The main difference with ISAs would seem to be that the loan is effectively from the school. With regular student loans, either the bank (i.e. the people who own stock in the bank) or the government (i.e. the taxpayers) have to eat the loss if the loan isn't repaid. With an ISA, it's the school which eats the loss. So nobody except the student/school should care if a student defaults on an ISA. It only affects the financial status of the school if too many of their graduates begin defaulting. It doesn't create a sword of Damocles threatening to sink the entire U.S. economy if the percentage of defaults rises too much, like we have with current student loans. Basically, all the risk of the uncertainty over the repayment rate has been shifted from the banks or the taxpayers to the school.
. I'd love to see their math on how the know the debris will drop out in 45 days. Ohh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris.
Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee and converts the elliptical orbit back into a circle, now at the higher orbit.
If you only apply one delta-V, all it does is turn your circular orbit into an ellipse. The key thing is that this new elliptical orbit must include the point in the original orbit where the delta-V occurred. This means if the original orbit was circular, the new elliptical orbit must intersect that original circle at some point. Meaning a single velocity change cannot increase your perigee. Only if the delta-V was in the direction of the original orbital motion does it result in the same perigee (and a higher apogee). All other possible delta-V vectors result in a lower perigee, meaning if the original circular orbit was just outside the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere, the debris will now orbit through a denser part of the atmosphere, and burn up and deorbit more quickly than if left in the original circular orbit
So generally, these destructive tests aren't harmful when done to satellites in low orbit. The vast majority of the debris ends up in new orbits which will deorbit faster than the satellite would have if it had been left alone. And you might get a few "lucky" pieces of debris which are now in an elliptical orbit with the original orbit's perigee, but now with a higher apogee.
If you conduct the test at a higher orbit though (like China did), the debris whose new orbits have a lower perigee may not have a perigee low enough to skim the Earth's atmosphere to slow it down substantially. And so a greater portion of the debris will remain in orbit for decades or centuries.
I don't see this as a problem that needs solving. If there's a copyrighted soundtrack playing in a noisy environment, then quite obviously the music (1) is secondary, tertiary, or non-essential to whatever else is going on in the video and thus not a copyright violation, and (2) is not a reproduction someone wanting an illegal copy of the copyrighted work would be interested in. So there's zero reason for a copyright holder to even want to detect it. It would result in stupid things like people getting a copyright strike on their YouTube video because some car passing by in the background has the radio on playing a song.
The only use I can think of this is to figure out what music and TV shows you like by eavesdropping in on what your Alexa / Google Home device's always-on microphone picks up as you play the radio or TV in your home.
It's relevant because nobody has come up with a more-widely supported animated graphics format. GIF is laughably outdated - it only supports 256 discrete colors picked from a regular 24-bit color palette in a weak non-lossy compression format. Most of you probably have no idea what that means because everything has supported at least 24-bit color for the last 20-30 years. As a graphics format it's been displaced by formats which handle full 24-bit color - JPEG for lossy compression (my first PC took nearly a minute to decode a 1024x768 JPEG while a similar size GIF could decode in about a second), and PNG for better non-lossy compression.
The only reason GIF sticks around is because it supports animated graphics, and nothing else has managed to displace it at that. There was an attempt at an animated PNG format. But it's not as widely supported as animated GIFs. (Microsoft IE and Edge were the major holdouts. Hopefully that'll change now that Microsoft is giving up on their own browser engine and using Chrome's. And we can finally give GIF the viking funeral it deserved two decades ago.)
I had a co-worker who would throw those in to keep people attentive and paying attention to his presentation, so they wouldn't miss the next easter egg to show up. They weren't necessarily naked pictures; most of them were humorous and did well to keep people from falling asleep or (these days) doing something else on their phone.
Because once everyone has paid for it, the carriers will approach the telemarketers and say "We'll let you bypass the spam blocking tool we sold to our customers if you pay us $x/mo." What's that saying about the only winner in a war being the guy who sells weapons to both sides?
Arguably, that was a solved problem between rational nation states. Mutually Assured Destruction kept us safe for 40 years during the Cold War. Either side could rain a salvo of missiles on the other, but neither did because they feared likewise retaliation.
A missile defense technology is really only effective against a rogue attacker who is crazy enough not to care about retaliation. e.g. North Korea flinging a missile at the U.S. west coast. And the bigger issue moving forward will be a small terrorist organization or a nation state sneaking in a nuke via a suitcase or car, and detonating it. Uncertainty over who exactly perpetrated the attack prevents retaliation, making it the perfect means for a weaker power to attack a stronger one. Missile defense doesn't protect you from that.
Then make it a deposit, not a fee. Like we have deposits for bottles and cans, which you can recoup in its entirety when you return the bottle/can for recycling.
That's what tells you if this is a surcharge to modify people's behavior, or an attempt by greedy politicians to grab more of your money. Deposit = behavior modification. Fee = greed.
That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance. The left advocates a government-centric approach to decision-making. Some government official (elected via what's basically a popularity contest, not an appraisal of competency) decides or appoints people to decide what the population should do.
