Show a picture of the side or rear of the device and it ceases to look anything like an iPad.
That's the rear of a different Samsung digital picture frame. I wasn't able to find pictures of the rear of the 2006 model, but here's the rear of the 2008 version (in white). As you can see, aside from the stand poking out the back, the relative thickness, and radius of the curvature, it looks very much like the original iPad.
Anyhow, the point wasn't that Samsung had released an iPad before the iPad. The point was that the design elements Apple is claiming ownership of in tablet-space were widely used long before the iPad existed.
a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.
Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious.
Take a look at this Samsung product. Obviously a rip-off of the iPad, right? Except Samsung released it in 2006, four years before the iPad.
There are certain basic concepts which recur over and over in product designs. Black looks good, certain things look better flat rather than curved, make the flat thing shiny for bonus points, a border around the main area of focus (screen/photo) helps isolate it from the background, a chrome/metal trim along the edge makes a good highlight. The only thing that's changed is that suddenly Apple is claiming that they own these basic age-old design concepts and nobody else is allowed to use them in certain types of new products.
I got into this debate with a friend. The problem is that different people have different definitions of terrorism. He felt any act which caused fear in people not directly affected by the act was terrorism. My definition is much narrower - an act whose goal is to cause political change not directly through the damage caused by the act, but primarily through the social (over)reaction to that act. Depending on which definition you use, the U.S. (or any other entity) is or isn't a terrorist organization.
The problem I have with his definition (which also seems to be pretty close to yours) is that it's so broad as to be (IMHO) nearly useless. With that definition, all killing and crime is terrorism. The bully beating a weak kid up to intimidate others into giving him their lunch money is terrorism. We already have words for those things: killing, crime, intimidation. Everyone already knows what those are and how they affect people. There's no need to layer another term ('terrorism') on top of them to describe the same thing. If we're going to make a new term, it needs to be nuanced enough to describe something different from already-existing words.
My definition is selected to reflect why organizations resort to such attacks instead of a straight-up fight. Typically, they lack the manpower or hardware to last in a straight-up military fight. So they resort to terrorist tactics since it maximizes their chances of causing political change while minimizing their exposure to retaliation. You have straight warfare, where two groups' armies go at each other head-to-head to try to beat the other into submission to force the desired political change upon the loser. You have guerrilla warfare where one group's army attacks the other's army, then blends into the environment and/or civilian population, to achieve the same. And you have terrorism where one group's army doesn't even bother trying to attack the other's army, and instead focuses on attacking the civilian population in order to try to get them to enact the desired political change.
Prior to the space race, the USAF and NACA had been working on powered high-altitude and sub-orbital flight (development began in 1955, even though the first flight wasn't until 1959). After Sputnik and for the moon race, this incremental approach towards higher, faster, further was dropped to a much lower priority, in favor of ground-launched rockets. They were tremendously wasteful of fuel, but they could get us into orbit more quickly since the fundamental R&D had already been done by the Germans (the early Redstone rockets were essentially upgraded V2s).
If Sputnik and the moon shots hadn't happened, we probably would have continued along the lines of the X-15, pursuing space planes instead of rockets. Which would have put us 10-20 years ahead in scramjet and hypersonic technology. Meaning it's possible we could have had a scramjet-based hypersonic transport flying the JFK-NRT route in 1 hour today. Of course since we haven't yet developed the technology, it's impossible to say with certainty. We don't know what problems and pitfalls lie ahead, or even if it will be commercially economically viable.
Alot of what was mentioned in the NY Times is new information. Describing worker dormitories
Why this obsession about worker dormitories? They're considered quite normal in developing countries because they're a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem of housing vs. jobs. How do you attract people to jobs at a new factory if there's inadequate housing nearby? How do you encourage builders to create housing nearby if there are no jobs?
