Now really, what's the rationale behind charging for a hyperlink, even if no content is displayed? Greed? Stupidity? Idiocy?
Brick-and-mortar business owners (mainly newspapers) misunderstanding how the Internet works. They're used to the idea of a physical storefront, where they put up a big sign advertising their newspaper. People see the sign, step up to their store, and buy the paper. They don't really understand how the Internet works, so they interpret how Google News works as Google coming in and putting up Google's sign in front of their sign, and effectively acting as gatekeeper to their customers. They think it's unfair since it's their paper which the customers want, not Google's sign, and they're getting laws passed to try to force Google to pay them.
The way it really works is that Google is not putting a sign in front of their sign. Google is building a road which passes in front of their store. The increased traffic from people using that road causes more people to see the newspaper's sign, and come in and buy papers. That's what Google News is - free advertising. This idiotic law is going to make Google build a wall blocking the view of these news sites' sign from people using the road, and their pageviews and revenue is going to shrivel up to almost nothing.
When that happens, they'll try to pass a law forcing Google to advertise their site (link to them). Combined with this law forcing Google to pay them for linking to them, it's a complete reversal of how business is supposed to work. Normally when you want someone to advertise for you, you have to pay them for it. The combination of those two laws would result in forcing Google to advertise for them, and Google paying them (instead of the other way around). If that law passes, then Google and every other search engine will simply pull out of the EU, and these people will be left wondering why no search engine wants to index the EU.
What Google should have done when they first started Google News was charge news sites a modest fee to include their snippets. That would have established up-front that (1) this was advertising and like all advertising you have to pay for it somehow, and (2) the sites being featured on Google News were doing so voluntarily. The big sites would've scoffed at the idea, but some of the smaller ones would have bit. When it became clear that news sites which paid to be featured in Google News got a lot more traffic (and thus a lot more ad revenue themselves), then all these newspapers would be tripping over themselves to pay Google to feature them in Google News. But by trying to be the nice guy and give these newspapers free advertising, Google inadvertently cemented in their minds the misconception that they're entitled to this advertising for free. Which starts them down the slippery slope to thinking that Google should be paying them for advertising for them.
think you made a couple mistakes though. First up, the inductive charger would REPLACE the 80% charging efficiency of the leaf's charger, not be in addition to it. In short, a wash. This is what I've found when I researched it myself, for EVs wireless and wired charging are effectively equal in efficiency.
The 80% wireless induction efficiency is for energy transfer over the wireless link. Basically you're switching from a 100% efficient cable to 80% efficient wireless. The 80% battery charging efficiency is for charging the battery - some of the electricity you pump into it gets converted into waste heat. So it is correct to include both.
Second, you make absolutely no adjustment for the energy costs involved in extracting, refining, shipping, and pumping gasoline.
I assumed those would be on the same order for gasoline, coal, and natural gas. Extraction costs are probably about the same (they all come from underground). Gasoline is actually probably cheaper to transport. due to being higher density than gas, and liquid being easier to transport than solid (coal). That's the entire reason it's used in transportation applications instead of coal or natural gas (which are substantially cheaper per MJ). But that's probably canceled out by having to refine oil to extract the gasoline.
This drops the energy efficiency of EVs below that of ICEs.
The EPA lists the Nissan Leaf at 30 kWh per 100 miles. This is energy stored in the battery. Getting the energy into the battery involves a charging efficiency of about 80% (i.e. only 80% of the electricity coming out the wall socket makes it into the battery, the other 20% becomes waste heat). Transmission over power lines is about 95% efficient. And electricity generated from coal plants is about 37% efficient, about 58% efficient for natural gas plants. Split the difference and call it 47.5%. So to move an EV 100 miles requires (30 kWh) / (0.8 * 0.95 * 0.475) = 83.1 kWh = 299 MJ worth of fuel if you're generating the electricity from fossil fuels.
The Nissan Versa hatchback (ICE equivalent to the Leaf) uses 2.9 gallons of gasoline per 100 miles. Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 MJ per liter, or 129.5 MJ per gallon. So 2.9 gallons holds 375.4 MJ. Making the ICE vehicle slightly less energy-efficient than the EV (uses about 25% more energy than the EV).
Wireless inductive chargers have been built over 90% efficient in labs, but the typical chargers in commercial production are only 75%-80% efficient. That moves the EV's 299 MJ per 100 mile energy consumption up to 374-399 MJ per 100 miles. Meaning the EV consumes more energy than an equivalent ICE vehicle to travel the same distance.
