Eminent domain requires justly compensating Apple for the loss of their property: not paying Apple the Proposed Tax Assessment value or the Fair Market value, that's not necessarily sufficient for just compensation. Even if the market considers their property worth only $5, and they might, if for example the property has special value to Apple
If both the buyer and seller agree on a valuation, that would be just compensation. Your example is based on the property having special value for Apple. Yet Apple themselves estimated its value as $200, which is their legal admission that it has very little value to them, special or not.
When the FCC defines broadband as 25 Mbps, many cellular wireless speeds already exceed wired speeds. Particularly in areas where the only broadband available is DSL (max speed of ADSL is 24 Mbps).
Cellular falls behind when lots of people are using bandwidth simultaneously. In wired connections, each node has a dedicated wire and bandwidth. But in wireless communications, the bandwidth is shared. 5G attempts to address that by using MIMO - basically using directional antennas to transmit different things to different locations over the same frequencies. (Imagine it as people in a room using directional flashlights to send messages to each other, instead of controlling a single light switch which turns the room's ceiling light on/off.) I'm curious to see how well it works when scaled up from the simple 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO found in 802.11ac routers.
As much as I dislike Trump, the specific line items in the budget are decided by Congress. The President only gets to sign or veto the whole thing as a single package.
I'd really like to see a $50 wall clock that's always accurate to milliseconds
They used to be, back when clocks were powered from an AC wall socket. Their gears were synchronized with the AC motor, and the power company worked really really hard to make sure the long-term average AC cycle was exactly 60 Hz. If equipment problems caused the frequency to drop slightly below 60 Hz, they'd run at slightly above 60 Hz for long enough to get the clocks back on the correct time.
Then we switched to clocks running off batteries with built-in quartz timing mechanisms. In theory they're better, but in practice they're never calibrated well enough or their calibration drifts with age and temperature, making them less accurate than the old AC powered clocks. The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot. With the 60 Hz power line method, only a single clock has to be calibrated to be super-accurate; and all the other clocks powered by AC synchronize off it.
While that's true, the flip side is that too much regulation can also become a nightmare. In fact several of the problems we have that people incorrectly attribute to capitalism, have actually been caused by government regulation run amok.
The "need" for net neutrality does not exist because capitalism allowed huge corporate ISPs to gain control of people's Internet access. It exists because local governments awarded monopolies to cable and phone ISPs. Capitalism wants to introduce other ISPs to make it a competitive marketplace, but is blocked by government regulations prohibiting competing ISPs. If you had a choice of multiple ISPs and you ISP began throttling Netflix to try to extort money from Netflix, you wouldn't have to sign petitions or hope for government action. All you'd have to do is terminate service with that ISP and sign up with a different ISP who didn't throttle Netflix. Net neutrality is only "needed" because government regulation created and protects the cable monopolies.
The massive rise in the cost of school tuition wasn't caused by the capitalistic market for colleges and universities. It was caused by government subsidies which made massive amounts of money in the form of grants and loans (money time-shifted from your future) available to prospective students. When supply and demand for something remains the same, but you double the amount of money available to the buyers, the market price doubles. Most of the complaints by Millenials that things their parents had are unffordable to them (like a house) stem from this government regulation-produced problem.
We dodged a bullet when the U.S. refused to go along with GSM as a digital cellular phone standard. GSM (initially) relied on TDMA - each phone takes turns talking to the tower. That worked fine for low-bandwidth applications like voice, but is incredibly wasteful for bursty high-bandwidth applications like data. Even if a phone doesn't need part or all of a data timeslice, it still takes up that bandwidth simply because it's that phone's turn. The U.S. refusing to require GSM gave CDMA services a chance to develop. In CDMA, all phones transmit at the same time using orthogonal codes (kinda like writing horizontally and vertically on the same sheet of paper - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can read both even though they overlap). They see the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which reduces their signal-to-noise ratio, and thus automatically reduces the bandwidth available to each phone. Within a year of 3G cellular data rolling out, GSM threw in the towel, licensed CDMA, and amended the GSM spec to make wideband CDMA the offficial 3G data channel on GSM. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM phones - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a separate CDMA radio for data. Since LTE mostly uses OFDMA (which uses orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes like CDMA), CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy "let everyone transmit at the same time" idea really worked on a nationwide network. So if the U.S. had tried to over-regulate cellular services like Europe did, There would be no CDMA, LTE would've been delayed by nearly a decade, and our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. And if it hadn't been for a gap in the regulatory armor protecting GSM, we'd all be stuck with vastly inferior cellular data today.
As with most things like life, too little and too much are both bad.
Fast charging creates more heat. Older batteries get hotter. It's likely that the charging system is ending charge prematurely with a worn out, hot battery. A slow charge mitigates that and actually puts more energy into the battery before the system thinks it is full.
The "reduced" battery capacity with an old battery isn't actually really reduced (at least not as dramatically as your % charge indicates). When you charge an old battery (normally, dunno about fast charge), it's still taking nearly the same amount of charge. (Capacity does drop slightly with age.)