The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach. So using your example of incandescent light bulbs, the red states would've preferred CFLs and LEDs compete with incandescents based solely on price. Once their savings in electricity and longevity versus incandescents made them a better buy, then people would've started buying them naturally and incadescents wold phase themselves out. It's pure democracy in action - every individual buyer gets to vote on what type of light bulb they prefer every time they buy one, unlike the statist top-down approach favored by the left. In that respect, the red states will "eventually fall in line". It was never a question of which technology was better long-term. It's a question of which technology is better now and how the transition should proceed.
Likewise, the right has no problem with solar or wind or EVs per se. If they're the better, more cost-effective product, the right will gladly embrace them. They just don't want those things shoved down their throats by government decree - they think every individual should be allowed to decide for themself whether or not to adopt these products.. But the left can't seem to grok this, so they concoct this fantasy where the right oppose anything the left advocates out of spite or ignorance.
Neither method is always right. The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma. The government approach fails when the people deciding fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences to their actions (cable and phone monopolies are granted by the government in exchange for things like guarantees to cover low-income areas - arguably the harm of those monopolies far outweighs the good of covering the low income area), or don't adequately search the solution space before mandating a single solution (GSM nearly doomed us because it used TDMA which is horribly inefficient with bandwidth because it assigns a full bandwidth timeslice to users who only need a little or no bandwidth; fortunately the US allowed CDMA to compete and prove itself a superior solution; and eventually GSM adopted CDMA into its spec and modern standards like LTE are based on the orthogonal signaling proven by CDMA).
That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach. Those who picked one can compare notes with those who picked the other to see who seems to be doing better. If the regulatory approach seems to be working better than the market approach, then numerous states will try adopting it, while others will retain the market approach. And when a clear majority of the states see a benefit to the regulatory approach, then that creates enough political support to pass the regulation on a national level. When you immediately regulate at the national level without sufficient trials at the lower government levels, you short circuit this weeding-out process and could doom us with something like GSM, except we'll never know because you prohibited the alternative before it could ever be tested.
Average income after paying for essentials is less than $1000/mo. Even if you look at just the $50k-$70k income range, it's only about $1200/mo. At $7/mo, you're spending ($7/$1200) = 0.6% of that on headphones. Or put another way, you can only afford to own 171 such toys. Even a minimalist owns 1.5x as many things. What you're proposing is not a sustainable lifestyle unless your income is substantially higher.
(Of course the counterargument is that you shouldn't be buying these unless you're making six figures. You should be buying wireless headphones which cost on the order of $25 instead.)
Now will people believe me when I say Right to Repair won't accomplish what they think it will? It'll just end up pushing manufacturers to create unrepairable products, to force you to buy a new one when it breaks.
Instead, treat it like a lease - force manufacturers to extend the warranty to cover whatever period they won't allow you to repair it. With control comes responsibility. They want to exert control over something after they "sell" it to you, then they're also responsible for fixing it until they cede that control. If they make it unfixable, then the warranty should default to some upper threshold like 5 or 7 years. If an unfixable product breaks within 5 or 7 years, the manufacturer has to replace it at no cost to you.
That'll encourage product designs which are reliable and fixable, and discourage repair lock-in unless the manufacturer is prepared to eat the cost of all the repairs during the lock-in period.
Gmail has a really nice spam filter; I can see some people routing their mail through it just for the spam filter. And with modern IMAP standards allowing you to leave the mail on the server, you can access your mail using multiple programs without them interfering with each other.
The last few updates to the Gmail web client have been pretty brutal too. It now takes 5+ seconds for my browser to load it the first time. And it seems to be freezing more often than before. It annoyed me enough to try accessing it with Thunderbird again, only to find out that the mails in the Social and Promotions tabs are actually in your inbox. It's the Gmail web client which separates them out into the different tabs. There's probably a way to set it up in Thunderbird (gmail has to be flagging those mails differently to put them into different tabs), but that's a project for a future rainy day.
At least not directly (we're probably transporting the fungus around the globe). That contradicts what I've heard said or implied in numerous documentaries and papers for decades - the top suspects were usually pesticides, or climate change, or habitat loss. It's interesting to go back to a 2008 slashdot article on the topic and see how many people jumped on the global warming and habitat loss bandwagon. The correct cause (the fungus) was even mentioned, but only modded up to a +4. Oh well, at least the top-modded main post is warning people not to jump to conclusions.
White does not keep things cooler than black. White acts like an insulator, black like a heat conductor. So if you paint it white, the inside will be cooler when the outside temp is hotter. But if the electronics heat up the inside to hotter than the outside temp, the white will actually inhibit heat flow out, thwarting your efforts to cool the interior.
For best temperature regulation (easiest to alter the interior temperature), paint it black, and shade it from direct sunlight to inhibit external heat flowing inside during the day.
White works for things like building roofs because there's relatively little heat generation inside. The biggest heat factor is the outside. So a white roof keeps your house cool in the day (prevents exterior heat from going in), warm at night (prevents interior heat from escaping out). But for most electronics, the biggest heat load is generated inside, and your goal is to maximize heat flow out. If your SoC is at 60C, it's highly unlikely the exterior temperature will be hotter (in the shade). So even during the day in the middle of a heat wave, you still want to maximize heat flow from inside to outside. And that means painting it black.
