Yes, added cost, but consider that you're buying with that extra cost a thinner laptop (because it didn't have to be included) and the option of NOT carrying it around. I've found that I almost never need either the display adapter or the ethernet adapter, so I don't have to carry them around if I don't need them (I have an Air).
The cost of an ethernet or display dongle and the cost of carrying around a built-in versions, pales in comparison to the cost of not having the port or dongle when you need it. We had a convention recently and one of the presenters forgot to bring his display dongle for his Mac. We spent a few minutes scrounging around for one while someone worked on copying his presentation over to a PC. 3 minutes * 150 guests = a cumulative 7.5 hours of wasted time. (And for you Mac fans who don't like how I'm counting time, it's how Steve Jobs thought of saving time.)
For me, the thinness is worth it.
That's the problem. People are starting to think of laptops as fashion statements foremost, rather than as tools. It's fine to want good aesthetics (a good-looking laptop is nicer than a bad-looking one), but one should never give up functionality for the sole purpose of aesthetics. If you're never going to present or plug in, then there's no problem. Any costs associated with forgotten dongles or lack of ports are yours to bear alone. But if you do stuff which might ever externalize that cost, you need to factor that into your decision of functionality vs. aesthetics. (For our part, we're going to have to buy a Mac video dongle for the projector to make sure this doesn't happen again. We're paying for the Mac users' aesthetic tastes. But at least it's damn cheaper than making 150 people wait.)
Not to usurp the anonymous coward who gave out the same info for Android, but this really needs to be heard. I myself didn't learn about it until an ICS beta.
Android: Press and hold Home for 3 sec. That'll pop up a list of running apps. Click one to switch to it. Flick it to close it (handy for closing a bunch of apps at once). Be aware that Android auto-closes apps when it runs out of memory, so if you haven't used the app in a while and are running a lot of other stuff, it may close on its own while in the background.
iOS: Double-click the home button. That'll pop up a list of apps much like Android. I hear it's a list of recently used apps, rather than a list of currently running apps. But I don't know enough about iOS multitasking to say for sure.
What a fucking stupid idea - the processor + storage are the CHEAP part of the phone.
Storage may be cheap, but the data on it is not. Ultimately, this is one solution to the problem of synchronizing data across multiple devices. Slashdot rejects the notion of cloud computing. Many of these devices are only networked intermittently so rsync is out. That pretty much leaves storing your data on one device and accessing it directly through multiple devices. Which will it be? You can't call both this and cloud computing stupid - that's equivalent to saying people don't need to sync their data across multiple devices, which is clearly not the case.
Just another race to the bottom. Corporations are going to end up tax-exempt and we're all going to end up living in a Neo-Feudalistic society where instead of an aristocracy we've got C-levels and their retinues while national governments sputter out with less and less tax revenue coming in and become more and more irrelevant.
Honest question: Why must corporations pay taxes? There seems to be a belief that if a corporation pays taxes, that means less taxes for individuals, and more money for them to spend.
But that's easily provably false. Income just represents productivity, and all productivity comes from people. If the nation's citizens generate $10 trillion in productivity, and the government spends $2.5 trillion, then it's pretty obvious. An overall 25% of the nation's productivity (income) needs to be diverted to the government in some form of taxes. Whether those taxes are income taxes, sales taxes, or corporate taxes is irrelevant. The combination of those (and other taxes) have to add up to 25% for the government not to run a deficit. It can be all income tax, all sales tax, or all corporate tax. The net result is the same - 25% of the average person's productivity goes to the government, and they get to keep 75% for personal use.
If all taxes were an income tax, and the average person made $40k a year, then they'd pay $10k to the government, and have $30k to spend for themselves.
What happens if we switched to all corporate taxes to fund government? You wouldn't suddenly have $40k to spend on yourself. One of two things (or a combination of them) will happen:
A) Companies would need to cut costs to pay for this tax. Consequently, your salary would be cut from $40k/yr to $30k/yr. Basically instead of you paying $10k/yr to the government via income taxes, your employer is paying it for you via corporate taxes and cutting your salary by the same amount.
B) Companies raise their prices by 33%. Your salary stays the same at $40k, but now the amount of goods you can buy is the same as if you were only being paid $30k. A 33% price increase means goods which used to cost $40k now cost $53.2k, and what used to cost $30k now cost $40k.
In the end it's all the same. But it seems to me a lot of people advocate corporate taxes mistakenly think that making companies pay taxes will somehow reduce their individual tax burden. It doesn't. There's no magic here. You do not magically create money (productivity) by shifting taxes to corporations. All it does is mess with wages, or prices and the value of money. Your overall productivity remains the same, and thus the overall fraction of your productivity you're paying to the government will be the same no matter where the taxes fall.
I can see using taxes as incentives or disincentives, and that could justify making some of the taxes corporate taxes. But most people believe in no taxation without representation. To these people, taxing corporations gives us a moral obligation to listen to their opinion (or rather the opinions of those running them) when it comes to government policy. We have to let corporations lobby. Wouldn't it be cleaner just to eliminate all corporate taxes, and ban lobbying by any entity which doesn't pay taxes (corporations, foreigners, foreign countries)?
this crap drives me crazy. Obama proposes a tax on people that make over $250k. Cut to endless footage of people that making $50k a year protesting that this is going to break them.
None of this is secret. Go play with the IRS tax statistics. See how much we'd have to raise the tax rate on those making >$250k to pay for the current deficits.
The bulk of the U.S. income base (nearly 52% in 2009) is in the $50k-$200k. The $200k+ brackets account for just 26% of income, 12% of which is the $200k-$500k bracket, meaning a $250k cutoff reduces that percentage significantly. Collectively, those making $200k+ had $1.96 trillion in income, of which they paid $434 billion as income taxes (an effective 22% income tax rate vs 13% for the country overall). Last year's budget deficit was $1.56 trillion. To pay for the budget deficit with only tax increases on those making $200k+ would require raising their effective income tax rate to 80%.
Obama's pledge to raise taxes only on those making $250k+ was just a campaign promise to get himself elected by ingratiating himself to a large percentage of voters. Any realistic budget reform has to include raising taxes on the $50k-$200k bracket, and/or significantly cutting Federal spending. Especially if we want to pay down the debt, not just eliminate deficits. It's the 21st century. Any time a politician makes a promise like this, the first thing you should be doing is googling the various fiscal statistics to see just how realistic the plan is.
The funny thing is that the low tax rates for some is the reason why Ireland had a deficit crisis.
