts. Apple's current abuse of the patent system has revealed a situation where the letter of the law can be used to violate the spirit of the law. Google is suggesting a fix for it.
I got this because I have a G+ account with all that tasty meta data about myself, and this allows youtube to pick adverts to show me.
I leave myself logged into gmail and google+ on Chrome. I use Firefox for my regular browsing with cookies and history set to delete every time I restart it. No cross-linked metadata.
A tax deduction is a reduction in your taxable income, not a reduction in your tax. If I'm in the 25% tax bracket and donate $1000 to charity, I only see a tax reduction of $250. I'm still left with $750 less than I would've had if I hadn't donated.
Basically, you can think of money donated to charities as going straight to the charity (i.e. you never received it), with the government not taxing the charity.
They have a $1 salary because salary is taxed at the higher rate reserved for the lower class. The CEO's get all their compensation in the form of stock options, and that is taxed at the lower rate reserved for the gentry
Do note that to pay more in income tax than the 15% long-term capital gains tax rate, you need to make at least $54,575. Other deductions and exemptions will push the threshold income level even higher.
$5,950 tax-free as standard deduction
next $8,700 taxed at 10% ($870)
next $26,650 taxed at 15% ($3997.50)
next $13,275 taxed at 25% ($3318.75)
= $54,575 in income, $8186.25 in taxes, or 15%
Yes the 15% capital gains tax rate is lower than the higher income tax brackets. But it's still significantly higher than the 12.8% the average taxpayer pays (2009, column T). Based on the IRS stats, the adjusted gross income at which a tax filer pays an average of 15% in income tax is somewhere around $160,000.
Do I think it's right that rich CEOs are only paying 15%? No. But the lower class does not have a "higher rate" reserved for them. They pay substantially less than 15%. Basically, the $1 salary tax dodge takes CEOs from taxation rates meant for people making over about $200k, and puts them at taxation rates meant for people making about $160k. The savings in terms of tax rate is a big deal (about 25% down to 15%), but the savings in terms of tax bracket is not (moving from the 99th or 98th percentile to about the 93rd-95th percentile).
Be that as it may, this is actually a pretty important case from an online privacy standpoint. If I send an IM to a few dozen friends, is it private? Is it public? If I deleted everything I uploaded to Facebook when I decided they were a crappy service 5 years ago, but FB still has a copy, can law enforcement get at it? These are questions that will need to be answered at some point.
In that respect, it's actually a good thing it's only for a disorderly conduct charge. That way the judge/jury ruling on this will consider its consequences for the smallest of infractions. If it had been for first degree murder, the seriousness of the crime may have made the judge/jury overreach in the interest of seeking justice.
The problem is that the people who like the small phones see all the features on the big phones, and want them in the small phones. They're not technically competent enough to understand that having extra cores, better 3D, microSD expansion, whatever requires a bigger battery and bigger circuit board. It's realistic to add these things to the bigger phone, but not to their small phone.
Consequently they misinterpret the problem as being due to a "trend toward bigger phones" causing manufacturers to choose to put these features in only the bigger phones. Not due to the technical impossibility of squeezing those features into a smaller phone with current technology.
The tape is a tamper-proof measure, so you know that someone else hasn't opened the box and replaced your new Nexus 7 with a broken one or their used one.
If the iPod packaging in the link is correct and it's just a box where you lift off the lid, then it's not tamper-proof. You have no way to know that your "new" iPod is in fact new, and not one that was already opened and returned. I would consider it functionally inferior packaging (assuming you place a value on new over pre-owned).
He pretty clearly stated why they're using an SUV, and I applaud his thinking. Since so many people want the SUV "feel", if he can succeed in this it could herald a major step forward.
No, the submitter chose the right vehicle but gave the wrong reasons. Need or feel has nothing to do with it. The best vehicle for this optimization is an SUV. It comes down to fuel efficiency being the inverse of mileage.
Say a person is going on a 450 mile trip. Say he drives a sedan which gets 30 mpg. In other words, he will burn 15 gallons on his trip.
