It's not random that a guy goes missing on April 1st, makes a few help me tweets on September 3rd and is then released a day or so later.
Maybe we're mixing up cause and effect? Maybe they decided they were going to release him, and one of the captors said, "Hey, he seems to know a lot about this Internet stuff. Before we let him go, can I see if he can get the Internet working on my phone?"
This really just should be made illegal. Both for copyrights and patents. Purchasing an intellectual monopoly with intent to cause fiscal harm to another party is profiteering and should be made illegal.
There's nothing wrong with suing for copyright/patent violation per se. You're forgetting that while yes, it causes fiscal harm to another, the "another" has already caused fiscal harm to the copyright/patent holder. In effect the lawsuit is just squaring the books and thus discouraging copyright/patent violation.
Where the problem comes about is when it becomes more profitable to file such suits than to normally sell the item under copyright/patent protection. The music industry has already passed this point (their current average settlement multiplied by the potential number of lawsuits they could bring far exceeds the entire RIAA's gross revenue). The Hurt Locker lawsuits come pretty close to this (~$15 million sought in settlements, vs. $15 mil production costs and $45 gross refenue). And in this particular case, since the company bought the rights to the article solely for the purpose of suing, that's a pretty clear sign that the lawsuit value of the copyright exceeded the value of the article under copyright itself.
When the value of a lawsuit for infringing a copyright/patent exceeds the market value of the work/invention used as intended, then you have a system which can be mathematically proven to be hurting the economy more than it helps any time a lawsuit happens. The solution is to scale back the awards in these suits so this is no longer the case.
Do they know what IP addresses these bots are connecting from? Is it possible to make a blacklist? How can I avoid accepting mail from these 2.5 million computers?
We've traced the spam... it's coming from inside your house!
This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.
You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences?
How do you figure that? You're assuming that the consequences of banning this would be harmful. There are two cases to consider here - one where the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, and another where they are operating below that.
If the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, then this becomes a zero-sum game. The gamer's packets being prioritized come at the price of other paying customers' packets being de-prioritized. In essence, the other customers are not getting the bandwidth they paid for. The ISP transmits the same number of packets, they collect the same amount of money from regular customers, and they collect more money from the gamers. In other words, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.
If the ISP is operating below 100% bandwidth, then the gamer gains nothing. His packets travel out with the same latency as regular customers' packets, so he gains nothing by paying extra. Again, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.
So in both cases, the harm comes from offering to prioritize gaming traffic for an extra fee. At its heart, that's what Net Neutrality aims to prevent - ISP using their monopoly position over your network data to extract more money from you while they do the exact same amount of work. Net neutrality encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the correct way - by adding more bandwidth. Except for illegal traffic (spam, copyrighted downloading), prioritization encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the wrong way - by not adding more bandwidth when they obviously need it, and taking bandwidth some customers have legitimately paid for and should get, and giving it to someone else who paid more.
Now, if ISPs wanted to lower prices for people willing to have their bandwidth degraded, while raising prices for people wanting to have their bandwidth prioritized, thus keeping their revenue the same, then there's no problem. But no ISP is going to do that because it involves them doing a whole lot of work implementing all this for no net revenue gain. The whole reason prioritization (of legal traffic) makes economic sense to ISPs is because it's essentially robbing from Peter to pay Paul, without Peter knowing that he's being robbed, and Paul is willing to pay extra for the service.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
1. That study took the wage increase of pupils due to a good kindergarten teacher and attributed it to the teacher. By asking kindergarten teachers be paid $320k, in essence you're asking the entirety of the pupil's increased potential be attributed to the kindergarten teacher; none to the pupil him/herself, none to any teachers at other grades, none to the educational system set up (buildings, libraries, school buses, etc).
2. As it happens, the U.S. already spends ~$9700 per pupil per year on public education. Project that out to a class of 35 and you're at $340k per teacher. So it actually sounds like we're spending about the right amount of money on education, maybe a little too much (you want your education system to realize a greater economic gain than what you've invested). The problem with low teacher pay isn't because we're not funding education enough. It's that the public education system is vastly inefficient and probably corrupt in places. A public airing of the dirty laundry like in TFA is probably what's needed to help clean it up and help increase teacher pay by reducing waste on underperforming teachers and elsewhere in the system.
Except that the "regulation is bad" dogma worked. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA providers while GSM originally used TDMA. The marketplace in the U.S. chose CDMA as the winner because it worked better and wasted less bandwidth than TDMA. The folks making the GSM spec agreed, and the 3G version of GSM in Europe (UMTS) used wideband CDMA.
In fact you can probably thank CDMA in the U.S. and Japan for getting you UMTS and HSDPA as quickly as you got it. The CDMA carriers got 3G speeds almost two years before GSM. GSM had to scramble to develop and push out technology would could offer 3G speeds ASAP to remain competitive. What would the world have missed out on if the U.S. had initially forced all its carriers to use the GSM standard? Standards are fine (I think SIM cards are a great idea), but some competition between standards is also necessary to keep technological improvements coming.
