To be fair, 100-250 MB Zip drives were fairly ubiquitous among Macs, while PC people were still waiting for CD-Rs to become affordable. So killing off floppies at the time didn't hurt Macs as much as it would've hurt PCs. The early Zip drives were SCSI, so they weren't as widely adopted among PC users before the advent of CD-R.
We need a new legal concept of "public but ephemeral" that applies to information that is normally soon forgotten like who was in a parking lot a week ago.
I don't think we need a new legal concept - reciprocity is enough. Just make it so that if the government wants to track the license plates of the public, first require that the plates of all government employees (especially elected officials) are always tracked and those positions made available to the public. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Then you'll see this idea die faster than the proverbial snowflake in hell.
From TFA, it was a general liability insurance policy. Those are supposed to cover medical bills in case of injury, property damage, and legal costs if you're sued. It's not an umbrella insurance policy. Zurich is arguing that Sony's customers becoming more vulnerable to identity theft does not constitute an "injury" nor "property damage", and thus is not covered.
It's actually going to be a fairly interesting case from the standpoint of defining what exactly identity theft is. If the courts decide it is property damage, that opens up a whole slew of possible legal avenues for getting compensation from e.g. banks which fail to protect your personal information.
But when insurance coverage is being denied, real and long-lasting damage has indeed occurred.
If it works like it does for small businesses, Sony is in for a world of hurt even if the insurance ends up covering it. General liability is priced partly based on how much has been paid out in claims for that company in recent years. So if the insurance is denied, Sony has to foot the bill. If the insurance covers it, Sony's insurance premiums will go up in the future. And for a company Sony's size, even a fraction of a percent increase would be a huge sum.
Some marketer at Maxtor(?) started the transition from the 2^20 definition of MB to 10^6 for HDDs in the mid-1990s. The (at the time) smaller HDD manufacturers like Western Digital quickly followed suit. Seagate was one of the later ones. IBM (now Hitachi) was the last one to make the switch - they held out until about 2000.
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself. When you're flying at altitude, there's less air to absorb ionizing cosmic radiation, so you end up encountering and absorbing more of it. Airline crews on certain routes actually get a higher annual dose of radiation than nuclear plant workers.
While I agree that the scanners are an abomination, the radiation from them is (assuming the machine is working properly) a tiny fraction of the increased radiation exposure you subject yourself to when you fly. If you're that paranoid about radiation, don't fly, drive.
I just installed DroidWall, which is a basic firewall for Android. You need to be rooted, and the UI isn't the greatest. But it lets you control which apps have permission to access the Internet (and you can choose WiFi and 3G/4G permissions separately if you so desire). What good is having my GPS location and contact list if you're unable to report it back home (Mr. Anderson)!
This is what happens when he law fails. Murdoch and his ilk cannot and will not be punished in our current system of law. Vigilante justice is wrong, but it is the only justice left to deal with these folks. If the law would do its job this would not happen.
Isn't this exactly the reasoning used by every terrorist, including McVeigh and bin Laden? I'm not saying it can't be right, but there damn well better be more to it than "They've put themselves above the law (IMHO) so we can do anything we want to them." Things such as proportional response to crimes, presumption of innocence, and unwillingness (or at least a strong abhorrence) to harm innocents in pursuit of the guilty all come to mind. Otherwise your vigilante cure is worse than the disease.
IMHO, resorting to vigilantism represents a loss of faith in the governing system we've established for society. I prefer to work towards solutions for these types of problems by trying to modify the system. Yes it can be hard, and a few guilty people might get off meanwhile, but the system will be made stronger and (hopefully) prevent recurrences. Vigilante action is tantamount to saying the system is so broken that there's no point trying to save it, and what's needed is revolution. We have to destroy the village in order to save it.
In case it isn't clear, OP means Google Apps for Domains, where you link up your domain with Google Apps so that e.g. instead of logging into gmail.com, you login to mail.mydomain.com and get the Gmail interface. For some reason it seems to be the red-headed stepchild at Google and is last to get all the cool new features they release to the general public. When I first got my android phone, I couldn't even use the gmail app to login to my Apps for Domains gmail account.
