The solution would seem to be to rely on less polluting energy generation mechanisms, since the fossil fuels are inherently less cost effective over time anyway.
The problem is there's a very vocal and politically active group which opposes the one power generation solution we already have which solves the problem - nuclear power.
Environmentalists suffer from what I call Just Right-itis. The insistence that there is just the right amount of global warming occurring. Enough that mankind is in mortal danger, so we have to take drastic action quickly. But not so much that we need to switch to a different power source ASAP. Instead there's just the right amount of global warming so that we can spend decades developing completely new power sources, meanwhile continuing to burn fossil fuels thus exacerbating the problem.
It's like finding out a asteroid will hit the Earth in a few decades and wipe out all life on it. But then staunchly opposing deflecting the asteroid using existing technology which is already capable of dealing with it, and instead insisting that completely new technology be developed to deal with the asteroid. This reasoning only makes sense if you value your pet technology over the survival of life on Earth. Their primary goal isn't stopping and arresting global warming. It's using it as a vehicle to drive the transition to renewable power, even if that means risking all life on Earth.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. The #1 priority should be getting off fossil fuels. We can do that with nuclear, buying ourselves decades if not centuries to develop renewables and batteries until they're in a state which can handle base load. Then we can switch from nuclear to renewables. If you oppose this most rational course of action, then you force us to start coming up with more and more desperate ideas to stave off disaster, like polluting the atmosphere in order to save it.
Black Friday isn't so much an after-Thanksgiving sale, as it is a kickoff for the Christmas holiday shopping season. If U.S. Thanksgiving didn't exist, that's probably what it would've been called - Christmas holiday shopping season. But because of most Americans beginning their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving, and the fact that many retailers operated in the red for most of the year, finally moving into the black after Thanksgiving, it's called Black Friday.
Cutting our military budget by 90% would put us down near Ghana and Nigeria. U.S. military spending is huge simply because the U.S. economy is huge.
Calls to slash military spending made sense in the 1950s and 1960s. But currently it's just slightly above the world average. If you account for Japan and NATO (whom we're obligated to defend by treaty), it's pretty much at the world average.
BTW, the biggest budget items are Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid. They're the programs whose growth is bursting our budget, and what we need to get under control if you want to pay for everyone to go to college. Even if you completely eliminated 100% of military spending, entitlement growth in the next 20 years or so would eat up all that savings. Like it has already eaten up the savings from cutting the military budget from the 1950s/1960s.
I highly recommend you read the CBO long-term budget projections to understand what exactly is causing excessive growth in government spending.
Back in the days before cell phones, it was common to have a landline phone next to the bed. So I suspect the percentage of people sleeping with a phone in/next to their bed has actually gone down with the advent of cell phones.
Note that the solution proposed by Google and accepted by the EU is to auction slots in the special shopping area at the top of the search results page, not to offer anything for free.
Auctioning slots does no good when Google is one of the bidders. Google can just bid $1 trillion for each slot. Since it's Google paying Google, their net cost is zero no matter what they bid. (Actually, if you take opportunity cost into account, their net cost is whatever the next highest bid was, since they are foregoing that revenue to advertise their product instead. Except that's how it works currently. They don't make any ad revenue listing competing shopping comparison sites, so they lose nothing by adopting a strategy which results in them not accepting any ad revenue from competing shopping comparison sites.)
I'm pretty critical of most of the EU actions against Google, but I fully support them on this one (just not with them accepting the proposed solution). If Google is going to run a search engine, its results should be agnostic, not biased towards their own product or against their competitors'.
Amazon has about 600,000 employees. I can't find a breakdown of U.S. vs overseas employees, but about 70% of their sales are in the U.S.. So figure 420,000 U.S. employees. If 11% of them move, that'd be 46,000 Amazon employees moving each year.. 0.74% of that is 340 Amazon employees moving to NYC each year.
Of that amount, most would rent. But it seems highly likely that more than two would end up buying.
How many city transport systems make a profit?
It is perfectly normal for subways to only get a fraction of their income from ticket sales. And for governments to fund the system from taxes, just like the roads.
Making a profit is what tells you that the value of the service being offered exceeds the cost of providing the service. If a city transport system isn't able to pay for itself entirely via fares, then it's costing the city more to maintain it than the value it's giving citizens.