What OP probably meant to say is that copyrights do not need to be enforced. The owner of an API copyright can simply state up-front that they will not be enforcing the copyright, and everyone can use the API freely without restriction. Which will cause people and companies to gravitate towards these open APIs instead of closed ones like Oracle is trying to make JAVA into. And eventually, the only APIs used between companies will be open ones whose copyright is not enforced.
Raising the question of what the hell was the whole point of making APIs copyrightable? When the only form of API which can self-perpetuate in the market is the kind which foregoes the protections offered by copyright?
We didn't need to know plastics were making it into our food supply. We were already well aware of the problem because of trash strewn all over the landscape. I grew up in the 70s too and agree with OP. Who the hell thought replacing paper with plastic (which we already knew was extremely durable and took forever to degrade) for single use products was a good idea? I wouldn't place blame entirely upon the environmental movement though. The oil industry was probably involved too, advocating widespread adoption of plastics.
Even today, I've eaten countless downvotes here for suggesting that we throw paper trash away instead of recycling them. When you throw paper away in a landfill, it's sequestering the carbon underground. Meaning new trees have to be cut down to make new paper, meaning loggers see more demand and have an incentive to plant lots more new trees. That increases the rate at which CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere (atmospheric CO2 becomes paper products, so there's a 1:1 correlation between paper thrown away in landfills and CO2 removed from the atmosphere).
Encouraging people to recycle paper products means there's less demand for new paper, meaning fewer new trees are planted by loggers. Fewer trees means less CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere to be converted into cellulose. Meaning atmospheric CO2 levels increase faster. So recycling paper actually increases the rate of global warming. Remember, "renewable" means you can use it and it automatically replenishes itself. Trees are renewable. And in this particular case, increasing the renewal rate (by throwing away paper instead recycling it) is better for the environment.
Think, people. Expand your reasoning beyond "recycling good, trash bad" caveman logic. Recycling is not a panacea. You can't just think of recycling on its own when deciding if it's good or bad. You have to compare it to the alternatives. And sometimes the alternative of throwing away things is better overall than recycling them.
When it comes to tractors, 99.5% of people don't care about tractor repairs. But we get stories on Slashdot and Presidential candidates pandering about it.
I can guarantee you that 99.5% of tractor owners care about tractor repairs. The percentage is probably a bit lower for John Deere tractor owners because the ones who care most self-selected themselves out of the sample by not buying a John Deere because of the repair issues, even though they really wanted one.
Anyway, Apple products are highlighted for right to repair because they're high-profile. The biggest right-to-repair issue is refilling ink cartridges. If you buy replacement ink cartridges from the printer manufacturer (as the chips in many cartridges force you to do), you're paying on the order of $1000 per gallon of ink. It's ludicrous, and only made possible by vendor encrypted lock-in whose only purpose is to prevent you from messing around with the internals of YOUR printer. Right to repair makes that type of lock-in illegal. So anyone who's ever grumbled about high ink cartridge costs cares about right-to-repair.
That's not strictly true. It's correct if you want to get there (the sun or leave the solar system) in one shot. But if you're willing to do multiple passes (slingshot maneuvers) around planets, you can get there for a lot less energy. (Non-wiki link because the Wikipedia article doesn't really explain it.)
It's easier to do this with the inner planets because (1) they're closer together so you don't have to wait as long for multiple flybys, and (2) they orbit more quickly so you don't have to wait as long for the proper orbital configuration. Cassini was launched this way, doing multiple passes around Venus, then another by Earth to pick up more velocity on its way to Saturn. So overall I suspect it's actually easier to send something into the sun (after passing inner planets multiple times) than it is to shoot it out of the solar system.
That they somehow managed to mess up something as testable as a keyboard, is one thing.
They are testing it. They have millions of people willing to buy their products without ever having seen or felt them (the Apple Watch became the #1 selling smartwatch through pre-sales, before it was even released). If you have a fan base that's that irrationally committed, you don't need to pay for product testing. Just make them test it for you.
Yes there's absolutely some fun to typing on a big old clacking keyboard with a long draw, but I find that flatter low travel keyboards are quicker to type on.
Yours would appear to be an extreme minority opinion. Keyboards have been around for over a century. If a significant number of people really did prefer low-travel keys, they would've been made thinner nearly a century ago when the first electric typewriters were introduced. You represent such a small minority that in all that time, nobody has even bothered to make a specialty thin keyboard just to sell to your niche market.
And if I did purchase a 2ndary property to rent out to randos, I'd furnish it accordingly, and insure it accordingly, and then charge accordingly. And I still wouldn't put a camera in the living room.
That's the beauty of it. You can rent out your property without a camera. Other property owners can put in a camera, inform the renter, and charge a lower rental fee because they don't have to insure as heavily as you do. And the renter can choose which they prefer - no camera but higher cost, or lower cost but with a camera.