Norway can get away with it because they get almost all their electricity from hydroelectric. But this idea won't work in countries heavily reliant on fossil fuels to generate electricity (most of the world). The EV still gets the advantage of being able to better filter out particulate emissions at the power plant using big effective filters, instead of poor transportable filters at the tailpipe of every car. But it would result in EVs generating more CO2 per mile than ICE vehicles, defeating much of the purpose of switching to EVs.
Agreed that this is security theater that offers very little real protection. But I disagree that it's wasted time and money (aside from some of the people doing it taking their jobs way too seriously). If you've lived through a riot, you realize that the "protection" offered by the police is mostly an illusion. And that if things really get out of hand, there is really nothing that the police can do. The role of the police is more to calm the public and create the self-fulfilling prophecy of the illusion of peace, so that people don't go nuts looting and destroying stuff because they have no fear of retribution.
Likewise, the role of TSA is security theater. But while it is theater, it is effective in keeping the traveling public calm about the safety of air travel. The threat itself is minuscule (air travel is the safest for of travel, and yet many more people are killed by random airliner accidents than by terrorists blowing up planes). The threat is just exaggerated in people's minds by disproportionate media coverage and media hype.
So security theater is the proper response - illusionary safety measures for assuaging people's illusionary fears.
It's important to avoid selection bias. The best example I've seen was a city wondering if subway funding needed to be increased or decreased. They thought measuing how much the subway was used would be good information for making this decision, so they hired someone to poll the city's residents to see how often they rode the subway. The person initially asked people at random in public spaces how often they rode the subway. He grew frustrated that very few people rode the subway, meaning he was collecting very little data for the number of people he was asking. That's when he got the brilliant idea of going onto the subway and asking people there.
The problem is, asking people riding the subway how often they use the subway introduces two selection biases. (1) It eliminates everyone who doesn't use the subway from your sample. And (2) people who ride the subway more often are more likely to be encountered in your polling (you're 10x as likely to randomly encounter someone who rides 10 hours a week as you are someone who rides 1 hour a week), skewing your polling data high. To properly measure subway ridership, you have to do a random sample orthogonal to subway use, which means asking random people in public places was the proper way to do it. A random telephone poll would probably have been best.
Similarly when you target one specific country for investigation, you're introducing a sampling bias. If you accuse a restaurant of being infested with roaches, and that prompts an investigation that finds roaches in the restaurant, that doesn't prove your accusation. All that proves is that the restaurant has roaches, not that it is "infested." Other restaurants may have roaches too. In fact, for all you know, the restaurant you accused may actually be the cleanest building in the city, and even your own house has more roaches than that restaurant. But by limiting the investigation to just that one restaurant, you can misleadingly create the impression that your accusation that the restaurant is infested with roaches is true.
Over and over, I saw this sampling bias being abused by those wishing to push the Russian interference story. e.g. Google and Facebook reported they searched their 2016 records for ads purchased by Russian agents, and found some. But in order for that to mean anything, they should have also searched for ads purchased by anyone else, and compared. I suspect if they had, they would've found attempted interference by China, by the EU, by Mexico, by Canada, by Anonymous, etc. The magnitude of the "Russian interference" (a few dozen to a few hundred people, and around six dollar figures in magnitude ) makes me suspect all these investigations found was the random noise that just happens everywhere all the time.
I didn't vote for Trump and I think is Presidency has been a travesty. But I think the abuse of statistics and manipulation of facts through selection bias by the media and those pushing this story is an even bigger travesty. If you really, truly believe that those few Russians managed to affect the outcome of the election using that little money, then every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire those guys. The amount of money spent in that election was staggering - tens to hundreds of dollars per vote. Trump actually spent close to the lowest at $5 per vote. Yet these people pushing this Russian interference angle somehow believe that these Russians were able to affect the election for pennies per vote.
If this report had found that the Russians had spent tens or hundreds of dollars per vote to interfere with the election, then I'd agree there was something worrying going on. But the amount of interference I've seen reported seems more like just the normal noise that comes from normal people from the sketchy side of the population's bell curve doing their normal sketchy things.
That's one of the problems I see with Google's approach. Instead of looking at how well a product solves a particular problem, they only look at how widely used a product is. It spells almost-certain doom for niche products like Reader, even if they're a great tool. I loved Hangouts because it solved two very specific messaging problems - (1) integration of text, voice, and video chat and conferencing, and (2) synchronized messaging across multiple devices (so you can do all these things on your phone, tablet, or PC). But those things aren't very important to most people. And as a text messaging app it was rather meh, so they killed it.