If you're forced to use general fund taxes to support the public transport system, then it becomes a subsidized service. Someone who doesn't use it is paying so riders can use it at a discounted price.
Your road analogy is wrong because road construction and maintenance is paid for by fuel taxes, which are also paid for by people using the roads.
The only role of government in creating these types of systems is in getting over the initial payment hump (the construction of the lines and purchase of the buses/trains), and coordinating the payments of the millions of riders. Once you start justifying supporting such systems via general tax funds instead of fares, you're justifying government waste.
According to Sahin and her colleaguesâ(TM) research, automated telemarketing calls cost about four cents a minute, but using human operators can cost up to a dollar a minute. Even when this human labor is moved overseas to call centers in the Philippines or India, telemarketers still pay about 20 cents per minute to call.
4 cents/min = $2.40/hr
20 cents/min = $12/hr
$1/min = $60/hr = $120k/yr equivalent @ 40 hrs/week, 50 weeks/yr
And that's just what the telemarketing company pays the dweeb they hired to call you.
No wonder there are so many telemarketing calls. You can make (steal) a huge amount of money doing it.
The multiple cameras are performing two functions, both of which save weight and improve image quality.
Having two identical cameras spaced apart (to generate parallax) allows you to computationally generate an image equivalent to if the photo were shot with a bigger (heavier, more expensive) single lens. Most notably, this allows blurring the background for more pleasing portraits. I've got huge 70-200mm f/2.8 lens on my DSLR for this purpose. You do NOT want something that big stuck to your phone.
Prime lenses (single focal length optics) have superior image quality to zooms. Primes are also less complex to design optically, resulting in a smaller lens.
So having two wide-angle cameras and two telephoto cameras on your phone duplicates a single big professional-quality zoom with a large aperture, but without the weight and expense. Unlike the display PPI war, the reason for these extra cameras is functional.
The curved screens most certainly do make sense, just perhaps not in your typical usage. They had their inception in Korea. The larger Galaxy Note phones were extremely popular among women there who'd slap a case on it, and carry the phone in their purses. Unfortunately, when they got a SMS, they had to open the purse, pull the phone out, and flip open the cover tor read the text message. By having a curved screen on the edge which could display a preview of the text, the woman could simply open the purse and peek at the phone to see what the text was.
I'd agree that at this point it's mostly become a marketing gimmick. But then the same is true for high-PPI displays, notches, glass backs, etc. Manufacturers don't make these things because they want to force them onto people. They make them because people fool themselves into wanting them. The manufacturers are just giving them what they want.
Not just modern companies. In a graduate software engineering class I took (mumble mumble) years ago we had a rather vigorous discussion about people versus process. That is, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated and well implemented process, do the people matter that much? And the reverse, if you have sufficiently excellent people, does the process matter that much?
If the job is mind-numbingly simple, then the people are no more than cogs, and the process is what's important. Given enough technology, the people could be replaced with robots.
If the job requires abstract and creative thought, then it can't be solved by an algorithmic process, and it's the people who are important. Even with magical levels of technology, a person will still be needed to do the job because it requires abstract reasoning to make the necessary decisions.
That's why there's little point lamenting the manufacturing jobs which got shipped overseas. For the most part they were the former type. If they hadn't gone overseas, they would've eventually been eliminated by automation (many already would have been if the unions hadn't opposed automation in the 1980s and 1990s). What's important for the future of the job market is to cultivate the latter type of jobs, and to educate the population to be able to perform those jobs. e.g. Instead of assembling and welding car parts, a person is needed who can design, troubleshoot, and/or repair a robot which assembles and welds car parts.
All these gendrified areas tend to be places where the locals have built something appealing enough that wealthier people want it for themselves, now that it is built.
That's the key flaw in blaming it on the wealthy people. The locals willingly sold the properties to the wealthy people. If you sell something, of course you don't get a say in what happens to it anymore (political machinations to pass zoning ordinances and rent controls aside). If you don't like what they're gonna do after they buy it, don't sell it to them in the first place.
Your analogy is for two individuals living under the same legal jurisdiction. A more apt analogy in this case would be you live near the border, and you use a telephoto camera to reveal the truth about something going on inside a neighboring house on the other side of the border (i.e. in another country).
