It's a 4th Generation service (uses completely different technology than 3G), therefore it's 4G.
The reason the definition was standardized was to prevent someone from implementing some lame 4th generation service with little or no improvement in speed, and advertising it as 4G. But when every 4G service which has been implemented falls within the same speed range and is short of the definition specified by ITU-R in the standard, then clearly it's the standard which is in error.
They go into Apple's ridiculously oversized war chest, and toward R&D that ends up generating more exploitative profit centers.
Apple's R&D spending as a percent of revenue is actually close to the bottom in the industry. Relative to other tech companies, very little of their revenue and profit is going to R&D.
Any money that stockholders make comes from selling their stock, which means it comes from the next sucker to buy it, NOT the money that Apple is pulling in from sales.
I should point out that Google is the same - no dividends. They're what a friend of mine calls baseball card stocks. They have no intrinsic value, their only worth is how much you can sell them to someone else. Something to keep in mind if you're thinking of investing in AAPL or GOOG. Generally the return on a stock is considered to be its price appreciation + dividend, so a mediocre stock which pays a good dividend can beat out those two from an investment perspective.
Whenever someone files a false DMCA claim they are guilty of perjury (which carreis a 5 year jail term). So when Viacom went after YouTubers who were covered by the fair use provisions, Viacom committed perjury, but nobody pressed charges against Viacom.
I'm not so sure. If you read the relevant section of the DMCA Sec 512 (c)(3)(a)(iv) it says "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." That sure sounds like the perjury penalty only applies if the complaining party is not authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
i.e. You can lie as much as you like when alleging copyright infringement. You just have to be sure that whatever it is you're alleging was infringed, you hold the copyright to or the copyright holder has authorized you to act on their behalf. If the perjury penalty applied to both clauses, it would've been at the beginning of the sentence. i.e. "Under penalty of perjury, a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and that the complaining party is authorized..."
OTOH, if you contest the DMCA takedown notice, you do so under the penalty of perjury. (Sec 512 (g)(3)(C)) BTW, this is one of the reasons why the DMCA is a terrible law. A good law respects the rights of both the accuser and the accused.
Lobbying is fine. Just make it so that all meetings between elected politicians and lobbyists/donors have to be videotaped and the videos put on the government website for the entire public to watch. This would have zero impact on legitimate lobbying. If an individual or a corporation has a good argument why a law should be changed, it will work on the public as well as it will on the politician. In fact they'd welcome this since it's free advertising for their issue.
The lobbyists trying to do something underhanded, against the better interest of the public, though (i.e. bribery). They will be running scared from this idea.
No, productivity in the U.S. in the 1950s was primarily domestic. In other words, that level of productivity (and standard of living) is self-sustainable.
As the economies of third world nations develop, their standard of living and costs will rise to be more in-line with first world nations like the U.S. The U.S. may fall a little, but the losses will only be that which was gained by exploiting the cheaper prices in those developing nations. Long-term productivity in the U.S. will stabilize at what it could sustain when most economic activity was domestic.
We (and Western Europe + Japan + Australia) may lose a bit from the excesses of the 1990s-2010s, but we won't lose what our grandparents fought for. Additional technological advances will increase productivity so we'll likely stabilize at a level above that of the 1950s. (In theory, productivity gains from advances in technology could completely offset the losses to be expected from globalization. The primary concern is availability and cost of energy, since energy is the fuel which allows us to use technology to increase productivity over manual labor. We really need to be pushing long-term energy generation technologies - renewables, fission, and fusion.)
1.) few people upload sensitive data to a web hosting service.
The problem with FTP isn't that it transmits data as cleartext (though it does that too). The problem is it transmits passwords as cleartext. Anyone snooping on your FTP session will know your username and password.
They support FTP and/or SFTP. As much as I like the idea of forcing everyone to use SFTP, it's really a decision for each customer to make. If you want to only allow SFTP connections, you can.
what that sentence is actually saying is: books that are published in the iBook Store must be exclusive to the iBook Store.
Why don't the authors do what Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, etc. do to prevent people from price matching. Carry the exact same product, except the model number and one or two trivial features are slightly different. The iBook store can have the -i version which is formatted in LucidiaGrande like the Macs. Amazon can have the -k version in Caecilia like the Kindle. Insert page breaks so the page numbers match up.
When I investigated a bunch of energy-saving options for a building I was managing, geothermal heat pumps were by far the most cost effective (not to be confused with geothermal energy). For our building, its payback time would have been 3-5 years. There are no fancy materials, no high-tech equipment involved. Just a bunch of buried/sunken plastic tubes with water flowing through them. The ancient Romans used a variant of it to air condition their homes.
Essentially they're the same thing as a window heat exchanger/air conditioner, except instead of using the ambient air as the heat dump, they use the ground or groundwater/pond. This provides a much steeper and more favorable temperature gradient in both winter and summer, allowing the heat exchanger to operate much more efficiently. Whereas air is about 90 F in summer, the ground is about 55 F making it much easier to pump heat into the ground. In winter the air is about 30 F, while the ground is still about 55 F, making it much easier to pump heat out of the ground. (Below about 40-50 F, most heat exchangers just shut off and run a heating coil, because it's so inefficient trying to extract heat from air that cold.)