Electronics can survive literally being shot out of a canon. A little-known secret is that you have to do practically nothing to harden modern electronics against high g-forces. It's not that hard - since they're extremely lightweight with no moving parts, COTS electronics can usually survive in excess of a hundred g. If the circuit board didn't flex enough to snap, I would expect any piece of consumer electronics this small to survive a fall at terminal velocity.
What will white roofs do in the winter? Make the building colder?
I suspect they would actually make the building warmer. It's a common misconception that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. Well, that in itself isn't the misconception, the misconception is that people think of the heat transfer happening only one way. Black is more conducive to heat transfer than white. That means if you have a black roof in winter (assume no snow), and the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, the black roof will radiate the interior heat to the sky faster than would a white roof. Think of white paint as a heat insulator, and black paint as a heat conductor.
True, during daylight the radiation from sunlight into the roof may exceed the radiation from inside the house to outside. But days are short in Winter, and I suspect the heat loss during the night far exceeds the gain during the day.
The problem is not only with external carriers. Verizon's internal billing system just seems to be a convoluted mess of kludges. About 3-4 years ago, a friend of mine with Verizon Wireless bought a house. Her landline phone service was Verizon RBOC. One day they sent her one of those "Consolidate all your Verizon bills and get a discount!" flyers and she signed up. She started getting bills which showed both her landline and wireless charges, and she dutifully paid them.
3 months later she got a phone call from Verizon Wireless about her account being overdue. She explained that she had consolidated billing with her home phone service and had paid. They insisted they hadn't received any payment. She called Verizon RBOC and they confirmed that she had consolidated billing and had paid her wireless bill. But nothing she or they could do could convince Verizon Wireless that she'd paid. They shut off her cell phone service, messed up her credit score, then eventually closed her account and gave her phone number to someone else before finally getting the whole thing straightened out about 6 months later.
You forgot the most important points: Wave power does not need any fuel, does not pollute and needs very little maintenance.
It does not need fuel, but my degree is in ocean engineering and I can guarantee you that anything in the ocean needs lots of maintenance, especially if it's metal. A typical ship is put into drydock about every 5 years for repainting and other maintenance below the waterline. Otherwise the corrosion and biological fouling makes it non-functional within a few years.
Consequently, this generator does pollute. The 315 kW unit has 236 tons of steel and an unknown tonnage of concrete if Wikipedia is to be believed. In contrast, a 1 MW wind turbine is about 150 tons of steel and concrete. These devices typically have a rated lifespan of 30 years before they need to be disposed of/recycled. Those amounts of waste material are several orders of magnitude better than coal per MWh generated, but wind is about 3x higher than nuclear. And if you scale the tonnage for the 315 kW Oyster unit, it would be about an order of magnitude higher than nuclear.
I didn't get into this in my original post because this is a new technology in its R&D phase, and scaling it up to compare with mature technologies in this manner could lead to erroneous conclusions. But neither should people be claiming that it "does not pollute". Everything that is manufactured and which needs to be disposed of at end of life will pollute.
Capacity factors I found online for wave power put it at 30%-45% with a suggestion that 35% was a good average. That is, if the unit is rated at 800 kW peak, you can expect it to produce 280 kW averaged over the entire year.
Onshore wind farms have a 20%-25% capacity factor. Offshore wind seems to have a 30%-40% capacity factor, with turbines in the 1 - 4 MW range. So this wave power unit will on average generate slightly less energy than one of the smaller offshore wind turbines. In the KE = 0.5mv^2 equation, water has about 800x more mass than air, but the average wind speed is a lot higher than the average speed of the waveheight up and down. Enough so that it seems wind ends up having the advantage. (This is just a comparison, not a trade-off. You could for example install these wave power machines in between your offshore wind turbines.)
Comparing to conventional energy sources, the typical coal plant in the U.S. is about 340 MW with a 65% capacity factor, for about 220 MW average generation. So that's about 800 of these wave energy generators. The typical nuclear plant is about 1.55 GW with a 90% capacity factor, for about 1.4 GW average generation, or about 5000 of these wave energy generators. So we've still got a long way to go before these can truly replace conventional energy sources.
Unfortunately I can't find the price for one of these units, probably since they're still very much in the R&D phase. So I can't do a cost comparison. Also note that the Wikipedia entry for this project says it has three flaps each of which is capable of 800 kW. So depending on if the summary or wikipedia is right, the average power generated may be a factor of 3 higher.