I've been on Sprint for nearly 2 decades now despite them being the "worst" carrier because, aside from a short 1-year stint in a rental apartment, I've been fortunate to live and work in places where they had great service. Right now my home is close enough to one of their towers that I use my phone as a hotspot whenever my home Internet goes down. I typically get 25-40 Mbps from them at home, which is actually close to double the national average speed for Verizon and T-Mobile. And I'm on an ancient grandfathered plan with unlimited data and no hotspot restriction, so am extremely reluctant to switch carriers.
For most of the TV channels, if you subscribe to a service which offers the channel, you can login directly to that channel's site and stream their content. The movie studios need to set up a similar system, where if a service you subscribe to carries a movie, then they will stream it to you after confirming your subscription.
What we need now is some master app which coordinates all this. Right now if you try to stream like this directly from all the channels, you'll have to go through a login procedure for each channel, where they redirect you to your subscription service and you have to login. You have to repeat this every few months. What's needed is something which automates this step, automatically verifying your subscription whenever you try to access a channel's stream. That would make the entire procedure seamless and transparent.
The only remaining troublesome feature would then be compiling a list of which channels each subscription service gives you, so you can compare them and decide which ones to subscribe to. For some reason they don't make it easy to compare channel offerings. I've had to get channel lists from news websites, and those lists rapidly go out of date as channels are added or removed. If each service would just offer their current channel list in xml format on their website, it'd be trivial to create a website which automatically compares them. You could pre-select which channels were must-have, might-watch, and never-watch, and the website could figure out which single service was best for you, or which multiple services gave you what you wanted with fewest subscriptions, or for lowest subscription price.
No, the third pilot's disassociated viewpoint had nothing to do with it. He simply knew the plane's checklist. That's a bunch of standard procedures every pilot is supposed to know of what to do when they encounter a specific type of problem on that specific model plane. When you hear that a pilot has been trained on a certain plane model, that's what they're talking about - they're leaning all these checklists. If a pilot can't remember it exactly, the entire book of checklists is available aboard the plane for the pilots to reference in a Quick Reference Handbook. Any time the pilots face a situation aboard the plane which puzzles them and they don't recall the resolution from their training, they should reach for the QRH. One of them flys the plane, the other looks up the problem in the QRH.
The third pilot knew the checklist for the 737 Max. He instructed the other pilots to perform the manufacturer's specified procedure to resolve the problem, and it did resolve the problem. The pilots in the two planes which crashed apparently did not know the checklist, and did not reference the QRH. (Speculating here a bit since we don't know yet what happened - maybe they performed the proper reset procedure and the problem didn't go away.)
Contrary to the way most people here seem to be interpreting it, the third pilot's anecdote actually absolves Boeing and places blame for the crashes primarily upon the four pilots. This is looking like a pilot training problem. Boeing is still culpable for designing an automatic safety system which was prone to fail multiple times in just months of operation, and for making it so hard and non-obvious to override. But based on the third pilot's anecdote, primary culpability would be upon the pilots of the two other planes for not knowing the plane's checklists, and not bothering to crack open the QRH to double-check if they were addressing the problem properly.
Planes are incredibly complicated and it's unreasonable to expect a pilot to understand how all of its systems interact. The checklists in the QRH are made by the engineers who designed the plane. They do understand all of the plane's systems and how they interact. They come up with every possible problem they can think of which a pilot might encounter, and write checklists to resolve every possible cause they can think of for those problems. The checklist procedure for this problem fixed it in the third pilot's case. If the four pilots did not follow that procedure, then the crashes were their fault, not Boeing's.
It seems like iTunes itself handles the content decryption process so you can view what you purchased. And once that can take place, you could write software that captures each frame out of the video buffer along with the audio that's playing back to the speakers and saves them to a new file?
The decryption is done inside an encrypted virtual machine, which is coded to pass the resulting video and audio directly to the GPU and audio hardware. This is why your phone can play Netflix using the Netflix app, but not Netflix in a browser. The former is done using the phone's GPU to decode the video. The latter is decoded using the phone's CPU, and most phone processors aren't powerful enough to do it in real time. Hollywood distinguishes between dedicated video playback hardware (Blu-ray players, Rokus, phones, tablets, etc are allowed to run an app which decodes using hardware acceleration) from general purpose computing devices (PCs, which are required to decode inside an encrypted virtual machine). Since iTunes/Netflix/etc. pass the decrypted video directly to the display hardware, in theory there's no way to capture the intermediate decrypted video stream.