I'm skeptical of that hypothesis. The EU countries with a deficit crisis are colloqually referred to as PIIGS - Portugul, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. If you look at their tax rates, you'll see that Ireland is the exception. The others all have average to above-average personal and corporate tax rates relative to the rest of the OECD.
Studies on tax rate vs. deficits typically find little to no correlation. The bottom line is if the government controls its spending to match revenue, then it can operate with little to no deficits. If the government doesn't control its spending, then it can end up with huge deficits and debt regardless of its tax rate.
Gas taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of infrastructure for automobiles. We heavily subsidize the costs of our auto-infrastructure through general taxes.
Gas taxes are a huge fraction of the cost of the infrastructure for automobiles, perhaps exceeding 100%. We heavily subsidize the cost of our trucking infrastructure through automobile gas taxes and general taxes. The average automobile doesn't weigh enough to put any significant wear on most of our roads. Almost all the damage to roads, and hence their upkeep and maintenance costs are due to trucks using them.
Kinda makes you wonder how we ended up using trucks instead of rail, doesn't it?
Right. "Force" people to use computers that were a vast improvement over what they had before, or help all kinds of underprivileged people via an array of humanitarian efforts. Yup, definitely a scumbag. He gave us Windows, after all, and might have prevented other multinationals from making more money than they did.
The accusation isn't that Windows failed to improve the status quo. It's that Windows held back the rate of progress in the state of the art. e.g. Pre-emptive multitasking. In pre-emptive multitasking, the OS controls the CPU and decides how long each app gets to use it. The OS pre-empts the app and takes the CPU away from it when its time is up, whether the app is done or not.
The alternative is cooperative multitasking. That's where the OS literally hands over the CPU to each app and asks "please give it back when you're done using it." It relies on the app to cooperate with the OS. If an app didn't give it back in a timely fashion, your system lagged. Worse yet, if the app hung or crashed before giving it back, your system locked up even though the OS and other apps were fine. Windows 3.x, 95 and 98 used cooperative multitasking. Because Microsoft owned the market, people just accepted that that was the way computers were - prone to lagging and crashing.
But pre-emptive multitasking had been around since the 1970s on mainframes, and the 1980s on home systems (CP/M, AmigaOS, and QDOS). Even OS/2 - MIcrosoft's initial joint effort with IBM to replace DOS with a graphical shell - supported pre-emptive multitasking by 1992. So why did Windows users suffer with cooperative multitasking until nearly 2000? Because Microsoft didn't want to share control of the OS market with IBM. They screwed over IBM on OS/2, and developed Windows completely in-house as a replacement instead. They basically used those earlier versions of Windows as a way to keep customers, as they worked on polishing Windows NT (which supported pre-emptive multitasking) as a replacement. The drawback of NT was that it didn't support DOS apps (even though OS/2 did in 1994), so it wasn't until Windows 2000 (which was based on NT) when most of the world had been weaned off of DOS apps that Windows users finally got a taste of pre-emptive multitasking.
Oh I mentioned OS/2. I must be one of those OS/2 nuts and thus my point is invalid, right? Ok, then how about Windows' security model? Muli-user OSes have distinguished between user and root privileges since about when multi-user systems were first invented in the 1960s. But Windows traces its roots back to DOS. Windows 3.x was actually a graphical shell which ran on top of DOS. Same for Win95 and Win98, except they used an integrated version of DOS. DOS has no concept of user privileges - an app can do anything and everything it wants to do with the computer. It wasn't until Windows Vista that Microsoft tried to correct this by forcing apps to run with user privileges by default instead of with admin privileges. The bulk of Windows' security issues and users suffering from virus and botnet infections stem from Microsoft's failure to make a timely transition to the obvious user / root privilege model.
Need another example? Internet Explorer. When the World Wide Web became the next big thing, Microsoft completely missed the boat. Netscape owned the next frontier in computing. Microsoft couldn't stand for that, so they leveraged their OS monopoly to gain browser market share by bundling IE for free (thus forcing Netscape to give away Navigator for free). Once IE eventually won market dominance (over 90%) and the competition had been pretty much vanquished from the market, what did Microsoft do? They rested on the laurels. For nearly 1.5 years, they did not make a single improvement to IE - the only updates were security updates. It wasn't until Firefox started gaining market share that Microsoft decided IE was worth spending developer time on. The state of the art of browser te
They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)
There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.
Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.
By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.
I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)
Tell me how well that works out for you when you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment out of pocket.
We have insurance to spread the risk, not to encourage people to take stupid risks and make intentionally bad choices.
This misconception, that insurance (whether private or public) will save us all by spreading out the risk, is really the problem. Cancer is not some rare statistical outlier whose cost can be significantly reduced per capita by spreading it out among the entire population. It's the second leading cause of death in the U.S. By the CDC's figures, 23% of the deaths in any given year are due to cancer. If a cancer treatment regiment costs a total of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" per patient, then spreading the risk with insurance only lowers the cost per capita to tens of thousands of dollars.
The American Cancer Society estimates we spend $103.8 billion annually on cancer treatment. Over a population of 310 million, that's $335/yr per capita. Over a 79 year lifetime expectancy, that's $26.5k each person has to pay even with the risk being spread. And this is for one disease! The per capita lifetime premium for all other illnesses like heart disease have to be added on top of that.
Insurance isn't the answer. We have to accept that we're all going to die. Rather than spend "hundreds of thousands of dollars" fighting what in most cases is the inevitable end, lower our expectations. Spend a few thousand or tens of thousand on treatment. If it works, great. If it doesn't, oh well. Your time was up. If you want to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money to try to eek out an extra 2-3 years of life (the 5-year and 10-year survival rates for cancer are not very good), that's your prerogative. But spending that much should not be the norm, nor the national or insurance standard.
This is an obvious failure of home "schooling". Send the kid to school. Let him learn to socialize for one, and get a well rounded education his parents apparently lack. The fact that he's had minimal science education for the first 4-5 grades of his life, is really a sad testament to this type of education.
I went to a U.S. public school system. "Minimal science education" is how I'd describe the public elementary school science curriculum. I learned far more science reading on my own than I did in class. I didn't take my first chemistry course until I was 13, and even that was a jr. high elective course. Most of my peers didn't take it until second year of high school when they were about 15. Unless things have drastically changed in public education since I was a child, teaching the kid chemistry at 10 years old would put him far, far ahead of the public education curve, not behind.