It also provides a means for a company to insulate their workers from rapid housing price inflation as the area surrounding the factory becomes more developed. You have to realize that unlike developed countries, most people taking a job at the factory do not have a financial nest egg or credit history with which to buy or rent housing. The dormitories are basically guaranteed fixed-price housing for such workers. When the government does it, it's called low-income housing; but when a company does it it's bad?
And there's also differences in population density between Asia and Western Europe, and especially the U.S. and Canada. Each family at a new factory having their own tract home with a garage, white picket fence, and 2.2 kids is simply unrealistic in most Asian countries. At best, on average everyone is going to own a block unit in a high rise apartment.
Is it because Western countries don't have them? The concept seems to recur frequently in developing economies. It goes through several give-and-take cycles as management vs. labor struggle with each other, until eventually the working class develops enough of a financial base and negotiating power not to need them anymore. While the pendulum is on management's side right now, swinging it back is something which has to happen internally. If foreign countries apply pressure and get it changed, it's never going to feel genuine. Chinese management is going to feel that it happened because outsiders forced them to make it happen, not because it came about naturally as a consequence of poor labor conditions. So they'll always be striving to change it back behind the scenes, instead of accepting that that's the way it's gotta be.
Developing an economy is not like jumping quantum states. You can't take a third world economy and instantaneously convert it into a developed first world economy. There's a long, meandering path you have to take as the economy gradually builds up, and worker dorms are just a milestone along that journey. It's a step up from shanty towns.
Conceptually, it's kind of a new type product. Something which you can use, but can't resell. In MMORPG terms, it's an item which binds to you upon pickup, so you can't sell it or even give it to anyone else.
Yes they're not lying about it. But since it's a new concept, if they don't make clear in great big letters on the box that it's not transferable, then it will be deceptive. At least until such items become commonplace enough that customers know enough to check whether the game is the transferable type or the binding type.
Also, if prices in MMORPGs are any guide, Shilling should take note that items which bind typically sell for 1/10th the price of the "real" thing or less. That is, when buying the "real" thing, people expect to get about 90% of the purchase price back on the resale, and value possessing the thing at only 10% the price they pay.
So if he's expecting to get anywhere near as many sales of these crippled games at uncrippled prices, that's a pipe dream. My own guess, based on the used price being about half the new price, would be they'd have to drop the retail price to half or a third in order to get as many sales as the unrestricted version at $50-$60. Unless they're deceptive about it and hide the fact that it's non-transferable, in which case they're going to trick a lot of people into paying $50-$60 thinking that they can resell it later.
Increasingly, students are in class to memorize material so that they can quickly recall it on one of many tests.
I know that's a popular meme these days, but it's not entirely accurate.
The point, at least in technical courses like math and science, isn't to force students to memorize material. It's to give them so much material that it becomes easier to understand it rather than memorize it. You can memorize the multiplication table, or you can understand the concept of multiplication so you know how to multiply two arbitrary numbers.
For certain small values, memorization is more effective. For everything else, understanding works better. Both are learning. And usually it's best to leave it up to the student to decide what to memorize and what to understand. Someone may have difficulty understanding abstract concepts, but be a genius at memorizing every trivial piece of info he runs across. Another may have a sucky memory, but be a genius at figuring out and understanding difficult concepts. Learning the best way your brain learns is also a part of learning.
With iOS, there is not much one can do about malware, if it gets past Apple's gatekeepers. JB-ing the device and slapping on Firewall iP is probably the best thing one can do. However, the barrier for entry for malware writers is very high. It is pretty difficult (and more expensive) for a blackhat organization create a new account with Apple , paying them a C-note a year), and cook up some personal info (like bank accounts and such to register under) to even be able to see iTunes Connect, much less have the app approved. This has done a good job in keeping iPhone users safe
It's done a good job keeping iOS users safe from blackhat malware. Legit apps on the other hand are having a field day mining and selling user data which most people would consider private.
