U.S. spending on public education per pupil is the 7th highest in the world (PDF warning), and above the OECD average as a percentage of GDP. We're spending more than enough money on education. As OP said, the problem is too much administrative overhead. Every time teachers complain about being underpaid, the administration points the finger at Congress and says they need more money. Every time Congress suggests cuts to Education, the administration dumps the cuts on the teachers making them rise up in furious opposition. The problem is the people who need to be cut are in charge of what to cut, so they make sure that they themselves are never cut.
Freight rail has more than "some" presence in the US, the US probably has the worlds most advanced freight rail system in the WORLD.
True, but the fly in the ointment for this idea is that transporting cargo by container ship is about 1/3rd the cost of rail per ton-mile. It's cheaper to load the freight into containers in Russia, transport those containers through Siberia to the Pacific via rail, and load it onto a cargo ship for the trip to the U.S. West coast.
The phone icon is a universal symbol that's been around since at least 1996. While Apple did apply for a trademark on it in 2010, the pre-existing use of the symbol I've linked to I think pretty clearly invalidates the trademark. Unless you're somehow claiming nobody else is allowed to color their phone symbol green (the internationally recognized color for go).
You don't see this kind of stuff in China, where the government is more interested in the whole nation actually advancing, instead of particular people or companies who pay off the right people. What we have in Western democracies is a ridiculous amount of blatant corruption from corporations, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of mechanism to deal with this.
You, sir, need to spend a month or two in China (or pretty much any Asian country) trying to do business. Political corruption, bribery, and corporate espionage is pretty much taken for granted. Most places will fire you if they ask you to bribe someone or steal another company's secrets, and you refuse. The business climate in Western democracies is much more ethical than there. The only reason you don't see it in China is because the government covers it up unless they want to make an example of it (e.g. executing the guys who put melamine into baby milk formula). If you follow the news for Japan and Korea, corporate and political corruption scandals are almost monthly occurrences.
I should add, though the DSL modems use standard RJ11 jacks, most DSLAMs do not. If it has a significant number of ports, the DSLAM will use probably use an RJ21 jack. You will need to learn about phone punchdown blocks and using a phone punch tool to send the DSL signal over the appropriate phone line. It's not that difficult if you're at all tech competent, but it does represent a small learning curve. If you know how to make your own LAN cables, this stuff will be easy to pick up.
I used Zyxel. We only needed 24 ports, and they had the cheapest VDSL DSLAM with 24 ports at the time. Didn't really have any problems with them, and based on talking with the current hotel staff it is holding up just fine. The only gotcha was their VDSL modems used an AC adapter which has 9V AC output. If someone equipment expecting DC had the same plug, you could fry it by plugging in the DSL modem's AC adapter. Oh, also, they don't make VDSL modems anymore. They've moved on to VDSL2 modems. They're supposed to be backwards compatible but neither I nor the hotel has had a chance to test them. I have no experience with the other manufacturers.
In theory you can use any brand VDSL modem with any brand VDSL DSLAM. The scattered reports I found at the time said that this wasn't always true in practice. ADSL seems to be more compatible and cheaper because its use is more widespread, so that may sway things in favor of ADSL. The primary drawback of ADSL was the 3.5 Mbps upstream limit - VDSL could do 18 Mbps both ways, VDSL2 can top 100 Mbps up to 1.5 km, 50 Mbps up to 3 km. From what I hear, certain fiber internet services are using VDSL2 from the street over the copper phone line to avoid having to lay down fiber to the actual home. So maybe VDSL equipment has become more compatible and cheaper.
You need to decide which technology to go with based on your bandwidth requirements, current market prices, and which technology you think will stick around. Just do a Google shopping search on DSLAM and your choice of ADSL2 or VDSL2 (or any other DSL - I don't know what is hot now).
I've put together a wired/wireless Internet distribution system for a hotel.
The existing APs are located in individual bottom floor rooms in two story buildings. They are placed in boxes sealed with tamperproof bolts. The only lines in are what appears to be a standard telephone line and a power cable. There is also a telephone line coming out connected to the telephone. Presumably, the company who manages the current system will take the old APs. The existing networking equipment is also protected from closer inspection though does connect through standard telephone punchdown blocks.
This is just a regular DSL/DSLAM setup. Basically the hotel is acting like a phone company providing DSL, and the phones in the hotel rooms are the "DSL customers". You go to where the hotel's phone switching equipment is at, and hook up a DSLAM which is connected to your public Internet router. You then use that to "provide DSL" to each of the rooms where you want a wired network drop. The chosen rooms (or tamperproof proprietary boxes in your case) have a DSL modem, which splits the ethernet from the POTS.