They're an easy energy-saving measure which quickly pays for itself. I'm surprised more new building construction doesn't incorporate it. Makes sense for cooling computers, motors, etc. too if you've already got the infrastructure in place for your home or building.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
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A Copyright Nightmare
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The bitter family feud that has divided the children of Martin Luther King Jr. isn't much different than other fights between brothers and sisters -- except that this one has spilled into the courts and publicly tarnished the legacy of an American icon of peace and harmony.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
So that dream came true, just not the way he expected.
Look at Japan. People there believed in progress, in technology, with an almost religious fervour. Until a disaster laid bare not flaws in the science, mind you, but flaws in the humans profiting off it.
I'm not sure anymore how much of that is real, and how much is stereotype due to the tech gadgets and anime which come out of Japan. During the nuclear crisis, watching NHK coverage was a treat. I had expected the Japanese to be well ahead of the U.S. in fancy computer graphics in their news broadcasts. Instead, they had a hand-made paper mache 3D model of the nuclear plant, giant posters for various charts, and the weather reports used cardboard cutout drawings of clouds, sun, rain, etc. which the weather lady stuck to a cloth map with velcro as she was talking. For pointing, she used a stick with what looked like a colored ping pong ball glued to the end. Very quaint.
Re:Solar Energy Storage
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Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ethanol is an extremely inefficient way to "store" solar energy.
Corn ethanol is an extremely inefficient way to "store" solar energy.
This whole boondoggle started because the U.S. always runs a corn surplus. The U.S. doesn't want a repeat of the 1930s, where crop failures led to hunger and near starvation, so the government deliberately subsidizes food production (mostly corn) to insure there's an oversupply. The question then becomes, what to do with all this extra corn? A lot of it is sent overseas as foreign aid. A bunch of it is converted to high fructose corn syrup, as a substitute for cane sugar. More still becomes grain feed for livestock, to satisfy our appetite for beef, milk, and cheese. And a few decades ago someone got the bright idea of converting it into ethanol to help ease the country's dependence on foreign oil.
That's the reason the country started making corn ethanol instead of using a more energy-efficient crop like sugar beets. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, it took on a life of its own, and under the influence of heavy lobbying we started growing corn for the sake of converting it into ethanol, rather than converting only excess corn into ethanol.
Ethanol, provided you make it from a sugar-rich crop, is actually a pretty good way to gather and store solar energy for transportation applications. The alternative (PV solar to electricity to batteries to electric vehicle) is horribly expensive. Wholesale cost of PV solar electricity is about $0.20-$0.25 per kWh, vs. about $0.055 (wholesale) for coal. The Leaf is rated at 34 kWh per 100 miles, or $6.80-$8.50 per 100 miles at wholesale PV solar electricity prices. To travel 100 miles requires 411 kg of batteries (EPA rage of 73 miles on 300 kg).
Brazil estimates its sugar cane ethanol costs $0.83/gal to produce. If you figure a Leaf-like car would get 35 mpg, modify that for ethanol's 70% energy density vs. gasoline, that would mean 4.08 gal per 100 miles, or a cost of $3.36 per 100 miles at wholesale cane sugar ethanol prices. The 4.08 gallons needed to move the vehicle 100 miles would only weigh 12.1 kg. So sugar cane ethanol is 2x - 2.5x cheaper and 34x lighter than PV solar (this ignores the engine weight, but I'm just following the criteria of this argument - "storing" solar energy).
Re:Corporatism aka right wing politics
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House Kills SOPA
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· Score: 1
Corporatism is just a facet of the right wing.
If that is what you truly believe, then you are part of the problem. The left wing is in bed with corporations just as much the right wing is. Your belief that your party is somehow innocent and uninvolved in this causes you to not question their actions. Because you don't critically analyze your party's actions, you give them carte blanche to perpetrate the very corporate cronyism you purportedly decry.
And the expert seismologist says something like this:
When they move production into a new area, earthquakes start there, and when they stop production, the earthquakes stop.
Well... You kinda have a reason to fear.
But earthquakes are zero-sum. They're just releases of stresses which have built up in the Earth's crust. Those stresses come from natural movements of the crust, not from the fracking. If fracking causes an earthquake, that means it's releasing those stresses a little at a time, before it would have released naturally, thereby decreasing the chances of an even larger natural earthquake. Like controlled man-induced avalanches, if fracking causes an earthquake that means it's making the area safer, not more dangerous.
just let out a couple of sonic farts at 140db should deafen the Dolphins permanently
140 dB underwater is actually pretty quiet. Sound levels underwater are based on a reference of 1 Pascal at 1 meter. Sound levels in the air were arbitrarily referenced to 20 Pascal at 1 meter to better align it with the sensitivity of the human ear. Water also has a much higher impedance than air. Consequently, to convert underwater dB to to air dB, you have to subtract 62. 140 dB underwater is equivalent to just 78 dB in air. And even whales are able to pump out 180-190 dB.
Unfortunately, PETA and some environmental groups have either failed to understand this or deliberately abused misunderstanding of it to generate hysteria among the public about the effects of underwater sonar and ship traffic on wildlife.