People seem to think that GSM is some static, monolithic standard. It's not - it is constantly changing and improving. About the only thing that's still the same with GSM is the SIM card. It's been integrating new technologies into the spec as we find out from real-world use what exactly works better. The same is happening with LTE - rather than a strict standard which defines exactly what technology you must implement, it's focusing more on flexibility and interoperability regardless of the specifics each company chooses to implement. That way you keep competition alive, but phones are still able to interoperate. Kinda like TCP/IP and how the Internet works regardless of your specific hardware.
When you say "deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications," it sounds like he stole Monsanto seed and planted it in his field. From reading the wiki page, it sounds more like he collected seeds from his own fields that had been pollinated with Monsanto GM naturally. In the former case, I'd say Monsanto should win - stealing their seeds is wrong. But if his fields had been naturally pollinated, why should he be responsible for Monsanto's inability to contain their pollen?
The court erred in their ruling. From the court ruling: "The trial judge found the patent to be valid and allowed the action, concluding that the appellants knew or ought to have known that they saved and planted seed containing the patented gene and cell and that they sold the resulting crop also containing the patented gene and cell. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the decision but made no finding on patent validity."
In other words, the Canadian courts took as fact Monsanto's word that their patented gene could not spread naturally, so if Mr. Schmeiser found crop which was Roundup-tolerant, he ought to have known that he was infringing the patent. Since it's now become clear that the gene can spread despite the best efforts of Monsanto's geneticists to prevent it, the ruling is in error and should be overturned.
In fact, if he was in the business of selling non-GMO, the contamination of his fields could cost him value, customers, or even entire markets.
A group of organic farmers in Canada filed suit claiming exactly that. The presence of GMO grains in Canada prohibits their export to the EU (where GMO is banned). These farmers argued that Monsanto, by selling GMO seed in Canada, was economically harming them by cutting them off from this market.
I've never really understood the complaints about eBay sniping. Set your maximum bid at the actual maximum that you want to pay. Whether someone snipes or not, if your bid is the highest you will win. If it's not, you won't.
Sniping is stupid because it wastes my time. Say I want to buy a single widget. I find it on eBay and place a bid. I wait 2 weeks for the auction to end. It looks like I'm going to win the bid, then I'm sniped at the last minute. Now I go find another widget. I place a bid on that one, wait 2 weeks, and I'm sniped again. I place a bid on a third widget, wait 2 weeks, and this time I manage to win the widget. Total time to acquire said item: 6 weeks and 3 search sessions on eBay.
The way it would work without sniping is: I find a widget and bid on it. I'm instantly outbid because the people interested in it have properly placed a maximum bid. So I go find a different widget. Place a bid, and am instantly outbid. So I find a third widget. This time my bid is the max, and two weeks later I have my widget. Total time to acquire said item: 2 weeks and 1 search session on eBay.
Unless you're willing to bid on multiple widgets when you only want one (and risk winning more than one auction), sniping wastes the time of every bidder who doesn't win. The whole point of the Internet is to speed up communication and interaction between people. Sniping slows it down. The only reasons eBay allows it is because it creates uncertainty, thus encouraging people to bid higher than they really want to (translating into higher prices and more profit for eBay). And it forces people to come back to their site over and over again at a different date.
For those not up to speed on jet engine technology, modern turbofans are essentially ducted propellers. The engine itself occupies a small section in the center. It burns fuel and throws the air it consumes out the back at a higher speed. This generates about 20% of the total thrust. The rest of the energy goes into spinning the bypass fan blades. Just like a propeller, they grab large chunks of air which never goes through the combustion chamber, and push it out the back at higher speed to generate about 80% of the thrust.
In current engine designs, the blades of the two are locked together (although some of the compressor blades inside the engine may rotate at a different speed). For the bypass fan blades to be spinning, the engine must also be on and spinning. The idea behind this hybrid is to decouple them so they can operate independently of each other. The bypass fan would be spun using an electric motor. I don't know the numbers involved, but theoretically that would mean you could always run the jet engine at its most efficient RPM to generate electricity, and even turn it off if there's little thrust required and the batteries have enough juice to run the bypass fan (e.g. descent).
if bush i in iraq i had decided to push on to baghdad and topple saddam in the early 1990s after racing across the desert unimpeded, then the world would have seen that as justified
however, the political fear of americans coming home in bodybags was too much, so they turned around and left saddam in power. kuwait was liberated, saddam was cowed, end of story... not
The UN mandate authorizing military action against Iraq in Gulf War I only allowed for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and safeguarding Kuwait. The world would not have seen racing to Baghdad as justified because the UN mandate did not allow for it. Bush I made the right decision to stop where we did. There was even some debate that occupying Southern Iraq violated the mandate (which was quickly rectified by passing UN mandates for enforcing no-fly zones, albeit not in time to help the Shiites revolting in the South - Gen. Schwartzkopf acknowledged he made a mistake when negotiating the cessation of hostilities by agreeing to let Iraq fly helicopters, thinking the Iraqis wished to transport equipment and wounded, not fly gunships). The U.S. only suffered 114 casualties in Gulf War I - more soldiers died to non-combat accidents during the deployment than in combat. So it's highly unlikely that there was any fear of a political backlash from Americans coming home in body bags at that point.
