It's common for businesses to have multiple lines. When they call you from one of those lines, they want their main phone number to show up on caller ID, not the number for that particular line. So they're allowed to spoof the caller ID for all those lines to show as their main number.
The problem is telemarketers spoof caller ID numbers which are not theirs. And the phone companies let them get away with it because those telemarketers account for a large fraction of their revenue (they're basically accepting money to let telemarketers waste the time of their other customers). The fix is for the phone companies to allow multi-line customers to spoof the caller ID only to a number they own.
The URLs you visit are not stored in history if you browse in private mode. I do nearly all my browsing in private mode. Occasionally it's a pain because I'll accidentally close a tab, and ctrl-shift-T (undo tab close) does not work because the browser doesn't know the URL you just closed. But otherwise it hasn't been any different from a regular browser. You have to manually enable extensions to work in private mode, and whitelist certain sites to be able to store cookies. The inability to undo a tab close has been the biggest headache, and it's relatively minor.
If the description in summary is accurate, it sounds like blocking scripts unless you've whitelisted the site should also be effective in preventing it as well (unless a major site which you've whitelisted gets hacked and the malware script injected). Yet another reason to disable javascript by default.
The problem here is that medical software is generally old. Programmers naively expect everyone to update software constantly, which is not feasible when the updates are expensive and require additional training
It's not an update problem. I help maintain the computers and software for several doctors. HIPAA required all hospitals and private practices to switch to electronic medical records by 2013. That deadline and more recent requirements being phased in (ICD-10 - standardized codes for reasons for a medical visit - was required a couple years back) means all medical software is relatively new or updated recently. Any doctor using software more than about 2 years old (for ICD-10) is operating illegally.
The fact that the programmers writing this software are using local time instead of UTC is sheer ignorance, laziness, or incompetence. Another scenario I can think of where local time is a problem is if a patient visits their doctor on the east coast, then immediately flies to the west coast and is hospitalized. The west coast hospital will request the electronic records from the doctor on the east coast. Because it takes some time for the doctor's staff to enter and finalize the data from the patient's visit, due to the different time zones some of the data the west coast hospital receives will be timestamped in the future if the software uses local time.
The confidence interval is 98%, sometimes 95%. That is, just by random chance, 2% or 5% of the time, a study will turn up a correlation which doesn't really exist. The die rolls just happened to come up snake eyes that time. The chances increase the more correlations a study looks for. Like the massive Netherlands study a couple decades back which found a strong correlation between cell phone radiation and certain types of cancer. But it turned out they looked at thousands of possible correlations, so just by chance alone you'd have expected them to find a few hundred random correlations, with a few "strong" ones (strong by chance, not because it was real). Like if you throw a thousand darts at a dartboard, just by pure chance a few will hit the bullseye; not because you're good at throwing darts, but because of random chance.
If (as the media tends to do) you then choose to publicize the studies finding a correlation while ignoring all the studies finding no correlation, then you're committing confirmation bias. Studies which find no positive result still generate valid data. And dismissing them in favor of studies with a positive result is a statistical and logical error. To properly assess what's going on, you need to compare the number of positive result studies with the number of negative result studies. And given the huge number of negative result studies, the greater likelihood here is that this is one of the studies which found a correlation due to a random blip, not something that's real.
Yes, it is an objective standard...and one that does not follow science in any way.
Skipped the chapter on reproductive biology, did you?
The thing most people seem to be missing from this debate is what is the purpose of defining gender in society? With the SCotUS decision allowing same-sex marriages, there are no more legal barriers imposed by gender. About the only issue that remains is which bathroom or changing room people can use. Those in support of LGBT rights consider only the plight of transgender people, and thus come out against bathroom use restrictions based on physical or genetic gender.
But think about it - how does this affect non-transgender people? Why do we have separate male and female bathrooms? What purpose do they serve? It's not the transgender argument - so men can be self-assured in their masculinity by going into the men's bathroom, or women can have their sense of femininity reinforced by stepping into a bathroom marked women-only. The purpose of having separate bathrooms is simple - to make it harder for perverts to peep. Since the vast majority of the population is heterosexual, the vast majority of perverts are also heterosexual, with male perverts wanting to get into the women's bathroom (and I suppose a few vice versa). Imposing restrictions on bathroom use based on gender is a simple way to thwart them. That's the purpose of bathroom gender restrictions. Heterosexuals created separate bathrooms as a way to thwart perverts. They didn't create them as a tool to oppress transgender people, and you arrive at a baseless conclusion if you assume they did.
That's the trade-off here. Like most things in life, there is no solution which results in the best outcome for all. You have to pick the solution with the fewest drawbacks.
If you enforce bathroom use based on physical gender, you stop the perverts, but you inconvenience transgender people.
If you enforce bathroom use based on claimed gender, you accommodate transgender people, but you also eliminate the barrier against peeping perverts (who simply have to claim they're transgender) and inconvenience everyone not wanting to be peeped upon.
The bigger cost to society here is in the second case, since it defeats the entire reason we have separate bathrooms in the first place. So the best choice is to restrict bathroom use based on physical gender. Actually, the best compromise is probably to use apparent gender rather than physical gender. Most peeping toms are unwilling to cross-dress, while most transgender people are happy to. So allowing only people who look like women into the women's bathroom, and people who look like men into the men's bathroom yields the best overall outcome. Thwarts most of the peeping perverts, while allowing most transgender people to use the bathroom they feel they should. After that, completely enclosed single-toilet bathrooms are the next best option.
Alaska has some of if not the biggest oil reserves in the U.S., and makes money from selling oil to the lower 48 states. Instead of the state keeping those proceeds, it distributes it to Alaskan citizens. That makes it different from a UBI because the money comes from actual productivity. Something of value which belonged to each Alaskan citizen was sold, and they are receiving payment for it. Productive transactions like this are positive-sum (both the buyer and seller benefit), and are what make the economy work.
That makes it different from a UBI where there's no additional productivity. In a UBI, you're just redistributing money among the population - taking from the more productive citizens via taxes, and distributing it to other citizens. That makes it zero-sum (one person wins, another person loses). It can have a positive influence if the people receiving the money were underpaid (what Ford stumbled upon when he paid his workers more) or causes people not to create other costs on society (e.g. not resorting to crime). Or it can have a negative influence if it leads people to decrease their average productivity because they'll get money regardless of whether they work.