Perhaps the only way to get paid is by actually doing something worth getting paid for, like giving me a physical copy of a book, or a concert I can go to, etc.
Some industries have already made this transition. Wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for a minimal fee, the charged a large amount for prints and reprints. If you wanted extra copies of your wedding photos for your extended family, you had to pay for the extra prints.
With the advent of scanners and dirt-cheap photo printers, they've transitioned to a model where they charge a lot for shooting the wedding, but charge little for the prints or even give them away for free. Technically they can charge for the prints as they did before, but realistically they know it's so easy to make copies there's no possible way they'd be able to enforce their copyright for every photo the take. So they've just restructured their payment system to reflect reality, rather than copyright laws.
Forget for a moment everything about copyright, publishing, movie/music production, etc. Think of this purely in terms of work vs. compensation. I shoot photos of a wedding and process the photos. That's a lot of work. I print pictures of said wedding. That's very little work. Under the old model, the payment system did not reflect my costs - I charged very little for the part which required a lot of work on my part, but charged a lot for the part which required almost no effort. The new system fixes this. I now charge a lot for the part which requires a lot of work, and charge little for the part which requires little work.
The same thing has got to happen to books, music, and movies. In the old days, musicians and actors were paid for live performances. That is the norm.
In the 20th century there was a bit less than 100 years where technology was good enough to allow mass duplication, but not good enough to lower cost of duplication to the point where individuals could duplicate. This allowed a business model to flourish in which payment did not reflect costs. Musicians and actors were able to work once, then sit back and make money over and over based on that single performance. This is not normal. No other business is like that - you have to constantly work if you want to keep making money.
Now in the 21st century, the cost of mass duplication has fallen far enough that it's now easily within grasp of the individual. No longer does it make sense for people to be charged large amounts of money for what is a nearly free service (duplication). People may be stuck on the morality of it because the 20th century way is all they've ever known. But strictly in terms of work invested vs. compensation, the 20th century way was clearly wrong since the most money was being made for the step which cost the least money.
The transition to a model where content creators are not paid for duplication services is not some new journey into unexplored territory. It is a return to what was the norm for millenia. For most of history, duplication was impossible (performances) or nearly impossible (books), so the only way to get paid was for the actual content creation. During the 20th century, duplication became possible, and content creators leveraged it to get paid multiple times over for the same work. Now in the 21st century duplication has become so cheap that people are starting to question if it's really fair for content creators to be paid multiple times for the same job. That is the true crux of the matter, not who owns the work or whether copying is stealing.
I do believe in copyright - the temporary monopoly does encourage creation. But the terms have to be reasonable. With duplication costs having dropped to almost zero, preventing society from making copies simply because of archaic laws does more harm than good. Something like 10-20 years for copyright seems about right to me. Copyright is fundamentally about encouraging creativity and creation of new content. A copyright term of life + 70 years discourages creativity, and instead encourages trying to figure out how to create something new once and live off it for the rest of your life.
Heavy copyright lawsuits must kick in to prevent this horrible scenario. Every model copyrighted, every 3D printer with online DRM.
That's what I've been saying. People think all the ruckus about IP laws and copyrights is about books, music, movies, and software. Those are relatively minor compared to what's coming down the road. In the future, when everyone can basically own a fab shop in a box, it's going to be about whether all the physical objects in your house can be created for the cost of materials, or will be heavily encumbered with licensing fees. The IP law we establish in the next 10-20 years is going to heavily impact human standard of living and productivity in the physical world for the next 100+ years.
What's that business concept called where they run the business to its crashing point, then try to run it just a hair above that? They do it to try to figure out where the rock bottom is on what they can get away with to maximize profits.
Evil.
Despite the jokes others have made in response, capitalism works because in a free society, transactions are only made when the result is beneficial to both parties. Say I have a business transporting furniture. I buy the horse and buggy whip from you for $200 because they're worth more than $200 to me. You sell the horse and buggy whip to me for $200 because they're worth less than $200 to you. In this way, even though the amount of stuff does not change from the transaction, its value increases. With each transaction, items get moved to the hands of people who are better able to make use of them to improve their productivity. Whereas the horse and buggy whip only cost you $190 worth of productivity to make, in my hands it can generate (say) $310 worth of productivity.
When a company forms a monopoly or subverts the market with laws like the content industry is trying, they break this mechanism. I buy the horse and buggy whip from you for $300 because it's worth $310 to me. To you they're only worth $190 because that's what they cost you to make. In functioning capitalism, market forces would drive the price down to about $200. But by subverting the free market with your monopoly and eliminating competition, you're able to drive the price the other way and get it near the maximum I'd be willing to pay. I end up paying an extra $100.
Furthermore, I should be able to buy a horseless carriage for $250 which will give me $500 worth of productivity. But you've gotten a law passed which bans it from the market. So by being forced to buy the horse and buggy whip, I also lose out on $190 worth of productivity.