What can help Android immensely would be an app that runs as root and can allow/disallow access to SD cards, contacts, SMS, phone, and networking. There is an app called LBE Privacy Guard which runs as root and offers features that should really be part of Android (perhaps some features behind an Advanced menu.)
Thank you so much. I already had DroidWall, but LBE Privacy Guard was exactly what I've been looking for. It's my phone. I should be able to control what data can be accessed by an app.
Most magazine articles nowadays give you a URL you can type into your browser to get any additional content. Some of them include a QR code for those too lazy to type in the URL themselves.
All of this is much, much better than the 1980s, when the computer magazines had code listings (in BASIC, Pascal, Logo, or even assembly!) printed out. You had to type it all in by hand (no OCR back then), and hope you didn't make a typo which would hang the computer. And we liked it!
They weren't right next to the ocean. They were about 8 meters above the previous highest recorded tsunami level in that area, so assumed to be safe from flooding. I mean, what are you going to do? The largest recorded tsunami was 524 metershigh. Are you going to require every nuclear plant to be relocated at least 525 meters above sea level because of this "obvious design flaw"?
The not-so-obvious design flaw was that the generators were all in the same location. So although they had multiple generators for redundancy in case some failed, that redundancy was made useless by a common failure mode. You want them in different locations, different makes, with different parts and connectors, and running off of different fuel tanks.
The statement would be more convicing with evidence they had looked for evidence.
Why? The way science works, you assume the hypothesis which results in an observable result is false, then look for evidence that it is true. So the burden of proof is upon those trying to show that uranium has leached into the seawater and spread to distances in concentrations measurably above natural background levels.
Even if you're skeptical of their finding that the hypothesis is false, heck even if it turns out that the people making that finding are were corrupt and made the whole thing up, that does not constitute evidence that the hypothesis is true. The burden of proof is still upon those trying to show that there is long-distance uranium contamination from the plant. It's not up to anyone to prove that there isn't, because you can't. One could sample water from every part of the ocean from everywhere around the world, and find no trace of excess uranium. And those who believe in the hypothesis would just claim that it settled to the ocean floor, or had already been absorbed by organisms. You can't prove a negative. So the burden of proof is upon those trying to prove otherwise.
That's if you want to prioritize satisfaction over all else. Paradoxically reduced choice can lead to greater satisfaction even if it leads to lower productivity. While customers may be seeking to maximize satisfaction for personal use, I daresay most businesses would choose to maximize productivity, or bang for the buck. While libertarians (both the right wing and left wing types) would choose to maximize choice.
AT&T wants its high data users to go to a competitor and clog up their networks instead.
Aren't AT&T's high data users grandfathered in on unlimited plans? So raising prices would drive their bread and butter customers (who pay for capped data) to competitors. The high data users on unlimited plans would stick with AT&T unless they want to switch to Sprint (only other major with an unlimited plan still available).
Maybe somewhat Minority Report-ish, but what if he actually WAS planning on trying to make a bomb? Why should we wait until this person has actually killed potentially hundreds of people with a bomb or some similar device or act before acting against him?
That question doesn't have a right or wrong answer. It's something we as a society have to decide, then stick to it. What threshold do we set for arresting (and jailing) people for potentially committing a criminal act in the future?
At one extreme, we arrest nobody until after they've committed a crime.
At the other extreme, we arrest anybody once we have the slightest evidence they're going to commit a crime.
And there's a whole range of possibilities in between.
For me personally, I'd say you need the physical presence of atypically dangerous materials. Merely possessing a book explaining how to make bombs is not enough - you have to catch him after he's built some bombs but before he's used them. Likewise, merely owning a gun is not enough - you have to catch him with weapons modified beyond sport/hunting/defense needs, or in possession of way too much ammo for a sport shooter or hunter to reasonably use.
