Yeah, for most tech businesses, payroll ends up about 30%-40% of all expenses. This MIT/Sloan article estimates the actual cost to maintain an employee to be 2.7x the employee's salary. The $37/hr vs $100/hr you cite turns out to be exactly 2.7x.
If folks think they can run an IT contracting businesses where non-payroll expenses are less than 50% of their costs, they're welcome to try. If it's as easy as they think, why sit here on slashdot complaining about it? Go start a contracting business for yourself and make a fortune as you drive all the other contractors charging "rip-off prices" out of the market.
Why do costs continue to skyrocket? Because the colleges know that effectively any student anywhere can get loans to pay for the cost of college. From the school's standpoint, they can just about charge whatever they want. There's no brake on the price increase.
Excuse me for geeking out, but do you remember the ST:TNG episode where the ship is being buffeted by subspace waves which keep growing stronger, threatening to tear the ship apart? They're calling for more shields, more shields, and they're working as hard as they can to increase their shields to survive the next wave. Until Data figures out that it's the shields which are causing the waves.
That's the problem we have with college tuition right now. You are correct that schools can charge almost whatever they want - the cost to supply the education is fixed, but the value of the education is many hundred thousands of dollars of extra income over a lifetime. That disparity allows schools to charge tuitions far in excess of what it actually costs them to teach the student.
But you are incorrect about there being no brake. There was a brake - lack of ability for students to pay. That used to keep tuition costs in check. But then we made a whole bunch of cheap student loans available, allowing students to time-shift money from their future into the present. That's what's causing tuition prices to increase. Because the cost of tuition keeps increasing, we keep calling for more loans, more loans, when it's the loans which are causing the rising tutions. We're trying make universities more accessible by giving money to students. But that increases demand, and anyone who's taken Econ 101 knows that increasing demand raises prices.
Instead of increasing demand, we need to be increasing supply. Gradually phase out all student loans which are not need-based. Put the money into public universities instead with the stipulation that they have to reduce their tuition. This will increase the value per tuition dollar for attending a public university, making them a more popular choice for college-bound students. Demand for overpriced private universities will dry up, driving tuition costs down as they struggle to attract students.
When it comes time to pay, most get student loans. They abuse the loans. By federal law, they're allowed to take a given class up to three times (with federal money). My parents see the same students over and over again, sleeping through class, texting, etc. The school doesn't care--they get tons of money from it. The students don't care--they're getting paid to be there. The teachers don't care--they're still getting paid.
Our guess is that programs like NCLB are the cause.
Programs like NCLB were created because of the problems you cite. It's circular reasoning to blame them on NCLB. Perhaps NCLB isn't helping, or even making things worse. But the problems with public education pre-date NCLB (2002) and so cannot have been caused by it.
You're hoping for too much from deniers. Their selective memory will take care of the issue and they won't admit to being wrong anyway.
You mean selective memory about things like this? So global warming causes there to be more water vapor in the air, which causes more rainfall and snow. But at the same time it causes more droughts?
I happen to believe the planet is warming, but the problem is that a lot of its proponents throw proper skepticism out the window in their zeal to turn anything which happens into evidence in support of it. It's no wonder a lot of people are in denial. A scientific theory has to be disprovable, and when those advocating a theory say things which remove disprovability by saying contradictory evidence supports the theory, of course people are going to be instinctively skeptical.
(And as for explaining the apparent contradiction between more droughts and more snowfall, higher temperatures means more energy in the system, and a more energetic system has more extreme highs and lows. Some local regions get unusually high precipitation, others get unusually low. But I'll bet most global warming proponents never thought of that. They just accepted it without question when told that more rainfall was due to global warming. And accepted it without question when told that more drought was due to global warming.)
As someone else pointed out, it's over-simplistic to look at just Presidents, you also have to look at who controls Congress (which the wiki entry does, but you elected to ignore). But if you're going to look at just Presidents, you left out:
Obama (2009-2011) +23.3% in two years
(The wiki entry oddly hasn't yet been updated with his 2011 budget, which ended last month.) I've been watching those figures compared to President, House, and Senate control by party since Reagan, and I really can't see a pattern. If there is one, it's that a D President with a R House and Senate provides the best results, but by that point the sample size is so small you can't really call it a pattern.
Also, I've found that looking purely at deficits makes it difficult to understand what's really going on since a deficit conflates spending and revenue. If you look at spending and revenue separately, you get a much clearer picture of what exactly happened (from this doc).
