People go to prison for copyright violation all the time. This case is just unusual because the guy didn't pirate the movie for personal financial gain. That's an important distinction which I feel needs to be retained in the law. If you violate copyright for personal gain, then I'm ok with the possibility of prison time. But if you violate it for no benefit to yourself, then I believe the penalty should be limited to fines. Maybe with a provision for prison time for repeat offenders.
The issue isn't that people are all too willing to violate copyright. The issue is that technology has advanced to the point where copyright is all too easy to violate. This suggests that copyright is outgrowing its usefulness, and we need to sit down and consider replacing it with a different model. The reduction in cost of duplication and distribution to near zero means it's becoming more and more expensive to enforce copyright. Meanwhile, the benefit to the copyright holder has held steady, while the potential benefit to society from just giving everyone a free copy has grown. So as a whole, the cost of copyright is increasing while its benefit is holding steady. We may soon reach a point where the cost of copyright exceeds its benefit to society. So the role of copyright may be better served in the future by the way artistic works were created in the past.
Centuries ago since it was nearly impossible to enforce copyright. So a rich patron would hire artists to create works. That's how artists got paid, and works got created. Once created, there was no copyright so anyone could copy the work. You'll notice that wedding photography has already reverted to this model. In the 20th century, the photographer shot your wedding for free or for a token fee. You then paid for copies of the photos. The increasing quality of scanners and color printers forced wedding photographers to abandon this model. Nowadays, you hire the wedding photographer for a large enough fee to cover all their costs (the "patron" model). The prints (or digital copies) are given to you for a token sum, or even for free.
It's not turned on all the time. It turns on briefly to take measurements, then goes back to sleep (everything powered down except the clock) until it's time for the next measurement. A battery life of months to over a year is not unusual if you use the electronics this way.
I had to think it through before reluctantly leaving Location Services on. I use traffic on Google Maps all the time. The only way Maps can show which roads are backed up is by the location data sent from phones of people sitting in traffic. So if it weren't for people having it on, there'd be no way to see the current amount of traffic via Google Maps. If I turned it off, I'd essentially be like a leecher for a torrent. Or someone who expects to receive blood from the hospital when injured, but never donates blood. So after much consideration, I turned Location Services on.
My Google history is turned off. You should at least be glad Google allows you to turn these off if you like. Unlike Amazon, Facebook, and Apple which collect this data regardless of your wishes.
Social Security is forced retirement savings - on average you get the money back after you retire. If you're going to call it a tax, then you have to call the money people put into 401ks, IRAs, and long-term investments a tax. And rich people put a helluva lot more money into those than the bottom 90%. Medicare and FUTA (unemployment) are insurance - they're managed so the amount paid out equals the amount paid in on average. The states manage their unemployment funds and the rate charged to each company so each company pays in as much as its ex-employees collect (yes your employer pays for unemployment, not the government). So for all three of these, on average you get back as much as you put in, resulting in a net zero tax rate.
The problem with the 1% underpaying is visible in the 2016 IRS tax stats (latest for which stats are available). Column T - income taxes as a percentage of AGI minus deficit. You'll notice that percentage gradually ramps up, indicating a progressive tax structure, up until a 29.1% rate for those making $2-$5 million. Then it starts to go down. 28.6% for those making $5-$10 million. 25.2% for those making $10+ million.
This is actually improved from before - changes to tax rates under Obama mitigated this downward trend. it used to begin ramping down at a bit above $1 million+ (anyone making more than about $500,000 is in the top 1%). So the problem has been pushed from about the top 0.5% up to the top 0.1%. We should probably add an additional tax brackets above $5 million and $10 million to get the percentage those people pay above 29.1%.
That said, the 85% tax rate proposed by GP is impractical fantasy. The top tax bracket in California is 13.3%, which would put the combined tax rate at 98.3%.. Add in other required payments and a 85% Federal tax rate is basically saying you're not allowed to keep any money above a certain income.
If you read TFA, the percentage of "underserved" kids with access to only one device is 19% (compared to 6% for "served" kids). Nowhere near as alarming as 85%.
Of the students who have access to only one computing device, 85% are "underserved", 15% are not. That's where the 85% figure comes from. I'd cut and paste the relevant quotes, but the PDF has the stupid no-copy flag.
AirBnb doesn't own houses or homes. They are convincing other people to rent out THEIR homes (as a charity donation).
That's still useful because AirBnb has legal guidelines in place to protect the homeowner when they decide to rent out their home. Many states have extremely strict tenant-protection laws which makes it take about a year to evict a squatting tenant. People who've invited a friend down on their luck to stay in an extra bedroom for "a short while" have run afoul of this, resulting in the friend refusing to move out and the homeowner having to go through the lengthy and expensive eviction process to remove them.
For this reason, unless it was a relative or one of my neighbors I know well, I doubt I'd invite anyone to stay at my home even in the event of a natural disaster. Unless it was under the legal protection of a company like AirBnb which provides legal and property insurance.
The real problem we have here is that companies have been allowed to use any old molecular structure in their products they wish without proving anything about the health impacts it may or may not impart.
Unfortunately, that's the only logical way you can do it. You cannot prove a negative - that's a fundamental tenet of the scientific method. If you push a hundred reindeer off a cliff and they fall to their deaths, you have not proven that reindeer cannot fly. All you've done is demonstrated that those hundred reindeer either could not or chose not to fly. OTOH, if you produce a single example of a flying reindeer, then you have unequivocally proven that reindeer can fly.
So you cannot prove that a newly developed chemical is not harmful. You can only prove if it is harmful. Consequently, the scientific way to handle newly developed chemicals is to assume they are safe until proven otherwise. You can run them through a preliminary gauntlet of tests designed to detect immediate or short-term toxicity. But long-term low-level toxicity as as appears to be the case with BPA requires years if not decades of data just to tease out a statistical probability that it might be harmful. If you required that all new chemicals be tested to root out that sort of low-level toxicity, nothing new would ever be developed because it'd be too expensive and take too long to approve for public release.