I suppose you could bypass it if you played iTunes in a virtual machine, and intercepted the screen output of the VM. iTunes would still think it's writing directly to the screen GPU. When in actuality its writing to a virtualized GPU whose output you could then capture on the host machine. There are so many ways you can poke holes in DRM if you really wanted to.
That is actually one of the problems with statistical significance. It's only relevant if you're reporting one single result. If you're reporting multiple results, then that creates a second layer of statistical significance, where on average you expect several of those results to surpass your single-sample threshold of significance just by random chance. And so your findings are only noteworthy if you get more than a certain number of results which surpass your single-sample threshold.
If you've got just one result, the confidence level in that result is 95%. If you've got two and one is "statistically significant", the confidence level drops to 90%. If you've got three it drops to 86%. etc. It converges on 1/e when the number of results you're reporting equals the single-confidence level. i.e. For statistical significance, since your threshold is a 1 in 20 chance of obtaining the result by random chance, the odds of getting one "statistically significant" result from 20 results is 1/e. (This might be easier to see in lottery tickets, where if you've go a 1 in 1 million chance of winning, and you buy a million random tickets, your odds of winning are 1/e.) When reporting larger numbers of results, you actually expect more than a single result to surpass your 95% threshold, so the odds of finding just one or even no "statistically significant" results begin to approach zero.
The 1/e value is the only constant point in all these probabilities. The chance for everything else varies depending on your threshold level and the number of results. So the threshold for "statistical significance" actually varies with the number of results you're reporting. But scientists report their results using the single-sample threshold for everything, as if that's the constant point, not 1/e. Which I'm guessing is what TFA (didn't read) is complaining about.
You can read the Canada Supreme Court decision that Monsato won over Percy Schmeiser (first link in the references). It was pretty obvious that he was innocent. The Court even reduced his fine to $1 (a fact scrubbed from the wiki page, probably by Monsanto-paid editors) because they determined that he didn't benefit in any way from planting the RoundUp Ready seeds (he never sprayed RoundUp on his crops).
The Court only decided in favor of Monsanto because they did have a patent, and they determined Schmeiser violated that patent by planting seeds with the patented gene. And even that determination is suspect because the Court bought Monsanto's argument that there was no way for plants to develop resistance to RoundUp on their own. So Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the canola plants he found in the gutters by his field that survived spraying with RoundUp were from Monsanto's patented seeds. This argument was later disproven when weeds were found which had developed resistance to RoundUp on their own, meaning Schmeiser was right when he argued that he believed the Canola in his gutters had developed resistance on their own.
MPG is actually the inverse of fuel consumption. That is, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is consumed. This has the effect of exaggerating people's perception of the effect of high-MPG vehicles on fuel consumption. Most people are surprised to learn that upgrading from a 14 MPG SUV to a 20 MPG SUV saves more fuel than upgrading from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. How can a +6 MPG improvement save more fuel than a +25 MPG improvement? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, meaning a +x MPG delta doesn't represent the same fuel savings throughout the entire MPG range. Say you drive 100 miles.
14 MPG SUV = 7.14 gallons
20 MPG SUV = 5.0 gallons
2.14 gallons saved per 100 miles
25 MPG sedan = 4.0 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2.0 gallons
2.0 gallons saved per 100 miles.
So +6 MPG @ 14 MPG results in more fuel savings than +25 MPG @ 25 MPG. A +x MPG improvement represents more fuel savings at lower MPG than it does higher MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. That's a direct measure of fuel consumption, not an inverse.
This means econoboxes are actually the worst vehicle to convert to a hybrid. They already use very little fuel, so the potential fuel savings by converting them to a hybrid is even smaller. And you're spending a lot of money on a hybrid drivetrain for a very small fuel savings. The hybrid SUVs that environmentalists scoffed at are actually the best personal vehicles for converting into hybrids. Likewise, you get the biggest fuel savings when you convert pickup trucks, buses, and tractor trailers to hybrids or electric. Musk understood this, which is why he produced an electric semi-trailer truck. There are roughly 2 million semi-trucks in the U.S. vs 250 million cars. Yet the semi-trucks consume nearly as much fuel as the cars.
(The same problem affects hard drives and SSDs. MB/s is actually the inverse of how we perceive drive speed. We think of speed in terms of how long we have to wait for the drive to complete an operation. So those multi-GB/s sequential speeds that NVMe SSDs can hit actually make very little difference. They're so fast the operation is completed in the blink of an eye. It's actually the smallest MB/s speeds which make the biggest difference. If your NMVe SSD can only manage 30 MB/s 4k reads, even a small number of small files which need to be read will easily make you wait for a longer time than hundreds of MB of sequential data. If you want a good SSD, ignore the sequential speeds, get something with fast 4k speeds.)