Agreed, I think part of actually sitting on these committees and the like should be a "no submarine patent" clause, and a rule that says that since this stuff is meant to be open, it it inherently something which can't be patented.
That was actually the case with JEDEC. Part of their contract for membership was that members would file no patents (submarine or otherwise) on the memory specifications being discussed, and any patents already in process would be disclosed to the other members. The Courts actually found RAMBUS in violation of this part of the contract. However, since RAMBUS' violation was of a private contract between private party, and not a violation of U.S. law, any punishment had to originate in the contract. And the membership contract didn't specify any penalties for a member filing a submarine patent. Basically even though RAMBUS violated the intent and spirit of membership to screw over the other members, the only recourse available to JEDEC was to kick RAMBUS out of JEDEC.
So it's not enough merely to have these clauses. You must also list specific and brutal punishments for anyone violating them.
The government really needs to set up an official central database for this. e.g. Set up a Federal website which any individual or business can visit and download a guaranteed up-to-date version of the latest tax table for the entire country. States and local governments should be required to update their tax rate on this site before the tax can officially be collected.
The current method of requiring businesses to collate this information themselves is too fraught with errors (it's really easy to miss a tax increase passed by a city one night), and gives an unfair advantage to bigger companies. Hiring a private company to compile the tax tables for you doesn't quite work because they don't indemnify you against their errors. If they screw up and you failed to collect $5000 in sales taxes because of it, you have to pay the $5000, not them. Having it be a single government site is the most efficient solution to the problem, and places the consequence for errors squarely upon the party making the error (whether it be the business getting a tax table entry wrong, or the state/local government failing to update the table).
We have something called a Supreme Court for deciding semantic arguments such as yours when the wording of the law is ambiguous or could have multiple interpretations. And the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that interstate sales taxes are indeed a duty prohibited by the Constitution.
You *already have to pay sales tax* on out of state purchases in pretty much every state with a sales tax.
I think you missed the memo that was passed around the office back in 1787. I'll repeat it for you: "No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress."
What you're describing is a use tax, not a sales tax. It has nothing to do with the sale of an item, and thus nothing to do with Amazon's transactions. The States just find it more convenient to collect the use tax at the time of sale. But nothing about it requires that it be collected at that time, nor does the Constitution allow States to force out-of-state businesses to collect that tax on their behalf.
The only change is that California in this instance wants to put the collection process in Amazon's hands.
This isn't requiring Amazon to pay California taxes for all of their sales. This is requiring Californian citizens, who already are required to pay taxes an easier and more straight forward system of paying at the point of purchase as if it was a physical store instead of filling out a form and keeping receipts.
Nobody has a problem with the second part. If California wants to collect that tax from their citizens, and their citizens agree to such taxation, nobody has a problem with it.
California, however, has no right to tell Amazon, an out-of-state company, to collect that tax for them.
This puts the internet companies on the same playing field as the mom and pop shops that don't go over state lines. Otherwise, there will never be any mom and pop shops anymore, just order everything you need online.
The States already have a perfectly Constitutional way to level the playing field between Internet retailers and mom and pop shops - lower or eliminate their sales tax. You see, the problem isn't that the Constitution gives Amazon an unfair advantage - both Amazon and the mom and pop shop play by the same rules. If they sell to a customer in-state, they charge sales tax. If they sell to a customer out-of-state, they don't charge sales tax.
The problem is that the States deliberately choose to put their mom and pop shops at an unfair disadvantage by requiring them to collect a sales tax that's high enough to impact customers' purchasing decisions. It's like Napoleon requiring his troops to each carry an extra 2 kg canteen full of wine into battle, then complaining that Cornwallis' troops have an unfair advantage because they're carrying less weight.
I don't really see what the problem here is. Conservatives hate taxes on business activity. Liberals hate regressive taxes like sales taxes. This should be win-win all around. Lower or eliminate state sales taxes. Raise other progressive taxes like state income taxes if you want to compensate.
At this point, all SSDs are basically "fast enough" for desktop usage. You notice a major difference between an SSD and a HDD. You don't notice much, if any, difference between a lower and higher end SSD on the desktop.
A large part of the reason SSDs are faster than HDDs is their low latency (has a big impact on small file read/writes). However there's another big reason you don't notice much difference between lower and higher end SSDs: We're using the wrong metric.