People want 100% safety, but practically that's an impossible goal to achieve. The best you can do is test for immediate toxicity, and recall chemicals which exhibit toxicity in the long-term after they've been in public circulation for a while.
Oil and tar are relatively short hydrocarbon chains (less than 10 to a few dozen carbons). There are bacteria which can break them down.
Plastics are extremely long hydrocarbon chains. Thousands of carbons or longer - if you stretched it out, a single PE molecule can be as long as a fraction of a mm. It's this length which makes them so durable and persistent. Bacteria cannot break them down. They remain stable until ionizing radiation (primarily UV light) breaks them into shorter hydrocarbon chains, and then bacteria can cope with them.
The same "problem" exists with naturally occurring hydrocarbon chains. Sugars like glucose form the basic hydrocarbon energy block that almost all life on earth relies on. If you glue sugar molecules together, you end up with starches, which most organisms can break down into sugar to use as fuel. But plants figured out that if they make the sugar chains even longer, they end up with cellulose. That's long enough that most organisms can't break it down into its constituent sugar molecules. Herbivores and termites are completely dependent on a few specialized bacteria which can break down those long cellulose chains, to unlock the sugar they contain. (That's why herbivores have 4 stomachs and regurgitate cud to chew it again - it's all a complex laboratory process to break down cellulose into shorter molecules so they can get at the sugar.)
In both cases, most of the original energy of the oil/sugar is still there (both plastic and wood burn readily). They're just protected from breakdown via biological processes by the extremely long molecular length. So yeah, making a road out of recycled plastic will result in microfragments of plastic which are resistant to bio-degradation being released into the environment.
Nope. For cell phones, most of the world uses the "both parties pay" model (the receiver pays for the convenience of getting a call via mobile). Under this model, because the recipient is paying for the spam call, they have a financial justification to complain to their carrier and require them to block the spam calls, and a legal right to sue the spammer for costing them money. The U.S. used to have this model before most cell phone plans went to an unlimited minutes model.
Calling party pays (and unlimited minutes) frees the spammer from any liability for spamming. They're paying for everything, the recipient pays nothing. So the recipient has no legal nor financial recourse to request a reduction in spam. This is why your mailbox is full of junk mail. Because the junk mail senders are paying for everything, and in fact are subsidizing first class postage.
Another reform would be to restrict spoofing. You should only be allowed to spoof if you own both numbers. This is another "American problem".
Spoofing numbers you don't own (as part of spam or a scam) is already illegal. The problem is (1) there's no way for the recipient to figure out who the actual caller from a spoofed number is, so they don't know who to sue or even complain about. And (2) as with junk mail, the spammers make up a significant fraction of phone company revenue, so the phone companies don't want to fix Caller ID to make it impossible to spoof a number they don't own.
With regards to (2), the phone companies are protected by their Common Carrier status, so it's probably going to take a change to phone protocols to prevent spoofing. e.g. Change how VoIP-to-VoIP calls are made so they also send a datagram encrypted with a private key owned by the caller. The receiving VoIP device looks up the Caller ID number in a public database to find that number's public key, and uses that key to decrypt the datagram. If the decryption fails, then it knows the caller doesn't have the proper private key for that Caller ID number, meaning the number has been spoofed, and drops the call. If the decryption is successful, then it knows the Caller ID info is accurate and allows the call to ring through.
Android had whole device search before Apple. But Apple was first to file for, and got the patent (Google apparently didn't think the idea was patentable). Google removed it from Android when Apple began using the patent to sue.
Digital cameras had an orientation sensor to detect if a photo was taken in portrait or landscape mode, and would display the photo as such (which creates the annoying problem where you take a photo in portrait mode, but want to view it in landscape mode - the device won't let you do it because it keeps flipping the photo's playback orientation).
While Apple pushed screens past 300 PPI, Android was actually the one which started the high-res craze. The original iPhone was only 163 PPI. The first Galaxy S was 233 PPI. And things began climbing from there. So picking 300 PPI as a threshold is extremely arbitrary. Apple was constrained to doubling the screen resolution (163 PPI to 326 PPI) due to limitations in iOS' design. Android's design allows variable screen size to resolution ratios, so its PPI climbed gradually as manufacturers pushed out higher and higher res screens.
Spell checkers are far, far older than phones. I remember seeing the squiggly line underneath spelling errors in the late 1990s.
Not sure why Apple is credited with multitasking cards. iOS multitasking initially wasn't true multitasking - only certain functions (like music playback) were allowed to continue running when an app was in the foreground. Outside of those functions, iOS would basically task-switch, not multi-task (continue to run the program in the background). Android had true multitasking from the get-go, killing tasks in FIFO order as the device ran out of RAM.
Cut, copy, paste is credited to Android in the list. But Apple introduced those concepts with the original Macintosh in the 1980s (though they probably lifted the idea from Xerox PARC).
The dock was introduced with NextSTEP way back in 19888. Though to be fair, Jobs was a co-founder of the company (probably some low-rank grunt developer came up with the idea).
Portrait photos (using two lenses to determine distance and blurring the background) was something I predicted way back in the 1990s when digital point and shoot cameras first began coming out. I'm sure I wasn't the first one to think of it either. It's an obvious idea if you understand how an interferometer works. You realize you don't need an entire circular lens to create the blur, you can simulate it with just two physical points on opposite sides of a virtual lens.
Pay-by-phone was available in Korea (primarily with Samsung's phones since they had NFC first) way back in 2011. Apple was just the first to introduce the function in the U.S.
You could do WiFi calls on both devices using a SIP app long before they began adding the capability to your phone's dailer. In particular, Sprint partnered with Google Voice in 2011 - your Sprint number became your Google Voice number, allowing you to make and receive calls from your phone number over cellular, WiFi, or cellular data. This was years before the 2014 "innovation" date listed in the spreadsheet.
Forcing phones to rely on a physical SIM guarantees you can swap the SIM card (e.g. to use the phone in another country). That is, any phone with a SIM can be used on any carrier or with another account by swapping the SIM.