The consequence of all this is that I no longer have an extra $100 to spend on something else productive, and my productivity has been lowered by $190 from where it should be. And you, because the extra $100 you made came too easily, you don't fully appreciate its value and are more likely to waste the extra money you make on silly things like gold plated toilet seats. The economy overall is harmed, the rate of technological progress slows down, recessions become more common, and increases in the standard of living slows down or even regresses.
It's normal to put your needs ahead of those of the single person you're dealing with in a transaction. People who buy high and sell low don't survive for long, and everyone has a personal obligation to look out for themselves. But putting your needs ahead of all of society by subverting free market forces for personal gain is just plain evil.
Not only conductivity, but how does the coating hold up under the friction of plugging in the charger every day? If you peek at the metal contacts of a USB cable with a flashlight, I'll bet they have spots worn into them from being plugged in. I doubt any coating could survive that, and the parts which suffer the most wear are also the parts that need waterproofing the most.
From what I've read, Russia's high-technology infrastructure is held together with band-aids® and chewing gum. They should concentrate upon repairing their space exploration foundation, then make the attempts to explore Mars.
Russian launch vehicles remain among the most reliable in use. It's not so much that the Russian space program infrastructure is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. It's that the U.S. space program is incredibly overdesigned with $billions spent on extra redundancy and safety to try to eek out another 0.001% increase in success rate. In some cases the overdesign probably hinders success more than helps, as you've added a lot more things which can go wrong.
From a strictly economic standpoint, the Russian program is much more cost-effective. Rather than optimizing success rate like the U.S. does, they try to optimize successes per dollar. You accept a few percent higher launch failure rate, in exchange for many tens of percent lower costs. As long as the value of the payloads lost in the extra failures does not exceed the cost savings you're making from the launches, you come out ahead. It's just that this particular failure happened with a high-publicity payload.
The state I live in, Texas, doesn't just have a state sales tax, we've also got county and city sales taxes- and each city and county sets their own, within guidelines set by the state. This is going to be a nightmare for retailers to keep up with, especially the little guys.
I'm a pretty free-market type guy, but this is really something the government should be handling. Currently, it's up to businesses to figure out all the different tax rates (or hire someone to do it) and apply them to their sales. For the small business, the only way they can realistically comply is to hire a company which collects and updates the tax rates and puts it into a database for them. The problem is these companies always indemnify themselves against errors. So a small business could be doing its best to comply with the tax laws, but if they failed to collect $5000 because company making the databae screwed up and entered an incorrect tax rate, they are on the hook for the $5k, not the company making the tax database. There's a disconnect between the party responsible for the error and the party that has to pay for it.
This really needs a Federal government program handling this. All the tax jurisdictions in the country should be required to submit and update their tax rates to a Federal web site in order for the tax to be considered effective. Business can then go to this Federal web site and download the latest tax rate table every day. If a business fails to do so and doesn't collect the right sales tax, they are liable for any shortfall. If a city or state fails to update their tax info on the web site, then they are liable and lose out on any shortfall. And if the web site goes down, the Federal government is liable for erroneous sales tax collections that day. Each party in the process is responsible for their own errors, none for the errors of others.
That's irrelevant though. Interstate commerce is by definition a transaction in which one party (Amazon in this case) resides outside the state. The residency of the other party is irrelevant, as long as it's a different state. The correct resolution to this problem is Federal legislation or a constitutional amendment which modifies the Commerce Clause. Not for states to file lawsuit after lawsuit against individual companies until they kowtow to the state's (currently unconstitutional) desires.
While sometimes true, it is far more commonly a failure to understand the user. The ability to evaluate the usability of an interface, not just based on how it fits your needs, but on how it would fit someone else's needs is rare and requires a good bit of cultivating.
No, this is mischaracterizing the problem. The problem isn't that people fail to understand "the user". The problem is that people think there is a single entity called "the user" whom they can design to satisfy. Programmers think "the user" is like them, so they make a UI which suits themselves. Designers think "the user" is like them, so they make a very different UI which suits themselves. Then they argue with each other about how they are right and the other is wrong. TFA is just another volley in this pointless war of blame.
The reality is that there is no single "the user". Users come in all different shapes and sizes. Some like ribbons, others like menus, and others still like command lines. If you design your UI to placate one of these types of users, you will alienate the others. The holy grail of a single UI which everyone likes is unattainable, so we shouldn't even bother trying.
Instead, I think the best way to approach UI design is like the presets for your car seat. Each user can customize the position of their car seat exactly how they like, and store it in a preset. But a different user can customize the seat they way they like, and store it in a different preset. In a similar way, I think UIs should come with several standard default presets - ribbon mode, menu mode, etc. You can pick the type of UI you want, tweak some elements if you prefer them different than the default, and save it as your own UI preset. That way when you work on your computer, the UI is to your liking. But if someone else borrows your computer, instead of getting all confused by your UI customizations, they can just click on one of the default presets (or load their own preset which they're carrying on their USB stick) and use something more comfortable to them. Microsoft has kinda done this with Windows 7. The file explorer interface is button-centric. But if you hit alt, the old menus appear.
In publishing space, designers and publishers are worse offenders than programmers. Look back at the history of HTML. When Tim Berners-Lee (a programmer) first came up with HTML, it was completely user-centric. The only thing the author got to "design" what text and pictures to include. The author had zero control over how it would be displayed on the user's screen - that was controlled entirely by the user (or rather, the user's browser).