You can piggyback this over your currently existing phone lines (that's the whole point of DSL), or you an run new Cat 3 lines just for the DSL (if you don't plan to offer wired network service in the rooms, and don't want customers messing with the hardware). Most hotel phone systems have plenty of extra capacity and lines for you to do this without having to install new cable. The reason for using DSL is that ethernet's specs limit it to 100 m, about 85 m in real life in my experience. That's way too short to reach from one end of a hotel to the other. DSL on the other hand is good out for several km.
It's pretty straightforward stuff if you've done any networking setup. The same stuff about regular DSL applies (e.g. use filters on any extra extensions). And unlike DSL from the phone company, you have to deal with both ends of the service. Most hotels use VDSL/VDSL2 because it allows higher bandwidth over a shorter distance. ADSL is really optimized for Cat 3 distances of several km, which isn't necessary for a hotel, and its max uplink throughput may be insufficient for a heavily used public WAP. I'd provide links but I did this about 5 years ago, so the links I have would likely be outdated.
The ability to centrally manage the APs is a strong plus. Additionally, logging is not highly critical but the ability to ensure that bandwidth is distributed as equitably as possible would be nice. Yes, I would like the ability to restrict botnets and other undesirable traffic.
Once you get the DSLAM and DSL modems set up, they act as a bridge and are transparent. The WAPs will show up on whatever LAN you have plugged into the DSLAM. If you want (and I would recommend), you can make it its own subnet. Assign static IPs to the WAPs so you can manage them. The fancier models will even let you set up VLANs, so you can do fancy things like limit direct access to the WAPs to a VLAN that's not available to customers connecting over the wireless (provided the WAPs are VLAN-aware). You will also have to handle QoS and bandwidth throttling, to prevent a single customer from using up all the bandwidth. But that's a given.
The granddaddy of them all was the Xerox Star workstation from 1981. This was what Steve Jobs saw while visiting PARC and became the inspiration for the GUI on the Lisa/Mac. As Jobs (the 1994 Jobs) said, Apple was always "shameless about stealing great ideas". Too bad the 2011 Jobs thinks behavior which helped build up Apple should be illegal for anyone else.
Everyone else in the world will have tapped out all of their resources and we will be left with ours. We will be left with our Oil and our Rare Earths because the EPA stuck it's nose in. When it matters, WE will be the ones that are self sufficient.
Unless something happens like happened to aluminum. At one point it was one of, if not the, most difficult metals to refine, and was worth more than gold or in some cases platinum. Then over the span of about a year, a couple people developed a new method of refining it. The price crashed to where, while still more expensive than other metals, is so cheap that we throw away cans and foil made out of it.
If there's a fusion breakthrough, oil prices will crash within a year or two. Rare earths are actually not that rare, they just take a lot of work to refine. If some new, cheaper method of refining them is invented, any vast reserves of them that we are hoarding could become worthless overnight.
Pass environmental laws because you want to protect the environment. Not because you want to gamble that a material will become rarer and more desirable in the future, under the guise of "planning ahead". If you really think the gamble is worth it, then be forthcoming and advocate planning ahead and conserving those supplies for exactly that reason (e.g. helium). Don't try to spin it as justification for environmental laws or vice versa.
Actually, many of the images in the court filing are deceptive if not outright photoshopped.
The Galaxy Tab on page 35 has obviously been squashed in its long dimension, to give it a more iPad-like appearance. The iPad to its left "for comparison" is shown at a more acute angle, making it appear slimmer.
The pic of the rear of the iPad on page 36 (lower left) it looks awfully long for an iPad. Measuring its dimensions in pixels gives you a height of 274 pixels, and a width of 196 to 223 (measured just before the corners start to curve). Average the two widths of the trapezoid and you get average dimensions of 274x209.5 pixels, or a foreshortened aspect ratio of 1.308. The iPad 2's actual dimensions are 241x186 mm, or a 1.295 aspect ratio. Foreshortening normally makes the aspect ratio smaller (when the product is sideways in portrait mode), since it lessens the height while not affecting the average width. But in this picture, the foreshortened aspect ratio is larger than the product's actual aspect ratio! Indicating that the picture has been stretched to make the iPad appear longer like the Galaxy Tab.