But if the device now uses a second non-removable SIM inside, then that opens up the possibility of deleting the physical SIM slot in future models. That is, the physical SIM is now an option rather than a requirement. Which defeats the entire reason GSM mandated a SIM card in the first place (to insure interoperability of phones and carriers).
each of its balloons, from 20km (12.4 miles) above earth, can cover an area of about 80km (49.7 miles) in diameter and serve about 1,000 users on the ground using an LTE connection
80 km diameter = 40 km radius
A = pi*r^2
A = pi * (40 km)^2
A = 5024 km^2
That works out to only one user per every 5 square km. This is the reason cell towers are typically spaced 3-7 km apart in urban and suburban areas. You need them that close to support the typical density of users in a cell. Their actual range if you don't have many users is much larger. GSM is limited to 35 km because it uses timeslices - beyond that a phone's transmission would arrive in the next phone's timeslice. CDMA will work as far out as the phone and tower are able to "hear" each other, which is more likely to be limited by line of sight than by distance (a 30 m tower only gets you about 25 km range before it's blocked by the horizon).
It might be useful in developing countries which don't have many cellular users, but from what I understand even third world countries are rapidly deploying standard cellular networks since it's so much cheaper than stringing up wires. That leaves the only practical use in emergencies if you block regular people from being able to use it, only allowing emergency personnel's devices to connect.
This could change in the future as MIMO becomes more commonplace (it's included in the 5G standard. MIMO basically makes the signals and receivers directional, allowing multiple devices to use the same bandwidth without interfering with each other (too much).
I've started comparing based on transistor density, rather than process size, to avoid this stupid apples to oranges nm comparison where one company's nm means something completely different from another company's nm.
TSMC's 7nm proceess yields 6.9 billion transistors on 100 mm^2, or 69 million transistors per mm^2.
Intel claims their 10nm process will yield up to 100 million transistors per mm^2, which would still put them ahead.
For reference, Intel's 14nm process yields 37.5 million transistors per mm^2. Meaning TSMC's 7nm process would be roughly equivalent to (14nm)*sqrt(37.5/69) = 10.3 nm in Intel-speak compared to Intel's 14nm process..
You'll note that Intel's 10nm process yields more improvement than the (14/10)^2 = 1.96x density increase you'd expect. So some of the components are being shrunk more thna a 14:10 ratio with the new process. However, Intel's 10nm process has been delayed repeatedly since 2016, with the latest schedule being no commercial shipments until 2019. So I guess that puts TSMC ahead for now if it can deliver this in volume without problems.
The consent decree shackling Microsoft after the IE bundling case expired in 2011. At the time it was made, a lot of us complained about it only lasting 9 years, when a similar consent decree against IBM was in place for 40 years.
Anyhow, bottom line is that stopping Microsoft's behavior this time around will require a new DoJ investigation, which if history is any guide will take more than a decade. Given the history, hopefully it'll be done quickly enough or the judges will be willing to grant restraining orders to prevent Edge's market share rising up to 90% as IE did.
I still maintain that the best solution back in the 1990s would've been to break apart Microsoft into two companies - an OS company and an applications company. Then there would've been no reason for the OS (Windows) to favor Edge or Office (ever notice a trial starter version comes with Win 10?) or any other Microsoft application.
Legitimate business transactions make money because a legitimate business transaction is a benefit to both buyer and seller. The seller sells the item because he's being paid more than it cost him to make or acquire. The buyer buys the item because it's worth more to him than the price that's being charged. That is, legitimate economic transactions are positive-sum.
Taxes transfer money. And inefficiently at that (you have to pay someone to calculate the taxes, pay to make the payment, and pay someone to collect the taxes). That is, taxation is negative-sum. So taxes in and of themselves cannot make money.
Taxation can be a net gain if the tax revenue is spent on things which benefit the economy more than the amount of money spent. For example, building a road may cost $1 million. But if the amount of money saved by companies transporting goods due to the new road exceeds a cumulative $1 million, then the road is a net benefit and spending to build it was worth it. So government spending can make money, but taxation on its own cannot. However, unlike a business, there is no inherent pressure to force a government to make sure all spending of tax revenue is justified in this manner. That is, a government can't go bankrupt if it wastes money - it can just continue to raise taxes to pay for wasteful spending, up until the amount of its spending equals the sum total productivity of all its citizens (effectively approaching 100% taxation, which is what leads to the runaway inflation Venezuela is experiencing).
In this particular situation, the "proper" price for the drug is the one which maximizes revenue. If the company sets the price too high, then sales decrease enough to offset the higher price, and the company makes less money. The "proper" price is when (units sold)*(price per unit - cost to produce) = a maximum. At that price, the drug is being distributed most efficiently - an equal split in the benefit of the drug between the buyer and the seller. In this way, if the benefit is extremely large, the profit is large, which attracts other manufacturers to enter the market, thus increasing competition and lowering prices (sellers take a smaller cut of the benefit).
Usually when these situations crop up where a company can jack up the price beyond reason, it's due to it being the sole supplier (having a monopoly). That's what happened with Epi-pens. Except natural monopolies are extremely rare, and AFAIK every one which has formed has been dealt with with anti-trust regulations. The remaining monopolies are all due to poor government regulation. In the case of Epi-pens, it was the FDA approval process raising the cost of entry for any competitor so high that nobody else felt it was worth entering the market (competing with an established supplier could lower the price to just above manufacturing cost, meaning it could take decades to make back enough money to pay for the FDA approval process).
According to wiki, Nitrofuratoin has been around since 1953. There are generic versions available, so it would appear the patents on it have expired. The only people having to pay the exorbitant new price are those who insist on buying the name-brand version instead of the generic version. If the generic version is not available for sale in the U.S., then that's a problem with the FDA approval for manufacturing the generic, not with a company jacking up prices. Unfortunately, TFA never explores this aspect of the problem since it appears to be a single-minded hit piece against pharmaceutical companies.