Lion Air likely didn't know there was a serious problem with the sensor. If TFA is correct, the dead-head pilot followed the correct procedure which cleared up the problem. All Lion Air's mechanics would've gotten was a note about the system malfunctioning (nobody knew the sensor was at fault until after the crash and the black box data was analyzed). And since the official resolution procedure cleared up the problem, that would've made it a low-priority fix, probably put off until the plane's next scheduled maintenance.
What's more concerning is that the dead-head pilot apparently knew something about the new plane's procedures that the regular pilots did not. That points to a training issue.
The plane doesn't exactly need extra special training. People need to understand that similarity to older systems (backwards compatibility) is not always a good thing. It can also be a detriment when it causes people to assume things in the new system work the same as they did in the old system. According to TFA, the procedure the pilot used used to clear the problem is actually in Boeing's 737 Max checklist (steps the pilots are supposed to take when a problem occurs - like your ISP has you unplug and plug in your network cables, power cycle your cable modem,etc.)
The so-called dead-head pilot on the flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor in the trim system that was driving the nose down, according to the people familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize.
Unfortunately, because of the similarity of the 737 Max to the older 737, two aircrews apparently assumed the new plane operated the same as the old one, and they apparently didn't follow the new checklist (likely didn't realize the new checklist differed) to clear up the problem. Resulting in two plane crashes. That would make it a training problem. But culpability still falls upon Boeing for not making it clear enough to pilots that the system had changed, and for designing a sensor which fails frequently enough to cause multiple incidents in only months of operation, and for designing a flight system which made it so difficult for the pilots to override a malfunctioning automated system.
Unlike the EU, the right of the accused to know the exact nature and cause of the accusation against them is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The EU never told Google what they thought Google was doing wrong. Just that it was "anti-competitive." The way the EU handles these cases is they inform Google that they're facing an anti-trust judgement, but never state exactly what the problem behavior is. Google had to come up with a proposed solution, present it to the EU, and the EU rejected it without explaining why. Google then had to come up with a different proposal, present it to the EU, and the EU rejected that. Repeat until the deadline passed.
Don't misunderstand me Google probably did need to be taken down a peg or two. And this is the same crappy way Google treats people with their YouTube demonitization and account revocation. They'll punish you without ever explaining why you're being punished, pointing you to their generic list of suggested guidelines without bothering to explain which one you ran afoul of. But it's wrong when Google does it, and it's wrong when the EU does it. If you think someone or some company did something wrong, you need to tell them exactly what they did wrong so they can correct that behavior. You don't just say "you're wrong" and punish them.
Contrary to popular belief, the population growth rate in developed countries is nearly zero. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries, and Africa has the highest growth rate by far. So as well-intentioned as these humanitarian measures are (saving babies, food, medicine, clean water, etc), they actually exacerbate the suffering of these people. Medicine, clean water, and saving babies will
cause their population to increase faster than it should be growing, forcing them to spread already-limited resources even thinner. Food aid puts local farmers out of business by depressing the market value of their crops, and discouraging others from taking up farming.
The correct way to help them is to help them develop their economies - improve their education systems (that's what the One Laptop per Child project was trying to do), help them build their civil infrastructure, keep criminals and militants in check, and promote private businesses. Then they can train their own doctors, build their own hospitals, grow their own food, pump their own clean water, and save their own babies. As barbaric as it sounds, right now the babies need to die at a high rate to keep their population growth in check. The high infant mortality rate there is symptom of their undeveloped economy. Treating the symptom with addressing the root cause just exacerbates the problem and their suffering.
The only reason off-shoring works is because you're part of the privileged 1%. Of the world. Your labor is priced higher than the labor of some underprivileged person in the developing world, creating an economic incentive to shift jobs away from you and to them. The jobs there raise their productivity, increasing their purchasing power, creating more demand, which creates more jobs, which increases their productivity more, etc. The positive effect of all that on the global economy outweighs the negative effect of a 1%er (you) losing their job. Which is what creates an economic pressure to offshore your job - it 's a net economic benefit.
Every argument you've come up with for why the top 1% of the U.S. is terrible and needs to be torn down and their wealth redistributed? Those arguments also apply to you relative to the rest of the world.
Spiral to the bottom.