Business is a cuthroat enterprise. As such, there is a clear, and present advantage to shafting employees and keeping them ignorant with information control. If you can pay your people peanuts and get away with it, why on earth would you ever want them to know that they are getting shafted? Profit man! Profit! Its why you started the business!
I take it you've never actually run a business. Unless you're running a mundane manual labor business (assembly line work, fruit picking, etc), employees are not expenses. They are the lifeblood of the company. You need their creativity and vitality for the company to prosper, because the employees are the company. Without the employees the company dies. Without the company, the employees can just start up another company doing what they were doing at the old company. If I didn't need the employees, I wouldn't have hired them in the first place.
People often poke fun of the government for awarding contracts to the lowest bidder. The private businesses I've been involved with and helped run didn't/don't do that. We recognized that the higher priced item can actually represent a better value. The same goes for employees. What's crucial is the value the employee offers - productivity per dollar of salary, not lowest salary. I've never had a problem with employees talking with each other about salary (and in many other countries it's not taboo like it is here). I've had to keep pretty good tabs on each employee's contributions and shortcomings for figuring out bonuses. If one of them comes to me complaining about his/her pay, I have a pretty detailed list of reasons why they're being paid what they are, and what they could do to improve their prospects of a raise. In fact if it weren't taboo here, often I'd like to be able to talk with them about it openly to encourage the underperformers to do better. "If you could do this, this, and this better, we could pay you better like we do Joe."
A company trying to prevent its employees from talking with each other about salary is a sign of a failing company IMHO. They're hemorrhaging cash so are desperately trying to cut as many expenses as they can, even if they end up cutting off meat along with the fat. If your company is trying to foist that upon you, I'd suggest either brushing off the resume or learning some skills so you're no longer a mundane manual laborer.
Disclaimer: Bradbury was one of my favorite authors.
Most of his stories have a twist at the end which cast the rest of the story in a completely different light. Many of the old Twilight Zone episodes (nearly all the best ones IMHO) are based on his stories. In this particular one he explores the question: who are the nameless beggars we see on the streets? He runs through the gamut of typical answers: scam artists, objects to be pitied, obstacles to be avoided, those down on their luck, liars, victims of personal tragedy, unfriendly scrounges who make you resent giving them anything, etc.
At the end he gives his answer: They're people, just like yourself, who think and wonder the same things you do, just from a different place.
Japan (and Korea and the coastal areas of SE and E Asia) are in a monsoon area. The heat is due to the humidity. The sun does not magically shine stronger there (if anything it shines less due to the pollution from China).
Once you subtract out government subsidies, solar is currently almost an order of magnitude more expensive per kWh than fossil fuels. Wind is a much better choice, at a bit less than 2x the cost. Nuclear is the best scalable option, at roughly the same cost as fossil fuels, but is a political hot potato. Hydro and geothermal are the best choices (cheaper than fossil fuels). But hydro is tapped out in most modern countries, and geothermal is limited in where it's available.
Why is cost so important? Because our modern standard of living is based on cheap energy. In medieval times, the average person had to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week in the fields just to generate enough productivity not to starve. Our modern standard of living is achieved by using cheap energy as a productivity multiplier. Instead of using nearly all our productivity to feed ourselves so we can produce more food, we spend a fraction of our productivity (money) on cheap energy. The energy powers machines which we then use to provide the majority of our productivity. People directly or indirectly just "work" by controlling those machines, thus generating enough productivity (income) to feed themselves in about 1 hr a day. The rest of your productivity (money) is spent buying a house and car and various entertainment -- things that would be considered lavish luxuries by medieval standards.
Take away cheap energy and you can't run those machines as much. The average productivity per person plummets, and a greater portion of their workday is needed to generate enough productivity to feed themselves. That means less income left over for a house, car, and entertainment. Our standard of living goes down.
Contrary to Apple marketing, the ultraslim notebook existed long before the Macbook Air. Here's the notebook I was using in 2000. Sharp came out with this model in 2001. "But those don't taper towards the front like the MBA!" you say? Apple wasn't the first with that either. Take a look at Sony's X505 from 2004.
BTW, all of those fit into a manilla envelope. Apple was just the first to think of doing that as a marketing gimmick. The people who think the MBA invented the form factor remind me of the people in 1995 who thought Microsoft invented the Internet because the first time they got online was with Windows 95. Just because the first place they saw something was on an Apple/Microsoft product, they think that's who invented it.
This translates to "we have far cooler spy stuff now".
I would imagine satellite imagery is being supplanted by covert reconnaissance drones. The achilles heel of spy satellites has been their fixed orbits. They can pass over a target only at certain times, can't loiter, and frequently can't get an ideal viewing angle (if the hangar doors open to the West, you have to place the camera there to peek inside). People paranoid about being spied upon can predict when the satellites will be overhead (their orbits are public knowledge since it's virtually impossible to hide anything in LEO), and simply hide everything they're doing when the satellites could see. Yes these problems can be overcome by changing the orbit, but that requires burning fuel, and there's only a finite amount aboard each satellite with (as of the Shuttle's retirement) no way to refuel them.
Drones overcome all these problems, at the cost of being easier to down. But they're several orders of magnitude cheaper (a few $million vs a few $billion), and there's nothing particularly secret about optics and CCDs. The thing that's puzzled me about the drone which was downed in Iran is that it wasn't near any valuable targets I can think of in Iran. It wasn't near Iran's nuclear plant, it wasn't near Tehran, it wasn't near their major military bases, and it wasn't near the Strait of Hormuz. All of these could have been more easily accessed by a drone launched from a nation "friendly" to the U.S. (Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE). But this drone went down way out in the boonies near Afghanistan, which makes me suspect either the USAF was telling the truth and it malfunctioned in Afghanistan and strayed into Iran, or that drones have pretty much supplanted spy satellites and the U.S. is flying a bunch of these all over the place even over medium- and low-value targets.
would something designed for looking down at Earth be easily adapted to astronomy?
You'd think the optics/instruments would be optimized for a different problem set.
The wider field of view would be the biggest impediment. But the uses NASA is thinking of need a wide field of view. And even then, you can add optics which narrow the field of view (increase the focal length). It's not as ideal as the larger optics being shaped from the onset for the longer focal length (more margin for error), but it's not that big a problem. Hubble basically had the same problem - its primary and secondary optics were ground to the wrong shape. This was corrected by inserting small lenses into the light path to correct the error.