What bugged me was they rearranged the layout of their client apps, to put the cloud services first. On Android I had to tap one or two more times to get to my local content (because the number of cloud services exceeded the max allowed on the home screen). You can fix this by editing it to put the cloud services last. But it was stupid to put them ahead of local content when 99% of Plex users are using it for local content. But they also made a change where if you hit back after watching a video it goes back to the home screen (probably to make you see the cloud services on the home screen more often), instead of up a level in my local content like it used to. Very annoying.
It is, by default, anti-competitive behavior and suspect in a free market.
Mergers aren't anti-competitive by default.
If one or both of the merging companies would otherwise have gone bankrupt, then it's not anti-competitive. The merger just redistributes the company's assets before bankruptcy, instead of after (assets are sold off). In other words, the merger accomplishes the same thing as a bankruptcy, except with less disruption to the market, creditors, stockholders, employees, and customers.
If neither company is in danger of bankruptcy long-term, then yeah it's anti-competitive.
Sprint / T-Mobile merging is kinda 50/50. People have been saying Sprint is on the verge of bankruptcy for close to a decade. And T-Mobile's owner (Deutsche Telekom) has been trying to sell it on and off for close to a decade because of its poor financial performance. That would support a merger. But Sprint posted its first profit in years, and T-Mobile's profit (net income) has grown substantially in the last two years. Suggesting the two companies are recovering enough to make a merger unnecessary.
No sympathy for YouTubers with this problem. If you're making a mint posting videos on YouTube, the solution is simple: Hire people to help you make the videos. Yeah it means you won't get to keep as much of that YouTube revenue. But we're talking like a 20% decrease in marginal income (i.e. you still get to keep 80%) for a 500% increase in quality of life (5x as many free hours because the people you've hired are editing the videos, maintaining the equipment, etc. instead of you).
I can kinda sympathize with the guy in TFA because he's streaming, so he kinda has to play every day to keep his revenue stream up. But (1) he makes more in 6 months than the average American makes in a lifetime. So he could quit and retire after a year, and still be ahead of the pack if he's smart about saving and investing. And (2) he needs to evaluate if live-streaming as he plays a game for 8 hours/day is more stressful than working a regular job for 8 hours/day. I would wager he'd find holding a regular job more stressful, and he's only complaining because he's incorrectly comparing making money via streaming to making money while doing nothing.
Predicted at 12 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 1 major hurricane.
Currently it's at 9 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 1 major hurricane.
Average is 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, 3 major hurricanes.
So it's actually a below-average hurricane season, but the media is taking advantage of the lone major hurricane heading towards the U.S. to push stories about how storms are getting worse. It's pretty naked confirmation bias.
It was engineered to clean up the garbage patches. Not as a permanent solution to garbage in the ocean.
Cleaning up the garbage patches is pointless. If there's a net influx of garbage into the seas, the garbage patch will just form again the moment you stop cleaning it.
It's like paying off the credit cards of someone who refuses to reduce their monthly spending to a level their income can support. Paying off their debt doesn't improve their situation - they'll just end up in debt again because their spending patterns haven't changed. In fact you make their behavior even worse by enabling them to rack up more debt - at least with the old debt on their cards, they'd eventually run into their credit limit and be prohibited from making additional purchases. (Analogous to countries dumping garbage into rivers being pressured by bad publicity to stop the behavior because of all the garbage piling up in these gyres. If those gyres are suddenly clean, the problem "appears" to be solved, and the pressure to stop dumping disappears.)
but also want to charge the content publisher for letting the customer receive the data.
Which is why this whole entire scheme is utterly dependent on the monopolies granted to the ISPs by the local government. If you had a choice of multiple ISPs and your ISP began throttling a content publisher for not paying them, you would simply cancel service and subscribe to a different ISP. The only reason they have the temerity to try to charge content publishers is because they know their customers are captive, and cannot flee to a different ISP. Essentially, not only do they have a monopoly on providing service to their customers, they also have a monopoly on giving content publishers access to those customers.
The whole thing is probably the best current example of government regulation run amok. The initial service monopolies granted by the local governments may have been well-intended (to prevent telephone poles from being strung up with dozens of unsightly wires, for guarantees to provide services to low income areas, etc). But it should be clear by now that they're doing far more harm than good, and should be abolished. We've tried government regulation of ISPs for 20+ years and it's failed miserably. Give competition a chance. Aside from access speed, things were actually better back in the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone used dialup connections. I remember canceling service with several ISPs which dissatisfied me before I found one I liked.
www.domain.com and domain.com actually have different entries on the DNS records and can resolve to different servers. Most companies have set it up so the former redirects to the latter (or vice versa), but for the ones that haven't, obfuscating www.domain.com can lead to people typing in just domain.com when you have a www.domain.com server specifically set up to handle http requests (the regular domain.com handling other tasks like ftp, ssh, etc). Your domain.com server then has to handle the http request, and send a redirect message to the browser to go to www.domain.com instead. Basically it unnecessarily puts additional load onto your main server when you've set up a separate web server specifically to avoid that unnecessary load, and causes the client browser to take a fraction of a second longer to get to the real site.
If this change had been the other way around (automatically pre-pending www to domain.com) I wouldn't see a problem with it (aside from inconveniencing a few domain owners who've haven't correctly set up their www.domain.com NS entry into setting it up correctly). But stripping out the www creates unnecessary server load, wastes a tiny bit of time for the person browsing, confuses domain owners trying to troubleshoot what's actually going on, and has no tangible benefit other than "decluttering" the URL bar by 3 characters. From a troubleshooting standpoint, I'd rate this change almost as bad as ISPs who redirect domain typos to an advertising page, instead of an error page.
The U.S. is blessed with a lot more land area (per capita) than most European and Asian countries. As a result, even its cities tend to be low density and sprawling. Public transportation works best in extremely dense urban areas. Lower density means:
The variability in number of people riding a particular bus/train becomes higher. This is a simple consequence of statistics. The more people on average there are waiting to get on at each bus stop, the less variability there is in the number of people who'll use that bus each day. And the easier it is to plan how many buses you should put on that route / less likely it is for the bus to waste fuel traveling with few or no people.