Venezuela is the perfect example of the difference between the two. When their oil exports were strong, it generated enough productivity (revenue from outside the country) to support their cushy socialist programs. But when the price of oil fell and that source of productivity dried up, they should've cut back the programs to match their decreased revenue. Instead, they tried to maintain the programs at the previous level. That doesn't work because unlike money, productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed has to be produced. If you try to create the illusion that production and consumption are not equal, the economy usually responds by altering the value of your currency to make the valuations of the two equal.
That's what's driving the tremendous inflation they're experiencing. Basically the country is creating $100 in productivity, but promising its citizens $500 in handouts to consume stuff. When you do that, the currency devalues (suffers inflation) so that it now costs $500 to buy what used to cost $100, thereby keeping production and consumption equal.
Kepler is in a slight earth-trailing orbit. 371 days to orbit the sun once, instead of 365 like the Earth. So the Earth should catch up to it again in some 60 years, but because Kepler's orbit is slightly larger it's unlikely to intersect the Earth as the two pass each other again. The orbit was selected because it required less fuel to attain and maintain than the L2 Lagrangian point/a?, meaning more fuel could be used for observations.
After seeing load given in elephant weights, I was expecting cross sectional area to be given as a fraction of human hair width, and disappointed when I didn't see it. We could standardize elephants per hair as a new unit of pressure for the media.
Well, they do say 80 gigapascals
Do note that the glass fibers in regular fiberglass have a tensile strength approaching 5 GPa. So regular materials are within an order of magnitude of what's needed for a space elevator. Fiberglass' performance only craters when you have to use resin to hold disparate fibers together. That's the real challenge here - how to extrude a single really-long carbon nanotube, or glue a bunch of them together with minimal loss of strength. One of the reasons the use of metals is so widespread is because their crystalline grains slide against each other until they interlock, self-solving the "glue a bunch of them together" poblem.
One of the things we covered in my LISP course was how to create a LISP compiler for a system, when the compiler code itself is written in LISP. The trick is to write a compiler which can interpret some basic LISP functions. Then use that to compile the other more complex LISP functions needed by the compiler (written in LISP). Then use that to compile a complete LISP compiler. Nobody really knows what's going on in the machine code for the compiler, since the code giving you the full functionality of LISP was made by a compiler which was made by a compiler.which in turn was made by a compiler which was made by hand-coding.
If you've got proof he spilled classified materials over an unsecured phone, then he absolutely should be jailed like Hillary (who wasn't). But as far as I've been able to tell, the NYT uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing (and you can bet they'd trumpet it if they had). They basically wrote a hit piece implying what could be happening in the hopes that people like you would jump to conclusions and get all stirred up about it. "White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them,"
There are lots of cases where classified materials are protected only by personal cognizance. A coworker of mine visited the Pentagon to meed his project sponsor. While visiting the bathroom, he said hi to another guy holding a bunch of papers in one hand. After he finished his business and went to wash his hands, he noticed the papers were sitting by the sink. Figuring they might be classified, he took them and handed them to the first security officer he saw. He then met with his sponsor. As they were walking to a different area, they passed by bathroom guy being escorted out in handcuffs. Taking classified materials to the bathroom with you under your personal protection is fine. Leaving them there unprotected is what'll get you in trouble. Just like using an unsecured phone is fine, as long as you're careful not to disclose anything classified over it. Just like Clinton using an unsecured email server was fine, right up until it ended up storing classified materials.
Study yields results you agree with. "Of course! It was obvious to begin with." No further review is done.
Study yields results you disagree with. You puzzle over it, nitpick at it, until you come up with some mitigating factors, and can reverse the findings of the study.
That introduces a confirmation bias, where studies will (after revision) on average have results which tend to confirm your preconceived beliefs. To avoid bias, all study results need to be nitpicked to the same degree. You may remember from your high school science courses that one element of your writeup in the conclusion is a discussion of limitations of your experiment and how you may have screwed up. That step is there specifically to force you to nitpick your results even if they confirmed your expectations. No experiment is perfect, and if you can't come up with possible flaws in one which confirms your expectations, you're allowing your biases prevent you from thinking critically..
One of my statistics homework assignments told half the class one thing ("couples with similar personalities have a lower rate of divorce"), the other half of the class was told the opposite (two different homework question printouts, handed out as if they were all the same). Everyone was told to come up with reasons why that trend might be. The next day, both sides presented their answers. Both sides came up with very plausible-sounding reasons and mechanisms to support both results, even though obviously only one of them could be correct. This was to highlight the danger of spending too much effort trying to rationalize the results of an experiment - all results can be made to seem reasonable, blinding you to the bias you're introducing. (And to keep your reasoning honest, I won't tell you which one is correct. That's not what's important here. As long as you're wondering which one is correct, you're reasoning in an unbiased manner. The moment you think one is correct, you're in danger of biasing your reasoning.)
The time change is done to keep sunrise around the same time (by the clock). So there is no GOTO 1 step because once you've shifted the clock so the start of the day coincides with sunrise, there's no need to shift the clock any further.
If the common reference were noon (sun furthest overhead), there would be no issue. In winter sunrise would come a bit later, sunset a bit sooner. But people like to (or liked to in the past) start their day with sunrise. In winter this assures you have the maximum amount of the short daylight available. In summer it assures you don't waste any daylight when sunrise shifts to very early (by the clock).
But in modern society, aside from a few agricultural jobs, the omnipresence of artificial lighting means there's little need to continue to do this. The only real argument for it I can think of is that you can guarantee at least one of the commute times (morning or evening) happens in the safety of daylight. Whereas if you keep the time synchronized around noon, in extreme northern latitudes both morning and evening commute would happen in darkness during winter. But the research I've seen says the time change itself is much more dangerous to people's health than the elevated risk of commuting in the dark.