The photo you cite on page 39 is taken at an angle, foreshortening the dimension where the two products differ the most, thus making the difference appear smaller than it actually is. The whole document seems to be crafted to deceive, with images manipulated either in post-processing or with camera angles to make the products appear more similar than they actually are.
Back when the U.S. was founded, the country was mostly rural and agrarian. Education was spotty, and it was assumed that most people weren't smart enough / not educated enough to make a good political decision. Voting was initially limited to white male landowners.
Against this backdrop, the founders wanted government powers not just split 3-ways, but with different sections of government less responsive to the "heat of passion" of the electorate. The House of Representatives was to be most responsive to the electorate, coming up for re-election every 2 years. The President was next, coming up for re-election every 4 years. Senators and judges were insulated from the electorate. Senators were appointed for 6 years by state legislatures. And judges were appointed for life by the President, but the Senate has to approve the appointment.
The landowning requirement was dropped in the early 1800s, followed by race after the Civil War (1860s), then gender (1920). Election of Senators was moved away from the state legislature and to the electorate in 1913. Judges are the last remaining government branch insulated from the direct electorate. Having Senators directly elected probably took some of the steam out of political will for direct election of judges (since the Senate has to approve judicial appointments). FWIW, many judges at the State and local level do have to be elected or have their appointments regularly approved by the electorate.
Unjust laws usually look like they'll never change up until they do.
Problem is, this is one of those laws that people think are unjust when used against them, but think makes perfect sense when used in their favor. "If someone wants to record me, they hella better get my permissions first, doesn't matter where or what the circumstances are!" But at the same time, "If I want to record someone else in a public place, then I should be able to record them!" The problem per se isn't that the law is unjust, the problem is that many (most?) people don't grok that those two situations are one and the same.
Overturning evil and corruption is easy compared to overcoming stupidity.
Tenba sells inserts. Other manufacturers might too. The problem I had with specialized camera + laptop bags was that sometimes I didn't want to bring the camera or the laptop. That resulted me in buying two bags - one for when I want just the laptop, another for when I want the camera+lenses (with or without laptop). The photo-centric design of many bags meant they frequently can't take a laptop, necessitating a third bag for camera+lenses with the laptop.
The insert lets me do it with just one bag. If I want the camera + lenses, I put in the insert. If I don't want them I remove the insert. Having my photo gear in the insert also makes it easy to switch between these two modes without having to move all my lenses one by one between bags. The size of the insert won't work for a pro, but I find it's enough to carry a 70-200, 28-70, one body, and a flash. If the bag I was using were bigger, I could probably squeeze in an extra big lens (put the flash outside but to the side of the insert - like I do the power adapter and cord for the laptop).
The insert also has the advantage of being extraordinarily cheap ($15-$30) compared to dedicated photo bags ($100+, for some reason when you put the word "photo" on something it triples or quadruples in price). And it gives you the flexibility to use whatever bag you like as long as it's big enough, instead of being limited to the dedicated laptop + photo bags that scream "valuable stuff inside!" to thieves.
The Economist had an interesting breakdown of an iPhone's manufacture. It actually looks like the U.S., Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are the biggest beneficiaries from the iPhone's manufacture. Well, aside from Apple itself that is. Foxconn's slice of the iPhone pie is minuscule.
One thing that is routinely ignored in discussions of space probes is the trade-off between cutting edge development and actual output of the space probe. For example, instead of building the Mars Science Laboratory and its gear, we could have sent around 8 Mars Expedition Rovers (the actual cost of building and launching a rover is somewhere around $300 million). You might not have gotten quite as nice a variety of scientific output for any given location as the MSL, but you'd get up to (counting the possibility of mission failures!) eight different locations and the risk per mission would be lower (since the MERs are proven tech).
My view here is that technology development has taken over the business of NASA's space science division. Yes, you do need on occasion to develop new technology in order to explore. But these missions have somewhere around two-thirds the cost of the entire mission in developing and building new, unproven technology. Then if the mission succeeds, they'll go on to more new, unproven technology rather than use the platform further.
IMHO, that is the point of NASA - to push the envelope of technological development in order to more rapidly create new innovative research methods and technologies, not to rest on its laurels and build a sustainable business model. The whole reason it's taxpayer-funded is because we expect lots of failures and for its returns to never directly pay for the initial investment. Bear in mind that NASA started off as NACA, whose goal was to centralize fundamental aerospace research. That way all companies could benefit from it, instead of each company wasting money conducting duplicate research to push the forefront of aviation. NACA itself didn't profit from its research.