If you examine that figure, you'll see that Clinton's surplus was really a phantom surplus. Yes he and the Republican Congress cut spending substantially - give them full credit for that; but their spending levels never dipped below the average revenue for the last 40 years. That is, compared to the average revenue over the last 40 years, Clinton's budgets were all deficit budgets. What caused the surplus was the tech bubble increasing tax revenue far above the average.
Likewise, Bush's deficits were mostly driven by lower tax revenue due to the recessions following the tech bubble popping and 9/11 (his tax cuts in 2003 didn't help either). One of the surprising things is that Bush's average spending during his 8 years was pretty much the same as Clinton's average spending during his 8 years. His problem wasn't spending, it was revenue.
If we look at this a bit further, the obvious alternative to US treasuries would have been AAA rated securities, such as the collateralized debt obligations [wikipedia.org] which more or less caused the current economic crisis. That makes this paper pretty foresighted.
Say what? You're assuming that money previously invested in the market must continue to be invested in the market, and cannot be invested anywhere else. Try savings accounts, CDs, MMAs. All the lack of U.S. Treasury bonds would do is increase the spread between the effective interest rate on those vs. the stock market in general, as banks factored in the higher overall risk they take investing the money you deposit with them. Hardly earth-shattering.
My question is the following, if this is illegal why is it still happening, since it is not a new event, why?
It's not illegal if you consent to the search. If a policeman pulls you over for speeding, it's illegal for him to search your car. But if he asks if he can search your car and you say "yes", then it's ok for him to search. You have voluntarily given up your 4th Amendment right for your car to be searched without a warrant. (And before anyone brings it up, the law is different for pursuit in the commission of a crime. But if all you did was speed, the cop cannot search your car without either a warrant or your permission.)
The problem is too many people just agree with these searches like sheep. Unfortunately, airports and Amtrak are government-owned, so if you refuse the search the TSA can refuse to let you board. But buses and ferries are private, and the TSA has no authority to prevent you from boarding if you refuse the search. (Though the bus or ferry company could refuse on the advice of the TSA if the ticket contract allows it.)
Congratulations. You've managed to come up with an argument where one party can control 99.8% of Congress, yet still be blameless for passing despised legislation. Party A has 434 votes, and splits 217/217 (50%-50%). Party B has 1 vote, and votes yes (100%-0%). Legislation passes 218/217, and by your reasoning is entirely the fault of party B.
If you view votes only based on aggregate two-party breakdown, you can justify nearly any ridiculous argument. You have to look at individual votes to accurately see what's going on. Most of the Republicans who voted against the Patriot Act were Libertarian- and Tea Party-affiliated.
Won't happen. SIP and IAX are out there, all free and decentralized, but all the proprietary junk continues to be adopted by the technologically-challenged masses.
This is why proprietary junk like Skype continues to flourish. You blame the users for the problem. The real reason is that the developers who advocate open protocols like SIP or IAX shun the technologically-challenged masses. They revel in complexity and flexibility, while most users just want something simple that works, no fuss, no muss. When users come to them with problems or questions, they're frequently met with scorn, ridicule, and non-answers like "it's open source, fix the bug yourself." Some developers even see themselves as gods, with the users as minions whose purpose is to worship them and be eternally grateful for their code.
In a successful product, the relationship works the other way around. The users needs and wants are paramount, and the developers work to fulfill them. Put out a SIP or IAX-based product which is free, and as simple and friendly to use as Skype. Then you'll start to whittle down its market share. You can keep all the complexity and flexibility that you like, but it has to be hidden behind a simple veneer whose defaults just work for the typical neophyte user. The problem isn't that technologically-challenged users adopt proprietary junk; the problem is that OSS developers write software which is difficult for technologically-challenged users to use.
I still don't get what's "crappy" about a screen size I can actually fit in my pocket.
That's not the point. Samsung sells smartphones with 2.8" screens, 3.5" screens, 4" screens, 4.3" screens, 4.5" screens, and 4.65" screens. If you want a big screen, you can get it. If you like the smaller size, you can get that instead.
With Apple, the screen size that Jobs liked is the only choice you have. The screen size is "just right" only if your tastes exactly matched his, or you were convinced by the hype that being trendy was more important than getting the screen size you really wanted.
Why does it have to be passive attenuation? Just cover the cockpit windows with monitors hooked up to cameras which show the appropriate view. If a laser hits the camera, the monitor will white out for an instant, but it won't be blinded, and its brightness will be nowhere near that of the laser. And if a camera/monitor dies, you can just remove it from the window and look through it normally until you get back on the ground.