I'm still trying to figure out what market demand 5G is trying to meet. The only use case I can think of which isn't already met by 4G data is pirating movies (downloading multi-gigabyte files in a short period of time). 4G is already fast enough for streaming, web browsing, email/facebook, video sharing/conferencing. It's already as fast or faster than the wired Internet speeds for anyone except people on fiber or high-end cable Internet plans. As people have joked, 5G speeds would let them blow through their monthly data cap in less than a minute.
The only practical reason I can think of for switching to 5G is that it helps carriers free up congestion. By providing higher burst bandwidth, it gets users off their data network more quickly, leaving more bandwidth for users who want new data.
To play video games in the 1980s, most of us went to the arcade. For me it was a half mile hike and climbing over a brick wall. Or you rode your bike over to a friend's house who had a home video game console (which weren't as good as the arcade games).
TV viewing has been ramping up steadily. It didn't suddenly spike in the 1980s. In fact it flattened out in the 1980s due to video games.
Actually, thinking back to my trips to the arcade, I'd say the biggest change is that parents don't let their kids play outside alone anymore. My parents gave me a bike as a present, and would let me go anywhere as long as I told them where I was going, and was back in time for dinner. My friends and I made several 10+ mile bike trips around the city. So I'd place more blame on the media for exaggerating the danger of child abductions by strangers.
The "High Fructose" in High Fructose Corn Syrup just refers to it having more fructose than regular syrup (which is about 10% fructose, 90% glucose). HFCS used in foods is about 42% fructose, 58% glucose. HFCS used in soft drinks is about 55% fructose, 45% glucose. There's a 90% fructose variety, but it exists just to make shipping easier, and is mixed with syrup at the destination to produce the 42% and 55% varieties of HFCS.
These ratios of fructose to glucose HFCS is about the same as in most fruits. In particular, berries and pomogranites are nearly identical to HFCS, and apples have an even higher concentration of fructose. And obesity was never associated with liking apples or other fruits.
It's the quantity of sugars people are consuming which is the problem, not the type.
Then how about the Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." All men, not just Americans.
My family immigrated into the U.S. legally. Wait list, visa, green card, then finally citizenship. Treating all men equally means people who entered the country illegally should be booted out, and forced to go through the same process we did.
You're not asking for equal rights for illegal immigrants. You're asking that illegal immigrants be given superior rights compared to legal immigrants.
And as an aside, the SCotUS has repeatedly held that U.S. Constitutional protections apply to everyone on U.S. soil, even those who entered the country illegally (heck, they're even counted for the purpose of determining Congressional representation). That was why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay - because it was Cuban soil, not U.S. soil, so he hoped to avoid giving the prisoners there Constitutional rights. So everyone in the U.S. enjoys the same rights and freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The people here illegally just don't get the rights and freedoms associated with U.S. citizenship (mainly, freedom from deportation, and ability to work legally).
But... all the outrage shown by these people against illegal immigration is fake. They want cheap strawberries and cheap fast food and cheap lawn mowing and cheap home construction. If they are really against illegal immigration they will prosecute the employers.
This line is parroted by people who have no idea what employers have to do to insure an employee you hire can legally work in the U.S. It is impossible for an employer to tell if an employee can work in the country legally. Pick your jaw up off the floor and let me repeat that. The U.S. government provides no way for an employer to tell if a prospective employee can legally work in the U.S.
When an employer hires someone, we're not allowed to ask race, nationality, country of origin, or legal status. All we're allowed to do is request the employee fill out form I-9 and present the piece(s) of ID required by the I-9. Most people give their driver's license and social security card. A few give their U.S. passport. Non-citizens give a copy of their work visa in lieu of their social security card.
The employer photocopies these documents, and puts them along with the I-9 in a filing cabinet. That's it.
You don't submit it to the government. There's no cross-check to verify that the IDs are valid, and not forged. Nobody reviews the info the person wrote on the I-9. If the employer suspects the documents are forged, they can refuse to hire the person. But you're taking an enormous risk since you'll be subject to discrimination lawsuits and fines if it turns out the documents were real. The form and copies of the work documents just sit in a filing cabinet. The sole purpose of the I-9 and the copies of the documentation is to prove the employer did their due diligence and asked the employee to present documents they're supposed to have before they can work. In the event that the employer is raided by INS, the I-9 and documents shield the employer from prosecution for hiring illegal immigrants. The illegally immigrants are still hired, it's just that the employer didn't know they were working illegally.
When you hear on the news that some company was raided and INS found illegal immigrants working there, that does not automatically mean the employer intentionally hired illegal immigrants. The employer could have, under current law, hired all those people legally, and some of them were still working illegally. As long as the employer has copies of the I-9 and work documents (fake or not), they have done nothing wrong, even if the employee is in the country and working illegally. Most of the stories you hear about employers "caught" hiring illegal immigrants are simply a result of the employer losing or misfiling the I-9, and they can't provide it to INS after a raid which turned up some people working illegally. (I kept photocopies, and also scanned them to avoid a single point of failure.)
The current system is a joke. With modern technology, it would be trivial for the government to set up a system where the info on the I-9 could be submitted to a government server, which spits out a simple yes/no verification. Or even not tell the employer, and some time later ICE drops by to investigate the person whose I-9 didn't match a known U.S. citizen. Some states have even passed laws making it illegal for employers to report to INS/ICE people who applied for a job but weren't able to fill out the I-9 and provide the requisite documents. It's not the employers who are at fault here. The government doesn't want you to know who is legal or illegal to hire.
A lot of this leniency stems from the post-Civil War era. A lot of people in the ex-Confederacy tried to make hard for freed slaves to work or vote, by denying they were legally eligible to do these things. So the law was set up to force employers and pollsters to assume the person cou
You've got two major errors which mostly but not entirely cancel each other out.
Condensing water produces heat energy. It's why your can of ice cold beer warms up. Water in the air condenses on the can, adding energy to the can and warming up the beer. So you don't need to produce the latent heat energy of evaporation, you just need a means to dissipate it to maintain the temperature of the chilled condensing surface.
To dissipate the energy that's absorbed, all you need is a heat pump (and a sufficient heat sink - typically a (unpotable) water source, the air, or even the ground. Heat pumps operate at a higher-than-one-to-one ratio of energy input to energy pumped. This ratio is given by coefficient of performance, which currently peaks at just above 4 for air conditioners, but depends on the climate and heat sink. If you go with a COP of 4, this divides the required energy by 4.