It's not a spiral to the bottom. It's lifting up the rest of the world. Unfortunately for the 1% (you and me), the process of lifting the rest of the world results in downward pressure on the 1%. That's what creating economic equality does. You're just used to always thinking about "equality" from the perspective of the underprivileged being raised up. You've never thought of it from the perspective of the privileged being brought down, even though that's your true station in the global scheme of things.
We won't get back to pre-equality levels of wealth and job security until after the rest of the world has become as developed as us, and the lowest-hanging economic fruit shifts back to improving our productivity. You can accept that that's our fate - how we have to "pay our fair share" to helping the rest of the world. Or you can oppose it, hypocritically demanding things from the 1% in the U.S that you yourself refuse to give up to the rest of the world.
Ignoring the latency, dropouts, and compression artifact issues. You're basically renting the GPU instead of buying it. This is taking advantage of the fact that most people's gaming GPUs sit idle for most of the day. If on average, gamers buy a GPU and use it only 20% of the time (4.8 hours/day), a streaming service like this can provide the same gaming experience for as little as 1/5th the cost, since their GPU can be used by someone else when you're not using it. So if you're used to buying a $600 top-of-the-line GPU every 2 years ($25/mo), a service like this could potentially give you the same graphical experience for $5/mo ($120 every 2 years). That huge price delta will be compelling enough to make a lot of people ignore the latency, dropouts, and compression artifacts.
The fact that Google might drop it won't matter because unlike the services you listed, the software service here is just a transparent streaming layer. You can always switch to a different streamed game service. Or even go back to buying a GPU and playing the games on your own hardware. As long as the same game titles are available, the interface will be the same, and you'll likely even be able to copy over your saved games. Like how you can cancel Netflix and switch to Hulu, and the only thing that really matters is which movies and shows are available in the library.
The "GPU is no longer important" not because the GPU isn't used, but because every modern GPU can handle 4k streams. The iGPU in Intel processors have been able to decode 4k video since Ivy Bridge (2012)). A lot of the GPUs in modern phones and tablets can do it too (one of the reasons I thought it was silly to complain about phone resolutions becoming so high). And obviously the GPU in Rokus and Fire TV sticks which support 4k and 4k smart TVs can decode 4k video streams.
The bigger issue has been support for newer codecs like h.265 and VP9 (and soon AV1). I had to start looking into upgrading from my 2014 tablet because I was running across more h.265 streams, and its GPU couldn't decode them.
Hard drives (SSDs nowadays) need a physical write lock switch. Once you set up a system so that it works like you want, you flip the switch and nothing can change it without physically flipping the switch back. OSes would need to be written so that things like log files and temporary files get written to a different drive which is write-enabled. But it would be impossible for malware to modify the core OS and programs, unless they tricked someone into flipping the physical switch. Which you can prevent by putting it behind a lock and making sure only IT has the key.
Instead we get Windows 10 with its forced automatic updates, which breaks the cardinal rule of business equipment - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Because some manager saved the company some money by having his high school nephew who's "really good at computers" write the password authentication program, instead of hiring a real programmer.
Presumably the part missing from the summary (I haven't read TFA) is that Uber offered better pay to GoCatch drivers to lure them away. And once GoCatch went bankrupt, Uber lowered the pay it offered to GoCatch drivers since they no longer needed to be competitive.
I became politically aware during Reagan and Bush1's presidency, with control of Congress split. I thought it was was the worst thing ever that Congress couldn't get anything done. Then I got to experience the Democrats controlling both branches of Congress under Bush1, Clinton, and Obama; and the Republicans controlling both branches under Clinton, Bush2, and Trump. Trust me, it's better when control is split.
See, Americans are on average centrist. Unfortunately, our plurality wins election system means the optimal solution is for there to be only 2 political parties - if you vote for a third party it's essentially a vote for the opposition party, as it takes away a vote away from the major party you more closely agree with. So when one of the two major parties has complete control, it results in laws and policies being passed which are either to the left or right of what Americans on average want. Worse yet, the extreme left and right are disproportionately effective at controlling both parties because those in the middle are split between two parties so their influence is halved, and each party is completely missing the opposite opposing viewpoints needed to balance out the extreme positions.
So as bad as do-nothing split control is, it's preferable to one party being in control and passing stuff which is far to the left or right of what most Americans really want. The only real fix is some sort of instant runoff voting system, which allows you to vote for the candidate you really want, without fear of wasting your vote if that candidate doesn't really have a shot at winning.