Fifty years from now, what of this whole stream of technology development will still be useful? Will it be like NASA's atmospheric science of the past where decades down the road, some entrepreneur might come along and pick and choose from the pieces of debris (mostly reports) that remain?
If you ask the scientists and engineers who were kids in the 1960s and 1970s why they chose their profession, I'd bet the vast majority would point to the space program and the moon landings. That's the intangible benefit of having a public program which is always on the cutting edge, rather than sitting safely behind it. And I would argue that's actually the primary goal of NASA. They shouldn't be promoting a specific scientific exploration, they should be promoting science and engineering in general.
Look at what happened in the 1970s after the initial moon landings. The public lost interest in it. NASA scrapped the later moon landings and instead used the remaining Saturn V rockets to launch an orbiting space station - because it hadn't been done yet. Look at what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when space shuttle launches became routine. The public lost interest in it. For the vast majority of people, there was only one moon landing, one aborted moon landing, and only 3 shuttle launches - Hubble's repair mission, and the two in which we lost orbiters. NASA needs to constantly be doing new, innovative stuff in order to fulfill its mission of engaging the public and getting them interested in science and engineering.
The two methods of valuation you presented give the current value of a company. Market cap takes into account expectation for future growth. So yeah market cap is a poor way to figure out what's the largest company, but it's not completely irrational either.
SSDs are too expensive to use as the only drive except on laptops. In desktops, you're going to have a mechanical HDD as a second drive, so keeping regular backups of the SSD is trivial. For laptops, you should be backing up to external storage anyway in case you somehow lose/destroy the laptop.
I can vouch for this. I added a mid-grade Kingston V+100 SSD ("only" about 250 MB/s) as the boot drive for my desktop. It now takes about 14 sec to POST, and 12 sec to boot with anti-virus loaded.
Even if making a bicycle leaves a carbon footprint...it is still going to save the rider in gas money
You make the same mistake TFA does - you assume that food intake has no cost. For this type of analysis, you have to take into account the energy needed to produce the food consumed. TFA assumes food intake is constant between the car/bus rider, walker, and bicyclist, which is rather silly if you're going to be using your bike to replace your car on a 5-10 mile daily commute. All that energy for pedaling has to come from somewhere.
Industrialized society has shifted food production away from labor-intensive operations in favor of mechanized operations which are energy-intensive. That is, the cost of energy is so cheap compared to the cost of manual labor, that for many industrialized food products the fuel-energy used to grow it exceeds the nutritional energy of the food. That's why you get seemingly counter-intuitive results such as corn ethanol in certain cases being net energy-negative. IIRC, energy from glucose converted to ATP to mechanical work vial cellular respiration is about 30% efficient, which is approximately the same as a good ICE. So if you were to compare fuel-energy used by a gas-powered moped vs. food-production-energy for a bicycle, for industrialized nations I'm not at all certain that the bicycle would win.
You people are assuming all terrorists are irrational and suicidal. They can be coldly rational too. The problem isn't the terrorist impersonating a pilot. The problem is a pilot being a terrorist, but a rational non-suicidal one. If he's given a free pass at security, he can smuggle in gun and bomb components piece by piece, and deposit them at prearranged obscure locations around the airport. The suicidal terrorists he's working with then pass through security, collect the pieces, and assemble the gun/bomb just before boarding the plane. Pilot terrorist is then free to repeat the process as often as he wants. That's why giving anyone a free pass through security is a dumb idea. Even the TSA personnel need to be screened, every time.
(Don't read any of this as me acknowledging such security is necessary. I'm just saying that if you start with the assumption that the real purpose of airport security is real security, then giving pilots free passes is a really dumb idea. Personally, I firmly believe airport security is security theater. You are much more likely to die from a lightning strike than from a terrorist attack. The security is already pretty ineffective. It's just there to calm the masses of their irrational fear of terrorism. In fact that's probably why this is being allowed despite what I wrote in the above paragraph. The powers that be know that it's just security theater, and have decided that this particular inconvenience isn't worth the benefit to the theatrics.)
You could make it even simpler, and have wars decided by a huge LAN party. Then losers would then have to report to disintegration chambers to simulate casualties.