Designers and publishers didn't like this. They (rightfully) wanted certain formatting, like the amount of indent at the beginning of a paragraph, to be consistent. So HTML was gradually extended to allow you to "hard-code" certain types of formatting. But then designers started to go overboard, insisting that their web page appear as similar as possible on every user's screen. Trying to view a web page on an 800x600 laptop screen? Too bad, the page is optimized for 1024x768, and I'm not going to let you change it to fit in your display. The ultimate culmination of this was the flash website. Where the menus, pages, pictures, were all coded in flash instead of in HTML, so that the site looked exactly as the designer wanted on every display, regardless of how well or how poorly the design worked on your particular display.
So HTML (or rather, HTML/flash) in its short history has spanned both extremes. Zero author control and total user control, to total author control and zero user control. And has now settled on CSS which gives lots of author control, but with the right tools (e.g. firebug) offers lots of user control. A site I visited insisted on formatting the text as centered, so I just modified the CSS in firebug to display it as left justified. (This example only covers pub
Slashdot Mirror
It's a 4th Generation service (uses completely different technology than 3G), therefore it's 4G.
The reason the definition was standardized was to prevent someone from implementing some lame 4th generation service with little or no improvement in speed, and advertising it as 4G. But when every 4G service which has been implemented falls within the same speed range and is short of the definition specified by ITU-R in the standard, then clearly it's the standard which is in error.
Apple's R&D spending as a percent of revenue is actually close to the bottom in the industry. Relative to other tech companies, very little of their revenue and profit is going to R&D.
I should point out that Google is the same - no dividends. They're what a friend of mine calls baseball card stocks. They have no intrinsic value, their only worth is how much you can sell them to someone else. Something to keep in mind if you're thinking of investing in AAPL or GOOG. Generally the return on a stock is considered to be its price appreciation + dividend, so a mediocre stock which pays a good dividend can beat out those two from an investment perspective.
I'm not so sure. If you read the relevant section of the DMCA Sec 512 (c)(3)(a)(iv) it says "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." That sure sounds like the perjury penalty only applies if the complaining party is not authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
i.e. You can lie as much as you like when alleging copyright infringement. You just have to be sure that whatever it is you're alleging was infringed, you hold the copyright to or the copyright holder has authorized you to act on their behalf. If the perjury penalty applied to both clauses, it would've been at the beginning of the sentence. i.e. "Under penalty of perjury, a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and that the complaining party is authorized..."
OTOH, if you contest the DMCA takedown notice, you do so under the penalty of perjury. (Sec 512 (g)(3)(C)) BTW, this is one of the reasons why the DMCA is a terrible law. A good law respects the rights of both the accuser and the accused.
Lobbying is fine. Just make it so that all meetings between elected politicians and lobbyists/donors have to be videotaped and the videos put on the government website for the entire public to watch. This would have zero impact on legitimate lobbying. If an individual or a corporation has a good argument why a law should be changed, it will work on the public as well as it will on the politician. In fact they'd welcome this since it's free advertising for their issue.
The lobbyists trying to do something underhanded, against the better interest of the public, though (i.e. bribery). They will be running scared from this idea.
No, productivity in the U.S. in the 1950s was primarily domestic. In other words, that level of productivity (and standard of living) is self-sustainable.
As the economies of third world nations develop, their standard of living and costs will rise to be more in-line with first world nations like the U.S. The U.S. may fall a little, but the losses will only be that which was gained by exploiting the cheaper prices in those developing nations. Long-term productivity in the U.S. will stabilize at what it could sustain when most economic activity was domestic.
We (and Western Europe + Japan + Australia) may lose a bit from the excesses of the 1990s-2010s, but we won't lose what our grandparents fought for. Additional technological advances will increase productivity so we'll likely stabilize at a level above that of the 1950s. (In theory, productivity gains from advances in technology could completely offset the losses to be expected from globalization. The primary concern is availability and cost of energy, since energy is the fuel which allows us to use technology to increase productivity over manual labor. We really need to be pushing long-term energy generation technologies - renewables, fission, and fusion.)
The problem with FTP isn't that it transmits data as cleartext (though it does that too). The problem is it transmits passwords as cleartext. Anyone snooping on your FTP session will know your username and password.
They support FTP and/or SFTP. As much as I like the idea of forcing everyone to use SFTP, it's really a decision for each customer to make. If you want to only allow SFTP connections, you can.
Why don't the authors do what Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, etc. do to prevent people from price matching. Carry the exact same product, except the model number and one or two trivial features are slightly different. The iBook store can have the -i version which is formatted in LucidiaGrande like the Macs. Amazon can have the -k version in Caecilia like the Kindle. Insert page breaks so the page numbers match up.
Obligatory TED talk.
When I investigated a bunch of energy-saving options for a building I was managing, geothermal heat pumps were by far the most cost effective (not to be confused with geothermal energy). For our building, its payback time would have been 3-5 years. There are no fancy materials, no high-tech equipment involved. Just a bunch of buried/sunken plastic tubes with water flowing through them. The ancient Romans used a variant of it to air condition their homes.