Arresting and jailing him for merely possessing information, and some circumstantial evidence suggesting intent leaves reasonable doubt of his innocence (yes I realize this is a U.S. standard, while this is a UK case). The public and the police and court system are better served if such evidence instead leads to monitoring and a warrant for wiretapping. And from there you build up a stronger circumstantial case which leaves less doubt, swooping in once he's acquired the physical materials those establishing clear intent. The public is happier due to there being less doubt, the police are happier for the easier conviction, and the courts are happier for an easier decision.
Disclaimer: I downloaded a copy of the anarchist's cookbook out of curiosity in my BBS days around 1990. Skimmed it, and tossed it as interesting but over-hyped. There's probably still a copy somewhere in my backups though.
More to the point, why would anyone care what % they drop in a ranking? A ranking is just an ordered list. It says nothing about the criteria used to put the elements in that order.
It's like finishing times for a marathon. If the leading pack crosses together, there could be only a 30 second difference between 1st place and 25th place. Meanwhile there could be a 5 minute difference between 25th place and 26st place. But if you look at just the ranking, you'd think that the 25th place finisher was nearly as bad as the 26th place finisher, when in reality he was actually very close to finishing 1st.
If you want to make relative comparisons like %, you have to look at the finishing times. In particular, the rank order is meaningless for gauging year-to-year changes. What if everyone improved? Then you could drop in rank despite doing better than the previous year.
People proposing a new law affecting the entire public should be the only ones subject to it for a 3 year trial period, to iron out any kinks or loopholes before it gets applied to the public at large.
What's that? You don't want to have all your online activity tracked and dissected by the public? Funny that.
This is why this fight over copyrights is so crucial to the future of humanity. The resolution has to be that the cost of a copyrighted product is somewhat proportional to [ (production cost / number of sales) + distribution cost ]. That doesn't happen if the copyright holder has a monopoly. If we allow it to continue to be (production cost * constant) for a single purchase like it currently is, millions if not billions of innovative and useful products are going to be locked up behind copyright for 130+ years. Human technological progress is going to continue at its current pace, instead of skyrocketing into a new creative renaissance because the benefits of near-zero cost of duplication will primarily go towards lining the pockets of copyright holders rather than making useful products widely available to the public.
Either the capacity to profit from copyright has to scale inversely with number of sales (legally force prices to be lowered as sales increase), or the term has to be shortened to where good designs enter the public domain quickly so all can benefit from it. The goal here is to maximize net benefit to society. That sits between the two extremes of giving the public everything for free, and maximizing profit for the copyright holder. Unfortunately the two most popular views on copyright seem to sit at those extremes.
The problem is that it's like selling knives to people and the most common thing people do is stab each other with them. You can try keeping up appearances and say we're only selling a tool, but sooner or later someone on your staff is going to crack and say "Yes, our tool is used for stabbing.
Depends on how the people store their files. If they're stored as plain files, unecrypted, then yes your knife analogy is somewhat apt. (From what I've been reading, this appears to have been the case at Megaupload).
But if people are predominantly storing encrypted files, then the file storage service is acting more like a public locker. Any member of the public can pay to rent space from them, store anything they want inside, and give anyone else the key. The locker company is only selling them the space, they themselves don't have access to the contents. Going after the locker company because someone stored illegal drugs inside a locker doesn't make sense.
I've long argued that a proper cloud storage solution is one in which the storage company has no idea what your files are. Encryption should be automatic. Firefox's sync service does this - encrypts everything before uploading it to the sync server, so even Mozilla has no idea what your bookmarks are. Many storage companies (e.g. Dropbox) have been resisting this - I assume they're either being lazy or they think they can sell information gleaned from what types of files are being stored. But from a privacy standpoint, a security standpoint (company servers being breached does not mean stored data is compromised), and now a legal liability standpoint, all signs point towards encrypting everything customers store so that the storage companies themselves do not know what's being stored.
If it's as the summary says and Google is just punishing excessive ads at the top, then I'd agree with you.