Both parties suffer from too much control by extremists. A two-party system combined with elections where you can vote for only one candidate results in political over-representation of the extremes. If you assume Americans' political affiliations form a normal distribution, the bulk of our representatives should be moderates in the center. But the two-party system eliminates those moderates in the primaries. Instead, the Democratic party ends up selecting on average candidates who are center in their party, meaning they fall about 1/3rd of the way from extreme left. And the Republican party does the same, resulting in their candidates being about 1/3rd of the way from extreme right.
So while the bulk of American voters may be moderates and centrists, the extremists are able to use the two-party system to get more extreme candidates into office. This is why both parties are unable to compromise on seemingly anything. Each representative dutifully carries out the political wishes of the ~55% of people who voted for them (either solidly right or solidly left), while completely disenfranchising the ~45% who voted against them. If the system were fair, the vast majority of elected officials would represent the ~60% in the middle who voted them in, while ignoring the ~20% on the extreme left and ~20% on the extreme right who voted against them.
Preferential voting systems (e.g. ranked votes with instant runoffs) and allowing everyone to vote in all primaries (not just party members) combats this and brings the distribution of elected officials' political beliefs back in-line with the distribution of voters political beliefs. But the extreme wings of both parties recognize this, and so fight against these changes since they would weaken their grip on power.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep class schedules the same, fire one administrator, give all the teachers a raise with the left-over money.
U.S. spending on public education per pupil is the 7th highest in the world (PDF warning), and above the OECD average as a percentage of GDP. We're spending more than enough money on education. As OP said, the problem is too much administrative overhead. Every time teachers complain about being underpaid, the administration points the finger at Congress and says they need more money. Every time Congress suggests cuts to Education, the administration dumps the cuts on the teachers making them rise up in furious opposition. The problem is the people who need to be cut are in charge of what to cut, so they make sure that they themselves are never cut.
True, but the fly in the ointment for this idea is that transporting cargo by container ship is about 1/3rd the cost of rail per ton-mile. It's cheaper to load the freight into containers in Russia, transport those containers through Siberia to the Pacific via rail, and load it onto a cargo ship for the trip to the U.S. West coast.
The phone icon is a universal symbol that's been around since at least 1996. While Apple did apply for a trademark on it in 2010, the pre-existing use of the symbol I've linked to I think pretty clearly invalidates the trademark. Unless you're somehow claiming nobody else is allowed to color their phone symbol green (the internationally recognized color for go).
You, sir, need to spend a month or two in China (or pretty much any Asian country) trying to do business. Political corruption, bribery, and corporate espionage is pretty much taken for granted. Most places will fire you if they ask you to bribe someone or steal another company's secrets, and you refuse. The business climate in Western democracies is much more ethical than there. The only reason you don't see it in China is because the government covers it up unless they want to make an example of it (e.g. executing the guys who put melamine into baby milk formula). If you follow the news for Japan and Korea, corporate and political corruption scandals are almost monthly occurrences.
I should add, though the DSL modems use standard RJ11 jacks, most DSLAMs do not. If it has a significant number of ports, the DSLAM will use probably use an RJ21 jack. You will need to learn about phone punchdown blocks and using a phone punch tool to send the DSL signal over the appropriate phone line. It's not that difficult if you're at all tech competent, but it does represent a small learning curve. If you know how to make your own LAN cables, this stuff will be easy to pick up.
I used Zyxel. We only needed 24 ports, and they had the cheapest VDSL DSLAM with 24 ports at the time. Didn't really have any problems with them, and based on talking with the current hotel staff it is holding up just fine. The only gotcha was their VDSL modems used an AC adapter which has 9V AC output. If someone equipment expecting DC had the same plug, you could fry it by plugging in the DSL modem's AC adapter. Oh, also, they don't make VDSL modems anymore. They've moved on to VDSL2 modems. They're supposed to be backwards compatible but neither I nor the hotel has had a chance to test them. I have no experience with the other manufacturers.
In theory you can use any brand VDSL modem with any brand VDSL DSLAM. The scattered reports I found at the time said that this wasn't always true in practice. ADSL seems to be more compatible and cheaper because its use is more widespread, so that may sway things in favor of ADSL. The primary drawback of ADSL was the 3.5 Mbps upstream limit - VDSL could do 18 Mbps both ways, VDSL2 can top 100 Mbps up to 1.5 km, 50 Mbps up to 3 km. From what I hear, certain fiber internet services are using VDSL2 from the street over the copper phone line to avoid having to lay down fiber to the actual home. So maybe VDSL equipment has become more compatible and cheaper.
