$1.65 billion in profit last quarter. Their international retail sales is still losing money, but it's swamped out by their North American sales, which made nearly as much money as AWS last quarter ($2.03b vs $2.08b).
That's probably the rationale behind thinking AWS will be spun off. Normally you stick a money-making division together with a money-losing division. That allows you to take the money from the money-making division, and invest it into improving the money-losing division. That reduces your net income (profit), and thus your taxable income. Once both divisions start making money, there's no longer any reason to keep them together. You're better off finding new businesses projects to invest in which can act as a money sink.
The Federal $7500 EV subsidy was structured as a tax credit. To take full advantage of the credit, you had to owe at least $7500 on your Federal taxes the year you bought/leased the EV. If you look at the 2016 IRS tax stats, you had to make about $80k/yr (column O*1000 / column N) to receive the full credit, which would put you in the top third of the U.S. by income. Someone making the U.S. median income of $59k would only receive about $4500. Or put another way, the subsidy makes that Leaf cost $3k less for the guy making $80k+ than it does for someone making $59k.
If you don't like EVs, you should be for repealing the subsidy because you don't think EVs should be subsidized.
If you like EVs, you should be for repealing the subsidy because it unfairly benefits wealthy people.
To the tune of about 50 cents per gallon. This far, far exceeds the subsidy oil companies receive, which works out to less than 10 cents per gallon even if you attribute the entire subsidy to gasoline (they make other products with oil too, like kerosene, asphalt, plastics). I think heating oil is the only petroleum product which is generally exempted from taxes (because poor people freezing to death in winter makes bad press for politicians).
You can argue we're not taxing fossil fuels enough. But it's silly to pretend they're not taxed. As the Tesla EVs are rated at about 30 kWh per 100 miles, at the U.S. average electricity price of 11.5 cents/kWh, that works out to $3.45 of electricity per 100 miles. A 25 MPG vehicle pays $2 in fuel taxes per 100 miles, so its taxes amount to 58% of the electricity price needed to power the EV. In some states with higher fuel taxes, the fuel tax alone is about the same as the cost of electricity to power an EV over the same route.
That's actually what 5G is supposed to fix. 4G is capable of several hundred Mbps speeds, it's just that all that bandwidth has to be divided among all the users simultaneously requesting data in a single tower's cell. After you divide it among them, the speed available to an individual instantaneous user drops to 2-25 Mbps in most cases.
5G is so much faster you could blow through your monthly quota in a less than a minute. No single user needs that much speed. But reducing the amount of time each individual user spends using bandwidth means fewer collisions among individuals requesting bandwidth. An individual user requests data, and the tower delivers it to them in a fraction of a second instead of the next 15-30 seconds, making it less likely that requests from multiple users will overlap So any individual is more likely to get the tower's full bandwidth at the instant they need it.
I'm seeing more and more help requests from gamers who aren't able to play a networked game because they sit behind a NATed IPv4 firewall they don't control, which blocks the ports their game needs and doesn't have UPnP enabled (for automatic port forwarding). Usually they're apartment dwellers, but a small number of them are people whose ISPs are putting them behind a NAT (i.e. the ISP has more customers than IPv4 addresses).
The Communist Party has been in control there for 69 years. They're the reason China is so behind the rest of the world. China's growth didn't begin until they got out of the way and allowed capitalistic reforms - allowed people to build and run businesses without Party interference. Giving them credit for the growth is rather like thanking your prison guard for not beating you today.
"I eat meat. Meat is yummy"
What an insightful comment! Here is a ball. Why don't you bounce it?
I'll bite. I eat meat. Meat is yummy. Your body has evolved so that things that are good for you taste yummy. By not eating meat, you are depriving your body of nutrients it needs to survive. Vegetarians and especially vegans have to be careful to supplement their diet with pills or sufficient quantities of specific plants which provide those nutrients. Thus indicating that theirs is the diet which is innately unnatural and unhealthy. You can make an argument against eating too much meat, but that does not translate into an argument for eating no meat at all.
The argument that eating meat is cruel is easy to shoot down too. If your reasoning is based on minimizing the amount of cruelty animals suffer, consider that the fate of nearly every living thing is to be eaten alive. It just happens out of our sight most of the time. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Living to a ripe old age and dying of natural causes (organ failure) is something almost unique to humans and the few animals we adopt as pets. Nearly all wild animals die young, painfully, and frequently with what most people would consider close to the "maximum" amount of suffering possible. In contrast, the way we dispatch domesticated animals for meat is quick, painless, and humane. So you actually reduce the total amount of cruelty suffered by animals by replacing wild animals in the environment with domesticated ones, protect them from predators and disease with our fences and medicines, then dispatch them painlessly when you're ready to slaughter them.