Now say he does some whiz-bang hybrid conversion which increases his mileage by 50%. The sedan now gets 45 mpg. He will now burn 10 gallons on his trip - a savings of 5 gallons.
Now look at the person doing the trip in an SUV which gets 15 mpg. Normally he'd burn 30 gallons on this trip.
You do the conversion and increase the mileage by 50%. It now gets 22.5 mpg. He will now burn 20 gallons - a savings of 10 gallons.
Unfortunately, because we in the U.S. use mpg to measure fuel efficiency, we get googly-eyed at high mpg numbers. In fact, the opposite is true. The biggest fuel savings comes from improving the efficiency of low mileage vehicles. Not by improving the efficiency of econoboxes. Improving the mileage of the SUV by 7.5 mpg saves you twice as much fuel than improving the mileage of the sedan by 15 mpg. The opposite of what you'd expect if you looked at just the delta in mpg.
No matter how complex the key bolt cutters usually work but it is rather difficult to conceal a set of bolt cutters big enough to do the job on one's person and bolt cutters that large are not all that common. Hand cuff components are made of hardened steel and a small set will not work.
Nonsense. Bolt cutters are just large because they use a simple lever to generate the force needed to cut through hardened steel. You could replace them with a small box with a hand crank and multiplier worm gear attached to the cutting teeth. Turn the crank a lot to move the cutting teeth a little. Same effect.
Lever-based bolt cutters are just easier to make and quicker to operate, and there is little to no legitimate market for a set of bolt cutters you can hide. But that doesn't mean someone couldn't custom-make a small cranked bolt cutter.
Based the Wikipedia article for the Emma Maersk (new top of the line container vessel), that comes to about 57 to 123 gallons of fuel per 20 foot container.
Which is roughly 1/2 to 1/3 the fuel capacity of a tractor trailer hauling one or two such containers. Basically, the fuel cost of trucking something a few hundred miles is more than the fuel cost of transporting it across the ocean via cargo ship.
Totally different story for rail, which is about 3-5x more efficient than truck, or about half the efficiency of cargo ship. But the U.S. mostly killed off its rail industry by subsidizing trucking. (The highways are paid for disproportionately by passenger cars - they pay about half the cost, while trucks cause most of the road damage which needs to be repaired. The average passenger car simply does not weigh enough to damage the highway appreciably.)
Even if you verify the source code is clean and compile it yourself, you're still vulnerable. The compiler could have a trojan hidden in it which inserts a backdoor when it detects certain functions are being compiled. And if you compile your compiler yourself? Well what's to say the compiler you use to do that doesn't have a trojan which inserts the trojan I just mentioned into your new compiler? And so on.
Basically, if you want to be 100% sure your code is clean, you have to write it (including any compilers you use) from scratch. Perhaps the most pertinent quote from that paper: "As the level of program gets lower, these [deliberately inserted] bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed [hardware] microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."
Not this again. Except for copyright-protected industries, no other profession has the concept that you can work once and get paid for it over and over. Copyright giving a distribution monopoly to the original author made sense in a world where reproduction and distribution were expensive. (It was frequently the most expensive part of bringing a creative idea to the masses, meaning you were getting paid for doing work - the work was partly creative, and partly the logistics of reproducing and distributing). It makes no sense in a world where reproduction and distribution are essentially free. Basically, the industries protected by copyright see the opportunity to make oodles of money by having a monopoly over selling something which costs them practically nothing to reproduce and distribute. That's morally wrong.
Songwriters can do what wedding photographers have done. In the old days, wedding photographers would shoot your wedding for a nominal fee, and charge up the wazoo for prints. This made sense because a couple who ordered dozens of albums for all their family represented a substantially higher cost to the photographer than the couple who ordered just one. Then scanners and photo printers came along and dropped the price of reproduction and distribution to near zero, which resulted in a lot of "piracy".