If you think the UN should get into the job of toppling dictators, then it's a different story. But the UN has always been extremely reluctant to get involved in the internal affairs of a member country, even if said country is perpetrating gross violations of human rights. That's why Bush II wasn't able to get UN support. Ultimately, what Saddam chose to do in Iraq, be it build NBC weapons or gas Kurds, was an internal affair. The UN passing a resolution authorizing attacking a member country due to activities it was conducting internally sets a really bad precedent for sovereignty, which could come back to haunt any member country doing something which the global community at large frowns upon. Think of the UN as an international policing body, not an intranational policing body.
Remember, the argument used by Bush II to get the UN to sign off on Gulf War II was not just that Saddam had WMDs, but also that said WMDs were a threat to other nations. At the time most nations and most people thought the first part was probably true even if there was no ironclad proof, but the second part was so speculative that the UN didn't sign off on it.
The article specifically mentions Bavaria, a region a thousand miles (and several countries) away. I admit I'm just an ignorant American, but surely this doesn't make any sense?
Most of the U.S. sits between 30-48 degrees latitude. The prevailing winds there blow from West to East, so it's easy to understand your confusion about radioactive fallout making its way westward.
Most of Europe sits from 40-60 degrees latitude, with Scandinavia going even higher. When you get up near 60 degrees latitude, the prevailing winds blow the opposite way from East to West. Chernobyl was at about 50 degrees latitude. The day it caught fire, the high level winds were blowing mostly to the North. That took the fallout up near the 60 degree mark, where the winds then blew it SW over Scandinavia and Britain. Then it got picked up by the regular West to East trade winds at 40 degrees latitude and contaminated most of Central Europe. One of the first clues the world outside the USSR got about the disaster was from a nuclear plant in Sweden having its radiation alarms triggered by the clothes of workers trying to enter the plant.
Indeed. The US system seems bizarre to the rest of the world.
In the rest of the world, countries either don't even have a credit reporting system, or if they do, it works from the assumption that you start with GOOD credit history, and the only thing that hurts it are previous debts you have defaulted on. I.e. someone that has never had any credit cards or other debt will be able to get a loan just as easily as someone who has had previous debt, but has paid it off on time etc. The idea of 'building' a credit history is un-necessary - just don't default on debts and you will be fine.
This may be because the U.S. has a larger immigrant and migrant population than most other countries. I personally know someone who came to attend a university in the U.S., got a credit card, ran up tens of thousands of dollars in charges, then when he finished school he simply moved back to his home country without paying. Another person intended to move to the U.S., got a work visa and was in line for a green card, racked up over $100k in loan and credit card debt, decided he could never repay it, and simply moved back to his home country.
Anti-discrimination laws prohibit profiling based on race or nationality, and it's simple enough to lie about citizenship (a proper visa will get you a social security number). So there's no easy way to determine if someone is a risk to flee the country without repaying debt. Assuming everyone is such a risk until proven otherwise would be a logical response, so you get a system where everyone starts with bad credit and has to work towards good.
Although technically, the blur in the image itself already recorded the motion, with better precision and without calibration issues. So this is more of supplementary data.
The problem I had attempting to remove motion blur with deconvolution was that it's easy to pick out the range of the motion from the size and length of the blur. What's not so easy to pick out is the time domain information of the motion. e.g. My camera may shake from left to right (range) as I take a picture, but it rarely shakes at a constant rate. It may be moving slower at the start of the picture, while speeding up towards the end. Without this time-domain information, if you deconvolve assuming constant motion, the result is unsatisfactory and quite often worse than the initial blurry picture. The problem is made worse in that the best parts of the image for figuring out range of motion (bright light points which turn into streaks) are the worst parts for figuring out the time-domain info (bright lights tend to blow out, so don't preserve if the camera was moving slowly or quickly).
Having an accelerometer record the exact nature of the motion as it happens is a really clever way to solve this problem.
Hate to rain on the parade, but if you compare that graphic to a breakdown of energy sources, it's pretty obvious renewables are getting a much larger subsidy per unit of energy produced. I dunno why people who make charts like yours insist on comparing numbers in such a skewed way. It's like claiming the Johnsons with a food budget of just $250/mo are somehow more frugal than the Smiths who have a food budget of $750/mo. Leaving out the fact that the Johnsons live alone, while the Smiths have 20 people living in their household. My belief is you can convince more people with intellectual honesty than by tricking them with statistics.
Agreed on the stuff about pollution and externalized negatives.
Not only that, 2.8 GB / 100 million users = 30 bytes per user. The vast majority of those "100 million users" probably had nothing on their Facebook pages and were dummy or deleted accounts.
Not quite... It was more like the council had a non-disclosure agreement, and Rambus showed them what they were working on, after which a couple of the other manufacturers turned around and blatantly copied the inventions. Unfortunately for them, the patents in question had been filed long before.
Which is why Rambus has been awarded compensation in several judgments.