Then there's the argument that meat is too resource-intensive. That the world's human population is growing beyond the land's capability to feed it, so we need to start eating lower on the food chain. Except that's false too. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing nations. The developed countries (where most meat eating happens) have close to zero population growth; some even have negative population growth (their population is shrinking). So they're clearly able to feed their populations using the land and resources they have. If you want to reduce population growth, the key is to help all countries on the planet become economically developed. Regressing to an agrarian society is actually counterproductive, and will result in even faster population growth.
The only argument for vegetarianism / veganism I've heard which makes sense is the energy intensity one. You can feed the population using less energy per capita if everyone eats plants (even after accounting for supplements to make up nutrients normally obtained from meat). But the entirety of modern civilization is based on being able to generate more energy per capita than in the past. As a nation develops, the percentage of its economic output devoted to food production decreases. Since everyone still must be eating (the same amount of food is being produced per capita), that means the country is producing more energy per capita than before. And that excess energy is being spent on productive tasks other than food production. If there's plenty of excess energy, why not use some of it to raise meat if you want?
Note that if the scientists researching this are able to produce something which tastes like meat but requires less energy to produce than raising animals, I will have no qualms about switching to it. Less energy to produce translates into lower cost, so it'll be a simple economic decision. Contrary to the imaginations of vegetarians / vegans, knowing an animal died to feed you is not a part of the enjoyment from eating meat.
The data contradicts your belief. Military enlistees are better educated, have higher IQs, and come from wealthier families than their peers in the general population.
Entrapment schemes like the one described in TFA are by their very definition designed to trap people who are behaving normally and reasonably. If there's any selection bias going on, it'd be on the part of the scammers. They might deliberately target military personnel because the potential penalty for being entrapped is much greater for military personnel (prison + dishonorable discharge) than for civilians (only prison), making them more likely to pay the extortion fee.
The buyer. If you don't want one, the bank may insist on one if they're giving you a loan. The realtor should have nothing to do with the appraisal or choice of appraiser, other than unlocking the door so he can get in. My appraiser and realtor arrived before I did, and I found them talking with each other in front of the house. I wasn't happy about that (it turned out they knew each other from past appraisals). When his work was done, I paid him with a personal check.
The whole point of the appraisal is to provide a third independent sanity check on the value of the home (the first two being the seller's valuation, and your realtor's valuation).
The bigger problem with the housing boom was that your realtor wasn't always acting in your best interests if you were buying. When you hire a professional, like a lawyer, you pay them a fee, and they work in your best interests. When you hire a Realtor, their fee is usually a set percentage of the sale price. That works for the seller, but for the buyer it creates a conflict of interest. Your Realtor is supposed to be trying to get you the best price possible, but they get paid more if they don't help you get the best price possible. The industry really needs to address this problem before it can be taken seriously as a "professional" organization. I used Redfin since their realtors get paid a fixed fee.
I'll will add, my main skepticism about the article was regarding the following: "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers... So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies." Hmm, 35nm airgaps in bendable materials - that sounds like a recipe for errors to me
The bend radius for things which are "flexible" on the human scale is so large that there's almost no bending on the nanoscale. Same reason fiberglass bends so easily. Glass in your experience with human-size windows shatters rather easily rather than bends. That's because a 1 cm thick window bent with (say) a 1 meter radius results in the the two sides differing in length by 1% before it breaks. But if you shrink the glass down to the 10 um (0.01 mm) thick, suddenly you can bend it in a 1 mm radius before it hits your 1% threshold. And the result is glass which behaves like cloth. (If you ever get your hands on an individual fiberglass fiber, you can in fact break it by tying it into a knot and tightening until the bend radius becomes too small for the glass to withstand.)
For materials like silicon, the rigid crystalline structure results in shattering at very small amounts of flex.
And I have to disagree with you, the headline was click-bait. It asked a question which TFA does not answer. TFA uses a non-click-baity headline: "New Metal-Air Transistor Replaces Semiconductors - A novel field emission transistor that uses air gaps could breathe life into Mooreâ(TM)s Law." That makes it clear the future potential is unknown, whereas the click-bait slashdot headline implies you'll get the answer to the question it asks if you read TFA. The click-bait headline was added by the slashdot editor.
You gotta be careful what type of milkweed you plant. The kind you buy from nurseries isn't native to North America, and its differences may be doing more harm than good.
That was my initial reaction. But a little research turned up that Lenovo only made about $250k from Superfish. So the condition that the fine greatly exceeds the profit has been met. Though I would've added a stipulation that in addition to the fine, they have to reimburse users for any expenses they incurred due to security breaches caused by Superfish-related vulnerabilities.
There's nothing stopping FOSS from releasing the same products as the corporations are. The corporations are just better than FOSS advocates at figuring out and giving users what they want.