The speakers/headphones make a big difference too. I have a set of high-quality studio monitors (headphones) I picked up for my electronic keyboard. I tried using them with games on my computer, but they were so good it was obvious all the game sounds were fake. It broke the suspension of disbelief, so I went back to just regular cheap speakers on my computer.
Using the monitors, I can tell a 320kbps MP3 from FLAC. That said, the difference is really subtle and pretty much insignificant for any purpose but archiving. If you want a perfect copy of your CDs for backup, then FLAC is good. But for any other purpose a 256kbps or 320kbps MP3 will do fine. Yeah you can tell FLAC is better if you play it and MP3 side-by-side. But if you randomly play one and are forced to guess whether it's FLAC or MP3, most people won't be able to do it.
According to the developers of Nest, 90% of programmable thermostats aren't programmed properly. Maybe you're in the 10% and wouldn't benefit. That doesn't mean it's not a good product for many of the 90%.
Yeah, that was my take on this too. This is for all the people who used to own VCRs forever blinking "12:00". Which, from my sample of friends' homes I've visited, was nearly all of them.
After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they raided the U.S. embassy and CIA office. U.S. personnel shredded all the documents they could (using strip shredders), but the Iranians used rug weavers to reconstruct many of the documents, and sold them as a book. This is the reason strip shredders are rarely used nowadays.
Aside from the obvious espionage uses, this would probably also be very useful for archeology. Some of the most common archeological finds are shattered pottery with pictures or writing on them, which are near-impossible to reconstruct.
Avira has this bad habit of detecting some files as malware (e.g. scene game cracks) although they don't exhibit infection.
Avira scans for both known malware in its database, and uses a heuristical algorithm to detect possible but unknown malware. So it will tend to flag flies other virus scanners miss. This can be bad as you found out, but it can be good as it can catch new viruses before they're in anyone's database. I don't think any of the other free antivirus software has this feature, though several of the top-rated pay antivirus software do.
I ended up ditching Avira though because of their daily pop-up reminder to buy their pay version. Too many calls from my client asking what it was and was it safe to click OK. I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials now, though I'm testing Avast. Avast introduced an automatic sandbox feature which if it works as advertised could solve my biggest headache - clients running files emailed to them by "friends". I'm still trying to figure out how it works though.
Economics is not a science. The legal structure of money, the way prices work in a one way fashion, and private ownershp are all political all the way through. Now this may piss off Americans but there are alternative ways to organize society whether they like it or not
You're not seeing the entirety of the economic spectrum. A market economy is easy to model scientifically when it's inefficient. If everyone needs widgets and there's a shortage of them, then it's easy to predict that the price of widgets will go up. People who see this and respond by making more widgets to alleviate the shortage make lots of money, as they should. On the flip side, during a bubble, people who get caught up in the hype while ignoring fundamental economics end up losing lots of money, as they should. Capitalism works.
But as a market economy becomes highly efficient, these obvious deviations become less frequent. The widget shortage gets addressed before it becomes an obvious shortage. The market's motions start to look more and more like random noise - noise which swamps out any signal. Luck starts to play a greater role than understanding and modeling. A monkey throwing darts beats the stock picks of top investment brokers. People start to get upset than some people are getting rich off the market by getting lucky, rather than actually solving real shortages or pulling money out of real bubbles. Then they learn that it wasn't luck but political manipulation and they get really mad. Manipulation which was much less likely to succeed back when the market was inefficient.
When your economy is far from optimal, the value of capitalism is real and beneficial. When your economy is close to optimal, the value of capitalism starts to look questionable. The trick is to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You want to keep enough capitalism to stay near that optimal point, while blunting it enough to mitigate gross social injustices which may arise through luck and malfeasance.
United and Lufthansa are codeshare partners. My last trip to Europe, I got booked on Lufthansa for the flight to, and United for the flight back. Both times I was seated near the center service area where the flight attendants park their carts. On the Lufthansa flight the FAs were constantly busy offering drinks, toys for kids, magazines, wet towels, etc. The longest gap between a FA walking by was about 10-15 min. On the United flight, I only saw the FAs during the meal and drink service, and a couple other times. On average it was about 30-45 min between me seeing a FA, and the longest lull was about 2 hours.
Here are the figures for radioactivity released from Chernobyl for comparison. Interestingly, Cs-137 makes up less than 8% of the radioactivity (becquerels, or radioactive emissions per second), but 58% of the total radiation released (becquerel * half-life, or total emissions over the radionuclide's lifetime), with the relatively benign (compared to Cs-137) plutonium radionuclides being the second biggest chunk at 25%, most of it spread over a 24k year half-life.