However, your calculation has overestimated the energy production of solar panels. 2.2 MJ / 1 hour = 611 Watts, which divided by your 4 square meters is just over 150 Watts/m^2. That's the maximum wattage that commercial solar panels can produce. They only produce that when the sun is directly overheat (travels through the least atmosphere) and the panel is pointed directly at the sun.
In real-life applications, unguided PV panels have a capacity factor of about 0.145 for the continental U.S (goes up to about 0.19 in the desert Southwest). Northern Europe is closer to 0.11. Capacity factor takes into account night, latitude, movement of the sun across the sky, weather, and downtime for maintenance. So for a year in the U.S. on average, 1 m^2 of PV panels rated at 150 W capacity would only produce (150 W)*(0.145)*(24 hours) = 522 Wh = 1.88 MJ per day. So 4 m^2 would produce just 7.52 MJ per day. A far cry from the 2.2 MJ per hour of daylight you calculated.
Combine these, and 1 m^2 of PV panels in the middle of the U.S. coupled with a 4.0 COP heat pump could produce 3.42 liters/day of water. So you'd need 14.6 m^2 to yield 50 liters/day, not 16 m^2.
Try bumping your thinking up one more abstraction level. Who pays corporate taxes? Corporate taxes are taken out of profits. Profits are distributed to shareholders. Shareholders wishing larger distributions (higher profits) insist on lower employee wages and higher prices for products. So corporate taxes are paid for via (1) higher product prices, (2) lower employee wages, and (3) lower shareholder distribution.
There's no need for corporate taxes if you just tax those three directly. (1) can be replaced by a sales tax. (2) can be replaced by an earned income tax. (3) can be replaced by a unearned income tax (interest on savings, distributions). None of these can be thwarted by the Double Irish. (1) yields tax revenue in the country where the sale occurred. (2) yields tax revenue in the country where the company is operating (has employees). (3) yields tax revenue in the country where the owners reside. All bases are covered. The only difference is in the bookkeeping.
The only reason the Double Irish works is because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries. People can only exist in one country at a time, so they can't pull off a Double Irish. So it's easy to eliminate this problem - eliminate corporate taxes and shift them to sales, earned income, and unearned income taxes. The only problem is that a large number of people mistakenly think that corporate taxes have no impact on people, and so feel taxing corporations is preferable to taxing people.
There is no difference - no matter what you tax, in the end a person somewhere pays for it. Taxes are an assignment of a percentage of the country's productivity to the government coffers. And since the only source of productivity is people (everything a company does is done by its employees), in the end all taxes are paid for by people. Get yourself over the notion that corporate taxes are necessary and the Double Irish problem vanishes. Corporate taxes accomplish nothing which cannot be accomplished with different taxes.
But from a fiscal point of view, Software was always a subscription, as long as you got your patches and updates. You just never got the bill split up into the initial payment for the software and the subsequent payment for the software assurance subscription, as you had to pay for it all at once.
Technically, anything you buy which wears out is a subscription (rent). If you buy a washing machine for $500, which dies after 5 years (on average) and needs to be replaced with a new $500 washing machine, you are paying $100/year for the washing machine. If you buy a car (new or used) for $20k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $10k, your car ownership is basically the same as renting for $2k/year.
The resistance to a rental model is mainly because most people ignore maintenance and upkeep costs in their purchase decisions. You'll notice I left out the maintenance costs of the car in the above example and it probably never crossed your mind. So people's cursory fiscal analysis of renting vs buying tends to be skewed against renting, because they leave the maintenance and upkeep costs out on the buying side, but which are included as the norm in renting..
Software is the exception however. Software doesn't wear out. If Office 2003 worked and had all the features you ever needed in 2003, then it still works and has all the features you ever needed in 2018. And your one-time payment for it in 2003 could be stretched out to 15+ years. The only issue with software is security patches. Which for an app really should never be an issue if the system were designed properly (require root/admin privileges for an app to do something which modifies the system, don't run third party scripts by default like Office likes to do).
Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription prices are actually pretty reasonable. $120/year for Photoshop and Lightroom. Those used to have an upgrade cost of $150 and $120 respectively, with a new version coming out about every 1.5 years. So effectively their subscription price is the same as ($150 + $120) / ($120) = upgrading every 2.25 years. So cheaper than if you upgraded every version, more expensive than if you upgraded every other version. Back when I did a lot of photography I used to upgrade every other version, but overall I consider it priced pretty fairly. Except now that I do much less photography, the existing one-time-purchase copies of Photoshop and Lightroom I've still got are more than pulling their weight since I can still run them without needing to pay a subscription fee (they don't try to modify the system or run third party scripts, so security updates are unnecessary).
Likewise, Office 365 is priced pretty reasonably too if you planned to stay current with updates. Purchasing Home and Student outright is $150. A one-seat subscription to Office 365 is $70/yr. So about the same as upgrading every 2 years. 6-seat license is $100/yr, which is equivalent to upgrading every 9 years. But is probably more realistically priced since most home users who bought Office illegally installed it on more than one computer at home. (Microsoft wasn't as nice as Adobe. Adobe allowed you to install Photoshop on multiple computers, as long as you only used one copy at a time. A realistic concession to many people having a laptop for travel, and a home PC which was more powerful for doing "real work.")
I don't consider a subscription model valid for an OS though. The OS should work as long as the hardware works, because the two are useless without each other. The only way I'd consider a subscription model reasonable for an OS is if the seller also rents you the hardware for the same term as the OS subscription,. And takes care of any required software and hardware maintenance and fixes during that period.
Provided no critical electrical or fuel lines are pierced in the process
The wings on a plane are the fuel tanks.
Structurally the damage is survivable. It looks similar to bird strikes. The difference is a bird strike is a blob of meat and blood hitting the plane. A drone strike would include lots of spark-inducing metal parts and volatile battery intruding into the fuel tank. The engines have some fire extinguishing capability (a small tank holding fire retardant). But fuel leaking from a wing catching fire would stay on fire until either the all the fuel drained out of the wing, or the plane reached the ground.