That's always been the problem with FOSS, as far back as the 1990s when I first began using it. FOSS advocates have this preconceived notion of what the software they write should be. And users who tell them that's not what they need get told "if that's what you want, then you write it." If you're not a programmer, you're excluded from guiding the direction of FOSS.. Whereas corporations run usability tests and product trials specifically to let non-programmers tell them which direction they should go.
This is where Stallman messed up IMHO. Profit is a motivator by which users can influence programmers (they'll pay you more if you add a feature they want). FOSS would work if profit were removed and replaced with some other way for users to influence programmers. But Stallman just removed profit and called it a day, believing everything else would take care of itself. FOSS works fine between programmers, which is why so many programmers at corporations use it and contribute to it for behind-the-scenes software. But users vastly outnumber programmers, and if they don't have a voice in the direction your software should go, then any user-facing FOSS software like Desktop Linux is rudderless.
I agree with you. But Simpson's point is the distinction between a Ford owner saying "I'm to drunk to drive, I'd better call a cab," and a Tesla owner saying "I'm to drunk to drive, but I don't need to call a cab because my car has autopilot!"
I agree with you because he hasn't proven this isn't a case of "I'm not too drunk to drive.... zzzzzzzzz" You need to disprove that possibility before you can arrive at the conclusion he's asserting. But contrary to what you claim, there is a (possible) distinction in liability between Tesla and the other car manufacturers here. It's just not proven yet.
50% of people can NOT tell any res difference between 720P native and 1080P native. This was good.
I'd put this closer to 90%-95%. The test I always use is that some of the major TV networks broadcast in 720p, some of them broadcast in 1080i (which your TV converts to 1080p). I ask people to identify which networks are 720p, which are 1080i. Despite having watched these networks on their HDTVs for a decade, nobody has been able to answer me correctly. Try it yourself - of ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, which are 720p, which are 1080i? I'll give the answer at the end of this post.
I think 8k is going to fall down a similar hole, and the next big step is going to be 16k.
1080p is 2x the pixels of 720p (which is actually 1366x768, not 1280x720). People can't really tell when it comes to video.
4k is 4x the pixels of 1080p. People can tell the resolution is higher. They just don't care.
8k is 2x the pixels of 4k.
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Answer: ABC and Fox are 720p, CBS and NBC are 1080i.
So by your reasoning, because the Democratic Party tried to swing the 2016 Republican primary to Trump (because they thought he would be easy to run against), the Democrats are therefore responsible for Trump being in the White House, and the fact that we have a buffoon for President is the Democrats' fault?
Everyone is allowed to contribute to the process - if you're vilified for contributing, it's no longer a democracy. But ultimate responsibility lies with your final vote. The Republicans are responsible for Trump being President because they voted for him in the end. If they didn't like him being their nominee, they should have voted for someone else (many of them did, voting for Clinton or third party). The Democrats are responsible for Obamacare because they passed it in the end. If they didn't like the amendments, they either should have voted not to include them (they did hold significant majorities in both House and Senate), or should have voted against Obamacare because of the amendments. (A few dozen Democrats in the House did vote against it, but none of the Democrat Senators did.)
Civics 101: The President doesn't make the budget. The President suggests a budget, but ultimately it's Congress who gets to decide what does or doesn't make it into the budget. The President only gets to sign or veto the whole thing as one lump sum. He can't excise the parts of it he doesn't like while keeping the rest.
The Democrats controlled both branches of Congress during his Presidency, and insisted the budget should have a tax increase. Bush refused to sign it to the point where the government went into shutdown. But he ultimately decided stopping the shutdown from further harming the economy was more important than keeping his promise, so he blinked and signed. The Democrats won, got their tax increase, and managed to dump the blame for it on Bush.
Comcast, Verizon, etc. all get their Internet service from other Tier 1 (and in some cases Tier 2) providers like Level 3. Any civilian can get service from L3. You just have to pay a ton for it because their lowest tier of service is so much more than any single individual would need, and they're gonna charge you for the cost of laying fiber to your house. So cable companies would still be exempt under the conditions you've laid out. I'm not being obtuse here, I'm trying to point out why it's a problem if you define a law as "I just know" certain companies should be covered and others exempt. The arguments I'm putting forth are the arguments the cable ISPs would use in court to exempt themselves from Net Neutrality.
I've been trying to push you, hoping you could arrive at the correct answer on your own. But I don't have time to continue monitoring this thread so I'll give you the answer. The difference between Starbucks and Comcast as an ISP is that Comcast has a monopoly in most of the areas where they provide service. You don't have to use a Starbucks for WiFi. You can go to another Starbucks, or a McDonalds, or a friend's house to leech off their free WiFi. Not so with Comcast. For most U.S. households in Comcast territory, Comcast is their only choice for cable Internet. And if Comcast decides to do something with the Internet service not in the best interests of its customers, the customers have no recourse. They cannot flee to get Internet service from another company. Their only choice is to live with Comcast's restrictions, or do without Internet.