SSDs and HDDs benchmarks are almost universally given in MB/s. The problem is, people don't perceive speed in MB. They perceive it in seconds. The computing tasks you need to get done are almost never "I can wait 1 second. How much data can my computer crunch?" They're of the type "I need to crunch 1 GB of data. How many seconds will that take?" So the correct metric we should be using is s/MB.
But it's the same number! Why should this make a difference? Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?
Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time.)
Anandtech basically stated as much in a recent SSD review. They admitted that in real world use (i.e. benchmarks measured in seconds), there really isn't much difference between the different SSDs. But reviews with benchmarks showing all products having nearly the same result doesn't get people coming back to read more reviews. So to hype people up, reviewers invert the scale and measure in MB/s to exaggerate small differences. Differences which for the vast majority of people are so small as to be nearly meaningless in their real-world computer use.
The same thing crops up with fuel mileage in cars. Fuel consumption is actually gallons per mile. But because the U.S. measures it in miles per gallon, it exaggerates the benefit of high mileage vehicles. If you ask a dozen people which saves more gas, switching from a 14 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan, or switching from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid, I will bet nearly all of them will say switching to the hybrid saves more gas. After all, 50-25 = 25 MPG improvement, while 25-14 = only a 11 MPG improvement. But if you drive 100 miles:
14 MPG SUV = 7.1 gallons used
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons used
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons used
Surprise. The 11 MPG improvement switching from the SUV to sedan saves you 3.1 gallons per 100 miles driven, while the 25 MPG improvement switching from sedan to hybrid only saves you 2 gallons. The metric we should be using is GPM, not MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km for this reason. (A consequence of this is that if we as a nation wish to lower our fuel consumpt
We are told that if we just get government regulators out of the way, the "free market" will sort everything out.
I don't want a truly free market, but technically, patents and copyrights are regulation of a free market. In a truly free market, everyone could freely copy each others' ideas. But government decided that's bad for innovation, so regulates the market to give authors and inventors a "temporary" monopoly on their ideas.
So in this case, Apple wants a tightly regulated market. In a truly free market, Apple couldn't pull off shenanigans like this because patents and copyrights wouldn't exist. So this is actually an example of government intervention in a free market allowing bigger corporations to squash their competition - precisely the opposite of what you're trying to assert.
Oh, the infamous Lafffer curve (too lazy to post a link to wikipedia, check it yourself). Too bad it has not been proved, nobody knows where the optimal point is (why they always assume the optimal point is with LESS taxes, and no with more?)
Outside of economic circles, the general case of the Laffer curve is known as the Mean Value Theorem. So I'd say it's been solidly proven. The only question is, as you point out, where the optimal point lies.
Off-topic, but this is something I've been struggling with. Does anyone know a good way to synchronize metatags of photos online with the same photos sitting on my hard drive? Most of the apps I've tried will go the other way - let you tag photos on your hard drive, then carry those tags with them when you upload the photos to a website. But I haven't found anything that'll synchronize the tags back if others add more info about the photos.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, 100-250 MB Zip drives were fairly ubiquitous among Macs, while PC people were still waiting for CD-Rs to become affordable. So killing off floppies at the time didn't hurt Macs as much as it would've hurt PCs. The early Zip drives were SCSI, so they weren't as widely adopted among PC users before the advent of CD-R.
I don't think we need a new legal concept - reciprocity is enough. Just make it so that if the government wants to track the license plates of the public, first require that the plates of all government employees (especially elected officials) are always tracked and those positions made available to the public. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Then you'll see this idea die faster than the proverbial snowflake in hell.
From TFA, it was a general liability insurance policy. Those are supposed to cover medical bills in case of injury, property damage, and legal costs if you're sued. It's not an umbrella insurance policy. Zurich is arguing that Sony's customers becoming more vulnerable to identity theft does not constitute an "injury" nor "property damage", and thus is not covered.
It's actually going to be a fairly interesting case from the standpoint of defining what exactly identity theft is. If the courts decide it is property damage, that opens up a whole slew of possible legal avenues for getting compensation from e.g. banks which fail to protect your personal information.
If it works like it does for small businesses, Sony is in for a world of hurt even if the insurance ends up covering it. General liability is priced partly based on how much has been paid out in claims for that company in recent years. So if the insurance is denied, Sony has to foot the bill. If the insurance covers it, Sony's insurance premiums will go up in the future. And for a company Sony's size, even a fraction of a percent increase would be a huge sum.