According to the paper, Fukushima released about 2.5x more Xe-133 than Chernobyl, but with a half life of just 5.3 days most of that decayed while over the ocean. Overall emissions looks to be about 1/3rd that of Chernobyl with most of it falling in the sea, with Cs-137 accounting for nearly all of the long-term contamination unlike Chernobyl.
All because some bozos at TEPCO wanted to try to salvage the plant and delayed dumping seawater into the core to prevent the zircaloy cladding from melting.
Because of the hydrogen explosions. Containments are vented through the "smoke" stacks. If there had been no leak of the containment prior, during or after the venting, no hydrogen could have accumulated in the reactor buildings, because it would have left through the stacks. It didn't. Some of the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor buildings or they could not have exploded. This hydrogen came straight from the reactors and was as inextricably mixed with Xenon-133 as the proverbial piss in the water of the swimming pool.
Gaseous hydrogen (H2) is among the smallest of molecules. It is so small it can leak out of welds and seals which are otherwise watertight and airtight, and yes, xenon-tight. That is why hydrogen can escape a reactor which is otherwise not leaking, to cause hydrogen explosions. The presence of hydrogen gas outside the reactor does not in itself mean containment has been breached. (This is also one of the reasons why pure hydrogen makes a really crappy fuel - it is considerably more difficult to store and distribute than a liquid like petroleum.)
What they are hinting at is that containment was breached before any of the explosions, possibly by the quake itself. Not enough for the reactors to lose a noticeable amount of pressure, but enough for larger molecules like xenon to escape.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
I'm not anti corporation, but why people scream about getting rid of regulation and ignore the history of corporate activity.
What you say is true for externalized negatives - things whose costs are not immediately borne by the company benefiting. Pollution is probably the prime example. Externalized negatives create a tragedy of the commons situation, where the company or individual reaps the positives but society bears the negatives. In these cases, regulation is necessary to either internalize the negative, or to create artificial negatives (fines, jail time) proportional to the cost of the negative to society.
But not all situations are a tragedy of the commons. In fact they're more the exception rather than the rule. If there is no tragedy of the commons (or a prisoner's dilemma - there may be others, I'm always searching for more), then the best outcome is typically achieved when there is no regulation. Regulating in these cases simply distorts market forces and leads to a non-optimal allocation of resources (e.g. corn ethanol subsidies leading to the bulk of the U.S. ethanol being derived from corn, even though corn is not the best crop to be converting into ethanol).
So sometimes regulation is the answer, and sometimes deregulation is the answer. The problem is that some people wrongly believe that regulation is always needed, while others wrongly believe that regulation is never needed. There is no hard and fast rule that regulation = good, or regulation = bad. You have to analyze each situation and apply regulation only if needed.
I'm sure the workaround is to put a slight curve into the slider, or some movement other than just sliding, or to emulate a sweeping motion instead of a slide etc. etc. I think the solution in Android 3 / 4 is novel enough not to qualify either - you drag a circle onto another circle. You're not "sliding" the circle because you can drag it up, down, left or right.
The problem is that this is a gesture patent. By definition, anything you do on a touchscreen is a gesture - sliding your finger in a certain pattern. Apple gets a patent for sliding in a straight line to unlock. Google gets one for sliding in a circle to unlock. Microsoft is forced to use a square or triangle to unlock. HP decides to patent the WebOS motion of flicking up to close an app. Google patents flicking down to expand the notification bar. Someone else patents sliding in a straight line to scroll. Another patents sliding across a word to select it. etc.
There are only a limited number of simple gestures, all obvious, but apparently the USPTO has never seen anything like them before. Using workaround gestures is not the solution, no more than other newspapers printing their text in different colors would be a solution to the New York Times getting a patent on printing in black ink. This patent is so mind-bogglingly stupid that if it's not overturned it will absolutely cripple the industry.
You can have it alert you via twitter or email. Aurorawatch's alert was sent out at 5:05 pm Pacific (8:05 pm Eastern). Still not a lot of lead time, so you definitely want it sent to your phone. If it was sent to your email and you don't get email notification on your phone, you probably didn't see it until this morning. Alas for me, the skies in Southern California were overcast.