Greater travel distance. This presents a conundrum - either increase the distance between stops, or increase the number of stops. If you increase the distance between stops, people end up having to talk longer distances to get to/from the nearest stop, making them more likely to want to drive a car or take Uber. If you increase the number of stops, then it takes longer to get from place to place via public transportation, and people are more likely to want to drive a car or take Uber.
More roads so there's less traffic and it's easier to route around traffic jams. That makes driving a car even more appealing. When I lived in Boston, during rush hour it would take me as long to drive to/from work through traffic as it would take me to walk. So I ended up biking to work.
More space to park your car / parking costs less or is free. Except for a few beaches, parking is free in the suburb where I live now. When I lived in Boston, some annual parking spaces cost as much as a small apartment. This lower cost makes paying for public transport less appealing.
This is also why public transportation is still prevalent and highly utilized in the denser urban city centers in the U.S., but mostly absent in the less dense surroundings and suburbs. Even when it's present in those areas, you're usually looking at 30-45 minute wait times for the next bus. Increasing funding for public transport doesn't solve any of these issues (unless you're willing to accept increased waste - more buses and subway cars traveling empty).
The homes themselves use less. But if you add in all the additional support services needed for those homes (power for street lighting, water pressure, service workers, etc), it ends up being about that high. It's even more if you include industrial power usage to produce the things people buy to put in their homes (food, clothing, your car, TV, computer, etc).
Tidal power is too low density. Wind is already very low density (replacing the Fukushima nuclear plant with wind turbines would require several hundred km^2). But a 1.5 MW wind turbine with 22% capacity factor (average for land, it's actually higher in the UK due to more consistent winds) produces (1.5 MW)*(0.22)*(24 hours) = 7.92 MWh per day.
7.92 MWh = 28512 MJ. If you figure the average tide is 1 meter and happens 2x a day, then to produce the same amount of energy from tidal power requires an area of
Potential Energy = mgh
28512 MJ/day = (2 tides/day) * (1000 kg/m^3) * (x m^2 * 1 m) * (9.8 m/s^2) * (1 m)
x = (28512 MJ) / (2 * 9.8 m/s^2 * 1000 kg/m^3 *1 m) = 1 454 694 m^3, or nearly 1.5 km^2.
So you need to enclose about 1.5 km^2 of ocean to produce as much energy on average as a single 1.5 MW wind turbine. Some places experience higher tides, but that's highly dependent on geography. Islands in particular tend to experience ocean-like tides (1 meter or less) since having large tides depends on a resonance between the tidal flow and the movement of water in/out of an inlet. The inlet also helps in that 3 sides are already blocked off by land, so nature has already done most of the work for you in enclosing the huge amount of water area needed to generate reasonable amounts of energy from tidal power.
Same goes for using underwater turbines to tap into tidal power. At 2x per day, the current the tides generate is too slow (a fraction of a m/s). As the energy of motion goes as 0.5*m*v^2, despite water being 800x denser than air, it only takes a slight wind velocity for turbine in air to produce more energy than a turbine underwater.
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People go to prison for copyright violation all the time. This case is just unusual because the guy didn't pirate the movie for personal financial gain. That's an important distinction which I feel needs to be retained in the law. If you violate copyright for personal gain, then I'm ok with the possibility of prison time. But if you violate it for no benefit to yourself, then I believe the penalty should be limited to fines. Maybe with a provision for prison time for repeat offenders.
The issue isn't that people are all too willing to violate copyright. The issue is that technology has advanced to the point where copyright is all too easy to violate. This suggests that copyright is outgrowing its usefulness, and we need to sit down and consider replacing it with a different model. The reduction in cost of duplication and distribution to near zero means it's becoming more and more expensive to enforce copyright. Meanwhile, the benefit to the copyright holder has held steady, while the potential benefit to society from just giving everyone a free copy has grown. So as a whole, the cost of copyright is increasing while its benefit is holding steady. We may soon reach a point where the cost of copyright exceeds its benefit to society. So the role of copyright may be better served in the future by the way artistic works were created in the past.
Centuries ago since it was nearly impossible to enforce copyright. So a rich patron would hire artists to create works. That's how artists got paid, and works got created. Once created, there was no copyright so anyone could copy the work. You'll notice that wedding photography has already reverted to this model. In the 20th century, the photographer shot your wedding for free or for a token fee. You then paid for copies of the photos. The increasing quality of scanners and color printers forced wedding photographers to abandon this model. Nowadays, you hire the wedding photographer for a large enough fee to cover all their costs (the "patron" model). The prints (or digital copies) are given to you for a token sum, or even for free.
It's not turned on all the time. It turns on briefly to take measurements, then goes back to sleep (everything powered down except the clock) until it's time for the next measurement. A battery life of months to over a year is not unusual if you use the electronics this way.
I had to think it through before reluctantly leaving Location Services on. I use traffic on Google Maps all the time. The only way Maps can show which roads are backed up is by the location data sent from phones of people sitting in traffic. So if it weren't for people having it on, there'd be no way to see the current amount of traffic via Google Maps. If I turned it off, I'd essentially be like a leecher for a torrent. Or someone who expects to receive blood from the hospital when injured, but never donates blood. So after much consideration, I turned Location Services on.
My Google history is turned off. You should at least be glad Google allows you to turn these off if you like. Unlike Amazon, Facebook, and Apple which collect this data regardless of your wishes.
Social Security is forced retirement savings - on average you get the money back after you retire. If you're going to call it a tax, then you have to call the money people put into 401ks, IRAs, and long-term investments a tax. And rich people put a helluva lot more money into those than the bottom 90%. Medicare and FUTA (unemployment) are insurance - they're managed so the amount paid out equals the amount paid in on average. The states manage their unemployment funds and the rate charged to each company so each company pays in as much as its ex-employees collect (yes your employer pays for unemployment, not the government). So for all three of these, on average you get back as much as you put in, resulting in a net zero tax rate.