Some marketer at Maxtor(?) started the transition from the 2^20 definition of MB to 10^6 for HDDs in the mid-1990s. The (at the time) smaller HDD manufacturers like Western Digital quickly followed suit. Seagate was one of the later ones. IBM (now Hitachi) was the last one to make the switch - they held out until about 2000.
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself. When you're flying at altitude, there's less air to absorb ionizing cosmic radiation, so you end up encountering and absorbing more of it. Airline crews on certain routes actually get a higher annual dose of radiation than nuclear plant workers.
While I agree that the scanners are an abomination, the radiation from them is (assuming the machine is working properly) a tiny fraction of the increased radiation exposure you subject yourself to when you fly. If you're that paranoid about radiation, don't fly, drive.
I just installed DroidWall, which is a basic firewall for Android. You need to be rooted, and the UI isn't the greatest. But it lets you control which apps have permission to access the Internet (and you can choose WiFi and 3G/4G permissions separately if you so desire). What good is having my GPS location and contact list if you're unable to report it back home (Mr. Anderson)!
Isn't this exactly the reasoning used by every terrorist, including McVeigh and bin Laden? I'm not saying it can't be right, but there damn well better be more to it than "They've put themselves above the law (IMHO) so we can do anything we want to them." Things such as proportional response to crimes, presumption of innocence, and unwillingness (or at least a strong abhorrence) to harm innocents in pursuit of the guilty all come to mind. Otherwise your vigilante cure is worse than the disease.
IMHO, resorting to vigilantism represents a loss of faith in the governing system we've established for society. I prefer to work towards solutions for these types of problems by trying to modify the system. Yes it can be hard, and a few guilty people might get off meanwhile, but the system will be made stronger and (hopefully) prevent recurrences. Vigilante action is tantamount to saying the system is so broken that there's no point trying to save it, and what's needed is revolution. We have to destroy the village in order to save it.
In case it isn't clear, OP means Google Apps for Domains, where you link up your domain with Google Apps so that e.g. instead of logging into gmail.com, you login to mail.mydomain.com and get the Gmail interface. For some reason it seems to be the red-headed stepchild at Google and is last to get all the cool new features they release to the general public. When I first got my android phone, I couldn't even use the gmail app to login to my Apps for Domains gmail account.
Electronics can survive literally being shot out of a canon. A little-known secret is that you have to do practically nothing to harden modern electronics against high g-forces. It's not that hard - since they're extremely lightweight with no moving parts, COTS electronics can usually survive in excess of a hundred g. If the circuit board didn't flex enough to snap, I would expect any piece of consumer electronics this small to survive a fall at terminal velocity.
I suspect they would actually make the building warmer. It's a common misconception that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. Well, that in itself isn't the misconception, the misconception is that people think of the heat transfer happening only one way. Black is more conducive to heat transfer than white. That means if you have a black roof in winter (assume no snow), and the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, the black roof will radiate the interior heat to the sky faster than would a white roof. Think of white paint as a heat insulator, and black paint as a heat conductor.
True, during daylight the radiation from sunlight into the roof may exceed the radiation from inside the house to outside. But days are short in Winter, and I suspect the heat loss during the night far exceeds the gain during the day.
The problem is not only with external carriers. Verizon's internal billing system just seems to be a convoluted mess of kludges. About 3-4 years ago, a friend of mine with Verizon Wireless bought a house. Her landline phone service was Verizon RBOC. One day they sent her one of those "Consolidate all your Verizon bills and get a discount!" flyers and she signed up. She started getting bills which showed both her landline and wireless charges, and she dutifully paid them.
3 months later she got a phone call from Verizon Wireless about her account being overdue. She explained that she had consolidated billing with her home phone service and had paid. They insisted they hadn't received any payment. She called Verizon RBOC and they confirmed that she had consolidated billing and had paid her wireless bill. But nothing she or they could do could convince Verizon Wireless that she'd paid. They shut off her cell phone service, messed up her credit score, then eventually closed her account and gave her phone number to someone else before finally getting the whole thing straightened out about 6 months later.
Multiply it by a couple hundred lawyers waving threats of patent litigation and you'll start to see the problem.