Essentially they're the same thing as a window heat exchanger/air conditioner, except instead of using the ambient air as the heat dump, they use the ground or groundwater/pond. This provides a much steeper and more favorable temperature gradient in both winter and summer, allowing the heat exchanger to operate much more efficiently. Whereas air is about 90 F in summer, the ground is about 55 F making it much easier to pump heat into the ground. In winter the air is about 30 F, while the ground is still about 55 F, making it much easier to pump heat out of the ground. (Below about 40-50 F, most heat exchangers just shut off and run a heating coil, because it's so inefficient trying to extract heat from air that cold.)
They're an easy energy-saving measure which quickly pays for itself. I'm surprised more new building construction doesn't incorporate it. Makes sense for cooling computers, motors, etc. too if you've already got the infrastructure in place for your home or building.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
So that dream came true, just not the way he expected.
I'm not sure anymore how much of that is real, and how much is stereotype due to the tech gadgets and anime which come out of Japan. During the nuclear crisis, watching NHK coverage was a treat. I had expected the Japanese to be well ahead of the U.S. in fancy computer graphics in their news broadcasts. Instead, they had a hand-made paper mache 3D model of the nuclear plant, giant posters for various charts, and the weather reports used cardboard cutout drawings of clouds, sun, rain, etc. which the weather lady stuck to a cloth map with velcro as she was talking. For pointing, she used a stick with what looked like a colored ping pong ball glued to the end. Very quaint.
Corn ethanol is an extremely inefficient way to "store" solar energy.
This whole boondoggle started because the U.S. always runs a corn surplus. The U.S. doesn't want a repeat of the 1930s, where crop failures led to hunger and near starvation, so the government deliberately subsidizes food production (mostly corn) to insure there's an oversupply. The question then becomes, what to do with all this extra corn? A lot of it is sent overseas as foreign aid. A bunch of it is converted to high fructose corn syrup, as a substitute for cane sugar. More still becomes grain feed for livestock, to satisfy our appetite for beef, milk, and cheese. And a few decades ago someone got the bright idea of converting it into ethanol to help ease the country's dependence on foreign oil.
That's the reason the country started making corn ethanol instead of using a more energy-efficient crop like sugar beets. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, it took on a life of its own, and under the influence of heavy lobbying we started growing corn for the sake of converting it into ethanol, rather than converting only excess corn into ethanol.
Ethanol, provided you make it from a sugar-rich crop, is actually a pretty good way to gather and store solar energy for transportation applications. The alternative (PV solar to electricity to batteries to electric vehicle) is horribly expensive. Wholesale cost of PV solar electricity is about $0.20-$0.25 per kWh, vs. about $0.055 (wholesale) for coal. The Leaf is rated at 34 kWh per 100 miles, or $6.80-$8.50 per 100 miles at wholesale PV solar electricity prices. To travel 100 miles requires 411 kg of batteries (EPA rage of 73 miles on 300 kg).
Brazil estimates its sugar cane ethanol costs $0.83/gal to produce. If you figure a Leaf-like car would get 35 mpg, modify that for ethanol's 70% energy density vs. gasoline, that would mean 4.08 gal per 100 miles, or a cost of $3.36 per 100 miles at wholesale cane sugar ethanol prices. The 4.08 gallons needed to move the vehicle 100 miles would only weigh 12.1 kg. So sugar cane ethanol is 2x - 2.5x cheaper and 34x lighter than PV solar (this ignores the engine weight, but I'm just following the criteria of this argument - "storing" solar energy).
If that is what you truly believe, then you are part of the problem. The left wing is in bed with corporations just as much the right wing is. Your belief that your party is somehow innocent and uninvolved in this causes you to not question their actions. Because you don't critically analyze your party's actions, you give them carte blanche to perpetrate the very corporate cronyism you purportedly decry.
But earthquakes are zero-sum. They're just releases of stresses which have built up in the Earth's crust. Those stresses come from natural movements of the crust, not from the fracking. If fracking causes an earthquake, that means it's releasing those stresses a little at a time, before it would have released naturally, thereby decreasing the chances of an even larger natural earthquake. Like controlled man-induced avalanches, if fracking causes an earthquake that means it's making the area safer, not more dangerous.
140 dB underwater is actually pretty quiet. Sound levels underwater are based on a reference of 1 Pascal at 1 meter. Sound levels in the air were arbitrarily referenced to 20 Pascal at 1 meter to better align it with the sensitivity of the human ear. Water also has a much higher impedance than air. Consequently, to convert underwater dB to to air dB, you have to subtract 62. 140 dB underwater is equivalent to just 78 dB in air. And even whales are able to pump out 180-190 dB.
Unfortunately, PETA and some environmental groups have either failed to understand this or deliberately abused misunderstanding of it to generate hysteria among the public about the effects of underwater sonar and ship traffic on wildlife.
Dropbox just resells Amazon's S3 storage service. They have a slicker interface, but the heavy lifting is all done by Amazon.