How did wedding photographers respond to this? They didn't whine and moan and try to get authoritarian laws passed which force the public to live by the old rules in this new reality. They simply changed their business model. They now charge a lot for the wedding shoot, and a nominal fee for the pictures (some even give you digital copies for free).
Someone wants a song written. You negotiate with them and come to an greement for how much they'll pay you. You write the song and give it to them. They pay you money. Get paid for doing work. Radical concept, I know. So radical that songwriters you've never heard of like Mozart and Beethoven are the only ones who had to make a living under it.
(The "what if the song becomes a big hit?" argument is circular. It assumes the artist performing the song is working under the current copyright rules. Under the scheme I'm suggesting, both the artist and songwriter wouldn't make more money by distributing more copies of the song. They'd make it from better name recognition allowing them to negotiate for higher compensation for future jobs/performances. Just like everybody else.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's patent on this dates back to the early 1990s. Back then, Archie indexed and let you search a single ftp site. Veronica did a similar thing for multiple gopher sites, but only the menus (categories, probably most analogous to directories in today's GUI-centric model). "But those are all remote servers!" you say. Well, if the Unix system you were using to conduct your Veronica search also ran a gopher site, it was simultaneously a local search as well.
A group of companies, including Apple, got together and took the next obvious step of combining the two - indexing and letting you search the files on multiple gopher sites, not just their menus. I think that's where the patent comes from. I and I think most reasonable people would say it's obvious, but apparently the USPTO is not staffed by reasonable people.
The problem with the Federal budget isn't military spending. Yes defense can be cut, but it's already the one budget item which has been cut the most in the last 50 years. Right now, our annual budget deficit exceeds the defense budget, so we could drop defense spending to zero and we'd still have a budget crisis. And FWIW, defense spending is on the chopping block as well if the Budget Control Act kicks in.
Likewise, the U.S. spends pretty close to the most of any country on public education per student. So our education problems aren't because of lack of funding. The "lack of money" for education is an illusion created by school administrators, either to cover up their own incompetence or to attempt to carve a bigger piece of the budget pie for themselves. Cutting defense and shifting the money to education is just swapping one form of wasteful spending for another.
What needs to be cut are the social programs - primarily Medicare and Medicaid. Social Security was a problem too, but its growth was mitigated with some of the reforms passed some years ago. Don't believe me? Go read the CBO reports. They've been saying this for over a decade now - Medicare and Medicaid projected to grow to consume 100% of tax revenue by 2050-2070 (the doomsday date changes from year to year). The notes on the NPR graph mention the same thing too - that the social programs are the parts of the budget which have grown the most. Unfortunately some people refuse to acknowledge that this is the real problem, and jealously guard these programs against any and all cuts - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all exempt from the Budget Control Act's mandatory budget cuts. And instead insist that everything can be fixed by cutting defense when simple math ($budget_deficit > $defense_budget) says it can't.
Don't trust what I tell you, don't trust what your friends in your political circles tell you. Read the CBO reports and decide for yourself. They're very enlightening.
No, it's "The original estimate was 30 feet. But after we got to 30 feet, we looked ahead and it looked like there was at least 10 more feet of pier. So we went to 40 feet." Likewise, if it's extended to 80 feet, it's going to be by peeking ahead to see if there seem to be 80 more feet of pier before going on. Not by running blind.
SONGS has been offline since January due to premature wear detected in pipes installed in 2010-2011. They've vowed not to restart it until they know exactly what caused the problem. The inspection regimen caught the problem. Fairly early too.
People always talk about how unsafe nuclear plants are due to human failings. But if you look at their safety record, we'd be a lot better off worrying more about other power sources rather than nuclear power. More people were killed in the U.S. by commercial wind power just last year (1 maintenance worker, 2 members of the public) than have been killed by commercial nuclear power in 54 years (zero). Statistically, nuclear power is actually the safest power source man has ever harnessed.