JEDEC operated on a cooperative basis and required that its members participate in good
faith. According to JEDEC policy and practice, members were expected to reveal the existence
of patents and patent applications that later might be enforced against those practicing the
JEDEC standards. In addition, JEDEC members were obligated to offer assurances to license
patented technologies on RAND terms, before members voted to adopt a standard that would
incorporate those technologies. The intent of JEDEC policy and practice was to prevent
anticompetitive hold-up.
Rambus, however, chose to disregard JEDEC's policy and practice, as well as the duty to
act in good faith. Instead, Rambus deceived the other JEDEC members. Rambus capitalized on
JEDEC's policy and practice - and also on the expectations of the JEDEC members - in several
ways. Rambus refused to disclose the existence of its patents and applications, which deprived
JEDEC members of critical information as they worked to evaluate potential standards. Rambus
took additional actions that misled members to believe that Rambus was not seeking patents that
would cover implementations of the standards under consideration by JEDEC. Rambus also
went a step further: through its participation in JEDEC, Rambus gained information about the
pending standard, and then amended its patent applications to ensure that subsequently-issued
patents would cover the ultimate standard. Through its successful strategy, Rambus was able to
conceal its patents and patent applications until after the standards were adopted and the market
was locked in. Only then did Rambus reveal its patents - through patent infringement lawsuits
against JEDEC members who practiced the standard.
The Commission finds that Rambus violated Section 5 of the FTC Act by engaging in
exclusionary conduct that contributed significantly to the acquisition of monopoly power in four
relevant and related markets. We further find a sufficient causal link between Rambus's
exclusionary conduct and JEDEC's adoption of the SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM standards (but
not the subsequent DDR2-SDRAM standard). Questions remain, however, regarding how the
Commission can best determine the appropriate remedy. Accordingly, the Commission orders
additional briefing for further consideration of remedial issues.
Yes Rambus had some patents pending before they approached JEDEC. But the whole point of being a member of JEDEC was to disclose those patents and negotiate licenses for the patents before the technologies were codified as a standard. That way the other members could decide, with all information in hand, which memory technology they would make the standard. Rambus deliberately failed to do this and did not disclose what they were patenting, essentially tricking the others into creating a memory standard which incorporated their patented technology so they could later threaten them with patent infringement lawsuits. They event went so far as to take ideas other JEDEC members revealed with the understanding that it wouldn't be patented so everyone would be free to use it, and incorporated them into their own patents.
The reason Rambus "won" was because even though the FTC found that they violated JEDEC's policies, the courts still found that the patents were valid. Normally when you write a contract, you're supposed to include
The "free market" theory is obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.
The problem is that there is no free market of ISPs here. Most municipalities have government mandated monopolies. In most cases, one cable provider and one telephone provider. Only those two have been "blessed" by the local government to provide service in the area. If your phone service hasn't run fiber to the home yet, the speed difference between cable and DSL effectively means you have one choice for high-speed broadband. So I don't see how the fact that it's not working is a repudiation of the free market. If anything, it's saying that government-granted monopolies don't work.
In this case, the "entire population" would be all of the U.S. You survey a random sample of the U.S., find how many people have used AT&T, and find what percentage of those people are/were happy with AT&T. Best results if you do the same thing with all carriers and compare. Self-selection sampling error is taught in Stats 101, and the only people who don't account for it are people who haven't yet learned about it, or who are deliberately trying to misuse stats to deceive others.
Um, if you do a subjective survey of only people who use the service, of course it's going to get high marks. The people who are dissatisfied with it have mostly left for a different service. This is why you do random samples. So you get a representative sample of the entire population.
The only way the stat they measured carries any weight is if you compare to an identical survey of customers with other phone networks. The relative satisfaction rate between different providers can carry some statistical meaning. e.g. If AT&T's satisfaction rate is 73% and Verizon's is 90% (made up as an example), that tells you something. Otherwise, all you're doing is measuring the degree of self-selection of a self-selected population, which is pretty useless for market analysis.
I wonder what the old phone system would be like if it hadn't had common carrier net neutrality status, or roads, or railroads, or airplanes.
You might want to read up on airline deregulation. It's actually a pretty good argument for a free market approach. Prior to deregulation, the government mandated which routes were flown and what the fares were. Post-deregulation, fares dropped, service expanded, and quality of service went down. But more people could get to where they wanted to go for cheaper, so on the balance they were happier.
Not that I think this changes the net neutrality debate. I'm actually for net neutrality. I'm just against silly "leaving businesses to their own devices is always bad" or "more government regulation is always bad" one-sided non-reasoning.
BP's credibility as a responsible energy corporation is at stake, and this photo indeed was intended to be a demonstration of BP's response to the oil disaster. Knowing that they'd go to such lengths (albeit haphazardly) to doctor--and subsequently lie about--the photos further damages that credibility. Oil spills are bad, but misinformation about them is no less destructive.
So I take it you think the scientists in "Climategate" who admitted to using "tricks" to massage data, and subsequently "lost" the data sets have severely damaged their credibility?
People are not perfect. When judging them, you have to allow some tolerance for mistakes and bad judgment before deciding that they're deliberately trying to mislead you.