Some industries have already made this transition. Wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for a minimal fee, the charged a large amount for prints and reprints. If you wanted extra copies of your wedding photos for your extended family, you had to pay for the extra prints.
With the advent of scanners and dirt-cheap photo printers, they've transitioned to a model where they charge a lot for shooting the wedding, but charge little for the prints or even give them away for free. Technically they can charge for the prints as they did before, but realistically they know it's so easy to make copies there's no possible way they'd be able to enforce their copyright for every photo the take. So they've just restructured their payment system to reflect reality, rather than copyright laws.
Forget for a moment everything about copyright, publishing, movie/music production, etc. Think of this purely in terms of work vs. compensation. I shoot photos of a wedding and process the photos. That's a lot of work. I print pictures of said wedding. That's very little work. Under the old model, the payment system did not reflect my costs - I charged very little for the part which required a lot of work on my part, but charged a lot for the part which required almost no effort. The new system fixes this. I now charge a lot for the part which requires a lot of work, and charge little for the part which requires little work.
The same thing has got to happen to books, music, and movies. In the old days, musicians and actors were paid for live performances. That is the norm.
In the 20th century there was a bit less than 100 years where technology was good enough to allow mass duplication, but not good enough to lower cost of duplication to the point where individuals could duplicate. This allowed a business model to flourish in which payment did not reflect costs. Musicians and actors were able to work once, then sit back and make money over and over based on that single performance. This is not normal. No other business is like that - you have to constantly work if you want to keep making money.
Now in the 21st century, the cost of mass duplication has fallen far enough that it's now easily within grasp of the individual. No longer does it make sense for people to be charged large amounts of money for what is a nearly free service (duplication). People may be stuck on the morality of it because the 20th century way is all they've ever known. But strictly in terms of work invested vs. compensation, the 20th century way was clearly wrong since the most money was being made for the step which cost the least money.
The transition to a model where content creators are not paid for duplication services is not some new journey into unexplored territory. It is a return to what was the norm for millenia. For most of history, duplication was impossible (performances) or nearly impossible (books), so the only way to get paid was for the actual content creation. During the 20th century, duplication became possible, and content creators leveraged it to get paid multiple times over for the same work. Now in the 21st century duplication has become so cheap that people are starting to question if it's really fair for content creators to be paid multiple times for the same job. That is the true crux of the matter, not who owns the work or whether copying is stealing.
I do believe in copyright - the temporary monopoly does encourage creation. But the terms have to be reasonable. With duplication costs having dropped to almost zero, preventing society from making copies simply because of archaic laws does more harm than good. Something like 10-20 years for copyright seems about right to me. Copyright is fundamentally about encouraging creativity and creation of new content. A copyright term of life + 70 years discourages creativity, and instead encourages trying to figure out how to create something new once and live off it for the rest of your life.
That's what I've been saying. People think all the ruckus about IP laws and copyrights is about books, music, movies, and software. Those are relatively minor compared to what's coming down the road. In the future, when everyone can basically own a fab shop in a box, it's going to be about whether all the physical objects in your house can be created for the cost of materials, or will be heavily encumbered with licensing fees. The IP law we establish in the next 10-20 years is going to heavily impact human standard of living and productivity in the physical world for the next 100+ years.
Evil.
Despite the jokes others have made in response, capitalism works because in a free society, transactions are only made when the result is beneficial to both parties. Say I have a business transporting furniture. I buy the horse and buggy whip from you for $200 because they're worth more than $200 to me. You sell the horse and buggy whip to me for $200 because they're worth less than $200 to you. In this way, even though the amount of stuff does not change from the transaction, its value increases. With each transaction, items get moved to the hands of people who are better able to make use of them to improve their productivity. Whereas the horse and buggy whip only cost you $190 worth of productivity to make, in my hands it can generate (say) $310 worth of productivity.
When a company forms a monopoly or subverts the market with laws like the content industry is trying, they break this mechanism. I buy the horse and buggy whip from you for $300 because it's worth $310 to me. To you they're only worth $190 because that's what they cost you to make. In functioning capitalism, market forces would drive the price down to about $200. But by subverting the free market with your monopoly and eliminating competition, you're able to drive the price the other way and get it near the maximum I'd be willing to pay. I end up paying an extra $100.
Furthermore, I should be able to buy a horseless carriage for $250 which will give me $500 worth of productivity. But you've gotten a law passed which bans it from the market. So by being forced to buy the horse and buggy whip, I also lose out on $190 worth of productivity.
The consequence of all this is that I no longer have an extra $100 to spend on something else productive, and my productivity has been lowered by $190 from where it should be. And you, because the extra $100 you made came too easily, you don't fully appreciate its value and are more likely to waste the extra money you make on silly things like gold plated toilet seats. The economy overall is harmed, the rate of technological progress slows down, recessions become more common, and increases in the standard of living slows down or even regresses.
It's normal to put your needs ahead of those of the single person you're dealing with in a transaction. People who buy high and sell low don't survive for long, and everyone has a personal obligation to look out for themselves. But putting your needs ahead of all of society by subverting free market forces for personal gain is just plain evil.