And because someone who can't wrap his head around the idea that wind is more dangerous than nuclear under our current regulatory structure is going to call BS:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/22/lamar-alexander/facts-risks-nuclear-power-plants/
http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=118532
http://www.sanduskyregister.com/news/2011/jun/14/bellevuefall061411azxml
http://siouxcityjournal.com/news/local/article_e00a0cd2-bfcd-5543-85fd-cafa456922e4.html
(I'm limiting it to commercial power generation, leaving out 2 wind-related construction fatalities and one fatal fall from a research turbine.)
Income taxes make perfect sense.
Wealth taxes make no sense, unless it's a once-in-a-lifetime tax (e.g. inheritance tax). The reason is that wealth has already been taxed. Wealth is just the accumulation of income and durable goods you've bought with that income. In the case of appreciated stocks, it's just pending income that will be taxed when you cash out on it. You already taxed that income (presumably). Taxing wealth then means you're double-taxing the same income.
Mathematically, income and income taxes are rates - dollars/yr. Wealth is an amount - dollars. So a wealth tax has to also be an amount, which is why a once-in-a-lifetime wealth tax works. If you try to make a wealth tax something it's not - a rate - it creates all sorts of inequitable situations. e.g. Nancy and Jane both work jobs making $50k/yr, and pay $10k/yr in taxes. Nancy blows all her money on parties, fancy clothes and jewelry, and flashy cars and thus has no savings. Jane lives frugally and saves $25k for her retirement.
Now throw in a 20% wealth tax. Nancy has no wealth so doesn't pay it. Jane has $25k in savings, so ends up paying an extra $5k. Essentially, both made $50k in income that year. But Nancy paid $10 in taxes while Jane had to pay $15k in taxes because she had the temerity to save. It gets worse the following year. Nancy still pays no tax. Jane now has $45k in savings, so ends up paying $9k in wealth taxes. Despite having the exact same income as Nancy, Jane is now paying almost twice as much in taxes - $19k vs $10k, all because she's trying to save for her future. By 10 years Nancy has paid $100k in taxes, Jane has paid $261k. By 25 years Nancy has paid $250k in taxes (20% of her cumulative income), Jane has paid $775k in taxes (62% of her cumulative income).
Just don't go there. Wealth taxes are stupid and don't make sense, and there's no fair way to implement them. Stick with income taxes. (Excise taxes like property taxes may seem to be a wealth tax. But they're designed more to offset the fixed cost of the government regulating something like vehicle registration, or to discourage sitting on property while it appreciates like a vegetable field in the middle of a city.)
Kleenex narrowly avoided becoming a generic term (as did Xerox and Band-Aid). The list of brand names which became generic include: aspirin, thermos, escalator, zipper, heroin, videotape, laundromat. You probably thought those were just regular words, not words invented by some company to sell a product. That's what happens when your trademark becomes genericized.
Ugh. Is this the level of scientific education our schools are churning out today? And modded to +5 insightful? This is the reason why there's so much debate about AGW - because of nonsensical and politically-charged arguments like yours.
Errors in magnitude don't care about sign. If you predict temperatures will go down by 0.3 degrees, and I predict temperatures will go up by 4 degrees, and what actually happens is that temperatures go up by 0.5 degrees, your prediction was considerably more accurate and had a much smaller error in magnitude than my prediction (0.8 degree error vs 3.5 degree error), despite me falling on the correct side of zero while you fell on the wrong side. (There's a small gotcha here with positive feedback mechanisms, since they flip their driving direction depending on which side of the zero you're at. But positive feedback mechanisms are by definition unstable, and the fact that our climate has been variable but stable for billions of years is an indication the negative feedback mechanisms far outweigh the positive feedback mechanisms.)
Qualitative errors are ones which misunderstand the mechanics of what's going on. If I claim temperatures will go up because Gaia is angry that we've stopped caring about her, and temperatures go up, I may be quantitatively correct, but qualitatively completely off my rocker.
Yeah, you can use the studios' own argument against them here. If piracy was costing them umpteen bajillion dollars in revenue, and the 3-strikes law hasn't resulted in an increase in revenue of at least a few bajillion dollars, then by their own measure it hasn't reduced piracy. It's either driven it underground, probably to sneakernet. Or the anti-*IAA forces were right and most of those pirated songs never would've been sales in the first place, and so wasn't costing them anything.