As for the latter photo, the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than any camera. Adjusting the brightness of light and dark areas so they're more visible makes the picture more like how it appears to the eye in real life, not less. All photographers tweak this when needed. All of them. In fact the best pro photographers are frequently the best because they can eyeball a scene and know how to set the exposure and use reflectors/fill flash to preserve as much detail for later tweaking (no blown highlights or unrecoverable shadows).
This type of post-processsing was programmed into the machines which printed the negatives of the photos you took of your vacation (back when people used film cameras). Yeah, none of those photos are true to what your camera recorded. If you're shooting your digital camera on auto mode, its computer is probably doing this sort of adjustment automatically too (tweaking the shape of the brightness histogram to enhance contrast). The only time you don't want to do this type of editing is for law enforcement or scientific applications (e.g. Mars rover photos), where the raw luminance values may contain meaningful scientific data or constitute evidence. BP doing it for a publicity photo is a complete non-story.
Certainly some people prefer glossy screens. But nearly every poll on the subject I've found with Google shows matte being slightly or strongly preferred over glossy. The truth is, manufacturers are moving to glossy screens because they're cheaper, not because they're preferred.
Yeah, the discussion really should be about cheap glossy screens with no anti-reflective coating vs. good glossy screens with good anti-reflective coatings. Go to any store which has a bunch of laptops on display. Turn them off and check out the reflections from the glossy screens. Some are much more reflective than others. The best ones have so little reflection that it's hard to even tell it's a glossy screen.
But so many manufacturers cut so many corners that they just slap the cheapest screen they can get into the laptop and ship it. Long ago I bought Thinkpads where all the screens were matte. My first glossy screen was a Sony, which I bought without knowing it had AR coatings. Using it for a year led me to think all the talk about reflections on glossy screens was just hype. I could position it with a lamp directly behind reflected on the screen, and the reflection was barely visible.
So based on that experience, my next laptop I ordered sight unseen with a glossy screen. When I got it... the screen was almost unusable due to the reflections. I couldn't even watch movies on it in the dark because the light from the screen would light up my face and shirt, and I could clearly see those reflected on the screen. Ever since then, I always go for a matte screen, or a glossy screen I know has decent AR coatings.
So really, the hierarchy is: glossy with AR coatings > matte > glossy without AR coatings.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we're mixing up cause and effect? Maybe they decided they were going to release him, and one of the captors said, "Hey, he seems to know a lot about this Internet stuff. Before we let him go, can I see if he can get the Internet working on my phone?"
There's nothing wrong with suing for copyright/patent violation per se. You're forgetting that while yes, it causes fiscal harm to another, the "another" has already caused fiscal harm to the copyright/patent holder. In effect the lawsuit is just squaring the books and thus discouraging copyright/patent violation.
Where the problem comes about is when it becomes more profitable to file such suits than to normally sell the item under copyright/patent protection. The music industry has already passed this point (their current average settlement multiplied by the potential number of lawsuits they could bring far exceeds the entire RIAA's gross revenue). The Hurt Locker lawsuits come pretty close to this (~$15 million sought in settlements, vs. $15 mil production costs and $45 gross refenue). And in this particular case, since the company bought the rights to the article solely for the purpose of suing, that's a pretty clear sign that the lawsuit value of the copyright exceeded the value of the article under copyright itself.
When the value of a lawsuit for infringing a copyright/patent exceeds the market value of the work/invention used as intended, then you have a system which can be mathematically proven to be hurting the economy more than it helps any time a lawsuit happens. The solution is to scale back the awards in these suits so this is no longer the case.
Should an emergency arise, the CEO could ring a bell and a specially trained board member could come in and take over running the company.
We've traced the spam... it's coming from inside your house!
How do you figure that? You're assuming that the consequences of banning this would be harmful. There are two cases to consider here - one where the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, and another where they are operating below that.
If the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, then this becomes a zero-sum game. The gamer's packets being prioritized come at the price of other paying customers' packets being de-prioritized. In essence, the other customers are not getting the bandwidth they paid for. The ISP transmits the same number of packets, they collect the same amount of money from regular customers, and they collect more money from the gamers. In other words, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.
If the ISP is operating below 100% bandwidth, then the gamer gains nothing. His packets travel out with the same latency as regular customers' packets, so he gains nothing by paying extra. Again, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.
So in both cases, the harm comes from offering to prioritize gaming traffic for an extra fee. At its heart, that's what Net Neutrality aims to prevent - ISP using their monopoly position over your network data to extract more money from you while they do the exact same amount of work. Net neutrality encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the correct way - by adding more bandwidth. Except for illegal traffic (spam, copyrighted downloading), prioritization encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the wrong way - by not adding more bandwidth when they obviously need it, and taking bandwidth some customers have legitimately paid for and should get, and giving it to someone else who paid more.
Now, if ISPs wanted to lower prices for people willing to have their bandwidth degraded, while raising prices for people wanting to have their bandwidth prioritized, thus keeping their revenue the same, then there's no problem. But no ISP is going to do that because it involves them doing a whole lot of work implementing all this for no net revenue gain. The whole reason prioritization (of legal traffic) makes economic sense to ISPs is because it's essentially robbing from Peter to pay Paul, without Peter knowing that he's being robbed, and Paul is willing to pay extra for the service.