But if they're just tweaking their ranking algorithm to place greater emphasis on what's at the top of the page (where people's eyeballs fall first) and less emphasis on the bottom, then I don't see a problem with that. I'm tired of getting search results where I scan the entire page for my search terms, then at the very bottom I see it's just tossed in a thousand random keywords to trick search engines into thinking the page is relevant.
I doubt it. You need temperature variations in order to get this effect (hot ground, colder atmosphere) which is not going to happen on Venus, seeing as most of the heat and light is absorbed in the atmosphere before it touches the ground.
Temperature variations inside the camera can also cause these distortions (specifically, heating of trapped gas between the optics and the sensor; although in this case heating and expansion of the lens and its housing relative to each other could also be a factor). And the camera would have been subjected to a very large temperature change in a short period of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Turns out Slashdot editor is an oxymoron too.
That's the rear of a different Samsung digital picture frame. I wasn't able to find pictures of the rear of the 2006 model, but here's the rear of the 2008 version (in white). As you can see, aside from the stand poking out the back, the relative thickness, and radius of the curvature, it looks very much like the original iPad.
Anyhow, the point wasn't that Samsung had released an iPad before the iPad. The point was that the design elements Apple is claiming ownership of in tablet-space were widely used long before the iPad existed.
The MBP is not the origin of that svelte, flat look. This was the laptop I owned in 2000.
Take a look at this Samsung product. Obviously a rip-off of the iPad, right? Except Samsung released it in 2006, four years before the iPad.
There are certain basic concepts which recur over and over in product designs. Black looks good, certain things look better flat rather than curved, make the flat thing shiny for bonus points, a border around the main area of focus (screen/photo) helps isolate it from the background, a chrome/metal trim along the edge makes a good highlight. The only thing that's changed is that suddenly Apple is claiming that they own these basic age-old design concepts and nobody else is allowed to use them in certain types of new products.
I got into this debate with a friend. The problem is that different people have different definitions of terrorism. He felt any act which caused fear in people not directly affected by the act was terrorism. My definition is much narrower - an act whose goal is to cause political change not directly through the damage caused by the act, but primarily through the social (over)reaction to that act. Depending on which definition you use, the U.S. (or any other entity) is or isn't a terrorist organization.
The problem I have with his definition (which also seems to be pretty close to yours) is that it's so broad as to be (IMHO) nearly useless. With that definition, all killing and crime is terrorism. The bully beating a weak kid up to intimidate others into giving him their lunch money is terrorism. We already have words for those things: killing, crime, intimidation. Everyone already knows what those are and how they affect people. There's no need to layer another term ('terrorism') on top of them to describe the same thing. If we're going to make a new term, it needs to be nuanced enough to describe something different from already-existing words.
My definition is selected to reflect why organizations resort to such attacks instead of a straight-up fight. Typically, they lack the manpower or hardware to last in a straight-up military fight. So they resort to terrorist tactics since it maximizes their chances of causing political change while minimizing their exposure to retaliation. You have straight warfare, where two groups' armies go at each other head-to-head to try to beat the other into submission to force the desired political change upon the loser. You have guerrilla warfare where one group's army attacks the other's army, then blends into the environment and/or civilian population, to achieve the same. And you have terrorism where one group's army doesn't even bother trying to attack the other's army, and instead focuses on attacking the civilian population in order to try to get them to enact the desired political change.
Prior to the space race, the USAF and NACA had been working on powered high-altitude and sub-orbital flight (development began in 1955, even though the first flight wasn't until 1959). After Sputnik and for the moon race, this incremental approach towards higher, faster, further was dropped to a much lower priority, in favor of ground-launched rockets. They were tremendously wasteful of fuel, but they could get us into orbit more quickly since the fundamental R&D had already been done by the Germans (the early Redstone rockets were essentially upgraded V2s).