They coated the outside of the laptop with it, giving it a slightly rubbery/felt-like texture. Whereas regular plastic laptop lids picked up scratches from being slid in and out of cases, on the Thinkpad you could simply rub these scratches out. Dunno of Lenovo still uses it. I first learned of it when I complained to a friend that my Thinkpad had picked up a lot of scratches over the years. He told me about the coating, so I spent about 15 minutes rubbing and it looked nearly as good as new.
I mention this before the Apple fans start claiming Apple "pioneered" the use of such coatings in computers.
Even today, almost none of the connections between Internet nodes are ethernet. Your home broadband connection is not ethernet - it's DSL, cable modem, or fiber. Back in the day when most Internet nodes didn't have dedicated connections, they used dialup modems over POTS, not ethernet. Most dedicated connections used the X.25 network provided by the phone companies for dedicated data lines.
What enabled the Internet was the idea of layering communications. That way your applications saw the same packets coming from the network regardless of whatever software or hardware lay underneath. That is, rather than try to translate TCP/IP packet data into ethernet packet data, then translate that into DSL packet data, etc. for this post submission to get to slashdot, each layer just encapsulates the higher layer's data. So the TCP/IP packets never know they've been split up into 1542 byte chunks to be transmitted along ethernet to reach my DSL modem. They don't know they've been converted into whatever tortured protocol DSL uses, and so on all the way to slashdot's servers.
You just have underlying layers treat the above layers are data streams. Then the higher levels (e.g. apps) can interoperate completely agnostic to what underlying layers are used. Ethernet was one of those underlying layers, so had nothing to do with it. Ethernet's simplicity and versatility had a lot to do with it being adopted at the hardware level for LANs (as opposed to, say, Token Ring), but it had nothing to do with the Internet.
It was legislation, not collusion, which gave you just once choice in cable companies (unless you're talking about collusion between the government and the cable company). To lay down cables in the U.S. normally requires crossing private property. To avoid having to get permission from every homeowner along the path of a line, the government allows laying down cables in/along streets and easements (small portions of private property which the government has obtained cable-laying rights to via eminent domain). In other words, if you want to run a business which involves laying down cables, you need the government's permission to do it.
Unfortunately, they didn't let any cable company to lay down cable and allow the market to do its job. The municipal governments made demands such as x% coverage of a city, or payments to the city to help offset the cost of maintaining roads. The phone/cable companies only agreed on the condition that they get a monopoly. And so for the vast majority of the country, we only have a single choice of cable company and local phone company (though VoIP is making the latter less of an issue). There is no second cable company or second phone company because your local government made it illegal for there to be a second one.
In the suburb of Boston I used to live in, the city tore up its agreement with the cable company and allowed a second cable company to offer service. The first cable company immediately lowered my monthly bill $10 (to match the second company's price) without me even having to do anything. If you're going to give a company a monopoly on some sort of wired service, it should be under the eye of the public utilities commission, and should only be for the cables - i.e. providing the physical pipes. They should be prohibited from selling content which travels through those pipes. Their job should be maintain the pipe and sell access to it to cable/phone/internet providers. Those providers would then provide the content, and should then be free to offer you whatever you like at whatever prices they want to set.
Agreed that it shouldn't have been patentable. But Apple was second with the idea. Their slide to unlock patent was overturned in the UK based on prior art - Neonode patented slide to unlock 3 years before Apple.
And therein lies the problem with the current patent mess. If the value of licensing your patent under FRAND is less than the value of licensing it yourself, then nobody will license their patents under FRAND anymore. You're going to have dozens of companies in each industry reinventing the wheel a dozen different ways for every feature just to avoid having injunctions filed preventing them from selling their product.
Remember, the whole point of patents isn't to financially award the patent-holder. It's to promote progress in science and the useful arts. If FRAND patents become worth less than self-licensed patents, then it discourages progress in science and useful arts. Apple's current abuse of the patent system has revealed a situation where the letter of the law can be used to violate the spirit of the law. Google is suggesting a fix for it.