What happens with an older battery is that it's ability to delivery current (max current) decreases. Also, as the battery gets discharged, the max current it can deliver drops as well. With an older battery, these two combined could drop max currrent so much that it's barely enough to sustain the phone's operations anymore. That exacerbates the voltage sag, which is why you see the remaining charge suddenly drop from 40% to 2%. This is why it's usually coupled with the remaining charge increasing when you stop doing anything processor intensive (exacerbated voltage sag resulted in too-low estimated remaining charge, now that voltage sag is released the estimate is now going back up closer to the correct amount). Or why the phone suddenly shuts off when it hits 30% (the battery couldn't deliver enough current to keep the phone powered on).
Slow charging to "fill up" the battery won't really help, as the problem is the ability to extract current from the older battery, not put it in. It's why Apple tried capping the max processor speed on their devices with older batteries - to prevent current draw from going high enough to cause this instant shutoff. That said, heat is bad because it will hasten the rate at which the battery wears out.
Fires are natural part of the ecological cycle. Developed countries putting them out early for nearly 100 years is what's causing more fires to occur - the buildup of vegetation (dead and live) means more fuel for new fires. The ecosystem needs fires every now and then to clear out dead brush (release the elements and chemical compounds they contain back into the ecosystem), and clear room for new plant growth (which supports different species than old growth). If you're not gonna let loggers thin out those trees, then you gotta let fires thin them every now and then.
Forest fires happened for hundreds of millions of years before man arrived on the scene, and they never burned the entire Earth to a cinder. Leave them alone to do their thing. If they're threatening buildings, that's a sign that you need to build a bigger firebreak around those buildings. Not a reason to put the fire out.
About half the time I code something, I end up grabbing a chunk of code that someone else has written which almost does what I want but not quite, copy/pasting it, and making a few tweaks to it so it'll do what I want.
That's kinda the whole reason software is different from crafting or manufacturing - zero cost of duplication. So there's no point doing duplicate work if someone else has already done it. In fact that's the fundamental rationale underlying open source.
It featured a lossless compression mode. Back around 2000, I used JPEG2000 to make archival copies of my scanned photos. They came out roughly half the size of an equivalent TIFF.
JPEG2000's drawback (and probably its undoing) was that it was simply too processor-intensive for the hardware at the time. It took my 300 MHz Celeron about 5 minutes to compress a photo into JPEG2000 format, nearly a minute to decompress (read) it. That meant that you still had to rely on TIFF to save your intermediate photo editing steps. So lossless JPEG2000 only ended up saving you about 5%-10% of the storage space if you kept those intermediate editing savefiles, rather than 50%. At which point you figured why bother? Just save the final result as TIFF like you always did.
JPEG was the same when it first came out. I remember downloading a copy of it way back in the late 1980s when it was still being beta tested. It took over a minute to decompress a 1024x768 photo on my 33 MHz PC. But the file size was only about 200 kB, vs over a megabyte for a compressed bitmap (GIF crushes images down to 256 colors). The difference was JPEG didn't have any competing formats which could get sizes down as small, and disk prices and slow network speeds (300 bps dialup) meant shrinking image file size was incredibly important. But by 2000, storage prices had come way down and a good chunk of the country had broadband Internet speeds, meaning the extra file size reduction of JPEG2000 simply wasn't worth the huge amount of time it took on contemporaneous processors.
Technically, if the editor reads slashdot (a stretch, I know), and they wish not to reveal that they are the source of a comment, then they can be an "anonymous Slashdot reader."
China and the US are currently engaged in a trade war, causing many U.S. companies to lose money, lay off employees, or close entirely.
The way the media portrays it:
If a trade policy is implemented by a Democrat:
Open trade is good for the economy.
Tariffs protect American jobs by preventing them from being sent overseas.
If a trade policy is implemented by a Republican:
Open trade causes American jobs to be sent overseas.
Tariffs cost American jobs by stifling the economy.
The reality is that both are true. The press just likes to spin it in favor of or against the party in power.
Open trade causes American jobs to be sent overseas (assuming there are foreign countries with a lower standard of living than the U.S., which means they have lower labor costs). But the increased economic activity due to imported goods being cheaper than domestic goods results in a net boost to the domestic economy and the standard of living in the U.S.
Trade tariffs protect American jobs from being sent overseas. But do so by increasing the price of goods sold in the U.S., resulting in a net decrease to the domestic economy and the standard of living.
The tariffs are designed to help American manufacturing, they make American products cheaper than foreign products
Nope. They're designed to help American manufacturing by making foreign products more expensive than American products. That is, they protect American jobs, but do so by making the products you buy more expensive.
That's why I generally fall on the pro-open trade side of this. It's a Prisoner's dilemma situation, where if one side implements tariffs, they get a better result than open trade, while the other side gets the worst possible result. But if both sides implement tariffs, they both end up worse off than with open trade. The best solution for both sides overall is open trade.
Trump's rationale (which I partly agree with but mostly don't) is that China has been abusing our policy of open import of Chinese goods by restricting export of American goods to China and/or subsidizing some of their goods which the U.S. imports which artificially kills off U.S. producers, thus giving China the advantage in the Prisoner's dilemma (and puts the U.S. at a disadvantage). The best solution found thus far to the iterated Prisoner's dilemma is the tit for tat strategy. If one side abuses the Prisoner's dilemma, the other side abuses it right back thus signaling that it won't take such abuse lying down. And eventually the side which started the abuse backs down, and the other side also backs down, reverting both sides to the best possible strategy for both (in this case, open trade).