Even if peeping into a house is illegal in that country, the fact that you did it from your country would probably immunize you. In fact that's what should scare you most about this. If the DNC were to somehow succeed, that would give the MPAA/RIAA legal precedent to sue people in other countries for violating the copyright laws of the U.S. Either you believe each country is free to set up their own laws and are not subject to other countries' laws. Or you believe countries can enforce their laws in other countries.
First, in a competitive election, it is simply not fair (to the voters) to expose the dirt of one party and not the other. I assume, and I think MOST Americans assume that there is terrible corruption and dirt present in both major parties.
As long as we're talking about having an ideal world, can you agree that it's simply not fair for 90% of the press to mostly be trying to dig up dirt on one party, and only 10% trying to dig up dirt on the other party? If the press reports an equal amount of corruption in the Republican party as in the Democratic party, I'd take that as a pretty good sign that the Republican party is a lot less corrupt.
Second, if, as seems likely at this point, these hacks were carried out by someone acting on behalf of the Russian government, then every American should be fighting mad. Agents of an adversarial power interfering in our elections?
I've been thinking about that too. Apparently we're upset that people who cannot vote in our elections tried to influence our election.
But by that reasoning, shouldn't both political parties be prohibited from taking money raised outside a state or Congressional district, and using it to campaign for a candidate in those races? After all, that's money from someone outside that state/district who doesn't have a vote in that race trying to influence that election.
Macs are used heavily in the video and audio production industries. Apple started off catering to artists*, so they work to make sure OS X fully supports color profiles (the Macbook Pro screens are even color-calibrated at the factory). Unlike Windows which still has a color profile bug dating back to Vista (a UAC elevation popup which dims your desktop will dump the current color profile). And OS X is based on Unix so doesn't suffer as many audio dropouts as Windows used to, making it the preferred platform for sound sampling. So Macs tend to be overrepresented in what these people produce - movies, videos, DJing. When a scene calls for a laptop, these people will usually just grab whatever is most easily available, which is usually a Macbook.
Apple also offers its products for free for use in movies. They take em back after, but it helps if your production's prop budget is limited.
If you walk into any other business, 99% of their computers run Windows. That said, OS X has managed to claw above 10% market share in recent years.
* This is also why Macs got high-PPI "retina" screens first. Page layout artists also predominantly use Macs. Subpixel rendering, which basically triples the horizontal resolution without requiring new hardware, was introduced with Windows XP (ClearType). So Windows didn't need high-PPI to produce high-quality fonts. But subpixel rendering requires you to align the fonts to the subpixel grid. That's unacceptable for page layout work, where having the font appear where it'll actually appear when printed is more important than how sharp it looks on the screen. Consequently, OS X didn't use subpixel rendering (If you plugged a 1024x768 or 1280x800 monitor into a Windows PC, then a Mac, the Windows PC was noticeably sharper). OS X fonts are blurrier, but they're placed more accurately for page layout artists. The only recourse Apple had was to sharpen fonts was to switch to high-PPI displays.
The addition of advertising will certainly NOT improve my experience
You don't get it. You're no longer the customer. The advertisers they're selling your usage info to is now the customer. Microsoft is just seeing how much they can get away with doing to you (in favor of their real customers) before you give up and ditch Windows. They laugh that you're so set on running Windows-only apps that you're still willing to pay them for letting them exploit you.
Outside of gamers (who will also willingly limit themselves to console exclusives and 5-year old GPUs) and businesses who need a uniform desktop environment (but they've managed to get a version of Windows without the deep surveillance), there's almost nothing you can do with a computer today which requires Windows. Yet people keep insisting on not straying outside their comfort zone and not using Windows. It's like the dog which has been chained to its doghouse for all its life, and when the chain is removed it finds it can't move beyond its old limitations because it's been conditioned to stay near the doghouse.
If a country thinks it can win a potential war, it is better to hide their capability so enemies are unprepared.
If a country doesn't think it can win a potential war, it is better to advertise (claimed) newer capabilities so enemies are intimidated.
While the latter does mean the country will try to avoid a war, the former does not necessarily mean the country expects or wishes to go to war.