I leave myself logged into gmail and google+ on Chrome. I use Firefox for my regular browsing with cookies and history set to delete every time I restart it. No cross-linked metadata.
A tax deduction is a reduction in your taxable income, not a reduction in your tax. If I'm in the 25% tax bracket and donate $1000 to charity, I only see a tax reduction of $250. I'm still left with $750 less than I would've had if I hadn't donated.
Basically, you can think of money donated to charities as going straight to the charity (i.e. you never received it), with the government not taxing the charity.
Do note that to pay more in income tax than the 15% long-term capital gains tax rate, you need to make at least $54,575. Other deductions and exemptions will push the threshold income level even higher.
$5,950 tax-free as standard deduction
next $8,700 taxed at 10% ($870)
next $26,650 taxed at 15% ($3997.50)
next $13,275 taxed at 25% ($3318.75)
= $54,575 in income, $8186.25 in taxes, or 15%
Yes the 15% capital gains tax rate is lower than the higher income tax brackets. But it's still significantly higher than the 12.8% the average taxpayer pays (2009, column T). Based on the IRS stats, the adjusted gross income at which a tax filer pays an average of 15% in income tax is somewhere around $160,000.
Do I think it's right that rich CEOs are only paying 15%? No. But the lower class does not have a "higher rate" reserved for them. They pay substantially less than 15%. Basically, the $1 salary tax dodge takes CEOs from taxation rates meant for people making over about $200k, and puts them at taxation rates meant for people making about $160k. The savings in terms of tax rate is a big deal (about 25% down to 15%), but the savings in terms of tax bracket is not (moving from the 99th or 98th percentile to about the 93rd-95th percentile).
Be that as it may, this is actually a pretty important case from an online privacy standpoint. If I send an IM to a few dozen friends, is it private? Is it public? If I deleted everything I uploaded to Facebook when I decided they were a crappy service 5 years ago, but FB still has a copy, can law enforcement get at it? These are questions that will need to be answered at some point.
In that respect, it's actually a good thing it's only for a disorderly conduct charge. That way the judge/jury ruling on this will consider its consequences for the smallest of infractions. If it had been for first degree murder, the seriousness of the crime may have made the judge/jury overreach in the interest of seeking justice.
The problem is that the people who like the small phones see all the features on the big phones, and want them in the small phones. They're not technically competent enough to understand that having extra cores, better 3D, microSD expansion, whatever requires a bigger battery and bigger circuit board. It's realistic to add these things to the bigger phone, but not to their small phone.
Consequently they misinterpret the problem as being due to a "trend toward bigger phones" causing manufacturers to choose to put these features in only the bigger phones. Not due to the technical impossibility of squeezing those features into a smaller phone with current technology.
The tape is a tamper-proof measure, so you know that someone else hasn't opened the box and replaced your new Nexus 7 with a broken one or their used one.
If the iPod packaging in the link is correct and it's just a box where you lift off the lid, then it's not tamper-proof. You have no way to know that your "new" iPod is in fact new, and not one that was already opened and returned. I would consider it functionally inferior packaging (assuming you place a value on new over pre-owned).
No, the submitter chose the right vehicle but gave the wrong reasons. Need or feel has nothing to do with it. The best vehicle for this optimization is an SUV. It comes down to fuel efficiency being the inverse of mileage.
Say a person is going on a 450 mile trip. Say he drives a sedan which gets 30 mpg. In other words, he will burn 15 gallons on his trip.
Now say he does some whiz-bang hybrid conversion which increases his mileage by 50%. The sedan now gets 45 mpg. He will now burn 10 gallons on his trip - a savings of 5 gallons.
Now look at the person doing the trip in an SUV which gets 15 mpg. Normally he'd burn 30 gallons on this trip.
You do the conversion and increase the mileage by 50%. It now gets 22.5 mpg. He will now burn 20 gallons - a savings of 10 gallons.