What about the Mars orbiter that mixed up metric/imperial and thrust itself into the planet instead of going around it? How amateur was that?
Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost because of a metric/imperical mix-up as the press likes to portray it. It was lost because one lazy person didn't write down the units on a printout of numbers, and another lazy person just assumed what the units were supposed to be instead of picking up the phone and verifying. MCO would've been lost all the same if the numbers had been printed in kilonewtons and the person keying in the numbers assumed they were newtons. No Imperial units necessary. The first thing they drilled into our heads in my undergrad engineering school was that a number without a unit was meaningless (except as a ratio), and to treat it as NaN rather than assume the units.
Roughly half the missions to Mars fail, and NASA has had the highest success rate of any space agency. The overall success rate at Venus is higher, but mostly because only the Soviets tried to land on it. Everything else has been orbiters or flybys. However, contrary to GP's claim, Venus is a harder target than this asteroid. Because of the sun's gravity well, the least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit from Earth to Venus ends up taking about 6 months. This results in a relatively large delta-V between the spacecraft and target, which needs to be precisely canceled out when the spacecraft reaches Venus in order for it to enter planetary orbit (the same operation which doomed MCO). The asteroid Hyabusa2 is encountering is a near-earth asteroid, meaning its orbital velocity around the sun is not that different from Earth's. So the spacecraft could take a more leisurely trip there (roughly 3.5 years), requiring substantially less delta-V to slow down and match the asteroid's orbit.
Nintendo owns the intellectual property for its games, and when people pirate them instead of buying a Nintendo Super NES Classic Edition or a downloading a copy from one of its digital storefronts, it can argue it's losing money. [...] Even when a Nintendo game isn't for sale, it's still the company's intellectual property, and it can enforce its copyright if it wants.
Emphasis mine. If they're not selling the game, then they can't be making money off of it, so obviously they can't be losing money due to copyright violations. The purpose of Copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
If Copyright is preventing progress of the useful arts by allowing a copyright holder to block distribution of a pre-existing work by both not selling it and preventing its illegal distribution, then that's evidence that the duration of Copyright is too long. Copyright duration is so long that it is no longer financially viable for the copyright holder to continue to distribute the work, yet because they still hold the Copyright they can prevent others from distributing the work to "promote the progress of the useful arts."
It's been suggested before, but Copyright really needs to move to a dynamic duration rather than fixed. The point of Copyright should be to allow a content creator to profit from their work, but once public interest has waned and the profit motive has mostly disappeared, the Copyright should expire. Give everything a 10 year initial copyright. At the end of 10 years, the copyright holder can elect to renew it for another 10 years by paying a fee. The amount of the fee should increase with each renewal - something like
$1000 the first extra 10 years (expires after 20 years)
$3200 the next 10 years (expires after 30 years)
$10k for the next 10 years (expires after 40 years)
$32k for the next 10 years (expires after 50 years)
$100k for the next 10 years (expires after 60 yearsl)
$320k for the next 10 years (expires after 70 years)
$1 million for the next 10 years (expires after 80 years)
$3.2 million for the next 10 years (expires after 90 yearsl)
$10 million for each subsequent 10 years (100+ years)
That would have the effect of flushing out financially unviable copyrighted works into the public domain rather quickly, while allowing hugely successful works like Disney's to continue indefinitely as long as they're making money from it. The way current Copyright durations keep being extended, some works are so old and lost from public awareness that the only copy is held at the U.S. Copyright Office. That makes us vulnerable to one of the greatest losses of historical intellectual property since The Library of Alexandria burned down.
(Hmm, I suppose an easier way would be to require that after the initial 14 year term (the original duration set in 1790), in order to retain copyright up to its current maximum duration, the copyright holder must continue to offer the work for sale.)
During 1999-2015, the mesothelioma age-adjusted death rate decreased 21.7% from 13.96 per million population (1999) to 10.93 (2015) (p-value for time trend
So basically the mesothelioma death rate (from all causes, not just asbestos related) went from 1.396 per 100,000 to 1.093 per 100,000 per year.. Or a reduction of 0.3 per 100,000 per year. That puts the benefit of banning asbestos at the very bottom of the list of causes of death, even if you assume 100% of mesothelioma was caused by asbestos.
The money we spent banning and ripping out asbestos probably would've been much better spent on things like PSAs to buckle your seat belt, or suicide prevention hotlines. Those have a death rate nearly a hundred times higher than the reduction in mesothelioma death rate. Heck, fires kill 5.0 people per 100,000 each year, so it's even possible that banning asbestos resulted in more people dying to fires than were saved from death by mesothelioma.
Based on this one paper, it would seem that banning asbestos was a vast overreaction. Given the tiny scale of the problem, it probably would've been better addressed by stricter regulations mandating masks and filters during the mining and processing of asbestos, and manufacture of products containing asbestos, rather than a widescale ban. Kinda like how disproportionate news coverage of airliner crashes has caused us to spend more on preventing airliner crashes, resulting in air travel being 86x safer than cars.