1. That study took the wage increase of pupils due to a good kindergarten teacher and attributed it to the teacher. By asking kindergarten teachers be paid $320k, in essence you're asking the entirety of the pupil's increased potential be attributed to the kindergarten teacher; none to the pupil him/herself, none to any teachers at other grades, none to the educational system set up (buildings, libraries, school buses, etc).
2. As it happens, the U.S. already spends ~$9700 per pupil per year on public education. Project that out to a class of 35 and you're at $340k per teacher. So it actually sounds like we're spending about the right amount of money on education, maybe a little too much (you want your education system to realize a greater economic gain than what you've invested). The problem with low teacher pay isn't because we're not funding education enough. It's that the public education system is vastly inefficient and probably corrupt in places. A public airing of the dirty laundry like in TFA is probably what's needed to help clean it up and help increase teacher pay by reducing waste on underperforming teachers and elsewhere in the system.
Except that the "regulation is bad" dogma worked. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA providers while GSM originally used TDMA. The marketplace in the U.S. chose CDMA as the winner because it worked better and wasted less bandwidth than TDMA. The folks making the GSM spec agreed, and the 3G version of GSM in Europe (UMTS) used wideband CDMA.
In fact you can probably thank CDMA in the U.S. and Japan for getting you UMTS and HSDPA as quickly as you got it. The CDMA carriers got 3G speeds almost two years before GSM. GSM had to scramble to develop and push out technology would could offer 3G speeds ASAP to remain competitive. What would the world have missed out on if the U.S. had initially forced all its carriers to use the GSM standard? Standards are fine (I think SIM cards are a great idea), but some competition between standards is also necessary to keep technological improvements coming.
People seem to think that GSM is some static, monolithic standard. It's not - it is constantly changing and improving. About the only thing that's still the same with GSM is the SIM card. It's been integrating new technologies into the spec as we find out from real-world use what exactly works better. The same is happening with LTE - rather than a strict standard which defines exactly what technology you must implement, it's focusing more on flexibility and interoperability regardless of the specifics each company chooses to implement. That way you keep competition alive, but phones are still able to interoperate. Kinda like TCP/IP and how the Internet works regardless of your specific hardware.
The court erred in their ruling. From the court ruling: "The trial judge found the patent to be valid and allowed the action, concluding that the appellants knew or ought to have known that they saved and planted seed containing the patented gene and cell and that they sold the resulting crop also containing the patented gene and cell. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the decision but made no finding on patent validity."
In other words, the Canadian courts took as fact Monsanto's word that their patented gene could not spread naturally, so if Mr. Schmeiser found crop which was Roundup-tolerant, he ought to have known that he was infringing the patent. Since it's now become clear that the gene can spread despite the best efforts of Monsanto's geneticists to prevent it, the ruling is in error and should be overturned.
A group of organic farmers in Canada filed suit claiming exactly that. The presence of GMO grains in Canada prohibits their export to the EU (where GMO is banned). These farmers argued that Monsanto, by selling GMO seed in Canada, was economically harming them by cutting them off from this market.
Sniping is stupid because it wastes my time. Say I want to buy a single widget. I find it on eBay and place a bid. I wait 2 weeks for the auction to end. It looks like I'm going to win the bid, then I'm sniped at the last minute. Now I go find another widget. I place a bid on that one, wait 2 weeks, and I'm sniped again. I place a bid on a third widget, wait 2 weeks, and this time I manage to win the widget. Total time to acquire said item: 6 weeks and 3 search sessions on eBay.
The way it would work without sniping is: I find a widget and bid on it. I'm instantly outbid because the people interested in it have properly placed a maximum bid. So I go find a different widget. Place a bid, and am instantly outbid. So I find a third widget. This time my bid is the max, and two weeks later I have my widget. Total time to acquire said item: 2 weeks and 1 search session on eBay.
Unless you're willing to bid on multiple widgets when you only want one (and risk winning more than one auction), sniping wastes the time of every bidder who doesn't win. The whole point of the Internet is to speed up communication and interaction between people. Sniping slows it down. The only reasons eBay allows it is because it creates uncertainty, thus encouraging people to bid higher than they really want to (translating into higher prices and more profit for eBay). And it forces people to come back to their site over and over again at a different date.
The press release is devoid of details, but a google search turns up that they're decoupling the jet engine (which generates the power) from the bypass fan (which generates most of the thrust).
For those not up to speed on jet engine technology, modern turbofans are essentially ducted propellers. The engine itself occupies a small section in the center. It burns fuel and throws the air it consumes out the back at a higher speed. This generates about 20% of the total thrust. The rest of the energy goes into spinning the bypass fan blades. Just like a propeller, they grab large chunks of air which never goes through the combustion chamber, and push it out the back at higher speed to generate about 80% of the thrust.
In current engine designs, the blades of the two are locked together (although some of the compressor blades inside the engine may rotate at a different speed). For the bypass fan blades to be spinning, the engine must also be on and spinning. The idea behind this hybrid is to decouple them so they can operate independently of each other. The bypass fan would be spun using an electric motor. I don't know the numbers involved, but theoretically that would mean you could always run the jet engine at its most efficient RPM to generate electricity, and even turn it off if there's little thrust required and the batteries have enough juice to run the bypass fan (e.g. descent).