You need to decide which technology to go with based on your bandwidth requirements, current market prices, and which technology you think will stick around. Just do a Google shopping search on DSLAM and your choice of ADSL2 or VDSL2 (or any other DSL - I don't know what is hot now).
This is just a regular DSL/DSLAM setup. Basically the hotel is acting like a phone company providing DSL, and the phones in the hotel rooms are the "DSL customers". You go to where the hotel's phone switching equipment is at, and hook up a DSLAM which is connected to your public Internet router. You then use that to "provide DSL" to each of the rooms where you want a wired network drop. The chosen rooms (or tamperproof proprietary boxes in your case) have a DSL modem, which splits the ethernet from the POTS.
You can piggyback this over your currently existing phone lines (that's the whole point of DSL), or you an run new Cat 3 lines just for the DSL (if you don't plan to offer wired network service in the rooms, and don't want customers messing with the hardware). Most hotel phone systems have plenty of extra capacity and lines for you to do this without having to install new cable. The reason for using DSL is that ethernet's specs limit it to 100 m, about 85 m in real life in my experience. That's way too short to reach from one end of a hotel to the other. DSL on the other hand is good out for several km.
It's pretty straightforward stuff if you've done any networking setup. The same stuff about regular DSL applies (e.g. use filters on any extra extensions). And unlike DSL from the phone company, you have to deal with both ends of the service. Most hotels use VDSL/VDSL2 because it allows higher bandwidth over a shorter distance. ADSL is really optimized for Cat 3 distances of several km, which isn't necessary for a hotel, and its max uplink throughput may be insufficient for a heavily used public WAP. I'd provide links but I did this about 5 years ago, so the links I have would likely be outdated.
Once you get the DSLAM and DSL modems set up, they act as a bridge and are transparent. The WAPs will show up on whatever LAN you have plugged into the DSLAM. If you want (and I would recommend), you can make it its own subnet. Assign static IPs to the WAPs so you can manage them. The fancier models will even let you set up VLANs, so you can do fancy things like limit direct access to the WAPs to a VLAN that's not available to customers connecting over the wireless (provided the WAPs are VLAN-aware). You will also have to handle QoS and bandwidth throttling, to prevent a single customer from using up all the bandwidth. But that's a given.
The granddaddy of them all was the Xerox Star workstation from 1981. This was what Steve Jobs saw while visiting PARC and became the inspiration for the GUI on the Lisa/Mac. As Jobs (the 1994 Jobs) said, Apple was always "shameless about stealing great ideas". Too bad the 2011 Jobs thinks behavior which helped build up Apple should be illegal for anyone else.
Unless something happens like happened to aluminum. At one point it was one of, if not the, most difficult metals to refine, and was worth more than gold or in some cases platinum. Then over the span of about a year, a couple people developed a new method of refining it. The price crashed to where, while still more expensive than other metals, is so cheap that we throw away cans and foil made out of it.
If there's a fusion breakthrough, oil prices will crash within a year or two. Rare earths are actually not that rare, they just take a lot of work to refine. If some new, cheaper method of refining them is invented, any vast reserves of them that we are hoarding could become worthless overnight.
Pass environmental laws because you want to protect the environment. Not because you want to gamble that a material will become rarer and more desirable in the future, under the guise of "planning ahead". If you really think the gamble is worth it, then be forthcoming and advocate planning ahead and conserving those supplies for exactly that reason (e.g. helium). Don't try to spin it as justification for environmental laws or vice versa.
Too bad the cable companies already do this with their set top boxes.
Actually, many of the images in the court filing are deceptive if not outright photoshopped.
The Galaxy Tab on page 35 has obviously been squashed in its long dimension, to give it a more iPad-like appearance. The iPad to its left "for comparison" is shown at a more acute angle, making it appear slimmer.
The pic of the rear of the iPad on page 36 (lower left) it looks awfully long for an iPad. Measuring its dimensions in pixels gives you a height of 274 pixels, and a width of 196 to 223 (measured just before the corners start to curve). Average the two widths of the trapezoid and you get average dimensions of 274x209.5 pixels, or a foreshortened aspect ratio of 1.308. The iPad 2's actual dimensions are 241x186 mm, or a 1.295 aspect ratio. Foreshortening normally makes the aspect ratio smaller (when the product is sideways in portrait mode), since it lessens the height while not affecting the average width. But in this picture, the foreshortened aspect ratio is larger than the product's actual aspect ratio! Indicating that the picture has been stretched to make the iPad appear longer like the Galaxy Tab.