The amber glasses used by shooters work by blocking blue light. The lens in your eye is a simple lens, so suffers from chromatic aberration. It does not focus the different colors of light onto the exact same spot. So what you see can be sharpened by blocking one end of the visible spectrum - red or blue. Your eyes are most sensitive to detail in green, less so in red, and suck at resolving blue. So blue light can be filtered out with very little effect on visual acuity (other than color accuracy). With less chromatic aberration, what you see appears slightly sharper.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power. But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem, environmentalists insisted that we dismantle that existing solution, and roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time. Then we can develop renewables at our leisure, and use those to phase out nuclear power as they (and battery technology) become capable of handling our base load requirements.
The low range of the time estimate (10 years) is coincidentally about the amount of time it takes to complete construction of a large nuclear plant. Let's see if environmentalists read this news about the coming doomsday scenario, and take it a a sign to drop opposition to nuclear power. Or if they'd rather let all life on Earth go extinct, than let renewable power temporarily take a back seat to nuclear power.
Difference is that purchase prices are actually a rate, not a fixed amount. The chair has longevity going for it. If your $600 chair will last you 10 years before you have to replace it, then it's actually only costing you $5/mo.
A $1000 phone that you replace in 2 years is costing you $42/mo. Which would be equivalent to "blowing" $5000 on an ergonomic chair which lasts 10 years.
Unless you're making about $100k/yr, I think $42/mo for a phone is silly. But lots of average-income people buy a $7 cup of coffee every workday morning, and that's $150/mo. So I've stopped trying to understand some people's purchase decisions. It's just annoying when these same people complain that it's so hard to make ends meet, and how it's a conspiracy by corporations/the government to keep them mired in a lower-middle class lifestyle. No it's not, it's your own lack of financial self-control.
Apparently the major shoe companies sell limited edition shoes on their websites which are highly desired by collectors, first come, first serve. He and people like him coded bots which would monitor the websites for these sales, and buy as many of these limited edition shoes as they could the instant they were listed on the website. Then he'd sell them to collectors at a considerable markup. Kinda like high-frequency trading, except with shoes.
(Past tense because his programming skills weren't enough to keep up, and he ended up getting a regular job as his bots were purchasing fewer and fewer shoes.)
You can read microfilm using a cell phone with a microscope lens attachment. All you need is some rack mechanism to let you precisely scroll the film left/right, and move the camera up/down across the film. I'm not sure why this guy insisted on salvaging an outdated reader. Those were bulky in order to avoid the expense of a an electronic camera sensor (which could cost millions of dollars at the time) and built-in monitor. Neither of those are expensive anymore.
Incompetent central planning (not having enough faith in the free market - the concept that individuals know what they want and need more than central planners) causes inequality and poverty.
Likewise, too much emphasis on the free market causes inequality and poverty (due to the tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, and monopolistic behavior though I would put that more in the third category).
And corruption causes inequality and poverty regardless of which type of system you use.
For the U.S. and Northern Europe in particular, the U.S. has a higher GDP per capita than any European country that isn't heavily involved in banking (Luxembourg, Switzerland), is energy-independent (Norway, Iceland), or plays tricks wit EU tax regulations to draw businesses to pay their EU taxes in their country (Ireland). So the lower amount of central regulation in the U.S. actually leads to higher overall productivity, not just more income inequality.
That's the tradeoff here. If you move the regulation slider all the way over the no regulation, you get very high productivity, but also very high income inequality. If you slide it all the way over to complete regulation (i.e. central planning), you get very low income inequality, but also very low productivity. There is not optimal "best" spot for this slider. Some developed countries prefer a little more productivity at the cost of a little more inequality. Some prefer more equality at the cost of a little less productivity. Neither is right, they are just different choices.
Someone posted above that their liability to assets ratio is 113%. That is, they owe more money than they're worth. This isn't a ploy. Their management seriously screwed up somehow.
Because for some reason people make a distinction between a corporate tax and a sales tax. What is the difference to you between:
you buy something from a company that costs $100. The company keeps $80, and sends $20 to the government as corporate taxes.
you buy something from a company that costs $80. The company collects an additional $20 as sales tax, making the final price you pay $100.
If you think about it, they're the same thing. You pay $100, the company gets to keep $80, the government gets $20.
Once you realize that, you realize the entire problem of multi-national corporations dodging taxes is self-inflicted. They can dodge taxes because they have no physical body and thus can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions. This allows them to shift "their" money from one jurisdiction to another in a manner which benefits them by allowing them to avoid corporate taxes. So the loophole only exists because we insist on taxing companies.
People, unlike companies, have a physical body and can thus only exist in one tax jurisdiction at a time, meaning they can't dodge taxes this way. So closing the loophole is easy - just set the corporate tax rate to zero and implement it as sales taxes. Once you get over the "I don't want to pay for it, the company should pay for it" misconception (the company pays for it by charging you a higher price, so you're still paying for it), this is a simple problem to solve.
The CAFE standards are set as MPG. But MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. As a result the bigger the MPG number gets, the smaller the reduction in fuel consumption. Imagine you drive a car 100 miles. How much fuel will it use?