Ultimately it doesn't matter what the property owner or some random Joe on the Internet thinks. It's up to the renter to choose what they want (the customer is always right). If they're opposed to cameras as vehemently as you are, then they'll gladly pay extra to cover your additional insurance and rent your unit because it doesn't have cameras. If they don't really care about cameras, they'll pass on your higher-priced rental. Airbnb's policy just makes sure the renter is informed, so they can make an informed decision.
Instead, just make it so if a company requires repairs be done through themselves or their authorized dealer chain, then the repairs are free. i.e. If the company wants to insist on exclusivity of repairs for 10 years, then their product basically has to have a 10 year warranty. If they want to insist on exclusivity forever, then the product is warranted forever.
The advantage is that a right to repair law can be challenged on the grounds that it's violating the manufacturer's right to offer its products for sale in whatever fashion it sees fit. If you do it my way, companies can still do what John Deere does with tractors, or Epson does with chipped printer cartridges, or Apple does with iPhones. But if they elect to do it that way, then the purchase essentially becomes a lease - the lessee gets use of the product, but the lessor is responsible for the maintenance and repair costs (not always obvious, but if your leased car breaks down and is too expensive to repair, you can just walk away from the lease and leave the car company to eat the loss on their broken product, not you). And the legal framework for leases is very well established so is unlikely to be overturned by a court challenge.
Basically, don't set up a confrontation between the buyer's right to repair and the seller's right to design a product as they see fit. Instead, channel products which come without restrictions on the owner into purchases, while products where the manufacturer retains control over after possession is transferred to the "buyer" become leases.
It's not the government's job to protect anyone's business model, particularly if that model is facilitating serious crime.
This isn't a binary succeed/fail thing. A single failure does not indicate there is a problem with the system. This is actually the same problem as Boeing self-testing some of the FAA requirements. Or how every individual files their own income tax returns, and the IRS only spot-auditing a random few to keep people honest.
Self-regulation is done as a cost-saving measure. If the IRS had to audit everyone's tax return to make sure people were being honest, yes the incidence of cheating would be 0%. But it'd be horrendously expensive to do - so expensive that the cost of enforcement exceeds the increase in revenue from 0% cheating. Self-regulation is done as a cost-cutting measure. As long as the amount of money saved by letting people file their own tax returns exceeds the amount of money lost to a few people who cheat on their taxes, the IRS is still coming out ahead. i.e. Yes some people will cheat. But the cost of catching those cheaters is greater than the tax money you'd get from running enough audits to catch them. In other words, the goal here is to maximize revenue, not to maximize compliance.
Likewise, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provide valuable services to society. You don't want them to livestream terrorist incidents, so you establish a zero-tolerance policy. Compliance with that policy comes at a cost. And if that cost is high enough to force the company to contract or stop offering their service, the loss to society may be greater than the value of compliance with your zero-tolerance policy. That is, the regulation is detracting from society, rather than contributing to it. Remember, the goal of the regulation is to maximize the value of the bossiness model's contribution to society, not to maximize compliance with the regulations.
So yes, it's not the government's job to protect anyone's business model. But it is the government's job not pass overzealous regulation which quashes a business model making a net beneficial contribution to society. If complying with a zero-tolerance policy against terrorist videos is so expensive as to make these services financially untenable, then your regulation is equivalent to banning live-streaming services. You've just done it in a roundabout way to avoid responsibility for banning such services.
If we just set people's timezone where 7am is always the approximate time of sunrise then this would answer this question fine and businesses can set schedules appropriately.
That is the fundamental problem. People want 7 am to match with sunrise year-round. But it's impossible to do that astronomically. There's no way to maintain sunrise at 7 am, and simultaneously have 24 hour days. The time of sunrise varies with your latitude, and with the time of year (and to a smaller extent, with your longitude within your time zone). So trying to maintain sunrise at close to the same time requires your day length to deviate from 24 hours. That's what the clock change for DST does - we make one day 23 hours, and another day 6 months later 25 hours.
The only astronomical constant is noon (and midnight but that's harder to tell). You can set noon to be when the sun is exactly in the middle of its travel through the sky, and that noon will remain constant year-round with 24 hour days. During the year, the day gets longer or shorter symmetrically around noon. During the Spring and Fall equinoxes, the day is noon +/- 6 hours everywhere. During summer they day is noon +/- more than 6 hours. It reaches its maximum length on the Summer solstice. During winter it's noon +/- fewer than 6 hours. It reaches its minimum length during the Winter solstice. The exact +/- hours depends on your latitude.
Because the length of the day varies with your latitude and time of year, it is futile to try to synchronize global times with sunrise. A winter time-shift which works for one latitude only works for that one latitude - it does not work for any other latitude. The only solution that makes sense is to keep noon at 12:00, and to have each locale vary their business/school hours depending on time of year. If you live near the equator where sunrise is always around 6 am, then you can just have the start of business/school be 7 am year-round. If you live at a high latitude where the sunrise is 3 am in summer, 9 am in winter, then you can adjust your business start hours accordingly through the year to keep it synchronized with your local sunrise. Forcing everyone else at different latitudes to change their clocks to match your local sunrise is stupid.