The photo you cite on page 39 is taken at an angle, foreshortening the dimension where the two products differ the most, thus making the difference appear smaller than it actually is. The whole document seems to be crafted to deceive, with images manipulated either in post-processing or with camera angles to make the products appear more similar than they actually are.
Back when the U.S. was founded, the country was mostly rural and agrarian. Education was spotty, and it was assumed that most people weren't smart enough / not educated enough to make a good political decision. Voting was initially limited to white male landowners.
Against this backdrop, the founders wanted government powers not just split 3-ways, but with different sections of government less responsive to the "heat of passion" of the electorate. The House of Representatives was to be most responsive to the electorate, coming up for re-election every 2 years. The President was next, coming up for re-election every 4 years. Senators and judges were insulated from the electorate. Senators were appointed for 6 years by state legislatures. And judges were appointed for life by the President, but the Senate has to approve the appointment.
The landowning requirement was dropped in the early 1800s, followed by race after the Civil War (1860s), then gender (1920). Election of Senators was moved away from the state legislature and to the electorate in 1913. Judges are the last remaining government branch insulated from the direct electorate. Having Senators directly elected probably took some of the steam out of political will for direct election of judges (since the Senate has to approve judicial appointments). FWIW, many judges at the State and local level do have to be elected or have their appointments regularly approved by the electorate.
Problem is, this is one of those laws that people think are unjust when used against them, but think makes perfect sense when used in their favor. "If someone wants to record me, they hella better get my permissions first, doesn't matter where or what the circumstances are!" But at the same time, "If I want to record someone else in a public place, then I should be able to record them!" The problem per se isn't that the law is unjust, the problem is that many (most?) people don't grok that those two situations are one and the same.
Overturning evil and corruption is easy compared to overcoming stupidity.
Tenba sells inserts. Other manufacturers might too. The problem I had with specialized camera + laptop bags was that sometimes I didn't want to bring the camera or the laptop. That resulted me in buying two bags - one for when I want just the laptop, another for when I want the camera+lenses (with or without laptop). The photo-centric design of many bags meant they frequently can't take a laptop, necessitating a third bag for camera+lenses with the laptop.
The insert lets me do it with just one bag. If I want the camera + lenses, I put in the insert. If I don't want them I remove the insert. Having my photo gear in the insert also makes it easy to switch between these two modes without having to move all my lenses one by one between bags. The size of the insert won't work for a pro, but I find it's enough to carry a 70-200, 28-70, one body, and a flash. If the bag I was using were bigger, I could probably squeeze in an extra big lens (put the flash outside but to the side of the insert - like I do the power adapter and cord for the laptop).
The insert also has the advantage of being extraordinarily cheap ($15-$30) compared to dedicated photo bags ($100+, for some reason when you put the word "photo" on something it triples or quadruples in price). And it gives you the flexibility to use whatever bag you like as long as it's big enough, instead of being limited to the dedicated laptop + photo bags that scream "valuable stuff inside!" to thieves.
The Economist had an interesting breakdown of an iPhone's manufacture. It actually looks like the U.S., Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are the biggest beneficiaries from the iPhone's manufacture. Well, aside from Apple itself that is. Foxconn's slice of the iPhone pie is minuscule.
IMHO, that is the point of NASA - to push the envelope of technological development in order to more rapidly create new innovative research methods and technologies, not to rest on its laurels and build a sustainable business model. The whole reason it's taxpayer-funded is because we expect lots of failures and for its returns to never directly pay for the initial investment. Bear in mind that NASA started off as NACA, whose goal was to centralize fundamental aerospace research. That way all companies could benefit from it, instead of each company wasting money conducting duplicate research to push the forefront of aviation. NACA itself didn't profit from its research.
If you ask the scientists and engineers who were kids in the 1960s and 1970s why they chose their profession, I'd bet the vast majority would point to the space program and the moon landings. That's the intangible benefit of having a public program which is always on the cutting edge, rather than sitting safely behind it. And I would argue that's actually the primary goal of NASA. They shouldn't be promoting a specific scientific exploration, they should be promoting science and engineering in general.
Look at what happened in the 1970s after the initial moon landings. The public lost interest in it. NASA scrapped the later moon landings and instead used the remaining Saturn V rockets to launch an orbiting space station - because it hadn't been done yet. Look at what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when space shuttle launches became routine. The public lost interest in it. For the vast majority of people, there was only one moon landing, one aborted moon landing, and only 3 shuttle launches - Hubble's repair mission, and the two in which we lost orbiters. NASA needs to constantly be doing new, innovative stuff in order to fulfill its mission of engaging the public and getting them interested in science and engineering.