As that monopoly is artificial (granted by the local government) rather than a natural monopoly, the government likewise is free to add conditions like Net Neutrality to the terms of that monopoly. No grandiose national law with majorities in both branches of Congress and the signature of the President is needed. No fuzzy definitions of what constitutes an ISP. Each city council simply has to decide for themselves that if they're going to give an ISP a monopoly, they're also going to require that ISP to treat data access neutrally. (But this gets back to my bigger point - why do you even need Net Neutrality in the first place? These local governments can simply allow multiple cable companies to offer Internet service in their city. And ISPs which try to throttle bandwidth would simply bleed customers to ISPs which don't throttle, automatically discouraging the behavior Net Neutrality is trying to prevent.)
It's not a USA thing. It's an accounting thing. When a company gives you money on a card, it's establishing a debt. The company accepted your money, and agrees to hold it on your half, processing it as a payment for anything you buy with the card. It owes you the money on the card - it has a debt to you. Unfortunately people sometimes forget about those cards, or don't realize that they've lost them. It's not much for any single year, but over time the amount of debt the company owes keeps growing. After enough years, the cumulative amount of these lost cards build up.
Eventually the debt they represent becomes a substantial percentage of the company's annual cash flow. Many accounting calculations and decisions are based on the amount of debt a company has, so after enough time this begins to affect the company's ability to, for example, qualify for a loan. These types of accounting decisions are made under the assumption "what if all your creditors ask you to suddenly repay your debt all at once?" Never mind that such a scenario is virtually impossible for lost cash card debt, the ease with which you can make such a calculation makes it an important tool in financing. The company would love to just return the cash it's holding on behalf of the cardholder to wipe the debt off its books, but it has no way to contact the cardholder because he purchased it at a gas station at 2 am paying for it and a pack of cigarettes with cash.
So to prevent this debt from staying on the books in perpetuity, they add recurring fees which will gradually whittle it away if you take too long to use the card. Generally the first year or two are free. Thereafter $1-$3 is deducted each month. In that way, if the card is lost, the debt disappears from the company's books before it becomes big enough to become a problem. Airlines had to do the same thing with their frequent flyer miles. People were dying without using their miles, and those miles were building up in their accounting books as debt which they may have to repay in the future (maybe a court would decide a person's children could use those miles). So they altered their frequent flyer programs to make your miles expire if unused after x years.
While I think the politician behind this has good intentions, not nefarious, the logical extension of this type of law is to ban bartering. So it'd be illegal to sell an item for money, but agree to trade it for another item. You have to accept cash.
Bartering is the last-ditch mechanism by which The People can escape economic malfeasance by The Government manipulating its own currency. When the German government began printing copious amounts of money after WWI to pay back war debt, you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. If you waited until later in the day to buy, you might need another half wheelbarrow. You could avoid this by bartering - trading something you made to the baker for the bread. The government generally frowns on bartering because it's economic activity which bypasses its ability to track or tax.
It's also possible to do this by using a foreign currency (why the U.S. Dollar is so popular in many countries with corrupt governments). But that generally works better in smaller countries. In larger countries it can take some time for the foreign currency to permeate.
Passing this type of law raises the stakes if the government should ever start to manipulate the value of the U.S. Dollar in ways which don't make economic sense for the people. It's a huge temptation because printing more money is a quick and easy way to basically steal money from people's savings (it decreases the value of those savings, transferring the lost value to the entity which holds the newly printed money - the government).
So your argument is that "predominant business is something else" frees the company from net neutrality. So you feel my cable TV company who offers customers Internet service under certain conditions should not be bound by net neutrality?
I'm curious how you can justify this while remaining consistent with net neutrality. The only argument I can come up with is if Starbucks gives WiFi access for free, then they're not obligated to provide a "complete" Internet experience. Except if they require or "encourage" you to buy something from them before giving you access, it's not really free.
"Net neutrality only applies when they block or slow down sites I want," is not a valid standard. The principle needs to be based on standards which are universal and agnostic, so it produces the same results regardless of whether you like or dislike the ISP (Starbucks or Comcast), or like or dislike the website (Netflix or porn sites) it's applied to. Otherwise it's not neutrality.
The biggest difference I've seen is actually from the floor. The trend away from carpets towards hard flooring results in a huge increase in noise. True the latter are easier to clean after a spill, but most of the upscale restaurants I remember from my youth had carpeting, while the tile/linoleum flooring was only used by fast food joints. Nowadays I can't even remember the last restaurant I went to which had carpeted floors.