If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter.
If you live in a place where you only get 4 hours of sunlight in the winter (noon +/- 2 hours) and you don't want to wake up in the dark, then the correct solution is to adjust your local business hours in winter to start with the local sunrise. Forcing everyone - even those living in places which get 6, 8, 10, or 12 hours of sunlight in the winter - to change their business start time to match your local sunrise isn't just wrong. It's egotistically stupid.
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The main difference with ISAs would seem to be that the loan is effectively from the school. With regular student loans, either the bank (i.e. the people who own stock in the bank) or the government (i.e. the taxpayers) have to eat the loss if the loan isn't repaid. With an ISA, it's the school which eats the loss. So nobody except the student/school should care if a student defaults on an ISA. It only affects the financial status of the school if too many of their graduates begin defaulting. It doesn't create a sword of Damocles threatening to sink the entire U.S. economy if the percentage of defaults rises too much, like we have with current student loans. Basically, all the risk of the uncertainty over the repayment rate has been shifted from the banks or the taxpayers to the school.
Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee and converts the elliptical orbit back into a circle, now at the higher orbit.
If you only apply one delta-V, all it does is turn your circular orbit into an ellipse. The key thing is that this new elliptical orbit must include the point in the original orbit where the delta-V occurred. This means if the original orbit was circular, the new elliptical orbit must intersect that original circle at some point. Meaning a single velocity change cannot increase your perigee. Only if the delta-V was in the direction of the original orbital motion does it result in the same perigee (and a higher apogee). All other possible delta-V vectors result in a lower perigee, meaning if the original circular orbit was just outside the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere, the debris will now orbit through a denser part of the atmosphere, and burn up and deorbit more quickly than if left in the original circular orbit
So generally, these destructive tests aren't harmful when done to satellites in low orbit. The vast majority of the debris ends up in new orbits which will deorbit faster than the satellite would have if it had been left alone. And you might get a few "lucky" pieces of debris which are now in an elliptical orbit with the original orbit's perigee, but now with a higher apogee.
If you conduct the test at a higher orbit though (like China did), the debris whose new orbits have a lower perigee may not have a perigee low enough to skim the Earth's atmosphere to slow it down substantially. And so a greater portion of the debris will remain in orbit for decades or centuries.
I don't see this as a problem that needs solving. If there's a copyrighted soundtrack playing in a noisy environment, then quite obviously the music (1) is secondary, tertiary, or non-essential to whatever else is going on in the video and thus not a copyright violation, and (2) is not a reproduction someone wanting an illegal copy of the copyrighted work would be interested in. So there's zero reason for a copyright holder to even want to detect it. It would result in stupid things like people getting a copyright strike on their YouTube video because some car passing by in the background has the radio on playing a song.
The only use I can think of this is to figure out what music and TV shows you like by eavesdropping in on what your Alexa / Google Home device's always-on microphone picks up as you play the radio or TV in your home.
It's relevant because nobody has come up with a more-widely supported animated graphics format. GIF is laughably outdated - it only supports 256 discrete colors picked from a regular 24-bit color palette in a weak non-lossy compression format. Most of you probably have no idea what that means because everything has supported at least 24-bit color for the last 20-30 years. As a graphics format it's been displaced by formats which handle full 24-bit color - JPEG for lossy compression (my first PC took nearly a minute to decode a 1024x768 JPEG while a similar size GIF could decode in about a second), and PNG for better non-lossy compression.
The only reason GIF sticks around is because it supports animated graphics, and nothing else has managed to displace it at that. There was an attempt at an animated PNG format. But it's not as widely supported as animated GIFs. (Microsoft IE and Edge were the major holdouts. Hopefully that'll change now that Microsoft is giving up on their own browser engine and using Chrome's. And we can finally give GIF the viking funeral it deserved two decades ago.)
I had a co-worker who would throw those in to keep people attentive and paying attention to his presentation, so they wouldn't miss the next easter egg to show up. They weren't necessarily naked pictures; most of them were humorous and did well to keep people from falling asleep or (these days) doing something else on their phone.
Because once everyone has paid for it, the carriers will approach the telemarketers and say "We'll let you bypass the spam blocking tool we sold to our customers if you pay us $x/mo." What's that saying about the only winner in a war being the guy who sells weapons to both sides?
Arguably, that was a solved problem between rational nation states. Mutually Assured Destruction kept us safe for 40 years during the Cold War. Either side could rain a salvo of missiles on the other, but neither did because they feared likewise retaliation.
A missile defense technology is really only effective against a rogue attacker who is crazy enough not to care about retaliation. e.g. North Korea flinging a missile at the U.S. west coast. And the bigger issue moving forward will be a small terrorist organization or a nation state sneaking in a nuke via a suitcase or car, and detonating it. Uncertainty over who exactly perpetrated the attack prevents retaliation, making it the perfect means for a weaker power to attack a stronger one. Missile defense doesn't protect you from that.
Then make it a deposit, not a fee. Like we have deposits for bottles and cans, which you can recoup in its entirety when you return the bottle/can for recycling.