Back in the 1990s, I was on a commuter flight whose pilot decided to land in the middle of a thunderstorm. The turbulence was so bad that if you didn't have your seatbelt fastened, you would be thrown out of your seat. But the experience made me realize that the lightning we see from the ground is just a tiny fraction of all the lightning that goes off. The vast majority of it is air-to-air, not air-to-ground, and hidden from view from the ground by the thick clouds during a thunderstorm. Up at 25,000 feet while we were starting our descent, the cumulonimbus cloud was simply alive with lightning, with (visible through my window) several flashes going off every second.
So the frequency with which these ice crystals realign is completely normal, not extraterrestrial.
Mutually Assured Destruction (holding each others' cities hostage) may have gotten the most publicity, but you only need a few hundred nukes to accomplish MAD. The reason the U.S. and Soviets built thousands of nuclear weapons was because each one was targeted at an individual hardened missile silo or mobile launcher (and to account for a percentage of your missiles failing or being taken out). Usually those aren't located in cities, so reducing the amount of collateral damage is somewhat relevant. (This was also one of the reasons the military wanted GPS - improved accuracy was more valuable than increased explosive yield).
Re:good sound-bite, lousy argument
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The goal is always increased productivity. If it results in fewer jobs, that doesn't mean the increase in productivity is bad, it means your jobs retraining programs are inadequate. The point of the anecdote is that increasing jobs at the cost of productivity is counter-productive. You are better off building the canal with machines at lower cost, and using the money saved to create other jobs.
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Yeah, for most tech businesses, payroll ends up about 30%-40% of all expenses. This MIT/Sloan article estimates the actual cost to maintain an employee to be 2.7x the employee's salary. The $37/hr vs $100/hr you cite turns out to be exactly 2.7x.
If folks think they can run an IT contracting businesses where non-payroll expenses are less than 50% of their costs, they're welcome to try. If it's as easy as they think, why sit here on slashdot complaining about it? Go start a contracting business for yourself and make a fortune as you drive all the other contractors charging "rip-off prices" out of the market.
Excuse me for geeking out, but do you remember the ST:TNG episode where the ship is being buffeted by subspace waves which keep growing stronger, threatening to tear the ship apart? They're calling for more shields, more shields, and they're working as hard as they can to increase their shields to survive the next wave. Until Data figures out that it's the shields which are causing the waves.
That's the problem we have with college tuition right now. You are correct that schools can charge almost whatever they want - the cost to supply the education is fixed, but the value of the education is many hundred thousands of dollars of extra income over a lifetime. That disparity allows schools to charge tuitions far in excess of what it actually costs them to teach the student.
But you are incorrect about there being no brake. There was a brake - lack of ability for students to pay. That used to keep tuition costs in check. But then we made a whole bunch of cheap student loans available, allowing students to time-shift money from their future into the present. That's what's causing tuition prices to increase. Because the cost of tuition keeps increasing, we keep calling for more loans, more loans, when it's the loans which are causing the rising tutions. We're trying make universities more accessible by giving money to students. But that increases demand, and anyone who's taken Econ 101 knows that increasing demand raises prices.
Instead of increasing demand, we need to be increasing supply. Gradually phase out all student loans which are not need-based. Put the money into public universities instead with the stipulation that they have to reduce their tuition. This will increase the value per tuition dollar for attending a public university, making them a more popular choice for college-bound students. Demand for overpriced private universities will dry up, driving tuition costs down as they struggle to attract students.
Programs like NCLB were created because of the problems you cite. It's circular reasoning to blame them on NCLB. Perhaps NCLB isn't helping, or even making things worse. But the problems with public education pre-date NCLB (2002) and so cannot have been caused by it.
You mean selective memory about things like this? So global warming causes there to be more water vapor in the air, which causes more rainfall and snow. But at the same time it causes more droughts?
I happen to believe the planet is warming, but the problem is that a lot of its proponents throw proper skepticism out the window in their zeal to turn anything which happens into evidence in support of it. It's no wonder a lot of people are in denial. A scientific theory has to be disprovable, and when those advocating a theory say things which remove disprovability by saying contradictory evidence supports the theory, of course people are going to be instinctively skeptical.
(And as for explaining the apparent contradiction between more droughts and more snowfall, higher temperatures means more energy in the system, and a more energetic system has more extreme highs and lows. Some local regions get unusually high precipitation, others get unusually low. But I'll bet most global warming proponents never thought of that. They just accepted it without question when told that more rainfall was due to global warming. And accepted it without question when told that more drought was due to global warming.)