When I bought my house, I gave in to my parents and sister who insisted that I should rip out the carpeting and install wood flooring because it was trendy. I'm not happy with the increase in noise. Fortunately I held firm and refused to remove the carpeting from the upstairs bedrooms. They're harder to clean, but much quieter.
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$1.65 billion in profit last quarter. Their international retail sales is still losing money, but it's swamped out by their North American sales, which made nearly as much money as AWS last quarter ($2.03b vs $2.08b).
That's probably the rationale behind thinking AWS will be spun off. Normally you stick a money-making division together with a money-losing division. That allows you to take the money from the money-making division, and invest it into improving the money-losing division. That reduces your net income (profit), and thus your taxable income. Once both divisions start making money, there's no longer any reason to keep them together. You're better off finding new businesses projects to invest in which can act as a money sink.
The Federal $7500 EV subsidy was structured as a tax credit. To take full advantage of the credit, you had to owe at least $7500 on your Federal taxes the year you bought/leased the EV. If you look at the 2016 IRS tax stats, you had to make about $80k/yr (column O*1000 / column N) to receive the full credit, which would put you in the top third of the U.S. by income. Someone making the U.S. median income of $59k would only receive about $4500. Or put another way, the subsidy makes that Leaf cost $3k less for the guy making $80k+ than it does for someone making $59k.
If you don't like EVs, you should be for repealing the subsidy because you don't think EVs should be subsidized.
If you like EVs, you should be for repealing the subsidy because it unfairly benefits wealthy people.
To the tune of about 50 cents per gallon. This far, far exceeds the subsidy oil companies receive, which works out to less than 10 cents per gallon even if you attribute the entire subsidy to gasoline (they make other products with oil too, like kerosene, asphalt, plastics). I think heating oil is the only petroleum product which is generally exempted from taxes (because poor people freezing to death in winter makes bad press for politicians).
You can argue we're not taxing fossil fuels enough. But it's silly to pretend they're not taxed. As the Tesla EVs are rated at about 30 kWh per 100 miles, at the U.S. average electricity price of 11.5 cents/kWh, that works out to $3.45 of electricity per 100 miles. A 25 MPG vehicle pays $2 in fuel taxes per 100 miles, so its taxes amount to 58% of the electricity price needed to power the EV. In some states with higher fuel taxes, the fuel tax alone is about the same as the cost of electricity to power an EV over the same route.
That's actually what 5G is supposed to fix. 4G is capable of several hundred Mbps speeds, it's just that all that bandwidth has to be divided among all the users simultaneously requesting data in a single tower's cell. After you divide it among them, the speed available to an individual instantaneous user drops to 2-25 Mbps in most cases.
5G is so much faster you could blow through your monthly quota in a less than a minute. No single user needs that much speed. But reducing the amount of time each individual user spends using bandwidth means fewer collisions among individuals requesting bandwidth. An individual user requests data, and the tower delivers it to them in a fraction of a second instead of the next 15-30 seconds, making it less likely that requests from multiple users will overlap So any individual is more likely to get the tower's full bandwidth at the instant they need it.
I'm seeing more and more help requests from gamers who aren't able to play a networked game because they sit behind a NATed IPv4 firewall they don't control, which blocks the ports their game needs and doesn't have UPnP enabled (for automatic port forwarding). Usually they're apartment dwellers, but a small number of them are people whose ISPs are putting them behind a NAT (i.e. the ISP has more customers than IPv4 addresses).
The Communist Party has been in control there for 69 years. They're the reason China is so behind the rest of the world. China's growth didn't begin until they got out of the way and allowed capitalistic reforms - allowed people to build and run businesses without Party interference. Giving them credit for the growth is rather like thanking your prison guard for not beating you today.
I'll bite. I eat meat. Meat is yummy. Your body has evolved so that things that are good for you taste yummy. By not eating meat, you are depriving your body of nutrients it needs to survive. Vegetarians and especially vegans have to be careful to supplement their diet with pills or sufficient quantities of specific plants which provide those nutrients. Thus indicating that theirs is the diet which is innately unnatural and unhealthy. You can make an argument against eating too much meat, but that does not translate into an argument for eating no meat at all.
The argument that eating meat is cruel is easy to shoot down too. If your reasoning is based on minimizing the amount of cruelty animals suffer, consider that the fate of nearly every living thing is to be eaten alive. It just happens out of our sight most of the time. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Living to a ripe old age and dying of natural causes (organ failure) is something almost unique to humans and the few animals we adopt as pets. Nearly all wild animals die young, painfully, and frequently with what most people would consider close to the "maximum" amount of suffering possible. In contrast, the way we dispatch domesticated animals for meat is quick, painless, and humane. So you actually reduce the total amount of cruelty suffered by animals by replacing wild animals in the environment with domesticated ones, protect them from predators and disease with our fences and medicines, then dispatch them painlessly when you're ready to slaughter them.