Normally that's how it works. But accidents typically happen between two cars. So if human driving is more dangerous than automated driving, then one person choosing to drive increases the risk for everyone else including people driving automated cars.. An analogy might be someone choosing to rock climb El Capitan, vs someone choosing to climb a skyscraper where lots of people are walking on the sidewalk underneath. If he slips and falls from El Capitan, he only kills himself. If he slips and falls off the skyscraper, there's a good chance he'll also kill a pedestrian who deliberate opted for the safer option (not climbing the skyscraper).
Slashdot Mirror
It's common for businesses to have multiple lines. When they call you from one of those lines, they want their main phone number to show up on caller ID, not the number for that particular line. So they're allowed to spoof the caller ID for all those lines to show as their main number.
The problem is telemarketers spoof caller ID numbers which are not theirs. And the phone companies let them get away with it because those telemarketers account for a large fraction of their revenue (they're basically accepting money to let telemarketers waste the time of their other customers). The fix is for the phone companies to allow multi-line customers to spoof the caller ID only to a number they own.
The URLs you visit are not stored in history if you browse in private mode. I do nearly all my browsing in private mode. Occasionally it's a pain because I'll accidentally close a tab, and ctrl-shift-T (undo tab close) does not work because the browser doesn't know the URL you just closed. But otherwise it hasn't been any different from a regular browser. You have to manually enable extensions to work in private mode, and whitelist certain sites to be able to store cookies. The inability to undo a tab close has been the biggest headache, and it's relatively minor.
If the description in summary is accurate, it sounds like blocking scripts unless you've whitelisted the site should also be effective in preventing it as well (unless a major site which you've whitelisted gets hacked and the malware script injected). Yet another reason to disable javascript by default.
It's not an update problem. I help maintain the computers and software for several doctors. HIPAA required all hospitals and private practices to switch to electronic medical records by 2013. That deadline and more recent requirements being phased in (ICD-10 - standardized codes for reasons for a medical visit - was required a couple years back) means all medical software is relatively new or updated recently. Any doctor using software more than about 2 years old (for ICD-10) is operating illegally.
The fact that the programmers writing this software are using local time instead of UTC is sheer ignorance, laziness, or incompetence. Another scenario I can think of where local time is a problem is if a patient visits their doctor on the east coast, then immediately flies to the west coast and is hospitalized. The west coast hospital will request the electronic records from the doctor on the east coast. Because it takes some time for the doctor's staff to enter and finalize the data from the patient's visit, due to the different time zones some of the data the west coast hospital receives will be timestamped in the future if the software uses local time.
They know that. They just looked at that list and figured, "Bah, that's too much work. Let's just throw AI at it and call it a day."
The confidence interval is 98%, sometimes 95%. That is, just by random chance, 2% or 5% of the time, a study will turn up a correlation which doesn't really exist. The die rolls just happened to come up snake eyes that time. The chances increase the more correlations a study looks for. Like the massive Netherlands study a couple decades back which found a strong correlation between cell phone radiation and certain types of cancer. But it turned out they looked at thousands of possible correlations, so just by chance alone you'd have expected them to find a few hundred random correlations, with a few "strong" ones (strong by chance, not because it was real). Like if you throw a thousand darts at a dartboard, just by pure chance a few will hit the bullseye; not because you're good at throwing darts, but because of random chance.
If (as the media tends to do) you then choose to publicize the studies finding a correlation while ignoring all the studies finding no correlation, then you're committing confirmation bias. Studies which find no positive result still generate valid data. And dismissing them in favor of studies with a positive result is a statistical and logical error. To properly assess what's going on, you need to compare the number of positive result studies with the number of negative result studies. And given the huge number of negative result studies, the greater likelihood here is that this is one of the studies which found a correlation due to a random blip, not something that's real.
Obligatory XKCD comic.
Skipped the chapter on reproductive biology, did you?
The thing most people seem to be missing from this debate is what is the purpose of defining gender in society? With the SCotUS decision allowing same-sex marriages, there are no more legal barriers imposed by gender. About the only issue that remains is which bathroom or changing room people can use. Those in support of LGBT rights consider only the plight of transgender people, and thus come out against bathroom use restrictions based on physical or genetic gender.
But think about it - how does this affect non-transgender people? Why do we have separate male and female bathrooms? What purpose do they serve? It's not the transgender argument - so men can be self-assured in their masculinity by going into the men's bathroom, or women can have their sense of femininity reinforced by stepping into a bathroom marked women-only. The purpose of having separate bathrooms is simple - to make it harder for perverts to peep. Since the vast majority of the population is heterosexual, the vast majority of perverts are also heterosexual, with male perverts wanting to get into the women's bathroom (and I suppose a few vice versa). Imposing restrictions on bathroom use based on gender is a simple way to thwart them. That's the purpose of bathroom gender restrictions. Heterosexuals created separate bathrooms as a way to thwart perverts. They didn't create them as a tool to oppress transgender people, and you arrive at a baseless conclusion if you assume they did.
That's the trade-off here. Like most things in life, there is no solution which results in the best outcome for all. You have to pick the solution with the fewest drawbacks.
The bigger cost to society here is in the second case, since it defeats the entire reason we have separate bathrooms in the first place. So the best choice is to restrict bathroom use based on physical gender. Actually, the best compromise is probably to use apparent gender rather than physical gender. Most peeping toms are unwilling to cross-dress, while most transgender people are happy to. So allowing only people who look like women into the women's bathroom, and people who look like men into the men's bathroom yields the best overall outcome. Thwarts most of the peeping perverts, while allowing most transgender people to use the bathroom they feel they should. After that, completely enclosed single-toilet bathrooms are the next best option.
Alaska has some of if not the biggest oil reserves in the U.S., and makes money from selling oil to the lower 48 states. Instead of the state keeping those proceeds, it distributes it to Alaskan citizens. That makes it different from a UBI because the money comes from actual productivity. Something of value which belonged to each Alaskan citizen was sold, and they are receiving payment for it. Productive transactions like this are positive-sum (both the buyer and seller benefit), and are what make the economy work.