The problem with the 1% underpaying is visible in the 2016 IRS tax stats (latest for which stats are available). Column T - income taxes as a percentage of AGI minus deficit. You'll notice that percentage gradually ramps up, indicating a progressive tax structure, up until a 29.1% rate for those making $2-$5 million. Then it starts to go down. 28.6% for those making $5-$10 million. 25.2% for those making $10+ million.
This is actually improved from before - changes to tax rates under Obama mitigated this downward trend. it used to begin ramping down at a bit above $1 million+ (anyone making more than about $500,000 is in the top 1%). So the problem has been pushed from about the top 0.5% up to the top 0.1%. We should probably add an additional tax brackets above $5 million and $10 million to get the percentage those people pay above 29.1%.
That said, the 85% tax rate proposed by GP is impractical fantasy. The top tax bracket in California is 13.3%, which would put the combined tax rate at 98.3%.. Add in other required payments and a 85% Federal tax rate is basically saying you're not allowed to keep any money above a certain income.
If you read TFA, the percentage of "underserved" kids with access to only one device is 19% (compared to 6% for "served" kids). Nowhere near as alarming as 85%.
Of the students who have access to only one computing device, 85% are "underserved", 15% are not. That's where the 85% figure comes from. I'd cut and paste the relevant quotes, but the PDF has the stupid no-copy flag.
That's still useful because AirBnb has legal guidelines in place to protect the homeowner when they decide to rent out their home. Many states have extremely strict tenant-protection laws which makes it take about a year to evict a squatting tenant. People who've invited a friend down on their luck to stay in an extra bedroom for "a short while" have run afoul of this, resulting in the friend refusing to move out and the homeowner having to go through the lengthy and expensive eviction process to remove them.
For this reason, unless it was a relative or one of my neighbors I know well, I doubt I'd invite anyone to stay at my home even in the event of a natural disaster. Unless it was under the legal protection of a company like AirBnb which provides legal and property insurance.
Unfortunately, that's the only logical way you can do it. You cannot prove a negative - that's a fundamental tenet of the scientific method. If you push a hundred reindeer off a cliff and they fall to their deaths, you have not proven that reindeer cannot fly. All you've done is demonstrated that those hundred reindeer either could not or chose not to fly. OTOH, if you produce a single example of a flying reindeer, then you have unequivocally proven that reindeer can fly.
So you cannot prove that a newly developed chemical is not harmful. You can only prove if it is harmful. Consequently, the scientific way to handle newly developed chemicals is to assume they are safe until proven otherwise. You can run them through a preliminary gauntlet of tests designed to detect immediate or short-term toxicity. But long-term low-level toxicity as as appears to be the case with BPA requires years if not decades of data just to tease out a statistical probability that it might be harmful. If you required that all new chemicals be tested to root out that sort of low-level toxicity, nothing new would ever be developed because it'd be too expensive and take too long to approve for public release.
People want 100% safety, but practically that's an impossible goal to achieve. The best you can do is test for immediate toxicity, and recall chemicals which exhibit toxicity in the long-term after they've been in public circulation for a while.
Oil and tar are relatively short hydrocarbon chains (less than 10 to a few dozen carbons). There are bacteria which can break them down.
Plastics are extremely long hydrocarbon chains. Thousands of carbons or longer - if you stretched it out, a single PE molecule can be as long as a fraction of a mm. It's this length which makes them so durable and persistent. Bacteria cannot break them down. They remain stable until ionizing radiation (primarily UV light) breaks them into shorter hydrocarbon chains, and then bacteria can cope with them.
The same "problem" exists with naturally occurring hydrocarbon chains. Sugars like glucose form the basic hydrocarbon energy block that almost all life on earth relies on. If you glue sugar molecules together, you end up with starches, which most organisms can break down into sugar to use as fuel. But plants figured out that if they make the sugar chains even longer, they end up with cellulose. That's long enough that most organisms can't break it down into its constituent sugar molecules. Herbivores and termites are completely dependent on a few specialized bacteria which can break down those long cellulose chains, to unlock the sugar they contain. (That's why herbivores have 4 stomachs and regurgitate cud to chew it again - it's all a complex laboratory process to break down cellulose into shorter molecules so they can get at the sugar.)
In both cases, most of the original energy of the oil/sugar is still there (both plastic and wood burn readily). They're just protected from breakdown via biological processes by the extremely long molecular length. So yeah, making a road out of recycled plastic will result in microfragments of plastic which are resistant to bio-degradation being released into the environment.
Calling party pays (and unlimited minutes) frees the spammer from any liability for spamming. They're paying for everything, the recipient pays nothing. So the recipient has no legal nor financial recourse to request a reduction in spam. This is why your mailbox is full of junk mail. Because the junk mail senders are paying for everything, and in fact are subsidizing first class postage.
Spoofing numbers you don't own (as part of spam or a scam) is already illegal. The problem is (1) there's no way for the recipient to figure out who the actual caller from a spoofed number is, so they don't know who to sue or even complain about. And (2) as with junk mail, the spammers make up a significant fraction of phone company revenue, so the phone companies don't want to fix Caller ID to make it impossible to spoof a number they don't own.
With regards to (2), the phone companies are protected by their Common Carrier status, so it's probably going to take a change to phone protocols to prevent spoofing. e.g. Change how VoIP-to-VoIP calls are made so they also send a datagram encrypted with a private key owned by the caller. The receiving VoIP device looks up the Caller ID number in a public database to find that number's public key, and uses that key to decrypt the datagram. If the decryption fails, then it knows the caller doesn't have the proper private key for that Caller ID number, meaning the number has been spoofed, and drops the call. If the decryption is successful, then it knows the Caller ID info is accurate and allows the call to ring through.
Forcing phones to rely on a physical SIM guarantees you can swap the SIM card (e.g. to use the phone in another country). That is, any phone with a SIM can be used on any carrier or with another account by swapping the SIM.
But if the device now uses a second non-removable SIM inside, then that opens up the possibility of deleting the physical SIM slot in future models. That is, the physical SIM is now an option rather than a requirement. Which defeats the entire reason GSM mandated a SIM card in the first place (to insure interoperability of phones and carriers).