Slashdot Mirror
Brick-and-mortar business owners (mainly newspapers) misunderstanding how the Internet works. They're used to the idea of a physical storefront, where they put up a big sign advertising their newspaper. People see the sign, step up to their store, and buy the paper. They don't really understand how the Internet works, so they interpret how Google News works as Google coming in and putting up Google's sign in front of their sign, and effectively acting as gatekeeper to their customers. They think it's unfair since it's their paper which the customers want, not Google's sign, and they're getting laws passed to try to force Google to pay them.
The way it really works is that Google is not putting a sign in front of their sign. Google is building a road which passes in front of their store. The increased traffic from people using that road causes more people to see the newspaper's sign, and come in and buy papers. That's what Google News is - free advertising. This idiotic law is going to make Google build a wall blocking the view of these news sites' sign from people using the road, and their pageviews and revenue is going to shrivel up to almost nothing.
When that happens, they'll try to pass a law forcing Google to advertise their site (link to them). Combined with this law forcing Google to pay them for linking to them, it's a complete reversal of how business is supposed to work. Normally when you want someone to advertise for you, you have to pay them for it. The combination of those two laws would result in forcing Google to advertise for them, and Google paying them (instead of the other way around). If that law passes, then Google and every other search engine will simply pull out of the EU, and these people will be left wondering why no search engine wants to index the EU.
What Google should have done when they first started Google News was charge news sites a modest fee to include their snippets. That would have established up-front that (1) this was advertising and like all advertising you have to pay for it somehow, and (2) the sites being featured on Google News were doing so voluntarily. The big sites would've scoffed at the idea, but some of the smaller ones would have bit. When it became clear that news sites which paid to be featured in Google News got a lot more traffic (and thus a lot more ad revenue themselves), then all these newspapers would be tripping over themselves to pay Google to feature them in Google News. But by trying to be the nice guy and give these newspapers free advertising, Google inadvertently cemented in their minds the misconception that they're entitled to this advertising for free. Which starts them down the slippery slope to thinking that Google should be paying them for advertising for them.
The 80% wireless induction efficiency is for energy transfer over the wireless link. Basically you're switching from a 100% efficient cable to 80% efficient wireless. The 80% battery charging efficiency is for charging the battery - some of the electricity you pump into it gets converted into waste heat. So it is correct to include both.
I assumed those would be on the same order for gasoline, coal, and natural gas. Extraction costs are probably about the same (they all come from underground). Gasoline is actually probably cheaper to transport. due to being higher density than gas, and liquid being easier to transport than solid (coal). That's the entire reason it's used in transportation applications instead of coal or natural gas (which are substantially cheaper per MJ). But that's probably canceled out by having to refine oil to extract the gasoline.
This drops the energy efficiency of EVs below that of ICEs.
The EPA lists the Nissan Leaf at 30 kWh per 100 miles. This is energy stored in the battery. Getting the energy into the battery involves a charging efficiency of about 80% (i.e. only 80% of the electricity coming out the wall socket makes it into the battery, the other 20% becomes waste heat). Transmission over power lines is about 95% efficient. And electricity generated from coal plants is about 37% efficient, about 58% efficient for natural gas plants. Split the difference and call it 47.5%. So to move an EV 100 miles requires (30 kWh) / (0.8 * 0.95 * 0.475) = 83.1 kWh = 299 MJ worth of fuel if you're generating the electricity from fossil fuels.
The Nissan Versa hatchback (ICE equivalent to the Leaf) uses 2.9 gallons of gasoline per 100 miles. Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 MJ per liter, or 129.5 MJ per gallon. So 2.9 gallons holds 375.4 MJ. Making the ICE vehicle slightly less energy-efficient than the EV (uses about 25% more energy than the EV).
Wireless inductive chargers have been built over 90% efficient in labs, but the typical chargers in commercial production are only 75%-80% efficient. That moves the EV's 299 MJ per 100 mile energy consumption up to 374-399 MJ per 100 miles. Meaning the EV consumes more energy than an equivalent ICE vehicle to travel the same distance.
Norway can get away with it because they get almost all their electricity from hydroelectric. But this idea won't work in countries heavily reliant on fossil fuels to generate electricity (most of the world). The EV still gets the advantage of being able to better filter out particulate emissions at the power plant using big effective filters, instead of poor transportable filters at the tailpipe of every car. But it would result in EVs generating more CO2 per mile than ICE vehicles, defeating much of the purpose of switching to EVs.
Agreed that this is security theater that offers very little real protection. But I disagree that it's wasted time and money (aside from some of the people doing it taking their jobs way too seriously). If you've lived through a riot, you realize that the "protection" offered by the police is mostly an illusion. And that if things really get out of hand, there is really nothing that the police can do. The role of the police is more to calm the public and create the self-fulfilling prophecy of the illusion of peace, so that people don't go nuts looting and destroying stuff because they have no fear of retribution.