As someone else pointed out, it's over-simplistic to look at just Presidents, you also have to look at who controls Congress (which the wiki entry does, but you elected to ignore). But if you're going to look at just Presidents, you left out:
Obama (2009-2011) +23.3% in two years
(The wiki entry oddly hasn't yet been updated with his 2011 budget, which ended last month.) I've been watching those figures compared to President, House, and Senate control by party since Reagan, and I really can't see a pattern. If there is one, it's that a D President with a R House and Senate provides the best results, but by that point the sample size is so small you can't really call it a pattern.
Also, I've found that looking purely at deficits makes it difficult to understand what's really going on since a deficit conflates spending and revenue. If you look at spending and revenue separately, you get a much clearer picture of what exactly happened (from this doc).
If you examine that figure, you'll see that Clinton's surplus was really a phantom surplus. Yes he and the Republican Congress cut spending substantially - give them full credit for that; but their spending levels never dipped below the average revenue for the last 40 years. That is, compared to the average revenue over the last 40 years, Clinton's budgets were all deficit budgets. What caused the surplus was the tech bubble increasing tax revenue far above the average.
Likewise, Bush's deficits were mostly driven by lower tax revenue due to the recessions following the tech bubble popping and 9/11 (his tax cuts in 2003 didn't help either). One of the surprising things is that Bush's average spending during his 8 years was pretty much the same as Clinton's average spending during his 8 years. His problem wasn't spending, it was revenue.
Say what? You're assuming that money previously invested in the market must continue to be invested in the market, and cannot be invested anywhere else. Try savings accounts, CDs, MMAs. All the lack of U.S. Treasury bonds would do is increase the spread between the effective interest rate on those vs. the stock market in general, as banks factored in the higher overall risk they take investing the money you deposit with them. Hardly earth-shattering.
It's not illegal if you consent to the search. If a policeman pulls you over for speeding, it's illegal for him to search your car. But if he asks if he can search your car and you say "yes", then it's ok for him to search. You have voluntarily given up your 4th Amendment right for your car to be searched without a warrant. (And before anyone brings it up, the law is different for pursuit in the commission of a crime. But if all you did was speed, the cop cannot search your car without either a warrant or your permission.)
The problem is too many people just agree with these searches like sheep. Unfortunately, airports and Amtrak are government-owned, so if you refuse the search the TSA can refuse to let you board. But buses and ferries are private, and the TSA has no authority to prevent you from boarding if you refuse the search. (Though the bus or ferry company could refuse on the advice of the TSA if the ticket contract allows it.)
Congratulations. You've managed to come up with an argument where one party can control 99.8% of Congress, yet still be blameless for passing despised legislation. Party A has 434 votes, and splits 217/217 (50%-50%). Party B has 1 vote, and votes yes (100%-0%). Legislation passes 218/217, and by your reasoning is entirely the fault of party B.
If you view votes only based on aggregate two-party breakdown, you can justify nearly any ridiculous argument. You have to look at individual votes to accurately see what's going on. Most of the Republicans who voted against the Patriot Act were Libertarian- and Tea Party-affiliated.
This is why proprietary junk like Skype continues to flourish. You blame the users for the problem. The real reason is that the developers who advocate open protocols like SIP or IAX shun the technologically-challenged masses. They revel in complexity and flexibility, while most users just want something simple that works, no fuss, no muss. When users come to them with problems or questions, they're frequently met with scorn, ridicule, and non-answers like "it's open source, fix the bug yourself." Some developers even see themselves as gods, with the users as minions whose purpose is to worship them and be eternally grateful for their code.
In a successful product, the relationship works the other way around. The users needs and wants are paramount, and the developers work to fulfill them. Put out a SIP or IAX-based product which is free, and as simple and friendly to use as Skype. Then you'll start to whittle down its market share. You can keep all the complexity and flexibility that you like, but it has to be hidden behind a simple veneer whose defaults just work for the typical neophyte user. The problem isn't that technologically-challenged users adopt proprietary junk; the problem is that OSS developers write software which is difficult for technologically-challenged users to use.
That's not the point. Samsung sells smartphones with 2.8" screens, 3.5" screens, 4" screens, 4.3" screens, 4.5" screens, and 4.65" screens. If you want a big screen, you can get it. If you like the smaller size, you can get that instead.
With Apple, the screen size that Jobs liked is the only choice you have. The screen size is "just right" only if your tastes exactly matched his, or you were convinced by the hype that being trendy was more important than getting the screen size you really wanted.
Why does it have to be passive attenuation? Just cover the cockpit windows with monitors hooked up to cameras which show the appropriate view. If a laser hits the camera, the monitor will white out for an instant, but it won't be blinded, and its brightness will be nowhere near that of the laser. And if a camera/monitor dies, you can just remove it from the window and look through it normally until you get back on the ground.