80 km diameter = 40 km radius
A = pi*r^2
A = pi * (40 km)^2
A = 5024 km^2
That works out to only one user per every 5 square km. This is the reason cell towers are typically spaced 3-7 km apart in urban and suburban areas. You need them that close to support the typical density of users in a cell. Their actual range if you don't have many users is much larger. GSM is limited to 35 km because it uses timeslices - beyond that a phone's transmission would arrive in the next phone's timeslice. CDMA will work as far out as the phone and tower are able to "hear" each other, which is more likely to be limited by line of sight than by distance (a 30 m tower only gets you about 25 km range before it's blocked by the horizon).
It might be useful in developing countries which don't have many cellular users, but from what I understand even third world countries are rapidly deploying standard cellular networks since it's so much cheaper than stringing up wires. That leaves the only practical use in emergencies if you block regular people from being able to use it, only allowing emergency personnel's devices to connect.
This could change in the future as MIMO becomes more commonplace (it's included in the 5G standard. MIMO basically makes the signals and receivers directional, allowing multiple devices to use the same bandwidth without interfering with each other (too much).
You'll note that Intel's 10nm process yields more improvement than the (14/10)^2 = 1.96x density increase you'd expect. So some of the components are being shrunk more thna a 14:10 ratio with the new process. However, Intel's 10nm process has been delayed repeatedly since 2016, with the latest schedule being no commercial shipments until 2019. So I guess that puts TSMC ahead for now if it can deliver this in volume without problems.
The consent decree shackling Microsoft after the IE bundling case expired in 2011. At the time it was made, a lot of us complained about it only lasting 9 years, when a similar consent decree against IBM was in place for 40 years.
Anyhow, bottom line is that stopping Microsoft's behavior this time around will require a new DoJ investigation, which if history is any guide will take more than a decade. Given the history, hopefully it'll be done quickly enough or the judges will be willing to grant restraining orders to prevent Edge's market share rising up to 90% as IE did.
I still maintain that the best solution back in the 1990s would've been to break apart Microsoft into two companies - an OS company and an applications company. Then there would've been no reason for the OS (Windows) to favor Edge or Office (ever notice a trial starter version comes with Win 10?) or any other Microsoft application.
Legitimate business transactions make money because a legitimate business transaction is a benefit to both buyer and seller. The seller sells the item because he's being paid more than it cost him to make or acquire. The buyer buys the item because it's worth more to him than the price that's being charged. That is, legitimate economic transactions are positive-sum.
Taxes transfer money. And inefficiently at that (you have to pay someone to calculate the taxes, pay to make the payment, and pay someone to collect the taxes). That is, taxation is negative-sum. So taxes in and of themselves cannot make money.
Taxation can be a net gain if the tax revenue is spent on things which benefit the economy more than the amount of money spent. For example, building a road may cost $1 million. But if the amount of money saved by companies transporting goods due to the new road exceeds a cumulative $1 million, then the road is a net benefit and spending to build it was worth it. So government spending can make money, but taxation on its own cannot. However, unlike a business, there is no inherent pressure to force a government to make sure all spending of tax revenue is justified in this manner. That is, a government can't go bankrupt if it wastes money - it can just continue to raise taxes to pay for wasteful spending, up until the amount of its spending equals the sum total productivity of all its citizens (effectively approaching 100% taxation, which is what leads to the runaway inflation Venezuela is experiencing).
In this particular situation, the "proper" price for the drug is the one which maximizes revenue. If the company sets the price too high, then sales decrease enough to offset the higher price, and the company makes less money. The "proper" price is when (units sold)*(price per unit - cost to produce) = a maximum. At that price, the drug is being distributed most efficiently - an equal split in the benefit of the drug between the buyer and the seller. In this way, if the benefit is extremely large, the profit is large, which attracts other manufacturers to enter the market, thus increasing competition and lowering prices (sellers take a smaller cut of the benefit).
Usually when these situations crop up where a company can jack up the price beyond reason, it's due to it being the sole supplier (having a monopoly). That's what happened with Epi-pens. Except natural monopolies are extremely rare, and AFAIK every one which has formed has been dealt with with anti-trust regulations. The remaining monopolies are all due to poor government regulation. In the case of Epi-pens, it was the FDA approval process raising the cost of entry for any competitor so high that nobody else felt it was worth entering the market (competing with an established supplier could lower the price to just above manufacturing cost, meaning it could take decades to make back enough money to pay for the FDA approval process).
According to wiki, Nitrofuratoin has been around since 1953. There are generic versions available, so it would appear the patents on it have expired. The only people having to pay the exorbitant new price are those who insist on buying the name-brand version instead of the generic version. If the generic version is not available for sale in the U.S., then that's a problem with the FDA approval for manufacturing the generic, not with a company jacking up prices. Unfortunately, TFA never explores this aspect of the problem since it appears to be a single-minded hit piece against pharmaceutical companies.
What bugged me was they rearranged the layout of their client apps, to put the cloud services first. On Android I had to tap one or two more times to get to my local content (because the number of cloud services exceeded the max allowed on the home screen). You can fix this by editing it to put the cloud services last. But it was stupid to put them ahead of local content when 99% of Plex users are using it for local content. But they also made a change where if you hit back after watching a video it goes back to the home screen (probably to make you see the cloud services on the home screen more often), instead of up a level in my local content like it used to. Very annoying.
Mergers aren't anti-competitive by default.
Sprint / T-Mobile merging is kinda 50/50. People have been saying Sprint is on the verge of bankruptcy for close to a decade. And T-Mobile's owner (Deutsche Telekom) has been trying to sell it on and off for close to a decade because of its poor financial performance. That would support a merger. But Sprint posted its first profit in years, and T-Mobile's profit (net income) has grown substantially in the last two years. Suggesting the two companies are recovering enough to make a merger unnecessary.