This posturing is kinda moot though since China and the U.S. will never go to war, since that would result in nuclear annihilation for both sides. The most they'll do is get into a proxy war with each country supporting opposing sides in someone else's war. Just like the U.S. and USSR did in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. (Actually i doubt China will even go that far, since unlike the USSR they do a huge amount of trade with the U.S. Which hopefully has taught them that economic competition is constructive, whereas military competition is destructive. They may pick opposite sides in a conflict, but it won't become a full-scale proxy war.)
As for China's artificial island, the U.S. doesn't need military power to defeat it. All it needs to do is help the Philippines and Vietnam build their own islands just outside Chinese waters. That'll put China in a position where if they insist artificial islands legally extend territorial waters, then the new Philippine and Vietnamese islands move the border of China's waters to halfway between those islands and China's mainland (basically cutting China's territorial waters in half). Then the U.S. can help those two countries build new islands just outside the new border for Chinese waters. Repeat until China's territorial waters only extend a few miles from shore. We could do this for a fraction of the cost of the F35.
People say the solution to the tobacco use problem is to ban tobacco.
People say the solution to the illegal drug use problem is to legalize them.
Whenever a solution doesn't work perfectly, there's a knee-jerk reaction among people to suggest that the opposite of the current solution be tried. Such simplistic reasoning almost never works.
The person or company doing the Kickstarter/Indiegogo project doesn't get all the promised money. Kickstarter/Indiegogo take a percentage. Indiegogo is taking on the role of insurance company, and (based on their statistics for the success of past projects) are betting that they can pay for refunding failed projects out of their percentage cut, and still stay in the black.
It's pretty risky because unlike (say) cars, the liability for any individual project can vary by a huge amount. One big failed project could end up costing them a lot more than their averages say they should've expected. But they're the ones with the years of built-up statistics, not me. So presumably they know what they're doing. They'll probably do a more thorough vetting of each project before letting it through to funding. Which quite frankly is something the industry badly needs since it's become apparent that the individual donors are not doing it, and are treating it like shopping at Amazon only with a delay of a few months between purchase and receipt of goods.
The vast majority of people are employees. During their lifetime, they never have (and never will) manage other people. Since they've never had to do it, they only difficulty they attribute to managing is the aspect of it that they see - being told what to do. So they assume all a manger has to do is tell people what to do. And since anyone could do that, therefore managers are useless drains on a company (or country).
Once you've actually done the job of managing people, you realize just how asinine people can be, and how much work is involved in getting a group of people to work together smoothly. A good manager is worth their weight in gold. The difference in efficiency is enormous - like getting a group of people to clean a beach by assigning each one an equal sized strip parallel to the beach, vs everyone just wandering off in random directions. If he's good at managing and has competent advisors and sub-managers, he'll be fine.
Fusion in the sun happens very rarely.. The compost heap in your backyard makes about as much energy as fusion in the sun - about 276.5 Watts per m^3. Your body makes more energy just from metabolism (maintaining your body temp as you sit around). That's why they have to get it much hotter than the sun to get more energy out of it than they put in.
The sun is just really hot because of its enormous volume to surface area ratio. Each square meter of surface area is covering over 200 million cubic meters of volume.
4) As an employee, you are basically operating under work for hire. When the company hires you, they agree to pay you a certain amount in exchange for owning anything and everything you do (includes copyrights and patents). This includes being able to assign you to work on what it wants, which may not necessarily be what you want. If you want control over what you're assigned to work on, you have to work as an independent contractor. If a company asks you to work on a DoD project as a contractor and you don't want to, you simply refuse the contract.
This additional control as an independent contractor does not come for free. Being a contractor involves more risk. There's no safety net. You don't know if you'll be able to get sufficient contracts to continue working after this contract is completed, whereas a company continues paying you and would be responsible for reassigning an employee to a new task after the current one is completed. Your income is not stable (different contracts pay different amounts), and can go down (future contracts may pay less, whereas most companies do not decrease employee pay except in dire circumstances). You also have to handle your own insurance, bookkeeping, marketing, and taxes (most first-time contractors get a rude awakening when they learn your employer has been paying half your Social Security and Medicare taxes, and as a self-employed contractor you are now responsible for paying the whole thing).