The UN mandate authorizing military action against Iraq in Gulf War I only allowed for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and safeguarding Kuwait. The world would not have seen racing to Baghdad as justified because the UN mandate did not allow for it. Bush I made the right decision to stop where we did. There was even some debate that occupying Southern Iraq violated the mandate (which was quickly rectified by passing UN mandates for enforcing no-fly zones, albeit not in time to help the Shiites revolting in the South - Gen. Schwartzkopf acknowledged he made a mistake when negotiating the cessation of hostilities by agreeing to let Iraq fly helicopters, thinking the Iraqis wished to transport equipment and wounded, not fly gunships). The U.S. only suffered 114 casualties in Gulf War I - more soldiers died to non-combat accidents during the deployment than in combat. So it's highly unlikely that there was any fear of a political backlash from Americans coming home in body bags at that point.
If you think the UN should get into the job of toppling dictators, then it's a different story. But the UN has always been extremely reluctant to get involved in the internal affairs of a member country, even if said country is perpetrating gross violations of human rights. That's why Bush II wasn't able to get UN support. Ultimately, what Saddam chose to do in Iraq, be it build NBC weapons or gas Kurds, was an internal affair. The UN passing a resolution authorizing attacking a member country due to activities it was conducting internally sets a really bad precedent for sovereignty, which could come back to haunt any member country doing something which the global community at large frowns upon. Think of the UN as an international policing body, not an intranational policing body.
Remember, the argument used by Bush II to get the UN to sign off on Gulf War II was not just that Saddam had WMDs, but also that said WMDs were a threat to other nations. At the time most nations and most people thought the first part was probably true even if there was no ironclad proof, but the second part was so speculative that the UN didn't sign off on it.
Most of the U.S. sits between 30-48 degrees latitude. The prevailing winds there blow from West to East, so it's easy to understand your confusion about radioactive fallout making its way westward.
Most of Europe sits from 40-60 degrees latitude, with Scandinavia going even higher. When you get up near 60 degrees latitude, the prevailing winds blow the opposite way from East to West. Chernobyl was at about 50 degrees latitude. The day it caught fire, the high level winds were blowing mostly to the North. That took the fallout up near the 60 degree mark, where the winds then blew it SW over Scandinavia and Britain. Then it got picked up by the regular West to East trade winds at 40 degrees latitude and contaminated most of Central Europe. One of the first clues the world outside the USSR got about the disaster was from a nuclear plant in Sweden having its radiation alarms triggered by the clothes of workers trying to enter the plant.
This may be because the U.S. has a larger immigrant and migrant population than most other countries. I personally know someone who came to attend a university in the U.S., got a credit card, ran up tens of thousands of dollars in charges, then when he finished school he simply moved back to his home country without paying. Another person intended to move to the U.S., got a work visa and was in line for a green card, racked up over $100k in loan and credit card debt, decided he could never repay it, and simply moved back to his home country.
Anti-discrimination laws prohibit profiling based on race or nationality, and it's simple enough to lie about citizenship (a proper visa will get you a social security number). So there's no easy way to determine if someone is a risk to flee the country without repaying debt. Assuming everyone is such a risk until proven otherwise would be a logical response, so you get a system where everyone starts with bad credit and has to work towards good.
The problem I had attempting to remove motion blur with deconvolution was that it's easy to pick out the range of the motion from the size and length of the blur. What's not so easy to pick out is the time domain information of the motion. e.g. My camera may shake from left to right (range) as I take a picture, but it rarely shakes at a constant rate. It may be moving slower at the start of the picture, while speeding up towards the end. Without this time-domain information, if you deconvolve assuming constant motion, the result is unsatisfactory and quite often worse than the initial blurry picture. The problem is made worse in that the best parts of the image for figuring out range of motion (bright light points which turn into streaks) are the worst parts for figuring out the time-domain info (bright lights tend to blow out, so don't preserve if the camera was moving slowly or quickly).
Having an accelerometer record the exact nature of the motion as it happens is a really clever way to solve this problem.
Hate to rain on the parade, but if you compare that graphic to a breakdown of energy sources, it's pretty obvious renewables are getting a much larger subsidy per unit of energy produced. I dunno why people who make charts like yours insist on comparing numbers in such a skewed way. It's like claiming the Johnsons with a food budget of just $250/mo are somehow more frugal than the Smiths who have a food budget of $750/mo. Leaving out the fact that the Johnsons live alone, while the Smiths have 20 people living in their household. My belief is you can convince more people with intellectual honesty than by tricking them with statistics.
Agreed on the stuff about pollution and externalized negatives.
Not only that, 2.8 GB / 100 million users = 30 bytes per user. The vast majority of those "100 million users" probably had nothing on their Facebook pages and were dummy or deleted accounts.