No sympathy for YouTubers with this problem. If you're making a mint posting videos on YouTube, the solution is simple: Hire people to help you make the videos. Yeah it means you won't get to keep as much of that YouTube revenue. But we're talking like a 20% decrease in marginal income (i.e. you still get to keep 80%) for a 500% increase in quality of life (5x as many free hours because the people you've hired are editing the videos, maintaining the equipment, etc. instead of you).
I can kinda sympathize with the guy in TFA because he's streaming, so he kinda has to play every day to keep his revenue stream up. But (1) he makes more in 6 months than the average American makes in a lifetime. So he could quit and retire after a year, and still be ahead of the pack if he's smart about saving and investing. And (2) he needs to evaluate if live-streaming as he plays a game for 8 hours/day is more stressful than working a regular job for 8 hours/day. I would wager he'd find holding a regular job more stressful, and he's only complaining because he's incorrectly comparing making money via streaming to making money while doing nothing.
So it's actually a below-average hurricane season, but the media is taking advantage of the lone major hurricane heading towards the U.S. to push stories about how storms are getting worse. It's pretty naked confirmation bias.
Cleaning up the garbage patches is pointless. If there's a net influx of garbage into the seas, the garbage patch will just form again the moment you stop cleaning it.
It's like paying off the credit cards of someone who refuses to reduce their monthly spending to a level their income can support. Paying off their debt doesn't improve their situation - they'll just end up in debt again because their spending patterns haven't changed. In fact you make their behavior even worse by enabling them to rack up more debt - at least with the old debt on their cards, they'd eventually run into their credit limit and be prohibited from making additional purchases. (Analogous to countries dumping garbage into rivers being pressured by bad publicity to stop the behavior because of all the garbage piling up in these gyres. If those gyres are suddenly clean, the problem "appears" to be solved, and the pressure to stop dumping disappears.)
Which is why this whole entire scheme is utterly dependent on the monopolies granted to the ISPs by the local government. If you had a choice of multiple ISPs and your ISP began throttling a content publisher for not paying them, you would simply cancel service and subscribe to a different ISP. The only reason they have the temerity to try to charge content publishers is because they know their customers are captive, and cannot flee to a different ISP. Essentially, not only do they have a monopoly on providing service to their customers, they also have a monopoly on giving content publishers access to those customers.
The whole thing is probably the best current example of government regulation run amok. The initial service monopolies granted by the local governments may have been well-intended (to prevent telephone poles from being strung up with dozens of unsightly wires, for guarantees to provide services to low income areas, etc). But it should be clear by now that they're doing far more harm than good, and should be abolished. We've tried government regulation of ISPs for 20+ years and it's failed miserably. Give competition a chance. Aside from access speed, things were actually better back in the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone used dialup connections. I remember canceling service with several ISPs which dissatisfied me before I found one I liked.
www.domain.com and domain.com actually have different entries on the DNS records and can resolve to different servers. Most companies have set it up so the former redirects to the latter (or vice versa), but for the ones that haven't, obfuscating www.domain.com can lead to people typing in just domain.com when you have a www.domain.com server specifically set up to handle http requests (the regular domain.com handling other tasks like ftp, ssh, etc). Your domain.com server then has to handle the http request, and send a redirect message to the browser to go to www.domain.com instead. Basically it unnecessarily puts additional load onto your main server when you've set up a separate web server specifically to avoid that unnecessary load, and causes the client browser to take a fraction of a second longer to get to the real site.
If this change had been the other way around (automatically pre-pending www to domain.com) I wouldn't see a problem with it (aside from inconveniencing a few domain owners who've haven't correctly set up their www.domain.com NS entry into setting it up correctly). But stripping out the www creates unnecessary server load, wastes a tiny bit of time for the person browsing, confuses domain owners trying to troubleshoot what's actually going on, and has no tangible benefit other than "decluttering" the URL bar by 3 characters. From a troubleshooting standpoint, I'd rate this change almost as bad as ISPs who redirect domain typos to an advertising page, instead of an error page.
This is also why public transportation is still prevalent and highly utilized in the denser urban city centers in the U.S., but mostly absent in the less dense surroundings and suburbs. Even when it's present in those areas, you're usually looking at 30-45 minute wait times for the next bus. Increasing funding for public transport doesn't solve any of these issues (unless you're willing to accept increased waste - more buses and subway cars traveling empty).
The homes themselves use less. But if you add in all the additional support services needed for those homes (power for street lighting, water pressure, service workers, etc), it ends up being about that high. It's even more if you include industrial power usage to produce the things people buy to put in their homes (food, clothing, your car, TV, computer, etc).
Tidal power is too low density. Wind is already very low density (replacing the Fukushima nuclear plant with wind turbines would require several hundred km^2). But a 1.5 MW wind turbine with 22% capacity factor (average for land, it's actually higher in the UK due to more consistent winds) produces (1.5 MW)*(0.22)*(24 hours) = 7.92 MWh per day.
7.92 MWh = 28512 MJ. If you figure the average tide is 1 meter and happens 2x a day, then to produce the same amount of energy from tidal power requires an area of
Potential Energy = mgh
28512 MJ/day = (2 tides/day) * (1000 kg/m^3) * (x m^2 * 1 m) * (9.8 m/s^2) * (1 m)
x = (28512 MJ) / (2 * 9.8 m/s^2 * 1000 kg/m^3 *1 m) = 1 454 694 m^3, or nearly 1.5 km^2.
So you need to enclose about 1.5 km^2 of ocean to produce as much energy on average as a single 1.5 MW wind turbine. Some places experience higher tides, but that's highly dependent on geography. Islands in particular tend to experience ocean-like tides (1 meter or less) since having large tides depends on a resonance between the tidal flow and the movement of water in/out of an inlet. The inlet also helps in that 3 sides are already blocked off by land, so nature has already done most of the work for you in enclosing the huge amount of water area needed to generate reasonable amounts of energy from tidal power.
Same goes for using underwater turbines to tap into tidal power. At 2x per day, the current the tides generate is too slow (a fraction of a m/s). As the energy of motion goes as 0.5*m*v^2, despite water being 800x denser than air, it only takes a slight wind velocity for turbine in air to produce more energy than a turbine underwater.