Presumably the NRO stripped out all the instrument sensors and processing electronics. Those are the parts which were most suited for terrestrial targets, and which would've had to have been replaced anyway for deep space (very very low light) applications. Typically this involves cooling the sensor to cryogenic temperatures to decrease the noise floor. So overall this is a very, very good deal for NASA. Assuming they can find a way to launch it (the 94" mirror size was dictated by the largest diameter which was able to fit into the Shuttle's cargo bay).
For networking pre-existing structures such as hotels and condos, you can usually make do with VDSL2. It runs over regular cat 3 phone lines, and can provide speeds of 100+ Mbps up to 500 meters. You simply buy a DSLAM, install it in the building's phone room (where all the lines from the phone company get split up into the individual condo units). From that point it's just like DSL from your phone company (using VDSL2 modems instead of ADSL modems), except you have to provide the Internet service which plugs into the DSLAM.
You do have to wire up all 80 units' phone lines into the DSLAM, but that's a lot less work than running new cat5 or fiber cable to 80 condo units. The hard part is that you're effectively the building's ISP now. You have to negotiate for a dedicated line, maintain the contract and equipment, set up packet-shaping and bandwidth sharing rules, configure the LAN so users can't (or can) see each other, troubleshoot problems when they arise, etc. So you'll need someone on staff who can handle these problems. But for the most part once it's set up it'll continue to run on its own. I'd say it's the optimal solution for networking a hotel, and probably optimal for condos if you're willing to deal with the support.
The problem with a lot of these accident reports (or rather, people's reading of them) is that they list multiple causes. Most accident investigation agencies recognize that there is almost always never one cause of an accident. It's a confluence of multiple factors which causes an accident, the lack of any one which may have prevented it. Had the pitot tubes on AF447 not iced over, the pilots would not have gotten contradictory flight information. Had Airbus written the software better, the pilots would have realized exactly what parts of the plane they were/weren't controlling. And had the pilots (or rather one pilot) communicated better and realized they were giving the flight computer contradictory inputs, disaster could have been averted.
Unfortunately, there's a tendency for people to try to narrow things down too much, to one single cause. AF447 crashed because of the pilots. Or it crashed because of Airbus. The Gulf War was about oil, or it was about fighting terrorism. Things are almost never that simple, and most accident reports I've read have avoided this tendency and nearly always report multiple causes.
You have format shift. Buy a DVD and rip it. It's really easy. Yeah, the studios don't like it, but at least you're putting some money in the pockets of the people who are entertaining you.
I bought the LOtR extended edition on Blu-Ray. Then ripped it to try to format shift it so it'll be available over my network (no having to dig around for the discs, no discs getting scratched, no having to wait through annoying commercials and FBI warnings, and I can also dump copies onto my laptop or tablet for when I'm traveling).
Altogether, the raw rip is over 200 GB. And each movie is broken up into two discs. I have struggled for the last week to paste the files together into 3 movies, with subtitles and extra audio tracks intact. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to throw in the towel and just download it over torrent.
Whether the studios like it or not, digital file storage and movies streamed to your TV/computer (whether over a LAN or the Internet) are the future. It would be in their best interest to provide their product in that format for their legit customers. Otherwise we're never going to be able to distinguish legit downloading from real piracy.
(To their credit, they did provide digital download versions up to June 26. But they're standard def, and the fact that they're only downloadable via iTunes or Windows Media Center makes me suspect they're heavily DRM encrusted and can't be streamed to my TV.)
Interestingly, this is also how your eyes work. If you briefly flash a bunch of words in front of people, and ask them to read back ones in certain areas, they can. If you want a few seconds before asking, they can't. Your eye dumps its visual data into a short-term memory buffer which fades after a few seconds. Any information not transferred from that buffer to long-term memory is lost.
Way back when the web first took off (1994ish), 800x600 was the standard PC screen resolution, many people still used 640x480, and 1024x768 was a luxury. Since then, screen resolutions have increased and web designers / graphics artists have increased the "best viewed at" size of their web pages from 640x480, to 800x600, to 1024x768. Now with mobile browsing being the hot thing, we're trying to push the best viewed at size back down.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, the whole point was to transmit the information in a free-form format so that the recipient's computer could decide how to best display it in whatever was easiest for viewing at that end. That's why on less "designed" sites, you can change the width of your browser and the text will flow to match. But then the idea got subverted by web designers / graphics artists who wanted to strictly control over how their website appeared on everyone's computer (their pinnacle being the flash website). So now we're stuck with a bunch of websites which look fine at desktop or laptop computer resolution, but which suck on mobile devices. And lots of extra time, work, and money will be wasted creating and maintaining a duplicate website optimized for a different resolution.
There's a lesson here for music, movies, and ebooks. If you let the content producers strictly control how those are distributed and viewed, it's going to lead to lots of inefficiency and wasted work. You have to let the viewers have a say in how they want to watch/listen to those products if you want an efficient distribution system.
A banana gives off about 15 Bq of radiation, or about 400 picocuries.
The article you've liked to is talking about quantities of Cs-137 giving off about 3 picocuries per liter of milk. A banana is literally over 100x more radioactive.
The high reading of 390 picocuries of I-131 per liter of rainwater a year ago means drinking a liter of that "contaminated" rainwater carries pretty much the same radiation risk as eating a banana.
A seed is a thing which cannot be contained. If you neighbor has a crop, seeds will come to you farm.
If its a resilient crop, it may dominate too.
And then they lawyers come with their army, and drag you to court. How many small farmers can afford to fight.
Yes, there will be farmers who will willfully cheat, but right now the licensing model, and the law does not recognize this difference.
Exactly. To draw an analogy, the current situation with GMO crop licensing (at least in North America) is like DVDs being able to self-replicate and spread themselves into your house, and the movie studios being able to sue you for piracy if they find any copies in your house which you didn't purchase.
It's completely ass-backwards. The result of a natural process is assumed to be evidence of a crime, and the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove that he acquired it naturally rather than criminally. It needs to be the other way around, with the spread assumed to be natural and the burden of proof being on the patent owner to prove it was acquired criminally rather than naturally.
As for what I have read from the case, it is pretty clear that it derived from Monsanto, and that the farmer was aware.
That was a crucial flaw in the logic behind the decision in the case. The Canadian Supreme Court decided that the farmer "should have known" the seed was derived from Monsanto. i.e. They deemed it was impossible for the resistance to have developed naturally. Several weeds have since developed resistance to Round-Up naturally. So it's clear the court erred. They assumed the seed was Monsanto's, thus putting the burden of proof on the farmer to prove that it wasn't before he could legally use it to plant his crops.