Holy rewriting of history. Lemme quote the original FTC Commission report on the case (pdf):
Yes Rambus had some patents pending before they approached JEDEC. But the whole point of being a member of JEDEC was to disclose those patents and negotiate licenses for the patents before the technologies were codified as a standard. That way the other members could decide, with all information in hand, which memory technology they would make the standard. Rambus deliberately failed to do this and did not disclose what they were patenting, essentially tricking the others into creating a memory standard which incorporated their patented technology so they could later threaten them with patent infringement lawsuits. They event went so far as to take ideas other JEDEC members revealed with the understanding that it wouldn't be patented so everyone would be free to use it, and incorporated them into their own patents.
The reason Rambus "won" was because even though the FTC found that they violated JEDEC's policies, the courts still found that the patents were valid. Normally when you write a contract, you're supposed to include
The problem is that there is no free market of ISPs here. Most municipalities have government mandated monopolies. In most cases, one cable provider and one telephone provider. Only those two have been "blessed" by the local government to provide service in the area. If your phone service hasn't run fiber to the home yet, the speed difference between cable and DSL effectively means you have one choice for high-speed broadband. So I don't see how the fact that it's not working is a repudiation of the free market. If anything, it's saying that government-granted monopolies don't work.
In this case, the "entire population" would be all of the U.S. You survey a random sample of the U.S., find how many people have used AT&T, and find what percentage of those people are/were happy with AT&T. Best results if you do the same thing with all carriers and compare. Self-selection sampling error is taught in Stats 101, and the only people who don't account for it are people who haven't yet learned about it, or who are deliberately trying to misuse stats to deceive others.
Um, if you do a subjective survey of only people who use the service, of course it's going to get high marks. The people who are dissatisfied with it have mostly left for a different service. This is why you do random samples. So you get a representative sample of the entire population.
The only way the stat they measured carries any weight is if you compare to an identical survey of customers with other phone networks. The relative satisfaction rate between different providers can carry some statistical meaning. e.g. If AT&T's satisfaction rate is 73% and Verizon's is 90% (made up as an example), that tells you something. Otherwise, all you're doing is measuring the degree of self-selection of a self-selected population, which is pretty useless for market analysis.
Didn't you get the memo? 99.7% of computers sold without an OS are used for piracy!
You might want to read up on airline deregulation. It's actually a pretty good argument for a free market approach. Prior to deregulation, the government mandated which routes were flown and what the fares were. Post-deregulation, fares dropped, service expanded, and quality of service went down. But more people could get to where they wanted to go for cheaper, so on the balance they were happier.
Not that I think this changes the net neutrality debate. I'm actually for net neutrality. I'm just against silly "leaving businesses to their own devices is always bad" or "more government regulation is always bad" one-sided non-reasoning.
So I take it you think the scientists in "Climategate" who admitted to using "tricks" to massage data, and subsequently "lost" the data sets have severely damaged their credibility?
People are not perfect. When judging them, you have to allow some tolerance for mistakes and bad judgment before deciding that they're deliberately trying to mislead you.
As for the latter photo, the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than any camera. Adjusting the brightness of light and dark areas so they're more visible makes the picture more like how it appears to the eye in real life, not less. All photographers tweak this when needed. All of them. In fact the best pro photographers are frequently the best because they can eyeball a scene and know how to set the exposure and use reflectors/fill flash to preserve as much detail for later tweaking (no blown highlights or unrecoverable shadows).
This type of post-processsing was programmed into the machines which printed the negatives of the photos you took of your vacation (back when people used film cameras). Yeah, none of those photos are true to what your camera recorded. If you're shooting your digital camera on auto mode, its computer is probably doing this sort of adjustment automatically too (tweaking the shape of the brightness histogram to enhance contrast). The only time you don't want to do this type of editing is for law enforcement or scientific applications (e.g. Mars rover photos), where the raw luminance values may contain meaningful scientific data or constitute evidence. BP doing it for a publicity photo is a complete non-story.
Certainly some people prefer glossy screens. But nearly every poll on the subject I've found with Google shows matte being slightly or strongly preferred over glossy. The truth is, manufacturers are moving to glossy screens because they're cheaper, not because they're preferred.
Yeah, the discussion really should be about cheap glossy screens with no anti-reflective coating vs. good glossy screens with good anti-reflective coatings. Go to any store which has a bunch of laptops on display. Turn them off and check out the reflections from the glossy screens. Some are much more reflective than others. The best ones have so little reflection that it's hard to even tell it's a glossy screen.
But so many manufacturers cut so many corners that they just slap the cheapest screen they can get into the laptop and ship it. Long ago I bought Thinkpads where all the screens were matte. My first glossy screen was a Sony, which I bought without knowing it had AR coatings. Using it for a year led me to think all the talk about reflections on glossy screens was just hype. I could position it with a lamp directly behind reflected on the screen, and the reflection was barely visible.
So based on that experience, my next laptop I ordered sight unseen with a glossy screen. When I got it... the screen was almost unusable due to the reflections. I couldn't even watch movies on it in the dark because the light from the screen would light up my face and shirt, and I could clearly see those reflected on the screen. Ever since then, I always go for a matte screen, or a glossy screen I know has decent AR coatings.
So really, the hierarchy is: glossy with AR coatings > matte > glossy without AR coatings.