That makes it different from a UBI where there's no additional productivity. In a UBI, you're just redistributing money among the population - taking from the more productive citizens via taxes, and distributing it to other citizens. That makes it zero-sum (one person wins, another person loses). It can have a positive influence if the people receiving the money were underpaid (what Ford stumbled upon when he paid his workers more) or causes people not to create other costs on society (e.g. not resorting to crime). Or it can have a negative influence if it leads people to decrease their average productivity because they'll get money regardless of whether they work.
Venezuela is the perfect example of the difference between the two. When their oil exports were strong, it generated enough productivity (revenue from outside the country) to support their cushy socialist programs. But when the price of oil fell and that source of productivity dried up, they should've cut back the programs to match their decreased revenue. Instead, they tried to maintain the programs at the previous level. That doesn't work because unlike money, productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed has to be produced. If you try to create the illusion that production and consumption are not equal, the economy usually responds by altering the value of your currency to make the valuations of the two equal.
That's what's driving the tremendous inflation they're experiencing. Basically the country is creating $100 in productivity, but promising its citizens $500 in handouts to consume stuff. When you do that, the currency devalues (suffers inflation) so that it now costs $500 to buy what used to cost $100, thereby keeping production and consumption equal.
Kepler is in a slight earth-trailing orbit. 371 days to orbit the sun once, instead of 365 like the Earth. So the Earth should catch up to it again in some 60 years, but because Kepler's orbit is slightly larger it's unlikely to intersect the Earth as the two pass each other again. The orbit was selected because it required less fuel to attain and maintain than the L2 Lagrangian point/a?, meaning more fuel could be used for observations.
Do note that the glass fibers in regular fiberglass have a tensile strength approaching 5 GPa. So regular materials are within an order of magnitude of what's needed for a space elevator. Fiberglass' performance only craters when you have to use resin to hold disparate fibers together. That's the real challenge here - how to extrude a single really-long carbon nanotube, or glue a bunch of them together with minimal loss of strength. One of the reasons the use of metals is so widespread is because their crystalline grains slide against each other until they interlock, self-solving the "glue a bunch of them together" poblem.
One of the things we covered in my LISP course was how to create a LISP compiler for a system, when the compiler code itself is written in LISP. The trick is to write a compiler which can interpret some basic LISP functions. Then use that to compile the other more complex LISP functions needed by the compiler (written in LISP). Then use that to compile a complete LISP compiler. Nobody really knows what's going on in the machine code for the compiler, since the code giving you the full functionality of LISP was made by a compiler which was made by a compiler.which in turn was made by a compiler which was made by hand-coding.
If you've got proof he spilled classified materials over an unsecured phone, then he absolutely should be jailed like Hillary (who wasn't). But as far as I've been able to tell, the NYT uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing (and you can bet they'd trumpet it if they had). They basically wrote a hit piece implying what could be happening in the hopes that people like you would jump to conclusions and get all stirred up about it. "White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them,"
There are lots of cases where classified materials are protected only by personal cognizance. A coworker of mine visited the Pentagon to meed his project sponsor. While visiting the bathroom, he said hi to another guy holding a bunch of papers in one hand. After he finished his business and went to wash his hands, he noticed the papers were sitting by the sink. Figuring they might be classified, he took them and handed them to the first security officer he saw. He then met with his sponsor. As they were walking to a different area, they passed by bathroom guy being escorted out in handcuffs. Taking classified materials to the bathroom with you under your personal protection is fine. Leaving them there unprotected is what'll get you in trouble. Just like using an unsecured phone is fine, as long as you're careful not to disclose anything classified over it. Just like Clinton using an unsecured email server was fine, right up until it ended up storing classified materials.
That introduces a confirmation bias, where studies will (after revision) on average have results which tend to confirm your preconceived beliefs. To avoid bias, all study results need to be nitpicked to the same degree. You may remember from your high school science courses that one element of your writeup in the conclusion is a discussion of limitations of your experiment and how you may have screwed up. That step is there specifically to force you to nitpick your results even if they confirmed your expectations. No experiment is perfect, and if you can't come up with possible flaws in one which confirms your expectations, you're allowing your biases prevent you from thinking critically..
One of my statistics homework assignments told half the class one thing ("couples with similar personalities have a lower rate of divorce"), the other half of the class was told the opposite (two different homework question printouts, handed out as if they were all the same). Everyone was told to come up with reasons why that trend might be. The next day, both sides presented their answers. Both sides came up with very plausible-sounding reasons and mechanisms to support both results, even though obviously only one of them could be correct. This was to highlight the danger of spending too much effort trying to rationalize the results of an experiment - all results can be made to seem reasonable, blinding you to the bias you're introducing. (And to keep your reasoning honest, I won't tell you which one is correct. That's not what's important here. As long as you're wondering which one is correct, you're reasoning in an unbiased manner. The moment you think one is correct, you're in danger of biasing your reasoning.)
The time change is done to keep sunrise around the same time (by the clock). So there is no GOTO 1 step because once you've shifted the clock so the start of the day coincides with sunrise, there's no need to shift the clock any further.
If the common reference were noon (sun furthest overhead), there would be no issue. In winter sunrise would come a bit later, sunset a bit sooner. But people like to (or liked to in the past) start their day with sunrise. In winter this assures you have the maximum amount of the short daylight available. In summer it assures you don't waste any daylight when sunrise shifts to very early (by the clock).
But in modern society, aside from a few agricultural jobs, the omnipresence of artificial lighting means there's little need to continue to do this. The only real argument for it I can think of is that you can guarantee at least one of the commute times (morning or evening) happens in the safety of daylight. Whereas if you keep the time synchronized around noon, in extreme northern latitudes both morning and evening commute would happen in darkness during winter. But the research I've seen says the time change itself is much more dangerous to people's health than the elevated risk of commuting in the dark.
I'm still trying to figure out what market demand 5G is trying to meet. The only use case I can think of which isn't already met by 4G data is pirating movies (downloading multi-gigabyte files in a short period of time). 4G is already fast enough for streaming, web browsing, email/facebook, video sharing/conferencing. It's already as fast or faster than the wired Internet speeds for anyone except people on fiber or high-end cable Internet plans. As people have joked, 5G speeds would let them blow through their monthly data cap in less than a minute.
The only practical reason I can think of for switching to 5G is that it helps carriers free up congestion. By providing higher burst bandwidth, it gets users off their data network more quickly, leaving more bandwidth for users who want new data.