The speakers/headphones make a big difference too. I have a set of high-quality studio monitors (headphones) I picked up for my electronic keyboard. I tried using them with games on my computer, but they were so good it was obvious all the game sounds were fake. It broke the suspension of disbelief, so I went back to just regular cheap speakers on my computer.
Using the monitors, I can tell a 320kbps MP3 from FLAC. That said, the difference is really subtle and pretty much insignificant for any purpose but archiving. If you want a perfect copy of your CDs for backup, then FLAC is good. But for any other purpose a 256kbps or 320kbps MP3 will do fine. Yeah you can tell FLAC is better if you play it and MP3 side-by-side. But if you randomly play one and are forced to guess whether it's FLAC or MP3, most people won't be able to do it.
Yeah, that was my take on this too. This is for all the people who used to own VCRs forever blinking "12:00". Which, from my sample of friends' homes I've visited, was nearly all of them.
After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they raided the U.S. embassy and CIA office. U.S. personnel shredded all the documents they could (using strip shredders), but the Iranians used rug weavers to reconstruct many of the documents, and sold them as a book. This is the reason strip shredders are rarely used nowadays.
Aside from the obvious espionage uses, this would probably also be very useful for archeology. Some of the most common archeological finds are shattered pottery with pictures or writing on them, which are near-impossible to reconstruct.
Avira scans for both known malware in its database, and uses a heuristical algorithm to detect possible but unknown malware. So it will tend to flag flies other virus scanners miss. This can be bad as you found out, but it can be good as it can catch new viruses before they're in anyone's database. I don't think any of the other free antivirus software has this feature, though several of the top-rated pay antivirus software do.
I ended up ditching Avira though because of their daily pop-up reminder to buy their pay version. Too many calls from my client asking what it was and was it safe to click OK. I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials now, though I'm testing Avast. Avast introduced an automatic sandbox feature which if it works as advertised could solve my biggest headache - clients running files emailed to them by "friends". I'm still trying to figure out how it works though.
You're not seeing the entirety of the economic spectrum. A market economy is easy to model scientifically when it's inefficient. If everyone needs widgets and there's a shortage of them, then it's easy to predict that the price of widgets will go up. People who see this and respond by making more widgets to alleviate the shortage make lots of money, as they should. On the flip side, during a bubble, people who get caught up in the hype while ignoring fundamental economics end up losing lots of money, as they should. Capitalism works.
But as a market economy becomes highly efficient, these obvious deviations become less frequent. The widget shortage gets addressed before it becomes an obvious shortage. The market's motions start to look more and more like random noise - noise which swamps out any signal. Luck starts to play a greater role than understanding and modeling. A monkey throwing darts beats the stock picks of top investment brokers. People start to get upset than some people are getting rich off the market by getting lucky, rather than actually solving real shortages or pulling money out of real bubbles. Then they learn that it wasn't luck but political manipulation and they get really mad. Manipulation which was much less likely to succeed back when the market was inefficient.
When your economy is far from optimal, the value of capitalism is real and beneficial. When your economy is close to optimal, the value of capitalism starts to look questionable. The trick is to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You want to keep enough capitalism to stay near that optimal point, while blunting it enough to mitigate gross social injustices which may arise through luck and malfeasance.
United and Lufthansa are codeshare partners. My last trip to Europe, I got booked on Lufthansa for the flight to, and United for the flight back. Both times I was seated near the center service area where the flight attendants park their carts. On the Lufthansa flight the FAs were constantly busy offering drinks, toys for kids, magazines, wet towels, etc. The longest gap between a FA walking by was about 10-15 min. On the United flight, I only saw the FAs during the meal and drink service, and a couple other times. On average it was about 30-45 min between me seeing a FA, and the longest lull was about 2 hours.
Here are the figures for radioactivity released from Chernobyl for comparison. Interestingly, Cs-137 makes up less than 8% of the radioactivity (becquerels, or radioactive emissions per second), but 58% of the total radiation released (becquerel * half-life, or total emissions over the radionuclide's lifetime), with the relatively benign (compared to Cs-137) plutonium radionuclides being the second biggest chunk at 25%, most of it spread over a 24k year half-life.
According to the paper, Fukushima released about 2.5x more Xe-133 than Chernobyl, but with a half life of just 5.3 days most of that decayed while over the ocean. Overall emissions looks to be about 1/3rd that of Chernobyl with most of it falling in the sea, with Cs-137 accounting for nearly all of the long-term contamination unlike Chernobyl.