Not only conductivity, but how does the coating hold up under the friction of plugging in the charger every day? If you peek at the metal contacts of a USB cable with a flashlight, I'll bet they have spots worn into them from being plugged in. I doubt any coating could survive that, and the parts which suffer the most wear are also the parts that need waterproofing the most.
Russian launch vehicles remain among the most reliable in use. It's not so much that the Russian space program infrastructure is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. It's that the U.S. space program is incredibly overdesigned with $billions spent on extra redundancy and safety to try to eek out another 0.001% increase in success rate. In some cases the overdesign probably hinders success more than helps, as you've added a lot more things which can go wrong.
From a strictly economic standpoint, the Russian program is much more cost-effective. Rather than optimizing success rate like the U.S. does, they try to optimize successes per dollar. You accept a few percent higher launch failure rate, in exchange for many tens of percent lower costs. As long as the value of the payloads lost in the extra failures does not exceed the cost savings you're making from the launches, you come out ahead. It's just that this particular failure happened with a high-publicity payload.
I'm a pretty free-market type guy, but this is really something the government should be handling. Currently, it's up to businesses to figure out all the different tax rates (or hire someone to do it) and apply them to their sales. For the small business, the only way they can realistically comply is to hire a company which collects and updates the tax rates and puts it into a database for them. The problem is these companies always indemnify themselves against errors. So a small business could be doing its best to comply with the tax laws, but if they failed to collect $5000 because company making the databae screwed up and entered an incorrect tax rate, they are on the hook for the $5k, not the company making the tax database. There's a disconnect between the party responsible for the error and the party that has to pay for it.
This really needs a Federal government program handling this. All the tax jurisdictions in the country should be required to submit and update their tax rates to a Federal web site in order for the tax to be considered effective. Business can then go to this Federal web site and download the latest tax rate table every day. If a business fails to do so and doesn't collect the right sales tax, they are liable for any shortfall. If a city or state fails to update their tax info on the web site, then they are liable and lose out on any shortfall. And if the web site goes down, the Federal government is liable for erroneous sales tax collections that day. Each party in the process is responsible for their own errors, none for the errors of others.
That's irrelevant though. Interstate commerce is by definition a transaction in which one party (Amazon in this case) resides outside the state. The residency of the other party is irrelevant, as long as it's a different state. The correct resolution to this problem is Federal legislation or a constitutional amendment which modifies the Commerce Clause. Not for states to file lawsuit after lawsuit against individual companies until they kowtow to the state's (currently unconstitutional) desires.
No, this is mischaracterizing the problem. The problem isn't that people fail to understand "the user". The problem is that people think there is a single entity called "the user" whom they can design to satisfy. Programmers think "the user" is like them, so they make a UI which suits themselves. Designers think "the user" is like them, so they make a very different UI which suits themselves. Then they argue with each other about how they are right and the other is wrong. TFA is just another volley in this pointless war of blame.
The reality is that there is no single "the user". Users come in all different shapes and sizes. Some like ribbons, others like menus, and others still like command lines. If you design your UI to placate one of these types of users, you will alienate the others. The holy grail of a single UI which everyone likes is unattainable, so we shouldn't even bother trying.
Instead, I think the best way to approach UI design is like the presets for your car seat. Each user can customize the position of their car seat exactly how they like, and store it in a preset. But a different user can customize the seat they way they like, and store it in a different preset. In a similar way, I think UIs should come with several standard default presets - ribbon mode, menu mode, etc. You can pick the type of UI you want, tweak some elements if you prefer them different than the default, and save it as your own UI preset. That way when you work on your computer, the UI is to your liking. But if someone else borrows your computer, instead of getting all confused by your UI customizations, they can just click on one of the default presets (or load their own preset which they're carrying on their USB stick) and use something more comfortable to them. Microsoft has kinda done this with Windows 7. The file explorer interface is button-centric. But if you hit alt, the old menus appear.
In publishing space, designers and publishers are worse offenders than programmers. Look back at the history of HTML. When Tim Berners-Lee (a programmer) first came up with HTML, it was completely user-centric. The only thing the author got to "design" what text and pictures to include. The author had zero control over how it would be displayed on the user's screen - that was controlled entirely by the user (or rather, the user's browser).
Designers and publishers didn't like this. They (rightfully) wanted certain formatting, like the amount of indent at the beginning of a paragraph, to be consistent. So HTML was gradually extended to allow you to "hard-code" certain types of formatting. But then designers started to go overboard, insisting that their web page appear as similar as possible on every user's screen. Trying to view a web page on an 800x600 laptop screen? Too bad, the page is optimized for 1024x768, and I'm not going to let you change it to fit in your display. The ultimate culmination of this was the flash website. Where the menus, pages, pictures, were all coded in flash instead of in HTML, so that the site looked exactly as the designer wanted on every display, regardless of how well or how poorly the design worked on your particular display.
So HTML (or rather, HTML/flash) in its short history has spanned both extremes. Zero author control and total user control, to total author control and zero user control. And has now settled on CSS which gives lots of author control, but with the right tools (e.g. firebug) offers lots of user control. A site I visited insisted on formatting the text as centered, so I just modified the CSS in firebug to display it as left justified. (This example only covers pub