That's basically the trade-off when you choose to become an employee. You cede control over all of these things to the company (which handles it all for you) in exchange for stability (a consistent income, steady work, being fired/let go only under certain circumstances). This includes ceding control over what you're assigned to work on. (The Google walk-out is a bit of a grey area, since Google employees are granted stock options meaning they're part-owners of the company. Which would give them a small say in what they're assigned to work on.)
He actually made two huge blunders. 1) Didn't have a backup. 2) Deliberately told Adobe software to use the Videos folder on his external drive as a temp folder, then told it to clear that temp folder, which it dutifully did.
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The problem is there's a very vocal and politically active group which opposes the one power generation solution we already have which solves the problem - nuclear power.
Environmentalists suffer from what I call Just Right-itis. The insistence that there is just the right amount of global warming occurring. Enough that mankind is in mortal danger, so we have to take drastic action quickly. But not so much that we need to switch to a different power source ASAP. Instead there's just the right amount of global warming so that we can spend decades developing completely new power sources, meanwhile continuing to burn fossil fuels thus exacerbating the problem.
It's like finding out a asteroid will hit the Earth in a few decades and wipe out all life on it. But then staunchly opposing deflecting the asteroid using existing technology which is already capable of dealing with it, and instead insisting that completely new technology be developed to deal with the asteroid. This reasoning only makes sense if you value your pet technology over the survival of life on Earth. Their primary goal isn't stopping and arresting global warming. It's using it as a vehicle to drive the transition to renewable power, even if that means risking all life on Earth.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. The #1 priority should be getting off fossil fuels. We can do that with nuclear, buying ourselves decades if not centuries to develop renewables and batteries until they're in a state which can handle base load. Then we can switch from nuclear to renewables. If you oppose this most rational course of action, then you force us to start coming up with more and more desperate ideas to stave off disaster, like polluting the atmosphere in order to save it.
Black Friday isn't so much an after-Thanksgiving sale, as it is a kickoff for the Christmas holiday shopping season. If U.S. Thanksgiving didn't exist, that's probably what it would've been called - Christmas holiday shopping season. But because of most Americans beginning their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving, and the fact that many retailers operated in the red for most of the year, finally moving into the black after Thanksgiving, it's called Black Friday.
Cutting our military budget by 90% would put us down near Ghana and Nigeria. U.S. military spending is huge simply because the U.S. economy is huge.
Calls to slash military spending made sense in the 1950s and 1960s. But currently it's just slightly above the world average. If you account for Japan and NATO (whom we're obligated to defend by treaty), it's pretty much at the world average.
BTW, the biggest budget items are Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid. They're the programs whose growth is bursting our budget, and what we need to get under control if you want to pay for everyone to go to college. Even if you completely eliminated 100% of military spending, entitlement growth in the next 20 years or so would eat up all that savings. Like it has already eaten up the savings from cutting the military budget from the 1950s/1960s.
I highly recommend you read the CBO long-term budget projections to understand what exactly is causing excessive growth in government spending.
degrees = tan ( x / y )
arctan (deg) = x / y
y = x / arctan (deg)
y = 4 cm / arctan (0.5 deg)
y = 458 cm
The leaning tower of Pisa is just 4.6 meters tall?
Back in the days before cell phones, it was common to have a landline phone next to the bed. So I suspect the percentage of people sleeping with a phone in/next to their bed has actually gone down with the advent of cell phones.
Auctioning slots does no good when Google is one of the bidders. Google can just bid $1 trillion for each slot. Since it's Google paying Google, their net cost is zero no matter what they bid. (Actually, if you take opportunity cost into account, their net cost is whatever the next highest bid was, since they are foregoing that revenue to advertise their product instead. Except that's how it works currently. They don't make any ad revenue listing competing shopping comparison sites, so they lose nothing by adopting a strategy which results in them not accepting any ad revenue from competing shopping comparison sites.)
I'm pretty critical of most of the EU actions against Google, but I fully support them on this one (just not with them accepting the proposed solution). If Google is going to run a search engine, its results should be agnostic, not biased towards their own product or against their competitors'.
About 11% of Americans move each year. That's about 35.5 million people.
About 264,000 people moved to NYC last year. So about 0.74% of all movers relocated to NYC.