12.5 MPG large SUV = 8 gallons
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons
100 MPG super-car = 1 gallon
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the fuel savings is half that of the previous doubling? So even though going from a sedan to a hybrid is an "impressive" +25 MPG increase, the fuel savings is only 2 gallons. Meanwhile, switching from a large SUV to a sedan yields only a +12.5 MPG increase (apparently half that of going from the sedan to the hybrid), but it saves twice as much fuel - 4 gallons. That's because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. The bigger MPG gets, the less of an improvement makes. It's why the rest of the world measures it in liters per 100 km (which is an inverse of MPG).
Put another way, MPG is the number you want to use if you have x gallons of gas, and want to know how far you want to drive with it. Nobody except race car drivers drives this way. The inverse of MPG, gallons per 100 miles, is the number you want if you need to drive x miles, and want to know how much fuel it'll take. That's how everyone drives.
You can't even average MPG easily. If you drive a 20 MPG vehicle and your spouse drives a 40 MPG vehicle, and each of you drives 100 miles in a week, your average is not 30 MPG. It's the harmonic mean, or 26.7 MPG. You only get a 30 MPG average if each car uses the same number of gallons in a week, not drives the same distance.
What this means for CAFE and fuel efficiency standards is that we shouldn't be concentrating on high-MPG vehicles like hybrids, or even the average MPG like CAFE does. To maximize the reduction in fuel consumption, our fuel efficiency standards should be set to raise the minimum MPG - that's where the most fuel is used and wasted. e.g. Increasing a tractor trailer's fuel efficiency from 6 MPG to 7 MPG saves as much fuel per mile as switching from a 23 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. Yes, that +1 MPG improvement is the same as the +27 MPG improvement (slightly more actually). Factor in that long-haul truckers typically drive about 100k-110k miles/yr, vs 15k miles/yr for the typical commuter car, and improving that one truck's mileage by +1 MPG is equivalent to getting 7 people to switch from an old sedan to a hybrid. Raising the low-MPG end makes a helluva lot more difference than increasing the high-MPG end. The environmentalists scoffed when automakers put hybrid drivetrains in SUVs, but that's precisely where they can generate the biggest reduction in fuel consumption.
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If both the buyer and seller agree on a valuation, that would be just compensation. Your example is based on the property having special value for Apple. Yet Apple themselves estimated its value as $200, which is their legal admission that it has very little value to them, special or not.
When the FCC defines broadband as 25 Mbps, many cellular wireless speeds already exceed wired speeds. Particularly in areas where the only broadband available is DSL (max speed of ADSL is 24 Mbps).
Cellular falls behind when lots of people are using bandwidth simultaneously. In wired connections, each node has a dedicated wire and bandwidth. But in wireless communications, the bandwidth is shared. 5G attempts to address that by using MIMO - basically using directional antennas to transmit different things to different locations over the same frequencies. (Imagine it as people in a room using directional flashlights to send messages to each other, instead of controlling a single light switch which turns the room's ceiling light on/off.) I'm curious to see how well it works when scaled up from the simple 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO found in 802.11ac routers.
As much as I dislike Trump, the specific line items in the budget are decided by Congress. The President only gets to sign or veto the whole thing as a single package.
They used to be, back when clocks were powered from an AC wall socket. Their gears were synchronized with the AC motor, and the power company worked really really hard to make sure the long-term average AC cycle was exactly 60 Hz. If equipment problems caused the frequency to drop slightly below 60 Hz, they'd run at slightly above 60 Hz for long enough to get the clocks back on the correct time.
Then we switched to clocks running off batteries with built-in quartz timing mechanisms. In theory they're better, but in practice they're never calibrated well enough or their calibration drifts with age and temperature, making them less accurate than the old AC powered clocks. The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot. With the 60 Hz power line method, only a single clock has to be calibrated to be super-accurate; and all the other clocks powered by AC synchronize off it.
Many photographers carry their expensive camera gear in a diaper bag with padded inserts.
Smarter Every Day covered spaghetti snapping into 3 pieces. Had to go all the way up to 250,000 fps to see what was happening.
As with most things like life, too little and too much are both bad.
The "reduced" battery capacity with an old battery isn't actually really reduced (at least not as dramatically as your % charge indicates). When you charge an old battery (normally, dunno about fast charge), it's still taking nearly the same amount of charge. (Capacity does drop slightly with age.)
What happens with an older battery is that it's ability to delivery current (max current) decreases. Also, as the battery gets discharged, the max current it can deliver drops as well. With an older battery, these two combined could drop max currrent so much that it's barely enough to sustain the phone's operations anymore. That exacerbates the voltage sag, which is why you see the remaining charge suddenly drop from 40% to 2%. This is why it's usually coupled with the remaining charge increasing when you stop doing anything processor intensive (exacerbated voltage sag resulted in too-low estimated remaining charge, now that voltage sag is released the estimate is now going back up closer to the correct amount). Or why the phone suddenly shuts off when it hits 30% (the battery couldn't deliver enough current to keep the phone powered on).