Then there's the argument that meat is too resource-intensive. That the world's human population is growing beyond the land's capability to feed it, so we need to start eating lower on the food chain. Except that's false too. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing nations. The developed countries (where most meat eating happens) have close to zero population growth; some even have negative population growth (their population is shrinking). So they're clearly able to feed their populations using the land and resources they have. If you want to reduce population growth, the key is to help all countries on the planet become economically developed. Regressing to an agrarian society is actually counterproductive, and will result in even faster population growth.
The only argument for vegetarianism / veganism I've heard which makes sense is the energy intensity one. You can feed the population using less energy per capita if everyone eats plants (even after accounting for supplements to make up nutrients normally obtained from meat). But the entirety of modern civilization is based on being able to generate more energy per capita than in the past. As a nation develops, the percentage of its economic output devoted to food production decreases. Since everyone still must be eating (the same amount of food is being produced per capita), that means the country is producing more energy per capita than before. And that excess energy is being spent on productive tasks other than food production. If there's plenty of excess energy, why not use some of it to raise meat if you want?
Note that if the scientists researching this are able to produce something which tastes like meat but requires less energy to produce than raising animals, I will have no qualms about switching to it. Less energy to produce translates into lower cost, so it'll be a simple economic decision. Contrary to the imaginations of vegetarians / vegans, knowing an animal died to feed you is not a part of the enjoyment from eating meat.
The data contradicts your belief. Military enlistees are better educated, have higher IQs, and come from wealthier families than their peers in the general population.
Entrapment schemes like the one described in TFA are by their very definition designed to trap people who are behaving normally and reasonably. If there's any selection bias going on, it'd be on the part of the scammers. They might deliberately target military personnel because the potential penalty for being entrapped is much greater for military personnel (prison + dishonorable discharge) than for civilians (only prison), making them more likely to pay the extortion fee.
The buyer. If you don't want one, the bank may insist on one if they're giving you a loan. The realtor should have nothing to do with the appraisal or choice of appraiser, other than unlocking the door so he can get in. My appraiser and realtor arrived before I did, and I found them talking with each other in front of the house. I wasn't happy about that (it turned out they knew each other from past appraisals). When his work was done, I paid him with a personal check.
The whole point of the appraisal is to provide a third independent sanity check on the value of the home (the first two being the seller's valuation, and your realtor's valuation).
The bigger problem with the housing boom was that your realtor wasn't always acting in your best interests if you were buying. When you hire a professional, like a lawyer, you pay them a fee, and they work in your best interests. When you hire a Realtor, their fee is usually a set percentage of the sale price. That works for the seller, but for the buyer it creates a conflict of interest. Your Realtor is supposed to be trying to get you the best price possible, but they get paid more if they don't help you get the best price possible. The industry really needs to address this problem before it can be taken seriously as a "professional" organization. I used Redfin since their realtors get paid a fixed fee.
The bend radius for things which are "flexible" on the human scale is so large that there's almost no bending on the nanoscale. Same reason fiberglass bends so easily. Glass in your experience with human-size windows shatters rather easily rather than bends. That's because a 1 cm thick window bent with (say) a 1 meter radius results in the the two sides differing in length by 1% before it breaks. But if you shrink the glass down to the 10 um (0.01 mm) thick, suddenly you can bend it in a 1 mm radius before it hits your 1% threshold. And the result is glass which behaves like cloth. (If you ever get your hands on an individual fiberglass fiber, you can in fact break it by tying it into a knot and tightening until the bend radius becomes too small for the glass to withstand.)
For materials like silicon, the rigid crystalline structure results in shattering at very small amounts of flex.
And I have to disagree with you, the headline was click-bait. It asked a question which TFA does not answer. TFA uses a non-click-baity headline: "New Metal-Air Transistor Replaces Semiconductors - A novel field emission transistor that uses air gaps could breathe life into Mooreâ(TM)s Law." That makes it clear the future potential is unknown, whereas the click-bait slashdot headline implies you'll get the answer to the question it asks if you read TFA. The click-bait headline was added by the slashdot editor.
You gotta be careful what type of milkweed you plant. The kind you buy from nurseries isn't native to North America, and its differences may be doing more harm than good.
That was my initial reaction. But a little research turned up that Lenovo only made about $250k from Superfish. So the condition that the fine greatly exceeds the profit has been met. Though I would've added a stipulation that in addition to the fine, they have to reimburse users for any expenses they incurred due to security breaches caused by Superfish-related vulnerabilities.
There's nothing stopping FOSS from releasing the same products as the corporations are. The corporations are just better than FOSS advocates at figuring out and giving users what they want.