If Sputnik and the moon shots hadn't happened, we probably would have continued along the lines of the X-15, pursuing space planes instead of rockets. Which would have put us 10-20 years ahead in scramjet and hypersonic technology. Meaning it's possible we could have had a scramjet-based hypersonic transport flying the JFK-NRT route in 1 hour today. Of course since we haven't yet developed the technology, it's impossible to say with certainty. We don't know what problems and pitfalls lie ahead, or even if it will be commercially economically viable.
Why this obsession about worker dormitories? They're considered quite normal in developing countries because they're a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem of housing vs. jobs. How do you attract people to jobs at a new factory if there's inadequate housing nearby? How do you encourage builders to create housing nearby if there are no jobs?
It also provides a means for a company to insulate their workers from rapid housing price inflation as the area surrounding the factory becomes more developed. You have to realize that unlike developed countries, most people taking a job at the factory do not have a financial nest egg or credit history with which to buy or rent housing. The dormitories are basically guaranteed fixed-price housing for such workers. When the government does it, it's called low-income housing; but when a company does it it's bad?
And there's also differences in population density between Asia and Western Europe, and especially the U.S. and Canada. Each family at a new factory having their own tract home with a garage, white picket fence, and 2.2 kids is simply unrealistic in most Asian countries. At best, on average everyone is going to own a block unit in a high rise apartment.
Is it because Western countries don't have them? The concept seems to recur frequently in developing economies. It goes through several give-and-take cycles as management vs. labor struggle with each other, until eventually the working class develops enough of a financial base and negotiating power not to need them anymore. While the pendulum is on management's side right now, swinging it back is something which has to happen internally. If foreign countries apply pressure and get it changed, it's never going to feel genuine. Chinese management is going to feel that it happened because outsiders forced them to make it happen, not because it came about naturally as a consequence of poor labor conditions. So they'll always be striving to change it back behind the scenes, instead of accepting that that's the way it's gotta be.
Developing an economy is not like jumping quantum states. You can't take a third world economy and instantaneously convert it into a developed first world economy. There's a long, meandering path you have to take as the economy gradually builds up, and worker dorms are just a milestone along that journey. It's a step up from shanty towns.
Conceptually, it's kind of a new type product. Something which you can use, but can't resell. In MMORPG terms, it's an item which binds to you upon pickup, so you can't sell it or even give it to anyone else.
Yes they're not lying about it. But since it's a new concept, if they don't make clear in great big letters on the box that it's not transferable, then it will be deceptive. At least until such items become commonplace enough that customers know enough to check whether the game is the transferable type or the binding type.
Also, if prices in MMORPGs are any guide, Shilling should take note that items which bind typically sell for 1/10th the price of the "real" thing or less. That is, when buying the "real" thing, people expect to get about 90% of the purchase price back on the resale, and value possessing the thing at only 10% the price they pay.
So if he's expecting to get anywhere near as many sales of these crippled games at uncrippled prices, that's a pipe dream. My own guess, based on the used price being about half the new price, would be they'd have to drop the retail price to half or a third in order to get as many sales as the unrestricted version at $50-$60. Unless they're deceptive about it and hide the fact that it's non-transferable, in which case they're going to trick a lot of people into paying $50-$60 thinking that they can resell it later.
Someone needs to hook up one of these things to IBM's Watson instead of Google or Wolfram Alpha.
Just be sure to phrase your question in the form of an answer.
I know that's a popular meme these days, but it's not entirely accurate.
The point, at least in technical courses like math and science, isn't to force students to memorize material. It's to give them so much material that it becomes easier to understand it rather than memorize it. You can memorize the multiplication table, or you can understand the concept of multiplication so you know how to multiply two arbitrary numbers.
For certain small values, memorization is more effective. For everything else, understanding works better. Both are learning. And usually it's best to leave it up to the student to decide what to memorize and what to understand. Someone may have difficulty understanding abstract concepts, but be a genius at memorizing every trivial piece of info he runs across. Another may have a sucky memory, but be a genius at figuring out and understanding difficult concepts. Learning the best way your brain learns is also a part of learning.