Amazon has about 600,000 employees. I can't find a breakdown of U.S. vs overseas employees, but about 70% of their sales are in the U.S.. So figure 420,000 U.S. employees. If 11% of them move, that'd be 46,000 Amazon employees moving each year.. 0.74% of that is 340 Amazon employees moving to NYC each year.
Of that amount, most would rent. But it seems highly likely that more than two would end up buying.
Making a profit is what tells you that the value of the service being offered exceeds the cost of providing the service. If a city transport system isn't able to pay for itself entirely via fares, then it's costing the city more to maintain it than the value it's giving citizens.
If you're forced to use general fund taxes to support the public transport system, then it becomes a subsidized service. Someone who doesn't use it is paying so riders can use it at a discounted price. Your road analogy is wrong because road construction and maintenance is paid for by fuel taxes, which are also paid for by people using the roads.
The only role of government in creating these types of systems is in getting over the initial payment hump (the construction of the lines and purchase of the buses/trains), and coordinating the payments of the millions of riders. Once you start justifying supporting such systems via general tax funds instead of fares, you're justifying government waste.
4 cents/min = $2.40/hr
20 cents/min = $12/hr
$1/min = $60/hr = $120k/yr equivalent @ 40 hrs/week, 50 weeks/yr
And that's just what the telemarketing company pays the dweeb they hired to call you.
No wonder there are so many telemarketing calls. You can make (steal) a huge amount of money doing it.
nm aren't comparable between companies. Each foundry is referring to a different thing when they call their process "x nm".
For example, TSMC's 7nm process yields 83 million transistors per mm^2. Meanwhile, the 10nm process Intel was working on yielded 100 million transistors per mm^2, indicating its average component size was smaller despite having a larger nm name. In fact, TSMC's 7nm process yields only twice the transistor density of Intel's 14nm process, not 4x as you'd expect if the nm were referring to the same thing.
So having two wide-angle cameras and two telephoto cameras on your phone duplicates a single big professional-quality zoom with a large aperture, but without the weight and expense. Unlike the display PPI war, the reason for these extra cameras is functional.
The curved screens most certainly do make sense, just perhaps not in your typical usage. They had their inception in Korea. The larger Galaxy Note phones were extremely popular among women there who'd slap a case on it, and carry the phone in their purses. Unfortunately, when they got a SMS, they had to open the purse, pull the phone out, and flip open the cover tor read the text message. By having a curved screen on the edge which could display a preview of the text, the woman could simply open the purse and peek at the phone to see what the text was.
I'd agree that at this point it's mostly become a marketing gimmick. But then the same is true for high-PPI displays, notches, glass backs, etc. Manufacturers don't make these things because they want to force them onto people. They make them because people fool themselves into wanting them. The manufacturers are just giving them what they want.
If the job is mind-numbingly simple, then the people are no more than cogs, and the process is what's important. Given enough technology, the people could be replaced with robots.
If the job requires abstract and creative thought, then it can't be solved by an algorithmic process, and it's the people who are important. Even with magical levels of technology, a person will still be needed to do the job because it requires abstract reasoning to make the necessary decisions.
That's why there's little point lamenting the manufacturing jobs which got shipped overseas. For the most part they were the former type. If they hadn't gone overseas, they would've eventually been eliminated by automation (many already would have been if the unions hadn't opposed automation in the 1980s and 1990s). What's important for the future of the job market is to cultivate the latter type of jobs, and to educate the population to be able to perform those jobs. e.g. Instead of assembling and welding car parts, a person is needed who can design, troubleshoot, and/or repair a robot which assembles and welds car parts.
That's the key flaw in blaming it on the wealthy people. The locals willingly sold the properties to the wealthy people. If you sell something, of course you don't get a say in what happens to it anymore (political machinations to pass zoning ordinances and rent controls aside). If you don't like what they're gonna do after they buy it, don't sell it to them in the first place.
Your analogy is for two individuals living under the same legal jurisdiction. A more apt analogy in this case would be you live near the border, and you use a telephoto camera to reveal the truth about something going on inside a neighboring house on the other side of the border (i.e. in another country).