That's always been the problem with FOSS, as far back as the 1990s when I first began using it. FOSS advocates have this preconceived notion of what the software they write should be. And users who tell them that's not what they need get told "if that's what you want, then you write it." If you're not a programmer, you're excluded from guiding the direction of FOSS.. Whereas corporations run usability tests and product trials specifically to let non-programmers tell them which direction they should go.
This is where Stallman messed up IMHO. Profit is a motivator by which users can influence programmers (they'll pay you more if you add a feature they want). FOSS would work if profit were removed and replaced with some other way for users to influence programmers. But Stallman just removed profit and called it a day, believing everything else would take care of itself. FOSS works fine between programmers, which is why so many programmers at corporations use it and contribute to it for behind-the-scenes software. But users vastly outnumber programmers, and if they don't have a voice in the direction your software should go, then any user-facing FOSS software like Desktop Linux is rudderless.
They needn't bother. GNOME is doing a perfectly good job scaring people away from desktop Linux.
I agree with you. But Simpson's point is the distinction between a Ford owner saying "I'm to drunk to drive, I'd better call a cab," and a Tesla owner saying "I'm to drunk to drive, but I don't need to call a cab because my car has autopilot!"
I agree with you because he hasn't proven this isn't a case of "I'm not too drunk to drive.... zzzzzzzzz" You need to disprove that possibility before you can arrive at the conclusion he's asserting. But contrary to what you claim, there is a (possible) distinction in liability between Tesla and the other car manufacturers here. It's just not proven yet.
I'd put this closer to 90%-95%. The test I always use is that some of the major TV networks broadcast in 720p, some of them broadcast in 1080i (which your TV converts to 1080p). I ask people to identify which networks are 720p, which are 1080i. Despite having watched these networks on their HDTVs for a decade, nobody has been able to answer me correctly. Try it yourself - of ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, which are 720p, which are 1080i? I'll give the answer at the end of this post.
I think 8k is going to fall down a similar hole, and the next big step is going to be 16k.
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Answer: ABC and Fox are 720p, CBS and NBC are 1080i.
So by your reasoning, because the Democratic Party tried to swing the 2016 Republican primary to Trump (because they thought he would be easy to run against), the Democrats are therefore responsible for Trump being in the White House, and the fact that we have a buffoon for President is the Democrats' fault?
Everyone is allowed to contribute to the process - if you're vilified for contributing, it's no longer a democracy. But ultimate responsibility lies with your final vote. The Republicans are responsible for Trump being President because they voted for him in the end. If they didn't like him being their nominee, they should have voted for someone else (many of them did, voting for Clinton or third party). The Democrats are responsible for Obamacare because they passed it in the end. If they didn't like the amendments, they either should have voted not to include them (they did hold significant majorities in both House and Senate), or should have voted against Obamacare because of the amendments. (A few dozen Democrats in the House did vote against it, but none of the Democrat Senators did.)
Civics 101: The President doesn't make the budget. The President suggests a budget, but ultimately it's Congress who gets to decide what does or doesn't make it into the budget. The President only gets to sign or veto the whole thing as one lump sum. He can't excise the parts of it he doesn't like while keeping the rest.
The Democrats controlled both branches of Congress during his Presidency, and insisted the budget should have a tax increase. Bush refused to sign it to the point where the government went into shutdown. But he ultimately decided stopping the shutdown from further harming the economy was more important than keeping his promise, so he blinked and signed. The Democrats won, got their tax increase, and managed to dump the blame for it on Bush.
The more you know...
Comcast, Verizon, etc. all get their Internet service from other Tier 1 (and in some cases Tier 2) providers like Level 3. Any civilian can get service from L3. You just have to pay a ton for it because their lowest tier of service is so much more than any single individual would need, and they're gonna charge you for the cost of laying fiber to your house. So cable companies would still be exempt under the conditions you've laid out. I'm not being obtuse here, I'm trying to point out why it's a problem if you define a law as "I just know" certain companies should be covered and others exempt. The arguments I'm putting forth are the arguments the cable ISPs would use in court to exempt themselves from Net Neutrality.
I've been trying to push you, hoping you could arrive at the correct answer on your own. But I don't have time to continue monitoring this thread so I'll give you the answer. The difference between Starbucks and Comcast as an ISP is that Comcast has a monopoly in most of the areas where they provide service. You don't have to use a Starbucks for WiFi. You can go to another Starbucks, or a McDonalds, or a friend's house to leech off their free WiFi. Not so with Comcast. For most U.S. households in Comcast territory, Comcast is their only choice for cable Internet. And if Comcast decides to do something with the Internet service not in the best interests of its customers, the customers have no recourse. They cannot flee to get Internet service from another company. Their only choice is to live with Comcast's restrictions, or do without Internet.