All because some bozos at TEPCO wanted to try to salvage the plant and delayed dumping seawater into the core to prevent the zircaloy cladding from melting.
Gaseous hydrogen (H2) is among the smallest of molecules. It is so small it can leak out of welds and seals which are otherwise watertight and airtight, and yes, xenon-tight. That is why hydrogen can escape a reactor which is otherwise not leaking, to cause hydrogen explosions. The presence of hydrogen gas outside the reactor does not in itself mean containment has been breached. (This is also one of the reasons why pure hydrogen makes a really crappy fuel - it is considerably more difficult to store and distribute than a liquid like petroleum.)
What they are hinting at is that containment was breached before any of the explosions, possibly by the quake itself. Not enough for the reactors to lose a noticeable amount of pressure, but enough for larger molecules like xenon to escape.
What you say is true for externalized negatives - things whose costs are not immediately borne by the company benefiting. Pollution is probably the prime example. Externalized negatives create a tragedy of the commons situation, where the company or individual reaps the positives but society bears the negatives. In these cases, regulation is necessary to either internalize the negative, or to create artificial negatives (fines, jail time) proportional to the cost of the negative to society.
But not all situations are a tragedy of the commons. In fact they're more the exception rather than the rule. If there is no tragedy of the commons (or a prisoner's dilemma - there may be others, I'm always searching for more), then the best outcome is typically achieved when there is no regulation. Regulating in these cases simply distorts market forces and leads to a non-optimal allocation of resources (e.g. corn ethanol subsidies leading to the bulk of the U.S. ethanol being derived from corn, even though corn is not the best crop to be converting into ethanol).
So sometimes regulation is the answer, and sometimes deregulation is the answer. The problem is that some people wrongly believe that regulation is always needed, while others wrongly believe that regulation is never needed. There is no hard and fast rule that regulation = good, or regulation = bad. You have to analyze each situation and apply regulation only if needed.
The problem is that this is a gesture patent. By definition, anything you do on a touchscreen is a gesture - sliding your finger in a certain pattern. Apple gets a patent for sliding in a straight line to unlock. Google gets one for sliding in a circle to unlock. Microsoft is forced to use a square or triangle to unlock. HP decides to patent the WebOS motion of flicking up to close an app. Google patents flicking down to expand the notification bar. Someone else patents sliding in a straight line to scroll. Another patents sliding across a word to select it. etc.
There are only a limited number of simple gestures, all obvious, but apparently the USPTO has never seen anything like them before. Using workaround gestures is not the solution, no more than other newspapers printing their text in different colors would be a solution to the New York Times getting a patent on printing in black ink. This patent is so mind-bogglingly stupid that if it's not overturned it will absolutely cripple the industry.
You can have it alert you via twitter or email. Aurorawatch's alert was sent out at 5:05 pm Pacific (8:05 pm Eastern). Still not a lot of lead time, so you definitely want it sent to your phone. If it was sent to your email and you don't get email notification on your phone, you probably didn't see it until this morning. Alas for me, the skies in Southern California were overcast.
Back in the 1990s, I was on a commuter flight whose pilot decided to land in the middle of a thunderstorm. The turbulence was so bad that if you didn't have your seatbelt fastened, you would be thrown out of your seat. But the experience made me realize that the lightning we see from the ground is just a tiny fraction of all the lightning that goes off. The vast majority of it is air-to-air, not air-to-ground, and hidden from view from the ground by the thick clouds during a thunderstorm. Up at 25,000 feet while we were starting our descent, the cumulonimbus cloud was simply alive with lightning, with (visible through my window) several flashes going off every second.
So the frequency with which these ice crystals realign is completely normal, not extraterrestrial.
Mutually Assured Destruction (holding each others' cities hostage) may have gotten the most publicity, but you only need a few hundred nukes to accomplish MAD. The reason the U.S. and Soviets built thousands of nuclear weapons was because each one was targeted at an individual hardened missile silo or mobile launcher (and to account for a percentage of your missiles failing or being taken out). Usually those aren't located in cities, so reducing the amount of collateral damage is somewhat relevant. (This was also one of the reasons the military wanted GPS - improved accuracy was more valuable than increased explosive yield).
The goal is always increased productivity. If it results in fewer jobs, that doesn't mean the increase in productivity is bad, it means your jobs retraining programs are inadequate. The point of the anecdote is that increasing jobs at the cost of productivity is counter-productive. You are better off building the canal with machines at lower cost, and using the money saved to create other jobs.