It needs to be the other way around. Farmers should be allowed to use whatever seed they want, and if Monsanto feels there's a violation the burden of proof should be on Monsanto to prove the seed is theirs, followed by a cease and desist letter outlining which crop cannot be used the following year. At that point the farmer can decide to pay to license it from Monsanto, or to scrap the seed from that area and plant different seed there the following year. Only if the farmer persists on using the seed they clearly know is in violation should Monsanto be able to sue them for damages.
Also of note in the case is that although the farmer lost, he was only fined $1. You see, there's a critical part of the story which most people miss - he never used Round-Up on his crop. He used it in a ditch and next to a telephone pole where he normally sprayed to kill weeds, but he never used it on his crop. The court thus decided he derived zero benefit from violating Monstanto's patent, and fined him just $1. Instead, Monsanto's PR department has spread it as if he were a lying, cheating scumbag who knowingly used Round-Up Ready Canola without a license to augment his crop productivity. That's not the case. He simply didn't want to put in the extra work to figure out which seed was and wasn't contaminated. And he shouldn't have to. The burden of proof should be on the patent-holder, not the victim of contamination.
Also, bear in mind that one of the rationales for the U.S. taxing based on citizenship rather than residency (like Canada) is to discourage U.S. citizens from enjoying the benefits of citizenship, but living abroad to avoid taxes.
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The cost of an ethernet or display dongle and the cost of carrying around a built-in versions, pales in comparison to the cost of not having the port or dongle when you need it. We had a convention recently and one of the presenters forgot to bring his display dongle for his Mac. We spent a few minutes scrounging around for one while someone worked on copying his presentation over to a PC. 3 minutes * 150 guests = a cumulative 7.5 hours of wasted time. (And for you Mac fans who don't like how I'm counting time, it's how Steve Jobs thought of saving time.)
That's the problem. People are starting to think of laptops as fashion statements foremost, rather than as tools. It's fine to want good aesthetics (a good-looking laptop is nicer than a bad-looking one), but one should never give up functionality for the sole purpose of aesthetics. If you're never going to present or plug in, then there's no problem. Any costs associated with forgotten dongles or lack of ports are yours to bear alone. But if you do stuff which might ever externalize that cost, you need to factor that into your decision of functionality vs. aesthetics. (For our part, we're going to have to buy a Mac video dongle for the projector to make sure this doesn't happen again. We're paying for the Mac users' aesthetic tastes. But at least it's damn cheaper than making 150 people wait.)
Not to usurp the anonymous coward who gave out the same info for Android, but this really needs to be heard. I myself didn't learn about it until an ICS beta.
Android: Press and hold Home for 3 sec. That'll pop up a list of running apps. Click one to switch to it. Flick it to close it (handy for closing a bunch of apps at once). Be aware that Android auto-closes apps when it runs out of memory, so if you haven't used the app in a while and are running a lot of other stuff, it may close on its own while in the background.
iOS: Double-click the home button. That'll pop up a list of apps much like Android. I hear it's a list of recently used apps, rather than a list of currently running apps. But I don't know enough about iOS multitasking to say for sure.
Storage may be cheap, but the data on it is not. Ultimately, this is one solution to the problem of synchronizing data across multiple devices. Slashdot rejects the notion of cloud computing. Many of these devices are only networked intermittently so rsync is out. That pretty much leaves storing your data on one device and accessing it directly through multiple devices. Which will it be? You can't call both this and cloud computing stupid - that's equivalent to saying people don't need to sync their data across multiple devices, which is clearly not the case.
Honest question: Why must corporations pay taxes? There seems to be a belief that if a corporation pays taxes, that means less taxes for individuals, and more money for them to spend.
But that's easily provably false. Income just represents productivity, and all productivity comes from people. If the nation's citizens generate $10 trillion in productivity, and the government spends $2.5 trillion, then it's pretty obvious. An overall 25% of the nation's productivity (income) needs to be diverted to the government in some form of taxes. Whether those taxes are income taxes, sales taxes, or corporate taxes is irrelevant. The combination of those (and other taxes) have to add up to 25% for the government not to run a deficit. It can be all income tax, all sales tax, or all corporate tax. The net result is the same - 25% of the average person's productivity goes to the government, and they get to keep 75% for personal use.
If all taxes were an income tax, and the average person made $40k a year, then they'd pay $10k to the government, and have $30k to spend for themselves.
What happens if we switched to all corporate taxes to fund government? You wouldn't suddenly have $40k to spend on yourself. One of two things (or a combination of them) will happen:
A) Companies would need to cut costs to pay for this tax. Consequently, your salary would be cut from $40k/yr to $30k/yr. Basically instead of you paying $10k/yr to the government via income taxes, your employer is paying it for you via corporate taxes and cutting your salary by the same amount.
B) Companies raise their prices by 33%. Your salary stays the same at $40k, but now the amount of goods you can buy is the same as if you were only being paid $30k. A 33% price increase means goods which used to cost $40k now cost $53.2k, and what used to cost $30k now cost $40k.
In the end it's all the same. But it seems to me a lot of people advocate corporate taxes mistakenly think that making companies pay taxes will somehow reduce their individual tax burden. It doesn't. There's no magic here. You do not magically create money (productivity) by shifting taxes to corporations. All it does is mess with wages, or prices and the value of money. Your overall productivity remains the same, and thus the overall fraction of your productivity you're paying to the government will be the same no matter where the taxes fall.
I can see using taxes as incentives or disincentives, and that could justify making some of the taxes corporate taxes. But most people believe in no taxation without representation. To these people, taxing corporations gives us a moral obligation to listen to their opinion (or rather the opinions of those running them) when it comes to government policy. We have to let corporations lobby. Wouldn't it be cleaner just to eliminate all corporate taxes, and ban lobbying by any entity which doesn't pay taxes (corporations, foreigners, foreign countries)?
None of this is secret. Go play with the IRS tax statistics. See how much we'd have to raise the tax rate on those making >$250k to pay for the current deficits.
The bulk of the U.S. income base (nearly 52% in 2009) is in the $50k-$200k. The $200k+ brackets account for just 26% of income, 12% of which is the $200k-$500k bracket, meaning a $250k cutoff reduces that percentage significantly. Collectively, those making $200k+ had $1.96 trillion in income, of which they paid $434 billion as income taxes (an effective 22% income tax rate vs 13% for the country overall). Last year's budget deficit was $1.56 trillion. To pay for the budget deficit with only tax increases on those making $200k+ would require raising their effective income tax rate to 80%.