That's what tells you if this is a surcharge to modify people's behavior, or an attempt by greedy politicians to grab more of your money. Deposit = behavior modification. Fee = greed.
That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance. The left advocates a government-centric approach to decision-making. Some government official (elected via what's basically a popularity contest, not an appraisal of competency) decides or appoints people to decide what the population should do.
The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach. So using your example of incandescent light bulbs, the red states would've preferred CFLs and LEDs compete with incandescents based solely on price. Once their savings in electricity and longevity versus incandescents made them a better buy, then people would've started buying them naturally and incadescents wold phase themselves out. It's pure democracy in action - every individual buyer gets to vote on what type of light bulb they prefer every time they buy one, unlike the statist top-down approach favored by the left. In that respect, the red states will "eventually fall in line". It was never a question of which technology was better long-term. It's a question of which technology is better now and how the transition should proceed.
Likewise, the right has no problem with solar or wind or EVs per se. If they're the better, more cost-effective product, the right will gladly embrace them. They just don't want those things shoved down their throats by government decree - they think every individual should be allowed to decide for themself whether or not to adopt these products.. But the left can't seem to grok this, so they concoct this fantasy where the right oppose anything the left advocates out of spite or ignorance.
Neither method is always right. The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma. The government approach fails when the people deciding fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences to their actions (cable and phone monopolies are granted by the government in exchange for things like guarantees to cover low-income areas - arguably the harm of those monopolies far outweighs the good of covering the low income area), or don't adequately search the solution space before mandating a single solution (GSM nearly doomed us because it used TDMA which is horribly inefficient with bandwidth because it assigns a full bandwidth timeslice to users who only need a little or no bandwidth; fortunately the US allowed CDMA to compete and prove itself a superior solution; and eventually GSM adopted CDMA into its spec and modern standards like LTE are based on the orthogonal signaling proven by CDMA).
That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach. Those who picked one can compare notes with those who picked the other to see who seems to be doing better. If the regulatory approach seems to be working better than the market approach, then numerous states will try adopting it, while others will retain the market approach. And when a clear majority of the states see a benefit to the regulatory approach, then that creates enough political support to pass the regulation on a national level. When you immediately regulate at the national level without sufficient trials at the lower government levels, you short circuit this weeding-out process and could doom us with something like GSM, except we'll never know because you prohibited the alternative before it could ever be tested.
Average income after paying for essentials is less than $1000/mo. Even if you look at just the $50k-$70k income range, it's only about $1200/mo. At $7/mo, you're spending ($7/$1200) = 0.6% of that on headphones. Or put another way, you can only afford to own 171 such toys. Even a minimalist owns 1.5x as many things. What you're proposing is not a sustainable lifestyle unless your income is substantially higher.
(Of course the counterargument is that you shouldn't be buying these unless you're making six figures. You should be buying wireless headphones which cost on the order of $25 instead.)
Now will people believe me when I say Right to Repair won't accomplish what they think it will? It'll just end up pushing manufacturers to create unrepairable products, to force you to buy a new one when it breaks.
Instead, treat it like a lease - force manufacturers to extend the warranty to cover whatever period they won't allow you to repair it. With control comes responsibility. They want to exert control over something after they "sell" it to you, then they're also responsible for fixing it until they cede that control. If they make it unfixable, then the warranty should default to some upper threshold like 5 or 7 years. If an unfixable product breaks within 5 or 7 years, the manufacturer has to replace it at no cost to you.
That'll encourage product designs which are reliable and fixable, and discourage repair lock-in unless the manufacturer is prepared to eat the cost of all the repairs during the lock-in period.
Gmail has a really nice spam filter; I can see some people routing their mail through it just for the spam filter. And with modern IMAP standards allowing you to leave the mail on the server, you can access your mail using multiple programs without them interfering with each other.
The last few updates to the Gmail web client have been pretty brutal too. It now takes 5+ seconds for my browser to load it the first time. And it seems to be freezing more often than before. It annoyed me enough to try accessing it with Thunderbird again, only to find out that the mails in the Social and Promotions tabs are actually in your inbox. It's the Gmail web client which separates them out into the different tabs. There's probably a way to set it up in Thunderbird (gmail has to be flagging those mails differently to put them into different tabs), but that's a project for a future rainy day.
At least not directly (we're probably transporting the fungus around the globe). That contradicts what I've heard said or implied in numerous documentaries and papers for decades - the top suspects were usually pesticides, or climate change, or habitat loss. It's interesting to go back to a 2008 slashdot article on the topic and see how many people jumped on the global warming and habitat loss bandwagon. The correct cause (the fungus) was even mentioned, but only modded up to a +4. Oh well, at least the top-modded main post is warning people not to jump to conclusions.
White does not keep things cooler than black. White acts like an insulator, black like a heat conductor. So if you paint it white, the inside will be cooler when the outside temp is hotter. But if the electronics heat up the inside to hotter than the outside temp, the white will actually inhibit heat flow out, thwarting your efforts to cool the interior.
For best temperature regulation (easiest to alter the interior temperature), paint it black, and shade it from direct sunlight to inhibit external heat flowing inside during the day.