Slow charging to "fill up" the battery won't really help, as the problem is the ability to extract current from the older battery, not put it in. It's why Apple tried capping the max processor speed on their devices with older batteries - to prevent current draw from going high enough to cause this instant shutoff. That said, heat is bad because it will hasten the rate at which the battery wears out.
Fires are natural part of the ecological cycle. Developed countries putting them out early for nearly 100 years is what's causing more fires to occur - the buildup of vegetation (dead and live) means more fuel for new fires. The ecosystem needs fires every now and then to clear out dead brush (release the elements and chemical compounds they contain back into the ecosystem), and clear room for new plant growth (which supports different species than old growth). If you're not gonna let loggers thin out those trees, then you gotta let fires thin them every now and then.
Forest fires happened for hundreds of millions of years before man arrived on the scene, and they never burned the entire Earth to a cinder. Leave them alone to do their thing. If they're threatening buildings, that's a sign that you need to build a bigger firebreak around those buildings. Not a reason to put the fire out.
About half the time I code something, I end up grabbing a chunk of code that someone else has written which almost does what I want but not quite, copy/pasting it, and making a few tweaks to it so it'll do what I want.
That's kinda the whole reason software is different from crafting or manufacturing - zero cost of duplication. So there's no point doing duplicate work if someone else has already done it. In fact that's the fundamental rationale underlying open source.
It featured a lossless compression mode. Back around 2000, I used JPEG2000 to make archival copies of my scanned photos. They came out roughly half the size of an equivalent TIFF.
JPEG2000's drawback (and probably its undoing) was that it was simply too processor-intensive for the hardware at the time. It took my 300 MHz Celeron about 5 minutes to compress a photo into JPEG2000 format, nearly a minute to decompress (read) it. That meant that you still had to rely on TIFF to save your intermediate photo editing steps. So lossless JPEG2000 only ended up saving you about 5%-10% of the storage space if you kept those intermediate editing savefiles, rather than 50%. At which point you figured why bother? Just save the final result as TIFF like you always did.
JPEG was the same when it first came out. I remember downloading a copy of it way back in the late 1980s when it was still being beta tested. It took over a minute to decompress a 1024x768 photo on my 33 MHz PC. But the file size was only about 200 kB, vs over a megabyte for a compressed bitmap (GIF crushes images down to 256 colors). The difference was JPEG didn't have any competing formats which could get sizes down as small, and disk prices and slow network speeds (300 bps dialup) meant shrinking image file size was incredibly important. But by 2000, storage prices had come way down and a good chunk of the country had broadband Internet speeds, meaning the extra file size reduction of JPEG2000 simply wasn't worth the huge amount of time it took on contemporaneous processors.
Technically, if the editor reads slashdot (a stretch, I know), and they wish not to reveal that they are the source of a comment, then they can be an "anonymous Slashdot reader."
The way the media portrays it:
If a trade policy is implemented by a Democrat:
If a trade policy is implemented by a Republican:
The reality is that both are true. The press just likes to spin it in favor of or against the party in power.
Nope. They're designed to help American manufacturing by making foreign products more expensive than American products. That is, they protect American jobs, but do so by making the products you buy more expensive.
That's why I generally fall on the pro-open trade side of this. It's a Prisoner's dilemma situation, where if one side implements tariffs, they get a better result than open trade, while the other side gets the worst possible result. But if both sides implement tariffs, they both end up worse off than with open trade. The best solution for both sides overall is open trade.
Trump's rationale (which I partly agree with but mostly don't) is that China has been abusing our policy of open import of Chinese goods by restricting export of American goods to China and/or subsidizing some of their goods which the U.S. imports which artificially kills off U.S. producers, thus giving China the advantage in the Prisoner's dilemma (and puts the U.S. at a disadvantage). The best solution found thus far to the iterated Prisoner's dilemma is the tit for tat strategy. If one side abuses the Prisoner's dilemma, the other side abuses it right back thus signaling that it won't take such abuse lying down. And eventually the side which started the abuse backs down, and the other side also backs down, reverting both sides to the best possible strategy for both (in this case, open trade).
Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost because of a metric/imperical mix-up as the press likes to portray it. It was lost because one lazy person didn't write down the units on a printout of numbers, and another lazy person just assumed what the units were supposed to be instead of picking up the phone and verifying. MCO would've been lost all the same if the numbers had been printed in kilonewtons and the person keying in the numbers assumed they were newtons. No Imperial units necessary. The first thing they drilled into our heads in my undergrad engineering school was that a number without a unit was meaningless (except as a ratio), and to treat it as NaN rather than assume the units.
Roughly half the missions to Mars fail, and NASA has had the highest success rate of any space agency. The overall success rate at Venus is higher, but mostly because only the Soviets tried to land on it. Everything else has been orbiters or flybys. However, contrary to GP's claim, Venus is a harder target than this asteroid. Because of the sun's gravity well, the least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit from Earth to Venus ends up taking about 6 months. This results in a relatively large delta-V between the spacecraft and target, which needs to be precisely canceled out when the spacecraft reaches Venus in order for it to enter planetary orbit (the same operation which doomed MCO). The asteroid Hyabusa2 is encountering is a near-earth asteroid, meaning its orbital velocity around the sun is not that different from Earth's. So the spacecraft could take a more leisurely trip there (roughly 3.5 years), requiring substantially less delta-V to slow down and match the asteroid's orbit.