Obama's pledge to raise taxes only on those making $250k+ was just a campaign promise to get himself elected by ingratiating himself to a large percentage of voters. Any realistic budget reform has to include raising taxes on the $50k-$200k bracket, and/or significantly cutting Federal spending. Especially if we want to pay down the debt, not just eliminate deficits. It's the 21st century. Any time a politician makes a promise like this, the first thing you should be doing is googling the various fiscal statistics to see just how realistic the plan is.
I'm skeptical of that hypothesis. The EU countries with a deficit crisis are colloqually referred to as PIIGS - Portugul, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. If you look at their tax rates, you'll see that Ireland is the exception. The others all have average to above-average personal and corporate tax rates relative to the rest of the OECD.
Studies on tax rate vs. deficits typically find little to no correlation. The bottom line is if the government controls its spending to match revenue, then it can operate with little to no deficits. If the government doesn't control its spending, then it can end up with huge deficits and debt regardless of its tax rate.
Gas taxes are a huge fraction of the cost of the infrastructure for automobiles, perhaps exceeding 100%. We heavily subsidize the cost of our trucking infrastructure through automobile gas taxes and general taxes. The average automobile doesn't weigh enough to put any significant wear on most of our roads. Almost all the damage to roads, and hence their upkeep and maintenance costs are due to trucks using them.
Kinda makes you wonder how we ended up using trucks instead of rail, doesn't it?
The accusation isn't that Windows failed to improve the status quo. It's that Windows held back the rate of progress in the state of the art. e.g. Pre-emptive multitasking. In pre-emptive multitasking, the OS controls the CPU and decides how long each app gets to use it. The OS pre-empts the app and takes the CPU away from it when its time is up, whether the app is done or not.
The alternative is cooperative multitasking. That's where the OS literally hands over the CPU to each app and asks "please give it back when you're done using it." It relies on the app to cooperate with the OS. If an app didn't give it back in a timely fashion, your system lagged. Worse yet, if the app hung or crashed before giving it back, your system locked up even though the OS and other apps were fine. Windows 3.x, 95 and 98 used cooperative multitasking. Because Microsoft owned the market, people just accepted that that was the way computers were - prone to lagging and crashing.
But pre-emptive multitasking had been around since the 1970s on mainframes, and the 1980s on home systems (CP/M, AmigaOS, and QDOS). Even OS/2 - MIcrosoft's initial joint effort with IBM to replace DOS with a graphical shell - supported pre-emptive multitasking by 1992. So why did Windows users suffer with cooperative multitasking until nearly 2000? Because Microsoft didn't want to share control of the OS market with IBM. They screwed over IBM on OS/2, and developed Windows completely in-house as a replacement instead. They basically used those earlier versions of Windows as a way to keep customers, as they worked on polishing Windows NT (which supported pre-emptive multitasking) as a replacement. The drawback of NT was that it didn't support DOS apps (even though OS/2 did in 1994), so it wasn't until Windows 2000 (which was based on NT) when most of the world had been weaned off of DOS apps that Windows users finally got a taste of pre-emptive multitasking.
Oh I mentioned OS/2. I must be one of those OS/2 nuts and thus my point is invalid, right? Ok, then how about Windows' security model? Muli-user OSes have distinguished between user and root privileges since about when multi-user systems were first invented in the 1960s. But Windows traces its roots back to DOS. Windows 3.x was actually a graphical shell which ran on top of DOS. Same for Win95 and Win98, except they used an integrated version of DOS. DOS has no concept of user privileges - an app can do anything and everything it wants to do with the computer. It wasn't until Windows Vista that Microsoft tried to correct this by forcing apps to run with user privileges by default instead of with admin privileges. The bulk of Windows' security issues and users suffering from virus and botnet infections stem from Microsoft's failure to make a timely transition to the obvious user / root privilege model.
Need another example? Internet Explorer. When the World Wide Web became the next big thing, Microsoft completely missed the boat. Netscape owned the next frontier in computing. Microsoft couldn't stand for that, so they leveraged their OS monopoly to gain browser market share by bundling IE for free (thus forcing Netscape to give away Navigator for free). Once IE eventually won market dominance (over 90%) and the competition had been pretty much vanquished from the market, what did Microsoft do? They rested on the laurels. For nearly 1.5 years, they did not make a single improvement to IE - the only updates were security updates. It wasn't until Firefox started gaining market share that Microsoft decided IE was worth spending developer time on. The state of the art of browser te
Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.
By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.
I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)
This misconception, that insurance (whether private or public) will save us all by spreading out the risk, is really the problem. Cancer is not some rare statistical outlier whose cost can be significantly reduced per capita by spreading it out among the entire population. It's the second leading cause of death in the U.S. By the CDC's figures, 23% of the deaths in any given year are due to cancer. If a cancer treatment regiment costs a total of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" per patient, then spreading the risk with insurance only lowers the cost per capita to tens of thousands of dollars.
The American Cancer Society estimates we spend $103.8 billion annually on cancer treatment. Over a population of 310 million, that's $335/yr per capita. Over a 79 year lifetime expectancy, that's $26.5k each person has to pay even with the risk being spread. And this is for one disease! The per capita lifetime premium for all other illnesses like heart disease have to be added on top of that.
Insurance isn't the answer. We have to accept that we're all going to die. Rather than spend "hundreds of thousands of dollars" fighting what in most cases is the inevitable end, lower our expectations. Spend a few thousand or tens of thousand on treatment. If it works, great. If it doesn't, oh well. Your time was up. If you want to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money to try to eek out an extra 2-3 years of life (the 5-year and 10-year survival rates for cancer are not very good), that's your prerogative. But spending that much should not be the norm, nor the national or insurance standard.
I went to a U.S. public school system. "Minimal science education" is how I'd describe the public elementary school science curriculum. I learned far more science reading on my own than I did in class. I didn't take my first chemistry course until I was 13, and even that was a jr. high elective course. Most of my peers didn't take it until second year of high school when they were about 15. Unless things have drastically changed in public education since I was a child, teaching the kid chemistry at 10 years old would put him far, far ahead of the public education curve, not behind.
I take it you've never actually run a business. Unless you're running a mundane manual labor business (assembly line work, fruit picking, etc), employees are not expenses. They are the lifeblood of the company. You need their creativity and vitality for the company to prosper, because the employees are the company. Without the employees the company dies. Without the company, the employees can just start up another company doing what they were doing at the old company. If I didn't need the employees, I wouldn't have hired them in the first place.