White works for things like building roofs because there's relatively little heat generation inside. The biggest heat factor is the outside. So a white roof keeps your house cool in the day (prevents exterior heat from going in), warm at night (prevents interior heat from escaping out). But for most electronics, the biggest heat load is generated inside, and your goal is to maximize heat flow out. If your SoC is at 60C, it's highly unlikely the exterior temperature will be hotter (in the shade). So even during the day in the middle of a heat wave, you still want to maximize heat flow from inside to outside. And that means painting it black.
What OP probably meant to say is that copyrights do not need to be enforced. The owner of an API copyright can simply state up-front that they will not be enforcing the copyright, and everyone can use the API freely without restriction. Which will cause people and companies to gravitate towards these open APIs instead of closed ones like Oracle is trying to make JAVA into. And eventually, the only APIs used between companies will be open ones whose copyright is not enforced.
Raising the question of what the hell was the whole point of making APIs copyrightable? When the only form of API which can self-perpetuate in the market is the kind which foregoes the protections offered by copyright?
We didn't need to know plastics were making it into our food supply. We were already well aware of the problem because of trash strewn all over the landscape. I grew up in the 70s too and agree with OP. Who the hell thought replacing paper with plastic (which we already knew was extremely durable and took forever to degrade) for single use products was a good idea? I wouldn't place blame entirely upon the environmental movement though. The oil industry was probably involved too, advocating widespread adoption of plastics.
Even today, I've eaten countless downvotes here for suggesting that we throw paper trash away instead of recycling them. When you throw paper away in a landfill, it's sequestering the carbon underground. Meaning new trees have to be cut down to make new paper, meaning loggers see more demand and have an incentive to plant lots more new trees. That increases the rate at which CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere (atmospheric CO2 becomes paper products, so there's a 1:1 correlation between paper thrown away in landfills and CO2 removed from the atmosphere).
Encouraging people to recycle paper products means there's less demand for new paper, meaning fewer new trees are planted by loggers. Fewer trees means less CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere to be converted into cellulose. Meaning atmospheric CO2 levels increase faster. So recycling paper actually increases the rate of global warming. Remember, "renewable" means you can use it and it automatically replenishes itself. Trees are renewable. And in this particular case, increasing the renewal rate (by throwing away paper instead recycling it) is better for the environment.
Think, people. Expand your reasoning beyond "recycling good, trash bad" caveman logic. Recycling is not a panacea. You can't just think of recycling on its own when deciding if it's good or bad. You have to compare it to the alternatives. And sometimes the alternative of throwing away things is better overall than recycling them.
I can guarantee you that 99.5% of tractor owners care about tractor repairs. The percentage is probably a bit lower for John Deere tractor owners because the ones who care most self-selected themselves out of the sample by not buying a John Deere because of the repair issues, even though they really wanted one.
Anyway, Apple products are highlighted for right to repair because they're high-profile. The biggest right-to-repair issue is refilling ink cartridges. If you buy replacement ink cartridges from the printer manufacturer (as the chips in many cartridges force you to do), you're paying on the order of $1000 per gallon of ink. It's ludicrous, and only made possible by vendor encrypted lock-in whose only purpose is to prevent you from messing around with the internals of YOUR printer. Right to repair makes that type of lock-in illegal. So anyone who's ever grumbled about high ink cartridge costs cares about right-to-repair.
That's not strictly true. It's correct if you want to get there (the sun or leave the solar system) in one shot. But if you're willing to do multiple passes (slingshot maneuvers) around planets, you can get there for a lot less energy. (Non-wiki link because the Wikipedia article doesn't really explain it.)
It's easier to do this with the inner planets because (1) they're closer together so you don't have to wait as long for multiple flybys, and (2) they orbit more quickly so you don't have to wait as long for the proper orbital configuration. Cassini was launched this way, doing multiple passes around Venus, then another by Earth to pick up more velocity on its way to Saturn. So overall I suspect it's actually easier to send something into the sun (after passing inner planets multiple times) than it is to shoot it out of the solar system.
They are testing it. They have millions of people willing to buy their products without ever having seen or felt them (the Apple Watch became the #1 selling smartwatch through pre-sales, before it was even released). If you have a fan base that's that irrationally committed, you don't need to pay for product testing. Just make them test it for you.
Yours would appear to be an extreme minority opinion. Keyboards have been around for over a century. If a significant number of people really did prefer low-travel keys, they would've been made thinner nearly a century ago when the first electric typewriters were introduced. You represent such a small minority that in all that time, nobody has even bothered to make a specialty thin keyboard just to sell to your niche market.
That's the beauty of it. You can rent out your property without a camera. Other property owners can put in a camera, inform the renter, and charge a lower rental fee because they don't have to insure as heavily as you do. And the renter can choose which they prefer - no camera but higher cost, or lower cost but with a camera.
Ultimately it doesn't matter what the property owner or some random Joe on the Internet thinks. It's up to the renter to choose what they want (the customer is always right). If they're opposed to cameras as vehemently as you are, then they'll gladly pay extra to cover your additional insurance and rent your unit because it doesn't have cameras. If they don't really care about cameras, they'll pass on your higher-priced rental. Airbnb's policy just makes sure the renter is informed, so they can make an informed decision.