It's done a good job keeping iOS users safe from blackhat malware. Legit apps on the other hand are having a field day mining and selling user data which most people would consider private.
Thank you so much. I already had DroidWall, but LBE Privacy Guard was exactly what I've been looking for. It's my phone. I should be able to control what data can be accessed by an app.
Most magazine articles nowadays give you a URL you can type into your browser to get any additional content. Some of them include a QR code for those too lazy to type in the URL themselves.
All of this is much, much better than the 1980s, when the computer magazines had code listings (in BASIC, Pascal, Logo, or even assembly!) printed out. You had to type it all in by hand (no OCR back then), and hope you didn't make a typo which would hang the computer. And we liked it!
C'mon, the people who are OCD about fingerprints on their screen need some loving too.
They weren't right next to the ocean. They were about 8 meters above the previous highest recorded tsunami level in that area, so assumed to be safe from flooding. I mean, what are you going to do? The largest recorded tsunami was 524 metershigh. Are you going to require every nuclear plant to be relocated at least 525 meters above sea level because of this "obvious design flaw"?
The not-so-obvious design flaw was that the generators were all in the same location. So although they had multiple generators for redundancy in case some failed, that redundancy was made useless by a common failure mode. You want them in different locations, different makes, with different parts and connectors, and running off of different fuel tanks.
Why? The way science works, you assume the hypothesis which results in an observable result is false, then look for evidence that it is true. So the burden of proof is upon those trying to show that uranium has leached into the seawater and spread to distances in concentrations measurably above natural background levels.
Even if you're skeptical of their finding that the hypothesis is false, heck even if it turns out that the people making that finding are were corrupt and made the whole thing up, that does not constitute evidence that the hypothesis is true. The burden of proof is still upon those trying to show that there is long-distance uranium contamination from the plant. It's not up to anyone to prove that there isn't, because you can't. One could sample water from every part of the ocean from everywhere around the world, and find no trace of excess uranium. And those who believe in the hypothesis would just claim that it settled to the ocean floor, or had already been absorbed by organisms. You can't prove a negative. So the burden of proof is upon those trying to prove otherwise.
That's if you want to prioritize satisfaction over all else. Paradoxically reduced choice can lead to greater satisfaction even if it leads to lower productivity. While customers may be seeking to maximize satisfaction for personal use, I daresay most businesses would choose to maximize productivity, or bang for the buck. While libertarians (both the right wing and left wing types) would choose to maximize choice.
Aren't AT&T's high data users grandfathered in on unlimited plans? So raising prices would drive their bread and butter customers (who pay for capped data) to competitors. The high data users on unlimited plans would stick with AT&T unless they want to switch to Sprint (only other major with an unlimited plan still available).
And they lower your price when your contract expires (phone subsidy ends).
That question doesn't have a right or wrong answer. It's something we as a society have to decide, then stick to it. What threshold do we set for arresting (and jailing) people for potentially committing a criminal act in the future?
At one extreme, we arrest nobody until after they've committed a crime.
At the other extreme, we arrest anybody once we have the slightest evidence they're going to commit a crime.
And there's a whole range of possibilities in between.
For me personally, I'd say you need the physical presence of atypically dangerous materials. Merely possessing a book explaining how to make bombs is not enough - you have to catch him after he's built some bombs but before he's used them. Likewise, merely owning a gun is not enough - you have to catch him with weapons modified beyond sport/hunting/defense needs, or in possession of way too much ammo for a sport shooter or hunter to reasonably use.
Arresting and jailing him for merely possessing information, and some circumstantial evidence suggesting intent leaves reasonable doubt of his innocence (yes I realize this is a U.S. standard, while this is a UK case). The public and the police and court system are better served if such evidence instead leads to monitoring and a warrant for wiretapping. And from there you build up a stronger circumstantial case which leaves less doubt, swooping in once he's acquired the physical materials those establishing clear intent. The public is happier due to there being less doubt, the police are happier for the easier conviction, and the courts are happier for an easier decision.