People often poke fun of the government for awarding contracts to the lowest bidder. The private businesses I've been involved with and helped run didn't/don't do that. We recognized that the higher priced item can actually represent a better value. The same goes for employees. What's crucial is the value the employee offers - productivity per dollar of salary, not lowest salary. I've never had a problem with employees talking with each other about salary (and in many other countries it's not taboo like it is here). I've had to keep pretty good tabs on each employee's contributions and shortcomings for figuring out bonuses. If one of them comes to me complaining about his/her pay, I have a pretty detailed list of reasons why they're being paid what they are, and what they could do to improve their prospects of a raise. In fact if it weren't taboo here, often I'd like to be able to talk with them about it openly to encourage the underperformers to do better. "If you could do this, this, and this better, we could pay you better like we do Joe."
A company trying to prevent its employees from talking with each other about salary is a sign of a failing company IMHO. They're hemorrhaging cash so are desperately trying to cut as many expenses as they can, even if they end up cutting off meat along with the fat. If your company is trying to foist that upon you, I'd suggest either brushing off the resume or learning some skills so you're no longer a mundane manual laborer.
Disclaimer: Bradbury was one of my favorite authors.
Most of his stories have a twist at the end which cast the rest of the story in a completely different light. Many of the old Twilight Zone episodes (nearly all the best ones IMHO) are based on his stories. In this particular one he explores the question: who are the nameless beggars we see on the streets? He runs through the gamut of typical answers: scam artists, objects to be pitied, obstacles to be avoided, those down on their luck, liars, victims of personal tragedy, unfriendly scrounges who make you resent giving them anything, etc.
At the end he gives his answer: They're people, just like yourself, who think and wonder the same things you do, just from a different place.
Least that's what I got from it.
Japan (and Korea and the coastal areas of SE and E Asia) are in a monsoon area. The heat is due to the humidity. The sun does not magically shine stronger there (if anything it shines less due to the pollution from China).
Once you subtract out government subsidies, solar is currently almost an order of magnitude more expensive per kWh than fossil fuels. Wind is a much better choice, at a bit less than 2x the cost. Nuclear is the best scalable option, at roughly the same cost as fossil fuels, but is a political hot potato. Hydro and geothermal are the best choices (cheaper than fossil fuels). But hydro is tapped out in most modern countries, and geothermal is limited in where it's available.
Why is cost so important? Because our modern standard of living is based on cheap energy. In medieval times, the average person had to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week in the fields just to generate enough productivity not to starve. Our modern standard of living is achieved by using cheap energy as a productivity multiplier. Instead of using nearly all our productivity to feed ourselves so we can produce more food, we spend a fraction of our productivity (money) on cheap energy. The energy powers machines which we then use to provide the majority of our productivity. People directly or indirectly just "work" by controlling those machines, thus generating enough productivity (income) to feed themselves in about 1 hr a day. The rest of your productivity (money) is spent buying a house and car and various entertainment -- things that would be considered lavish luxuries by medieval standards.
Take away cheap energy and you can't run those machines as much. The average productivity per person plummets, and a greater portion of their workday is needed to generate enough productivity to feed themselves. That means less income left over for a house, car, and entertainment. Our standard of living goes down.
Contrary to Apple marketing, the ultraslim notebook existed long before the Macbook Air. Here's the notebook I was using in 2000. Sharp came out with this model in 2001. "But those don't taper towards the front like the MBA!" you say? Apple wasn't the first with that either. Take a look at Sony's X505 from 2004.
BTW, all of those fit into a manilla envelope. Apple was just the first to think of doing that as a marketing gimmick. The people who think the MBA invented the form factor remind me of the people in 1995 who thought Microsoft invented the Internet because the first time they got online was with Windows 95. Just because the first place they saw something was on an Apple/Microsoft product, they think that's who invented it.
I would imagine satellite imagery is being supplanted by covert reconnaissance drones. The achilles heel of spy satellites has been their fixed orbits. They can pass over a target only at certain times, can't loiter, and frequently can't get an ideal viewing angle (if the hangar doors open to the West, you have to place the camera there to peek inside). People paranoid about being spied upon can predict when the satellites will be overhead (their orbits are public knowledge since it's virtually impossible to hide anything in LEO), and simply hide everything they're doing when the satellites could see. Yes these problems can be overcome by changing the orbit, but that requires burning fuel, and there's only a finite amount aboard each satellite with (as of the Shuttle's retirement) no way to refuel them.
Drones overcome all these problems, at the cost of being easier to down. But they're several orders of magnitude cheaper (a few $million vs a few $billion), and there's nothing particularly secret about optics and CCDs. The thing that's puzzled me about the drone which was downed in Iran is that it wasn't near any valuable targets I can think of in Iran. It wasn't near Iran's nuclear plant, it wasn't near Tehran, it wasn't near their major military bases, and it wasn't near the Strait of Hormuz. All of these could have been more easily accessed by a drone launched from a nation "friendly" to the U.S. (Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE). But this drone went down way out in the boonies near Afghanistan, which makes me suspect either the USAF was telling the truth and it malfunctioned in Afghanistan and strayed into Iran, or that drones have pretty much supplanted spy satellites and the U.S. is flying a bunch of these all over the place even over medium- and low-value targets.
The wider field of view would be the biggest impediment. But the uses NASA is thinking of need a wide field of view. And even then, you can add optics which narrow the field of view (increase the focal length). It's not as ideal as the larger optics being shaped from the onset for the longer focal length (more margin for error), but it's not that big a problem. Hubble basically had the same problem - its primary and secondary optics were ground to the wrong shape. This was corrected by inserting small lenses into the light path to correct the error.
Presumably the NRO stripped out all the instrument sensors and processing electronics. Those are the parts which were most suited for terrestrial targets, and which would've had to have been replaced anyway for deep space (very very low light) applications. Typically this involves cooling the sensor to cryogenic temperatures to decrease the noise floor. So overall this is a very, very good deal for NASA. Assuming they can find a way to launch it (the 94" mirror size was dictated by the largest diameter which was able to fit into the Shuttle's cargo bay).
For networking pre-existing structures such as hotels and condos, you can usually make do with VDSL2. It runs over regular cat 3 phone lines, and can provide speeds of 100+ Mbps up to 500 meters. You simply buy a DSLAM, install it in the building's phone room (where all the lines from the phone company get split up into the individual condo units). From that point it's just like DSL from your phone company (using VDSL2 modems instead of ADSL modems), except you have to provide the Internet service which plugs into the DSLAM.