Even if peeping into a house is illegal in that country, the fact that you did it from your country would probably immunize you. In fact that's what should scare you most about this. If the DNC were to somehow succeed, that would give the MPAA/RIAA legal precedent to sue people in other countries for violating the copyright laws of the U.S. Either you believe each country is free to set up their own laws and are not subject to other countries' laws. Or you believe countries can enforce their laws in other countries.
As long as we're talking about having an ideal world, can you agree that it's simply not fair for 90% of the press to mostly be trying to dig up dirt on one party, and only 10% trying to dig up dirt on the other party? If the press reports an equal amount of corruption in the Republican party as in the Democratic party, I'd take that as a pretty good sign that the Republican party is a lot less corrupt.
I've been thinking about that too. Apparently we're upset that people who cannot vote in our elections tried to influence our election.
But by that reasoning, shouldn't both political parties be prohibited from taking money raised outside a state or Congressional district, and using it to campaign for a candidate in those races? After all, that's money from someone outside that state/district who doesn't have a vote in that race trying to influence that election.
Macs are used heavily in the video and audio production industries. Apple started off catering to artists*, so they work to make sure OS X fully supports color profiles (the Macbook Pro screens are even color-calibrated at the factory). Unlike Windows which still has a color profile bug dating back to Vista (a UAC elevation popup which dims your desktop will dump the current color profile). And OS X is based on Unix so doesn't suffer as many audio dropouts as Windows used to, making it the preferred platform for sound sampling. So Macs tend to be overrepresented in what these people produce - movies, videos, DJing. When a scene calls for a laptop, these people will usually just grab whatever is most easily available, which is usually a Macbook.
Apple also offers its products for free for use in movies. They take em back after, but it helps if your production's prop budget is limited.
If you walk into any other business, 99% of their computers run Windows. That said, OS X has managed to claw above 10% market share in recent years.
* This is also why Macs got high-PPI "retina" screens first. Page layout artists also predominantly use Macs. Subpixel rendering, which basically triples the horizontal resolution without requiring new hardware, was introduced with Windows XP (ClearType). So Windows didn't need high-PPI to produce high-quality fonts. But subpixel rendering requires you to align the fonts to the subpixel grid. That's unacceptable for page layout work, where having the font appear where it'll actually appear when printed is more important than how sharp it looks on the screen. Consequently, OS X didn't use subpixel rendering (If you plugged a 1024x768 or 1280x800 monitor into a Windows PC, then a Mac, the Windows PC was noticeably sharper). OS X fonts are blurrier, but they're placed more accurately for page layout artists. The only recourse Apple had was to sharpen fonts was to switch to high-PPI displays.
You don't get it. You're no longer the customer. The advertisers they're selling your usage info to is now the customer. Microsoft is just seeing how much they can get away with doing to you (in favor of their real customers) before you give up and ditch Windows. They laugh that you're so set on running Windows-only apps that you're still willing to pay them for letting them exploit you.
Outside of gamers (who will also willingly limit themselves to console exclusives and 5-year old GPUs) and businesses who need a uniform desktop environment (but they've managed to get a version of Windows without the deep surveillance), there's almost nothing you can do with a computer today which requires Windows. Yet people keep insisting on not straying outside their comfort zone and not using Windows. It's like the dog which has been chained to its doghouse for all its life, and when the chain is removed it finds it can't move beyond its old limitations because it's been conditioned to stay near the doghouse.
Your cause is a bit off.
If a country thinks it can win a potential war, it is better to hide their capability so enemies are unprepared.
If a country doesn't think it can win a potential war, it is better to advertise (claimed) newer capabilities so enemies are intimidated.
While the latter does mean the country will try to avoid a war, the former does not necessarily mean the country expects or wishes to go to war.
This posturing is kinda moot though since China and the U.S. will never go to war, since that would result in nuclear annihilation for both sides. The most they'll do is get into a proxy war with each country supporting opposing sides in someone else's war. Just like the U.S. and USSR did in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. (Actually i doubt China will even go that far, since unlike the USSR they do a huge amount of trade with the U.S. Which hopefully has taught them that economic competition is constructive, whereas military competition is destructive. They may pick opposite sides in a conflict, but it won't become a full-scale proxy war.)