Disclaimer: I downloaded a copy of the anarchist's cookbook out of curiosity in my BBS days around 1990. Skimmed it, and tossed it as interesting but over-hyped. There's probably still a copy somewhere in my backups though.
More to the point, why would anyone care what % they drop in a ranking? A ranking is just an ordered list. It says nothing about the criteria used to put the elements in that order.
It's like finishing times for a marathon. If the leading pack crosses together, there could be only a 30 second difference between 1st place and 25th place. Meanwhile there could be a 5 minute difference between 25th place and 26st place. But if you look at just the ranking, you'd think that the 25th place finisher was nearly as bad as the 26th place finisher, when in reality he was actually very close to finishing 1st.
If you want to make relative comparisons like %, you have to look at the finishing times. In particular, the rank order is meaningless for gauging year-to-year changes. What if everyone improved? Then you could drop in rank despite doing better than the previous year.
People proposing a new law affecting the entire public should be the only ones subject to it for a 3 year trial period, to iron out any kinks or loopholes before it gets applied to the public at large.
What's that? You don't want to have all your online activity tracked and dissected by the public? Funny that.
This is why this fight over copyrights is so crucial to the future of humanity. The resolution has to be that the cost of a copyrighted product is somewhat proportional to [ (production cost / number of sales) + distribution cost ]. That doesn't happen if the copyright holder has a monopoly. If we allow it to continue to be (production cost * constant) for a single purchase like it currently is, millions if not billions of innovative and useful products are going to be locked up behind copyright for 130+ years. Human technological progress is going to continue at its current pace, instead of skyrocketing into a new creative renaissance because the benefits of near-zero cost of duplication will primarily go towards lining the pockets of copyright holders rather than making useful products widely available to the public.
Either the capacity to profit from copyright has to scale inversely with number of sales (legally force prices to be lowered as sales increase), or the term has to be shortened to where good designs enter the public domain quickly so all can benefit from it. The goal here is to maximize net benefit to society. That sits between the two extremes of giving the public everything for free, and maximizing profit for the copyright holder. Unfortunately the two most popular views on copyright seem to sit at those extremes.
Depends on how the people store their files. If they're stored as plain files, unecrypted, then yes your knife analogy is somewhat apt. (From what I've been reading, this appears to have been the case at Megaupload).
But if people are predominantly storing encrypted files, then the file storage service is acting more like a public locker. Any member of the public can pay to rent space from them, store anything they want inside, and give anyone else the key. The locker company is only selling them the space, they themselves don't have access to the contents. Going after the locker company because someone stored illegal drugs inside a locker doesn't make sense.
I've long argued that a proper cloud storage solution is one in which the storage company has no idea what your files are. Encryption should be automatic. Firefox's sync service does this - encrypts everything before uploading it to the sync server, so even Mozilla has no idea what your bookmarks are. Many storage companies (e.g. Dropbox) have been resisting this - I assume they're either being lazy or they think they can sell information gleaned from what types of files are being stored. But from a privacy standpoint, a security standpoint (company servers being breached does not mean stored data is compromised), and now a legal liability standpoint, all signs point towards encrypting everything customers store so that the storage companies themselves do not know what's being stored.
If it's as the summary says and Google is just punishing excessive ads at the top, then I'd agree with you.
But if they're just tweaking their ranking algorithm to place greater emphasis on what's at the top of the page (where people's eyeballs fall first) and less emphasis on the bottom, then I don't see a problem with that. I'm tired of getting search results where I scan the entire page for my search terms, then at the very bottom I see it's just tossed in a thousand random keywords to trick search engines into thinking the page is relevant.
Temperature variations inside the camera can also cause these distortions (specifically, heating of trapped gas between the optics and the sensor; although in this case heating and expansion of the lens and its housing relative to each other could also be a factor). And the camera would have been subjected to a very large temperature change in a short period of time.