You do have to wire up all 80 units' phone lines into the DSLAM, but that's a lot less work than running new cat5 or fiber cable to 80 condo units. The hard part is that you're effectively the building's ISP now. You have to negotiate for a dedicated line, maintain the contract and equipment, set up packet-shaping and bandwidth sharing rules, configure the LAN so users can't (or can) see each other, troubleshoot problems when they arise, etc. So you'll need someone on staff who can handle these problems. But for the most part once it's set up it'll continue to run on its own. I'd say it's the optimal solution for networking a hotel, and probably optimal for condos if you're willing to deal with the support.
The problem with a lot of these accident reports (or rather, people's reading of them) is that they list multiple causes. Most accident investigation agencies recognize that there is almost always never one cause of an accident. It's a confluence of multiple factors which causes an accident, the lack of any one which may have prevented it. Had the pitot tubes on AF447 not iced over, the pilots would not have gotten contradictory flight information. Had Airbus written the software better, the pilots would have realized exactly what parts of the plane they were/weren't controlling. And had the pilots (or rather one pilot) communicated better and realized they were giving the flight computer contradictory inputs, disaster could have been averted.
Unfortunately, there's a tendency for people to try to narrow things down too much, to one single cause. AF447 crashed because of the pilots. Or it crashed because of Airbus. The Gulf War was about oil, or it was about fighting terrorism. Things are almost never that simple, and most accident reports I've read have avoided this tendency and nearly always report multiple causes.
I bought the LOtR extended edition on Blu-Ray. Then ripped it to try to format shift it so it'll be available over my network (no having to dig around for the discs, no discs getting scratched, no having to wait through annoying commercials and FBI warnings, and I can also dump copies onto my laptop or tablet for when I'm traveling).
Altogether, the raw rip is over 200 GB. And each movie is broken up into two discs. I have struggled for the last week to paste the files together into 3 movies, with subtitles and extra audio tracks intact. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to throw in the towel and just download it over torrent.
Whether the studios like it or not, digital file storage and movies streamed to your TV/computer (whether over a LAN or the Internet) are the future. It would be in their best interest to provide their product in that format for their legit customers. Otherwise we're never going to be able to distinguish legit downloading from real piracy.
(To their credit, they did provide digital download versions up to June 26. But they're standard def, and the fact that they're only downloadable via iTunes or Windows Media Center makes me suspect they're heavily DRM encrusted and can't be streamed to my TV.)
Interestingly, this is also how your eyes work. If you briefly flash a bunch of words in front of people, and ask them to read back ones in certain areas, they can. If you want a few seconds before asking, they can't. Your eye dumps its visual data into a short-term memory buffer which fades after a few seconds. Any information not transferred from that buffer to long-term memory is lost.
Way back when the web first took off (1994ish), 800x600 was the standard PC screen resolution, many people still used 640x480, and 1024x768 was a luxury. Since then, screen resolutions have increased and web designers / graphics artists have increased the "best viewed at" size of their web pages from 640x480, to 800x600, to 1024x768. Now with mobile browsing being the hot thing, we're trying to push the best viewed at size back down.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, the whole point was to transmit the information in a free-form format so that the recipient's computer could decide how to best display it in whatever was easiest for viewing at that end. That's why on less "designed" sites, you can change the width of your browser and the text will flow to match. But then the idea got subverted by web designers / graphics artists who wanted to strictly control over how their website appeared on everyone's computer (their pinnacle being the flash website). So now we're stuck with a bunch of websites which look fine at desktop or laptop computer resolution, but which suck on mobile devices. And lots of extra time, work, and money will be wasted creating and maintaining a duplicate website optimized for a different resolution.
There's a lesson here for music, movies, and ebooks. If you let the content producers strictly control how those are distributed and viewed, it's going to lead to lots of inefficiency and wasted work. You have to let the viewers have a say in how they want to watch/listen to those products if you want an efficient distribution system.
A banana gives off about 15 Bq of radiation, or about 400 picocuries.
The article you've liked to is talking about quantities of Cs-137 giving off about 3 picocuries per liter of milk. A banana is literally over 100x more radioactive.
The high reading of 390 picocuries of I-131 per liter of rainwater a year ago means drinking a liter of that "contaminated" rainwater carries pretty much the same radiation risk as eating a banana.
Exactly. To draw an analogy, the current situation with GMO crop licensing (at least in North America) is like DVDs being able to self-replicate and spread themselves into your house, and the movie studios being able to sue you for piracy if they find any copies in your house which you didn't purchase.
It's completely ass-backwards. The result of a natural process is assumed to be evidence of a crime, and the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove that he acquired it naturally rather than criminally. It needs to be the other way around, with the spread assumed to be natural and the burden of proof being on the patent owner to prove it was acquired criminally rather than naturally.
That was a crucial flaw in the logic behind the decision in the case. The Canadian Supreme Court decided that the farmer "should have known" the seed was derived from Monsanto. i.e. They deemed it was impossible for the resistance to have developed naturally. Several weeds have since developed resistance to Round-Up naturally. So it's clear the court erred. They assumed the seed was Monsanto's, thus putting the burden of proof on the farmer to prove that it wasn't before he could legally use it to plant his crops.
It needs to be the other way around. Farmers should be allowed to use whatever seed they want, and if Monsanto feels there's a violation the burden of proof should be on Monsanto to prove the seed is theirs, followed by a cease and desist letter outlining which crop cannot be used the following year. At that point the farmer can decide to pay to license it from Monsanto, or to scrap the seed from that area and plant different seed there the following year. Only if the farmer persists on using the seed they clearly know is in violation should Monsanto be able to sue them for damages.
Also of note in the case is that although the farmer lost, he was only fined $1. You see, there's a critical part of the story which most people miss - he never used Round-Up on his crop. He used it in a ditch and next to a telephone pole where he normally sprayed to kill weeds, but he never used it on his crop. The court thus decided he derived zero benefit from violating Monstanto's patent, and fined him just $1. Instead, Monsanto's PR department has spread it as if he were a lying, cheating scumbag who knowingly used Round-Up Ready Canola without a license to augment his crop productivity. That's not the case. He simply didn't want to put in the extra work to figure out which seed was and wasn't contaminated. And he shouldn't have to. The burden of proof should be on the patent-holder, not the victim of contamination.
Also, bear in mind that one of the rationales for the U.S. taxing based on citizenship rather than residency (like Canada) is to discourage U.S. citizens from enjoying the benefits of citizenship, but living abroad to avoid taxes.