As that monopoly is artificial (granted by the local government) rather than a natural monopoly, the government likewise is free to add conditions like Net Neutrality to the terms of that monopoly. No grandiose national law with majorities in both branches of Congress and the signature of the President is needed. No fuzzy definitions of what constitutes an ISP. Each city council simply has to decide for themselves that if they're going to give an ISP a monopoly, they're also going to require that ISP to treat data access neutrally. (But this gets back to my bigger point - why do you even need Net Neutrality in the first place? These local governments can simply allow multiple cable companies to offer Internet service in their city. And ISPs which try to throttle bandwidth would simply bleed customers to ISPs which don't throttle, automatically discouraging the behavior Net Neutrality is trying to prevent.)
It's not a USA thing. It's an accounting thing. When a company gives you money on a card, it's establishing a debt. The company accepted your money, and agrees to hold it on your half, processing it as a payment for anything you buy with the card. It owes you the money on the card - it has a debt to you. Unfortunately people sometimes forget about those cards, or don't realize that they've lost them. It's not much for any single year, but over time the amount of debt the company owes keeps growing. After enough years, the cumulative amount of these lost cards build up.
Eventually the debt they represent becomes a substantial percentage of the company's annual cash flow. Many accounting calculations and decisions are based on the amount of debt a company has, so after enough time this begins to affect the company's ability to, for example, qualify for a loan. These types of accounting decisions are made under the assumption "what if all your creditors ask you to suddenly repay your debt all at once?" Never mind that such a scenario is virtually impossible for lost cash card debt, the ease with which you can make such a calculation makes it an important tool in financing. The company would love to just return the cash it's holding on behalf of the cardholder to wipe the debt off its books, but it has no way to contact the cardholder because he purchased it at a gas station at 2 am paying for it and a pack of cigarettes with cash.
So to prevent this debt from staying on the books in perpetuity, they add recurring fees which will gradually whittle it away if you take too long to use the card. Generally the first year or two are free. Thereafter $1-$3 is deducted each month. In that way, if the card is lost, the debt disappears from the company's books before it becomes big enough to become a problem. Airlines had to do the same thing with their frequent flyer miles. People were dying without using their miles, and those miles were building up in their accounting books as debt which they may have to repay in the future (maybe a court would decide a person's children could use those miles). So they altered their frequent flyer programs to make your miles expire if unused after x years.
While I think the politician behind this has good intentions, not nefarious, the logical extension of this type of law is to ban bartering. So it'd be illegal to sell an item for money, but agree to trade it for another item. You have to accept cash.
Bartering is the last-ditch mechanism by which The People can escape economic malfeasance by The Government manipulating its own currency. When the German government began printing copious amounts of money after WWI to pay back war debt, you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. If you waited until later in the day to buy, you might need another half wheelbarrow. You could avoid this by bartering - trading something you made to the baker for the bread. The government generally frowns on bartering because it's economic activity which bypasses its ability to track or tax.
It's also possible to do this by using a foreign currency (why the U.S. Dollar is so popular in many countries with corrupt governments). But that generally works better in smaller countries. In larger countries it can take some time for the foreign currency to permeate.
Passing this type of law raises the stakes if the government should ever start to manipulate the value of the U.S. Dollar in ways which don't make economic sense for the people. It's a huge temptation because printing more money is a quick and easy way to basically steal money from people's savings (it decreases the value of those savings, transferring the lost value to the entity which holds the newly printed money - the government).
So your argument is that "predominant business is something else" frees the company from net neutrality. So you feel my cable TV company who offers customers Internet service under certain conditions should not be bound by net neutrality?
One which doesn't have a DMCA?
I'm curious how you can justify this while remaining consistent with net neutrality. The only argument I can come up with is if Starbucks gives WiFi access for free, then they're not obligated to provide a "complete" Internet experience. Except if they require or "encourage" you to buy something from them before giving you access, it's not really free.
"Net neutrality only applies when they block or slow down sites I want," is not a valid standard. The principle needs to be based on standards which are universal and agnostic, so it produces the same results regardless of whether you like or dislike the ISP (Starbucks or Comcast), or like or dislike the website (Netflix or porn sites) it's applied to. Otherwise it's not neutrality.
The biggest difference I've seen is actually from the floor. The trend away from carpets towards hard flooring results in a huge increase in noise. True the latter are easier to clean after a spill, but most of the upscale restaurants I remember from my youth had carpeting, while the tile/linoleum flooring was only used by fast food joints. Nowadays I can't even remember the last restaurant I went to which had carpeted floors.
When I bought my house, I gave in to my parents and sister who insisted that I should rip out the carpeting and install wood flooring because it was trendy. I'm not happy with the increase in noise. Fortunately I held firm and refused to remove the carpeting from the upstairs bedrooms. They're harder to clean, but much quieter.