It does not need fuel, but my degree is in ocean engineering and I can guarantee you that anything in the ocean needs lots of maintenance, especially if it's metal. A typical ship is put into drydock about every 5 years for repainting and other maintenance below the waterline. Otherwise the corrosion and biological fouling makes it non-functional within a few years.
Consequently, this generator does pollute. The 315 kW unit has 236 tons of steel and an unknown tonnage of concrete if Wikipedia is to be believed. In contrast, a 1 MW wind turbine is about 150 tons of steel and concrete. These devices typically have a rated lifespan of 30 years before they need to be disposed of/recycled. Those amounts of waste material are several orders of magnitude better than coal per MWh generated, but wind is about 3x higher than nuclear. And if you scale the tonnage for the 315 kW Oyster unit, it would be about an order of magnitude higher than nuclear.
I didn't get into this in my original post because this is a new technology in its R&D phase, and scaling it up to compare with mature technologies in this manner could lead to erroneous conclusions. But neither should people be claiming that it "does not pollute". Everything that is manufactured and which needs to be disposed of at end of life will pollute.
Capacity factors I found online for wave power put it at 30%-45% with a suggestion that 35% was a good average. That is, if the unit is rated at 800 kW peak, you can expect it to produce 280 kW averaged over the entire year.
Onshore wind farms have a 20%-25% capacity factor. Offshore wind seems to have a 30%-40% capacity factor, with turbines in the 1 - 4 MW range. So this wave power unit will on average generate slightly less energy than one of the smaller offshore wind turbines. In the KE = 0.5mv^2 equation, water has about 800x more mass than air, but the average wind speed is a lot higher than the average speed of the waveheight up and down. Enough so that it seems wind ends up having the advantage. (This is just a comparison, not a trade-off. You could for example install these wave power machines in between your offshore wind turbines.)
Comparing to conventional energy sources, the typical coal plant in the U.S. is about 340 MW with a 65% capacity factor, for about 220 MW average generation. So that's about 800 of these wave energy generators. The typical nuclear plant is about 1.55 GW with a 90% capacity factor, for about 1.4 GW average generation, or about 5000 of these wave energy generators. So we've still got a long way to go before these can truly replace conventional energy sources.
Unfortunately I can't find the price for one of these units, probably since they're still very much in the R&D phase. So I can't do a cost comparison. Also note that the Wikipedia entry for this project says it has three flaps each of which is capable of 800 kW. So depending on if the summary or wikipedia is right, the average power generated may be a factor of 3 higher.
That was actually the case with JEDEC. Part of their contract for membership was that members would file no patents (submarine or otherwise) on the memory specifications being discussed, and any patents already in process would be disclosed to the other members. The Courts actually found RAMBUS in violation of this part of the contract. However, since RAMBUS' violation was of a private contract between private party, and not a violation of U.S. law, any punishment had to originate in the contract. And the membership contract didn't specify any penalties for a member filing a submarine patent. Basically even though RAMBUS violated the intent and spirit of membership to screw over the other members, the only recourse available to JEDEC was to kick RAMBUS out of JEDEC.
So it's not enough merely to have these clauses. You must also list specific and brutal punishments for anyone violating them.
The government really needs to set up an official central database for this. e.g. Set up a Federal website which any individual or business can visit and download a guaranteed up-to-date version of the latest tax table for the entire country. States and local governments should be required to update their tax rate on this site before the tax can officially be collected.
The current method of requiring businesses to collate this information themselves is too fraught with errors (it's really easy to miss a tax increase passed by a city one night), and gives an unfair advantage to bigger companies. Hiring a private company to compile the tax tables for you doesn't quite work because they don't indemnify you against their errors. If they screw up and you failed to collect $5000 in sales taxes because of it, you have to pay the $5000, not them. Having it be a single government site is the most efficient solution to the problem, and places the consequence for errors squarely upon the party making the error (whether it be the business getting a tax table entry wrong, or the state/local government failing to update the table).
We have something called a Supreme Court for deciding semantic arguments such as yours when the wording of the law is ambiguous or could have multiple interpretations. And the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that interstate sales taxes are indeed a duty prohibited by the Constitution.
I think you missed the memo that was passed around the office back in 1787. I'll repeat it for you: "No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress."