Instead, just make it so if a company requires repairs be done through themselves or their authorized dealer chain, then the repairs are free. i.e. If the company wants to insist on exclusivity of repairs for 10 years, then their product basically has to have a 10 year warranty. If they want to insist on exclusivity forever, then the product is warranted forever.
The advantage is that a right to repair law can be challenged on the grounds that it's violating the manufacturer's right to offer its products for sale in whatever fashion it sees fit. If you do it my way, companies can still do what John Deere does with tractors, or Epson does with chipped printer cartridges, or Apple does with iPhones. But if they elect to do it that way, then the purchase essentially becomes a lease - the lessee gets use of the product, but the lessor is responsible for the maintenance and repair costs (not always obvious, but if your leased car breaks down and is too expensive to repair, you can just walk away from the lease and leave the car company to eat the loss on their broken product, not you). And the legal framework for leases is very well established so is unlikely to be overturned by a court challenge.
Basically, don't set up a confrontation between the buyer's right to repair and the seller's right to design a product as they see fit. Instead, channel products which come without restrictions on the owner into purchases, while products where the manufacturer retains control over after possession is transferred to the "buyer" become leases.
This isn't a binary succeed/fail thing. A single failure does not indicate there is a problem with the system. This is actually the same problem as Boeing self-testing some of the FAA requirements. Or how every individual files their own income tax returns, and the IRS only spot-auditing a random few to keep people honest.
Self-regulation is done as a cost-saving measure. If the IRS had to audit everyone's tax return to make sure people were being honest, yes the incidence of cheating would be 0%. But it'd be horrendously expensive to do - so expensive that the cost of enforcement exceeds the increase in revenue from 0% cheating. Self-regulation is done as a cost-cutting measure. As long as the amount of money saved by letting people file their own tax returns exceeds the amount of money lost to a few people who cheat on their taxes, the IRS is still coming out ahead. i.e. Yes some people will cheat. But the cost of catching those cheaters is greater than the tax money you'd get from running enough audits to catch them. In other words, the goal here is to maximize revenue, not to maximize compliance.
Likewise, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provide valuable services to society. You don't want them to livestream terrorist incidents, so you establish a zero-tolerance policy. Compliance with that policy comes at a cost. And if that cost is high enough to force the company to contract or stop offering their service, the loss to society may be greater than the value of compliance with your zero-tolerance policy. That is, the regulation is detracting from society, rather than contributing to it. Remember, the goal of the regulation is to maximize the value of the bossiness model's contribution to society, not to maximize compliance with the regulations.
So yes, it's not the government's job to protect anyone's business model. But it is the government's job not pass overzealous regulation which quashes a business model making a net beneficial contribution to society. If complying with a zero-tolerance policy against terrorist videos is so expensive as to make these services financially untenable, then your regulation is equivalent to banning live-streaming services. You've just done it in a roundabout way to avoid responsibility for banning such services.
That is the fundamental problem. People want 7 am to match with sunrise year-round. But it's impossible to do that astronomically. There's no way to maintain sunrise at 7 am, and simultaneously have 24 hour days. The time of sunrise varies with your latitude, and with the time of year (and to a smaller extent, with your longitude within your time zone). So trying to maintain sunrise at close to the same time requires your day length to deviate from 24 hours. That's what the clock change for DST does - we make one day 23 hours, and another day 6 months later 25 hours.
The only astronomical constant is noon (and midnight but that's harder to tell). You can set noon to be when the sun is exactly in the middle of its travel through the sky, and that noon will remain constant year-round with 24 hour days. During the year, the day gets longer or shorter symmetrically around noon. During the Spring and Fall equinoxes, the day is noon +/- 6 hours everywhere. During summer they day is noon +/- more than 6 hours. It reaches its maximum length on the Summer solstice. During winter it's noon +/- fewer than 6 hours. It reaches its minimum length during the Winter solstice. The exact +/- hours depends on your latitude.
Because the length of the day varies with your latitude and time of year, it is futile to try to synchronize global times with sunrise. A winter time-shift which works for one latitude only works for that one latitude - it does not work for any other latitude. The only solution that makes sense is to keep noon at 12:00, and to have each locale vary their business/school hours depending on time of year. If you live near the equator where sunrise is always around 6 am, then you can just have the start of business/school be 7 am year-round. If you live at a high latitude where the sunrise is 3 am in summer, 9 am in winter, then you can adjust your business start hours accordingly through the year to keep it synchronized with your local sunrise. Forcing everyone else at different latitudes to change their clocks to match your local sunrise is stupid.
If you live in a place where you only get 4 hours of sunlight in the winter (noon +/- 2 hours) and you don't want to wake up in the dark, then the correct solution is to adjust your local business hours in winter to start with the local sunrise. Forcing everyone - even those living in places which get 6, 8, 10, or 12 hours of sunlight in the winter - to change their business start time to match your local sunrise isn't just wrong. It's egotistically stupid.