Emphasis mine. If they're not selling the game, then they can't be making money off of it, so obviously they can't be losing money due to copyright violations. The purpose of Copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
If Copyright is preventing progress of the useful arts by allowing a copyright holder to block distribution of a pre-existing work by both not selling it and preventing its illegal distribution, then that's evidence that the duration of Copyright is too long. Copyright duration is so long that it is no longer financially viable for the copyright holder to continue to distribute the work, yet because they still hold the Copyright they can prevent others from distributing the work to "promote the progress of the useful arts."
It's been suggested before, but Copyright really needs to move to a dynamic duration rather than fixed. The point of Copyright should be to allow a content creator to profit from their work, but once public interest has waned and the profit motive has mostly disappeared, the Copyright should expire. Give everything a 10 year initial copyright. At the end of 10 years, the copyright holder can elect to renew it for another 10 years by paying a fee. The amount of the fee should increase with each renewal - something like
$1000 the first extra 10 years (expires after 20 years)
$3200 the next 10 years (expires after 30 years)
$10k for the next 10 years (expires after 40 years)
$32k for the next 10 years (expires after 50 years)
$100k for the next 10 years (expires after 60 yearsl)
$320k for the next 10 years (expires after 70 years)
$1 million for the next 10 years (expires after 80 years)
$3.2 million for the next 10 years (expires after 90 yearsl)
$10 million for each subsequent 10 years (100+ years)
That would have the effect of flushing out financially unviable copyrighted works into the public domain rather quickly, while allowing hugely successful works like Disney's to continue indefinitely as long as they're making money from it. The way current Copyright durations keep being extended, some works are so old and lost from public awareness that the only copy is held at the U.S. Copyright Office. That makes us vulnerable to one of the greatest losses of historical intellectual property since The Library of Alexandria burned down.
(Hmm, I suppose an easier way would be to require that after the initial 14 year term (the original duration set in 1790), in order to retain copyright up to its current maximum duration, the copyright holder must continue to offer the work for sale.)
So basically the mesothelioma death rate (from all causes, not just asbestos related) went from 1.396 per 100,000 to 1.093 per 100,000 per year.. Or a reduction of 0.3 per 100,000 per year. That puts the benefit of banning asbestos at the very bottom of the list of causes of death, even if you assume 100% of mesothelioma was caused by asbestos.
The money we spent banning and ripping out asbestos probably would've been much better spent on things like PSAs to buckle your seat belt, or suicide prevention hotlines. Those have a death rate nearly a hundred times higher than the reduction in mesothelioma death rate. Heck, fires kill 5.0 people per 100,000 each year, so it's even possible that banning asbestos resulted in more people dying to fires than were saved from death by mesothelioma.
Based on this one paper, it would seem that banning asbestos was a vast overreaction. Given the tiny scale of the problem, it probably would've been better addressed by stricter regulations mandating masks and filters during the mining and processing of asbestos, and manufacture of products containing asbestos, rather than a widescale ban. Kinda like how disproportionate news coverage of airliner crashes has caused us to spend more on preventing airliner crashes, resulting in air travel being 86x safer than cars.
The amber glasses used by shooters work by blocking blue light. The lens in your eye is a simple lens, so suffers from chromatic aberration. It does not focus the different colors of light onto the exact same spot. So what you see can be sharpened by blocking one end of the visible spectrum - red or blue. Your eyes are most sensitive to detail in green, less so in red, and suck at resolving blue. So blue light can be filtered out with very little effect on visual acuity (other than color accuracy). With less chromatic aberration, what you see appears slightly sharper.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power. But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem, environmentalists insisted that we dismantle that existing solution, and roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time. Then we can develop renewables at our leisure, and use those to phase out nuclear power as they (and battery technology) become capable of handling our base load requirements.
The low range of the time estimate (10 years) is coincidentally about the amount of time it takes to complete construction of a large nuclear plant. Let's see if environmentalists read this news about the coming doomsday scenario, and take it a a sign to drop opposition to nuclear power. Or if they'd rather let all life on Earth go extinct, than let renewable power temporarily take a back seat to nuclear power.
Difference is that purchase prices are actually a rate, not a fixed amount. The chair has longevity going for it. If your $600 chair will last you 10 years before you have to replace it, then it's actually only costing you $5/mo.
A $1000 phone that you replace in 2 years is costing you $42/mo. Which would be equivalent to "blowing" $5000 on an ergonomic chair which lasts 10 years.
Unless you're making about $100k/yr, I think $42/mo for a phone is silly. But lots of average-income people buy a $7 cup of coffee every workday morning, and that's $150/mo. So I've stopped trying to understand some people's purchase decisions. It's just annoying when these same people complain that it's so hard to make ends meet, and how it's a conspiracy by corporations/the government to keep them mired in a lower-middle class lifestyle. No it's not, it's your own lack of financial self-control.