To play video games in the 1980s, most of us went to the arcade. For me it was a half mile hike and climbing over a brick wall. Or you rode your bike over to a friend's house who had a home video game console (which weren't as good as the arcade games).
TV viewing has been ramping up steadily. It didn't suddenly spike in the 1980s. In fact it flattened out in the 1980s due to video games.
Actually, thinking back to my trips to the arcade, I'd say the biggest change is that parents don't let their kids play outside alone anymore. My parents gave me a bike as a present, and would let me go anywhere as long as I told them where I was going, and was back in time for dinner. My friends and I made several 10+ mile bike trips around the city. So I'd place more blame on the media for exaggerating the danger of child abductions by strangers.
The "High Fructose" in High Fructose Corn Syrup just refers to it having more fructose than regular syrup (which is about 10% fructose, 90% glucose). HFCS used in foods is about 42% fructose, 58% glucose. HFCS used in soft drinks is about 55% fructose, 45% glucose. There's a 90% fructose variety, but it exists just to make shipping easier, and is mixed with syrup at the destination to produce the 42% and 55% varieties of HFCS.
These ratios of fructose to glucose HFCS is about the same as in most fruits. In particular, berries and pomogranites are nearly identical to HFCS, and apples have an even higher concentration of fructose. And obesity was never associated with liking apples or other fruits.
It's the quantity of sugars people are consuming which is the problem, not the type.
My family immigrated into the U.S. legally. Wait list, visa, green card, then finally citizenship. Treating all men equally means people who entered the country illegally should be booted out, and forced to go through the same process we did.
You're not asking for equal rights for illegal immigrants. You're asking that illegal immigrants be given superior rights compared to legal immigrants.
And as an aside, the SCotUS has repeatedly held that U.S. Constitutional protections apply to everyone on U.S. soil, even those who entered the country illegally (heck, they're even counted for the purpose of determining Congressional representation). That was why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay - because it was Cuban soil, not U.S. soil, so he hoped to avoid giving the prisoners there Constitutional rights. So everyone in the U.S. enjoys the same rights and freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The people here illegally just don't get the rights and freedoms associated with U.S. citizenship (mainly, freedom from deportation, and ability to work legally).
This line is parroted by people who have no idea what employers have to do to insure an employee you hire can legally work in the U.S. It is impossible for an employer to tell if an employee can work in the country legally. Pick your jaw up off the floor and let me repeat that. The U.S. government provides no way for an employer to tell if a prospective employee can legally work in the U.S.
When an employer hires someone, we're not allowed to ask race, nationality, country of origin, or legal status. All we're allowed to do is request the employee fill out form I-9 and present the piece(s) of ID required by the I-9. Most people give their driver's license and social security card. A few give their U.S. passport. Non-citizens give a copy of their work visa in lieu of their social security card.
The employer photocopies these documents, and puts them along with the I-9 in a filing cabinet. That's it.
You don't submit it to the government. There's no cross-check to verify that the IDs are valid, and not forged. Nobody reviews the info the person wrote on the I-9. If the employer suspects the documents are forged, they can refuse to hire the person. But you're taking an enormous risk since you'll be subject to discrimination lawsuits and fines if it turns out the documents were real. The form and copies of the work documents just sit in a filing cabinet. The sole purpose of the I-9 and the copies of the documentation is to prove the employer did their due diligence and asked the employee to present documents they're supposed to have before they can work. In the event that the employer is raided by INS, the I-9 and documents shield the employer from prosecution for hiring illegal immigrants. The illegally immigrants are still hired, it's just that the employer didn't know they were working illegally.
When you hear on the news that some company was raided and INS found illegal immigrants working there, that does not automatically mean the employer intentionally hired illegal immigrants. The employer could have, under current law, hired all those people legally, and some of them were still working illegally. As long as the employer has copies of the I-9 and work documents (fake or not), they have done nothing wrong, even if the employee is in the country and working illegally. Most of the stories you hear about employers "caught" hiring illegal immigrants are simply a result of the employer losing or misfiling the I-9, and they can't provide it to INS after a raid which turned up some people working illegally. (I kept photocopies, and also scanned them to avoid a single point of failure.)
The current system is a joke. With modern technology, it would be trivial for the government to set up a system where the info on the I-9 could be submitted to a government server, which spits out a simple yes/no verification. Or even not tell the employer, and some time later ICE drops by to investigate the person whose I-9 didn't match a known U.S. citizen. Some states have even passed laws making it illegal for employers to report to INS/ICE people who applied for a job but weren't able to fill out the I-9 and provide the requisite documents. It's not the employers who are at fault here. The government doesn't want you to know who is legal or illegal to hire.
A lot of this leniency stems from the post-Civil War era. A lot of people in the ex-Confederacy tried to make hard for freed slaves to work or vote, by denying they were legally eligible to do these things. So the law was set up to force employers and pollsters to assume the person cou
You've got two major errors which mostly but not entirely cancel each other out.
Condensing water produces heat energy. It's why your can of ice cold beer warms up. Water in the air condenses on the can, adding energy to the can and warming up the beer. So you don't need to produce the latent heat energy of evaporation, you just need a means to dissipate it to maintain the temperature of the chilled condensing surface.
To dissipate the energy that's absorbed, all you need is a heat pump (and a sufficient heat sink - typically a (unpotable) water source, the air, or even the ground. Heat pumps operate at a higher-than-one-to-one ratio of energy input to energy pumped. This ratio is given by coefficient of performance, which currently peaks at just above 4 for air conditioners, but depends on the climate and heat sink. If you go with a COP of 4, this divides the required energy by 4.
However, your calculation has overestimated the energy production of solar panels. 2.2 MJ / 1 hour = 611 Watts, which divided by your 4 square meters is just over 150 Watts/m^2. That's the maximum wattage that commercial solar panels can produce. They only produce that when the sun is directly overheat (travels through the least atmosphere) and the panel is pointed directly at the sun.