Unfortunately, because we in the U.S. use mpg to measure fuel efficiency, we get googly-eyed at high mpg numbers. In fact, the opposite is true. The biggest fuel savings comes from improving the efficiency of low mileage vehicles. Not by improving the efficiency of econoboxes. Improving the mileage of the SUV by 7.5 mpg saves you twice as much fuel than improving the mileage of the sedan by 15 mpg. The opposite of what you'd expect if you looked at just the delta in mpg.
Nonsense. Bolt cutters are just large because they use a simple lever to generate the force needed to cut through hardened steel. You could replace them with a small box with a hand crank and multiplier worm gear attached to the cutting teeth. Turn the crank a lot to move the cutting teeth a little. Same effect.
Lever-based bolt cutters are just easier to make and quicker to operate, and there is little to no legitimate market for a set of bolt cutters you can hide. But that doesn't mean someone couldn't custom-make a small cranked bolt cutter.
Which is roughly 1/2 to 1/3 the fuel capacity of a tractor trailer hauling one or two such containers. Basically, the fuel cost of trucking something a few hundred miles is more than the fuel cost of transporting it across the ocean via cargo ship.
Totally different story for rail, which is about 3-5x more efficient than truck, or about half the efficiency of cargo ship. But the U.S. mostly killed off its rail industry by subsidizing trucking. (The highways are paid for disproportionately by passenger cars - they pay about half the cost, while trucks cause most of the road damage which needs to be repaired. The average passenger car simply does not weigh enough to damage the highway appreciably.)
Sorry for the broken link. Here is the correct link. It should be required reading for anyone involved in computer security.
Even if you verify the source code is clean and compile it yourself, you're still vulnerable. The compiler could have a trojan hidden in it which inserts a backdoor when it detects certain functions are being compiled. And if you compile your compiler yourself? Well what's to say the compiler you use to do that doesn't have a trojan which inserts the trojan I just mentioned into your new compiler? And so on.
Basically, if you want to be 100% sure your code is clean, you have to write it (including any compilers you use) from scratch. Perhaps the most pertinent quote from that paper: "As the level of program gets lower, these [deliberately inserted] bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed [hardware] microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."
Not this again. Except for copyright-protected industries, no other profession has the concept that you can work once and get paid for it over and over. Copyright giving a distribution monopoly to the original author made sense in a world where reproduction and distribution were expensive. (It was frequently the most expensive part of bringing a creative idea to the masses, meaning you were getting paid for doing work - the work was partly creative, and partly the logistics of reproducing and distributing). It makes no sense in a world where reproduction and distribution are essentially free. Basically, the industries protected by copyright see the opportunity to make oodles of money by having a monopoly over selling something which costs them practically nothing to reproduce and distribute. That's morally wrong.
Songwriters can do what wedding photographers have done. In the old days, wedding photographers would shoot your wedding for a nominal fee, and charge up the wazoo for prints. This made sense because a couple who ordered dozens of albums for all their family represented a substantially higher cost to the photographer than the couple who ordered just one. Then scanners and photo printers came along and dropped the price of reproduction and distribution to near zero, which resulted in a lot of "piracy".
How did wedding photographers respond to this? They didn't whine and moan and try to get authoritarian laws passed which force the public to live by the old rules in this new reality. They simply changed their business model. They now charge a lot for the wedding shoot, and a nominal fee for the pictures (some even give you digital copies for free).
Someone wants a song written. You negotiate with them and come to an greement for how much they'll pay you. You write the song and give it to them. They pay you money. Get paid for doing work. Radical concept, I know. So radical that songwriters you've never heard of like Mozart and Beethoven are the only ones who had to make a living under it.
(The "what if the song becomes a big hit?" argument is circular. It assumes the artist performing the song is working under the current copyright rules. Under the scheme I'm suggesting, both the artist and songwriter wouldn't make more money by distributing more copies of the song. They'd make it from better name recognition allowing them to negotiate for higher compensation for future jobs/performances. Just like everybody else.)