The two methods of valuation you presented give the current value of a company. Market cap takes into account expectation for future growth. So yeah market cap is a poor way to figure out what's the largest company, but it's not completely irrational either.
SSDs are too expensive to use as the only drive except on laptops. In desktops, you're going to have a mechanical HDD as a second drive, so keeping regular backups of the SSD is trivial. For laptops, you should be backing up to external storage anyway in case you somehow lose/destroy the laptop.
I can vouch for this. I added a mid-grade Kingston V+100 SSD ("only" about 250 MB/s) as the boot drive for my desktop. It now takes about 14 sec to POST, and 12 sec to boot with anti-virus loaded.
You make the same mistake TFA does - you assume that food intake has no cost. For this type of analysis, you have to take into account the energy needed to produce the food consumed. TFA assumes food intake is constant between the car/bus rider, walker, and bicyclist, which is rather silly if you're going to be using your bike to replace your car on a 5-10 mile daily commute. All that energy for pedaling has to come from somewhere.
Industrialized society has shifted food production away from labor-intensive operations in favor of mechanized operations which are energy-intensive. That is, the cost of energy is so cheap compared to the cost of manual labor, that for many industrialized food products the fuel-energy used to grow it exceeds the nutritional energy of the food. That's why you get seemingly counter-intuitive results such as corn ethanol in certain cases being net energy-negative. IIRC, energy from glucose converted to ATP to mechanical work vial cellular respiration is about 30% efficient, which is approximately the same as a good ICE. So if you were to compare fuel-energy used by a gas-powered moped vs. food-production-energy for a bicycle, for industrialized nations I'm not at all certain that the bicycle would win.
You people are assuming all terrorists are irrational and suicidal. They can be coldly rational too. The problem isn't the terrorist impersonating a pilot. The problem is a pilot being a terrorist, but a rational non-suicidal one. If he's given a free pass at security, he can smuggle in gun and bomb components piece by piece, and deposit them at prearranged obscure locations around the airport. The suicidal terrorists he's working with then pass through security, collect the pieces, and assemble the gun/bomb just before boarding the plane. Pilot terrorist is then free to repeat the process as often as he wants. That's why giving anyone a free pass through security is a dumb idea. Even the TSA personnel need to be screened, every time.
(Don't read any of this as me acknowledging such security is necessary. I'm just saying that if you start with the assumption that the real purpose of airport security is real security, then giving pilots free passes is a really dumb idea. Personally, I firmly believe airport security is security theater. You are much more likely to die from a lightning strike than from a terrorist attack. The security is already pretty ineffective. It's just there to calm the masses of their irrational fear of terrorism. In fact that's probably why this is being allowed despite what I wrote in the above paragraph. The powers that be know that it's just security theater, and have decided that this particular inconvenience isn't worth the benefit to the theatrics.)
You could make it even simpler, and have wars decided by a huge LAN party. Then losers would then have to report to disintegration chambers to simulate casualties.
Rape, when it's discussed and agreed upon beforehand, is called consensual sex.
Both parties suffer from too much control by extremists. A two-party system combined with elections where you can vote for only one candidate results in political over-representation of the extremes. If you assume Americans' political affiliations form a normal distribution, the bulk of our representatives should be moderates in the center. But the two-party system eliminates those moderates in the primaries. Instead, the Democratic party ends up selecting on average candidates who are center in their party, meaning they fall about 1/3rd of the way from extreme left. And the Republican party does the same, resulting in their candidates being about 1/3rd of the way from extreme right.
So while the bulk of American voters may be moderates and centrists, the extremists are able to use the two-party system to get more extreme candidates into office. This is why both parties are unable to compromise on seemingly anything. Each representative dutifully carries out the political wishes of the ~55% of people who voted for them (either solidly right or solidly left), while completely disenfranchising the ~45% who voted against them. If the system were fair, the vast majority of elected officials would represent the ~60% in the middle who voted them in, while ignoring the ~20% on the extreme left and ~20% on the extreme right who voted against them.
Preferential voting systems (e.g. ranked votes with instant runoffs) and allowing everyone to vote in all primaries (not just party members) combats this and brings the distribution of elected officials' political beliefs back in-line with the distribution of voters political beliefs. But the extreme wings of both parties recognize this, and so fight against these changes since they would weaken their grip on power.