What you're describing is a use tax, not a sales tax. It has nothing to do with the sale of an item, and thus nothing to do with Amazon's transactions. The States just find it more convenient to collect the use tax at the time of sale. But nothing about it requires that it be collected at that time, nor does the Constitution allow States to force out-of-state businesses to collect that tax on their behalf.
Nobody has a problem with the second part. If California wants to collect that tax from their citizens, and their citizens agree to such taxation, nobody has a problem with it.
California, however, has no right to tell Amazon, an out-of-state company, to collect that tax for them.
The States already have a perfectly Constitutional way to level the playing field between Internet retailers and mom and pop shops - lower or eliminate their sales tax. You see, the problem isn't that the Constitution gives Amazon an unfair advantage - both Amazon and the mom and pop shop play by the same rules. If they sell to a customer in-state, they charge sales tax. If they sell to a customer out-of-state, they don't charge sales tax.
The problem is that the States deliberately choose to put their mom and pop shops at an unfair disadvantage by requiring them to collect a sales tax that's high enough to impact customers' purchasing decisions. It's like Napoleon requiring his troops to each carry an extra 2 kg canteen full of wine into battle, then complaining that Cornwallis' troops have an unfair advantage because they're carrying less weight.
I don't really see what the problem here is. Conservatives hate taxes on business activity. Liberals hate regressive taxes like sales taxes. This should be win-win all around. Lower or eliminate state sales taxes. Raise other progressive taxes like state income taxes if you want to compensate.
A large part of the reason SSDs are faster than HDDs is their low latency (has a big impact on small file read/writes). However there's another big reason you don't notice much difference between lower and higher end SSDs: We're using the wrong metric.
SSDs and HDDs benchmarks are almost universally given in MB/s. The problem is, people don't perceive speed in MB. They perceive it in seconds. The computing tasks you need to get done are almost never "I can wait 1 second. How much data can my computer crunch?" They're of the type "I need to crunch 1 GB of data. How many seconds will that take?" So the correct metric we should be using is s/MB.
But it's the same number! Why should this make a difference? Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?
Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time.)
Anandtech basically stated as much in a recent SSD review. They admitted that in real world use (i.e. benchmarks measured in seconds), there really isn't much difference between the different SSDs. But reviews with benchmarks showing all products having nearly the same result doesn't get people coming back to read more reviews. So to hype people up, reviewers invert the scale and measure in MB/s to exaggerate small differences. Differences which for the vast majority of people are so small as to be nearly meaningless in their real-world computer use.
The same thing crops up with fuel mileage in cars. Fuel consumption is actually gallons per mile. But because the U.S. measures it in miles per gallon, it exaggerates the benefit of high mileage vehicles. If you ask a dozen people which saves more gas, switching from a 14 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan, or switching from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid, I will bet nearly all of them will say switching to the hybrid saves more gas. After all, 50-25 = 25 MPG improvement, while 25-14 = only a 11 MPG improvement. But if you drive 100 miles:
14 MPG SUV = 7.1 gallons used
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons used
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons used
Surprise. The 11 MPG improvement switching from the SUV to sedan saves you 3.1 gallons per 100 miles driven, while the 25 MPG improvement switching from sedan to hybrid only saves you 2 gallons. The metric we should be using is GPM, not MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km for this reason. (A consequence of this is that if we as a nation wish to lower our fuel consumpt
I don't want a truly free market, but technically, patents and copyrights are regulation of a free market. In a truly free market, everyone could freely copy each others' ideas. But government decided that's bad for innovation, so regulates the market to give authors and inventors a "temporary" monopoly on their ideas.
So in this case, Apple wants a tightly regulated market. In a truly free market, Apple couldn't pull off shenanigans like this because patents and copyrights wouldn't exist. So this is actually an example of government intervention in a free market allowing bigger corporations to squash their competition - precisely the opposite of what you're trying to assert.
So it's "most undead"?
Outside of economic circles, the general case of the Laffer curve is known as the Mean Value Theorem. So I'd say it's been solidly proven. The only question is, as you point out, where the optimal point lies.
Off-topic, but this is something I've been struggling with. Does anyone know a good way to synchronize metatags of photos online with the same photos sitting on my hard drive? Most of the apps I've tried will go the other way - let you tag photos on your hard drive, then carry those tags with them when you upload the photos to a website. But I haven't found anything that'll synchronize the tags back if others add more info about the photos.