Apparently the major shoe companies sell limited edition shoes on their websites which are highly desired by collectors, first come, first serve. He and people like him coded bots which would monitor the websites for these sales, and buy as many of these limited edition shoes as they could the instant they were listed on the website. Then he'd sell them to collectors at a considerable markup. Kinda like high-frequency trading, except with shoes.
(Past tense because his programming skills weren't enough to keep up, and he ended up getting a regular job as his bots were purchasing fewer and fewer shoes.)
You can read microfilm using a cell phone with a microscope lens attachment. All you need is some rack mechanism to let you precisely scroll the film left/right, and move the camera up/down across the film. I'm not sure why this guy insisted on salvaging an outdated reader. Those were bulky in order to avoid the expense of a an electronic camera sensor (which could cost millions of dollars at the time) and built-in monitor. Neither of those are expensive anymore.
You're both right.
Incompetent central planning (not having enough faith in the free market - the concept that individuals know what they want and need more than central planners) causes inequality and poverty.
Likewise, too much emphasis on the free market causes inequality and poverty (due to the tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, and monopolistic behavior though I would put that more in the third category).
And corruption causes inequality and poverty regardless of which type of system you use.
For the U.S. and Northern Europe in particular, the U.S. has a higher GDP per capita than any European country that isn't heavily involved in banking (Luxembourg, Switzerland), is energy-independent (Norway, Iceland), or plays tricks wit EU tax regulations to draw businesses to pay their EU taxes in their country (Ireland). So the lower amount of central regulation in the U.S. actually leads to higher overall productivity, not just more income inequality.
That's the tradeoff here. If you move the regulation slider all the way over the no regulation, you get very high productivity, but also very high income inequality. If you slide it all the way over to complete regulation (i.e. central planning), you get very low income inequality, but also very low productivity. There is not optimal "best" spot for this slider. Some developed countries prefer a little more productivity at the cost of a little more inequality. Some prefer more equality at the cost of a little less productivity. Neither is right, they are just different choices.
Someone posted above that their liability to assets ratio is 113%. That is, they owe more money than they're worth. This isn't a ploy. Their management seriously screwed up somehow.
If you think about it, they're the same thing. You pay $100, the company gets to keep $80, the government gets $20.
Once you realize that, you realize the entire problem of multi-national corporations dodging taxes is self-inflicted. They can dodge taxes because they have no physical body and thus can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions. This allows them to shift "their" money from one jurisdiction to another in a manner which benefits them by allowing them to avoid corporate taxes. So the loophole only exists because we insist on taxing companies.
People, unlike companies, have a physical body and can thus only exist in one tax jurisdiction at a time, meaning they can't dodge taxes this way. So closing the loophole is easy - just set the corporate tax rate to zero and implement it as sales taxes. Once you get over the "I don't want to pay for it, the company should pay for it" misconception (the company pays for it by charging you a higher price, so you're still paying for it), this is a simple problem to solve.
The CAFE standards are set as MPG. But MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. As a result the bigger the MPG number gets, the smaller the reduction in fuel consumption. Imagine you drive a car 100 miles. How much fuel will it use?
12.5 MPG large SUV = 8 gallons
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons
100 MPG super-car = 1 gallon
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the fuel savings is half that of the previous doubling? So even though going from a sedan to a hybrid is an "impressive" +25 MPG increase, the fuel savings is only 2 gallons. Meanwhile, switching from a large SUV to a sedan yields only a +12.5 MPG increase (apparently half that of going from the sedan to the hybrid), but it saves twice as much fuel - 4 gallons. That's because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. The bigger MPG gets, the less of an improvement makes. It's why the rest of the world measures it in liters per 100 km (which is an inverse of MPG).
Put another way, MPG is the number you want to use if you have x gallons of gas, and want to know how far you want to drive with it. Nobody except race car drivers drives this way. The inverse of MPG, gallons per 100 miles, is the number you want if you need to drive x miles, and want to know how much fuel it'll take. That's how everyone drives.
You can't even average MPG easily. If you drive a 20 MPG vehicle and your spouse drives a 40 MPG vehicle, and each of you drives 100 miles in a week, your average is not 30 MPG. It's the harmonic mean, or 26.7 MPG. You only get a 30 MPG average if each car uses the same number of gallons in a week, not drives the same distance.
What this means for CAFE and fuel efficiency standards is that we shouldn't be concentrating on high-MPG vehicles like hybrids, or even the average MPG like CAFE does. To maximize the reduction in fuel consumption, our fuel efficiency standards should be set to raise the minimum MPG - that's where the most fuel is used and wasted. e.g. Increasing a tractor trailer's fuel efficiency from 6 MPG to 7 MPG saves as much fuel per mile as switching from a 23 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. Yes, that +1 MPG improvement is the same as the +27 MPG improvement (slightly more actually). Factor in that long-haul truckers typically drive about 100k-110k miles/yr, vs 15k miles/yr for the typical commuter car, and improving that one truck's mileage by +1 MPG is equivalent to getting 7 people to switch from an old sedan to a hybrid. Raising the low-MPG end makes a helluva lot more difference than increasing the high-MPG end. The environmentalists scoffed when automakers put hybrid drivetrains in SUVs, but that's precisely where they can generate the biggest reduction in fuel consumption.