In real-life applications, unguided PV panels have a capacity factor of about 0.145 for the continental U.S (goes up to about 0.19 in the desert Southwest). Northern Europe is closer to 0.11. Capacity factor takes into account night, latitude, movement of the sun across the sky, weather, and downtime for maintenance. So for a year in the U.S. on average, 1 m^2 of PV panels rated at 150 W capacity would only produce (150 W)*(0.145)*(24 hours) = 522 Wh = 1.88 MJ per day. So 4 m^2 would produce just 7.52 MJ per day. A far cry from the 2.2 MJ per hour of daylight you calculated.
Combine these, and 1 m^2 of PV panels in the middle of the U.S. coupled with a 4.0 COP heat pump could produce 3.42 liters/day of water. So you'd need 14.6 m^2 to yield 50 liters/day, not 16 m^2.
Try bumping your thinking up one more abstraction level. Who pays corporate taxes? Corporate taxes are taken out of profits. Profits are distributed to shareholders. Shareholders wishing larger distributions (higher profits) insist on lower employee wages and higher prices for products. So corporate taxes are paid for via (1) higher product prices, (2) lower employee wages, and (3) lower shareholder distribution.
There's no need for corporate taxes if you just tax those three directly. (1) can be replaced by a sales tax. (2) can be replaced by an earned income tax. (3) can be replaced by a unearned income tax (interest on savings, distributions). None of these can be thwarted by the Double Irish. (1) yields tax revenue in the country where the sale occurred. (2) yields tax revenue in the country where the company is operating (has employees). (3) yields tax revenue in the country where the owners reside. All bases are covered. The only difference is in the bookkeeping.
The only reason the Double Irish works is because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries. People can only exist in one country at a time, so they can't pull off a Double Irish. So it's easy to eliminate this problem - eliminate corporate taxes and shift them to sales, earned income, and unearned income taxes. The only problem is that a large number of people mistakenly think that corporate taxes have no impact on people, and so feel taxing corporations is preferable to taxing people.
There is no difference - no matter what you tax, in the end a person somewhere pays for it. Taxes are an assignment of a percentage of the country's productivity to the government coffers. And since the only source of productivity is people (everything a company does is done by its employees), in the end all taxes are paid for by people. Get yourself over the notion that corporate taxes are necessary and the Double Irish problem vanishes. Corporate taxes accomplish nothing which cannot be accomplished with different taxes.
Technically, anything you buy which wears out is a subscription (rent). If you buy a washing machine for $500, which dies after 5 years (on average) and needs to be replaced with a new $500 washing machine, you are paying $100/year for the washing machine. If you buy a car (new or used) for $20k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $10k, your car ownership is basically the same as renting for $2k/year.
The resistance to a rental model is mainly because most people ignore maintenance and upkeep costs in their purchase decisions. You'll notice I left out the maintenance costs of the car in the above example and it probably never crossed your mind. So people's cursory fiscal analysis of renting vs buying tends to be skewed against renting, because they leave the maintenance and upkeep costs out on the buying side, but which are included as the norm in renting..
Software is the exception however. Software doesn't wear out. If Office 2003 worked and had all the features you ever needed in 2003, then it still works and has all the features you ever needed in 2018. And your one-time payment for it in 2003 could be stretched out to 15+ years. The only issue with software is security patches. Which for an app really should never be an issue if the system were designed properly (require root/admin privileges for an app to do something which modifies the system, don't run third party scripts by default like Office likes to do).
Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription prices are actually pretty reasonable. $120/year for Photoshop and Lightroom. Those used to have an upgrade cost of $150 and $120 respectively, with a new version coming out about every 1.5 years. So effectively their subscription price is the same as ($150 + $120) / ($120) = upgrading every 2.25 years. So cheaper than if you upgraded every version, more expensive than if you upgraded every other version. Back when I did a lot of photography I used to upgrade every other version, but overall I consider it priced pretty fairly. Except now that I do much less photography, the existing one-time-purchase copies of Photoshop and Lightroom I've still got are more than pulling their weight since I can still run them without needing to pay a subscription fee (they don't try to modify the system or run third party scripts, so security updates are unnecessary).
Likewise, Office 365 is priced pretty reasonably too if you planned to stay current with updates. Purchasing Home and Student outright is $150. A one-seat subscription to Office 365 is $70/yr. So about the same as upgrading every 2 years. 6-seat license is $100/yr, which is equivalent to upgrading every 9 years. But is probably more realistically priced since most home users who bought Office illegally installed it on more than one computer at home. (Microsoft wasn't as nice as Adobe. Adobe allowed you to install Photoshop on multiple computers, as long as you only used one copy at a time. A realistic concession to many people having a laptop for travel, and a home PC which was more powerful for doing "real work.")
I don't consider a subscription model valid for an OS though. The OS should work as long as the hardware works, because the two are useless without each other. The only way I'd consider a subscription model reasonable for an OS is if the seller also rents you the hardware for the same term as the OS subscription,. And takes care of any required software and hardware maintenance and fixes during that period.
The wings on a plane are the fuel tanks.
Structurally the damage is survivable. It looks similar to bird strikes. The difference is a bird strike is a blob of meat and blood hitting the plane. A drone strike would include lots of spark-inducing metal parts and volatile battery intruding into the fuel tank. The engines have some fire extinguishing capability (a small tank holding fire retardant). But fuel leaking from a wing catching fire would stay on fire until either the all the fuel drained out of the wing, or the plane reached the ground.
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was caused by foam hitting the wing at high velocity. Though I suppose anyone younger than about 20 can be excused for not knowing materials in high-velocity impacts don't behave the way we're used to them behaving in everyday life. (e.g. metal bullets "splash".)
Normally that's how it works. But accidents typically happen between two cars. So if human driving is more dangerous than automated driving, then one person choosing to drive increases the risk for everyone else including people driving automated cars.. An analogy might be someone choosing to rock climb El Capitan, vs someone choosing to climb a skyscraper where lots of people are walking on the sidewalk underneath. If he slips and falls from El Capitan, he only kills himself. If he slips and falls off the skyscraper, there's a good chance he'll also kill a pedestrian who deliberate opted for the safer option (not climbing the skyscraper).
For those of you unfamiliar with American football, 100 U.S. football fields is about 2.75 Libraries of Congress.
(Kidding aside, it's a bit more than half a million square meters.)