As for China's artificial island, the U.S. doesn't need military power to defeat it. All it needs to do is help the Philippines and Vietnam build their own islands just outside Chinese waters. That'll put China in a position where if they insist artificial islands legally extend territorial waters, then the new Philippine and Vietnamese islands move the border of China's waters to halfway between those islands and China's mainland (basically cutting China's territorial waters in half). Then the U.S. can help those two countries build new islands just outside the new border for Chinese waters. Repeat until China's territorial waters only extend a few miles from shore. We could do this for a fraction of the cost of the F35.
People say the solution to the tobacco use problem is to ban tobacco.
People say the solution to the illegal drug use problem is to legalize them.
Whenever a solution doesn't work perfectly, there's a knee-jerk reaction among people to suggest that the opposite of the current solution be tried. Such simplistic reasoning almost never works.
The person or company doing the Kickstarter/Indiegogo project doesn't get all the promised money. Kickstarter/Indiegogo take a percentage. Indiegogo is taking on the role of insurance company, and (based on their statistics for the success of past projects) are betting that they can pay for refunding failed projects out of their percentage cut, and still stay in the black.
It's pretty risky because unlike (say) cars, the liability for any individual project can vary by a huge amount. One big failed project could end up costing them a lot more than their averages say they should've expected. But they're the ones with the years of built-up statistics, not me. So presumably they know what they're doing. They'll probably do a more thorough vetting of each project before letting it through to funding. Which quite frankly is something the industry badly needs since it's become apparent that the individual donors are not doing it, and are treating it like shopping at Amazon only with a delay of a few months between purchase and receipt of goods.
The vast majority of people are employees. During their lifetime, they never have (and never will) manage other people. Since they've never had to do it, they only difficulty they attribute to managing is the aspect of it that they see - being told what to do. So they assume all a manger has to do is tell people what to do. And since anyone could do that, therefore managers are useless drains on a company (or country).
Once you've actually done the job of managing people, you realize just how asinine people can be, and how much work is involved in getting a group of people to work together smoothly. A good manager is worth their weight in gold. The difference in efficiency is enormous - like getting a group of people to clean a beach by assigning each one an equal sized strip parallel to the beach, vs everyone just wandering off in random directions. If he's good at managing and has competent advisors and sub-managers, he'll be fine.
Fusion in the sun happens very rarely.. The compost heap in your backyard makes about as much energy as fusion in the sun - about 276.5 Watts per m^3. Your body makes more energy just from metabolism (maintaining your body temp as you sit around). That's why they have to get it much hotter than the sun to get more energy out of it than they put in.
The sun is just really hot because of its enormous volume to surface area ratio. Each square meter of surface area is covering over 200 million cubic meters of volume.
4) As an employee, you are basically operating under work for hire. When the company hires you, they agree to pay you a certain amount in exchange for owning anything and everything you do (includes copyrights and patents). This includes being able to assign you to work on what it wants, which may not necessarily be what you want. If you want control over what you're assigned to work on, you have to work as an independent contractor. If a company asks you to work on a DoD project as a contractor and you don't want to, you simply refuse the contract.
This additional control as an independent contractor does not come for free. Being a contractor involves more risk. There's no safety net. You don't know if you'll be able to get sufficient contracts to continue working after this contract is completed, whereas a company continues paying you and would be responsible for reassigning an employee to a new task after the current one is completed. Your income is not stable (different contracts pay different amounts), and can go down (future contracts may pay less, whereas most companies do not decrease employee pay except in dire circumstances). You also have to handle your own insurance, bookkeeping, marketing, and taxes (most first-time contractors get a rude awakening when they learn your employer has been paying half your Social Security and Medicare taxes, and as a self-employed contractor you are now responsible for paying the whole thing).
That's basically the trade-off when you choose to become an employee. You cede control over all of these things to the company (which handles it all for you) in exchange for stability (a consistent income, steady work, being fired/let go only under certain circumstances). This includes ceding control over what you're assigned to work on. (The Google walk-out is a bit of a grey area, since Google employees are granted stock options meaning they're part-owners of the company. Which would give them a small say in what they're assigned to work on.)
He actually made two huge blunders. 1) Didn't have a backup. 2) Deliberately told Adobe software to use the Videos folder on his external drive as a temp folder, then told it to clear that temp folder, which it dutifully did.