Likewise, the role of TSA is security theater. But while it is theater, it is effective in keeping the traveling public calm about the safety of air travel. The threat itself is minuscule (air travel is the safest for of travel, and yet many more people are killed by random airliner accidents than by terrorists blowing up planes). The threat is just exaggerated in people's minds by disproportionate media coverage and media hype.
So security theater is the proper response - illusionary safety measures for assuaging people's illusionary fears.
It's important to avoid selection bias. The best example I've seen was a city wondering if subway funding needed to be increased or decreased. They thought measuing how much the subway was used would be good information for making this decision, so they hired someone to poll the city's residents to see how often they rode the subway. The person initially asked people at random in public spaces how often they rode the subway. He grew frustrated that very few people rode the subway, meaning he was collecting very little data for the number of people he was asking. That's when he got the brilliant idea of going onto the subway and asking people there.
The problem is, asking people riding the subway how often they use the subway introduces two selection biases. (1) It eliminates everyone who doesn't use the subway from your sample. And (2) people who ride the subway more often are more likely to be encountered in your polling (you're 10x as likely to randomly encounter someone who rides 10 hours a week as you are someone who rides 1 hour a week), skewing your polling data high. To properly measure subway ridership, you have to do a random sample orthogonal to subway use, which means asking random people in public places was the proper way to do it. A random telephone poll would probably have been best.
Similarly when you target one specific country for investigation, you're introducing a sampling bias. If you accuse a restaurant of being infested with roaches, and that prompts an investigation that finds roaches in the restaurant, that doesn't prove your accusation. All that proves is that the restaurant has roaches, not that it is "infested." Other restaurants may have roaches too. In fact, for all you know, the restaurant you accused may actually be the cleanest building in the city, and even your own house has more roaches than that restaurant. But by limiting the investigation to just that one restaurant, you can misleadingly create the impression that your accusation that the restaurant is infested with roaches is true.
Over and over, I saw this sampling bias being abused by those wishing to push the Russian interference story. e.g. Google and Facebook reported they searched their 2016 records for ads purchased by Russian agents, and found some. But in order for that to mean anything, they should have also searched for ads purchased by anyone else, and compared. I suspect if they had, they would've found attempted interference by China, by the EU, by Mexico, by Canada, by Anonymous, etc. The magnitude of the "Russian interference" (a few dozen to a few hundred people, and around six dollar figures in magnitude ) makes me suspect all these investigations found was the random noise that just happens everywhere all the time.
I didn't vote for Trump and I think is Presidency has been a travesty. But I think the abuse of statistics and manipulation of facts through selection bias by the media and those pushing this story is an even bigger travesty. If you really, truly believe that those few Russians managed to affect the outcome of the election using that little money, then every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire those guys. The amount of money spent in that election was staggering - tens to hundreds of dollars per vote. Trump actually spent close to the lowest at $5 per vote. Yet these people pushing this Russian interference angle somehow believe that these Russians were able to affect the election for pennies per vote.
If this report had found that the Russians had spent tens or hundreds of dollars per vote to interfere with the election, then I'd agree there was something worrying going on. But the amount of interference I've seen reported seems more like just the normal noise that comes from normal people from the sketchy side of the population's bell curve doing their normal sketchy things.
That's one of the problems I see with Google's approach. Instead of looking at how well a product solves a particular problem, they only look at how widely used a product is. It spells almost-certain doom for niche products like Reader, even if they're a great tool. I loved Hangouts because it solved two very specific messaging problems - (1) integration of text, voice, and video chat and conferencing, and (2) synchronized messaging across multiple devices (so you can do all these things on your phone, tablet, or PC). But those things aren't very important to most people. And as a text messaging app it was rather meh, so they killed it.
I've been on Sprint for nearly 2 decades now despite them being the "worst" carrier because, aside from a short 1-year stint in a rental apartment, I've been fortunate to live and work in places where they had great service. Right now my home is close enough to one of their towers that I use my phone as a hotspot whenever my home Internet goes down. I typically get 25-40 Mbps from them at home, which is actually close to double the national average speed for Verizon and T-Mobile. And I'm on an ancient grandfathered plan with unlimited data and no hotspot restriction, so am extremely reluctant to switch carriers.
For most of the TV channels, if you subscribe to a service which offers the channel, you can login directly to that channel's site and stream their content. The movie studios need to set up a similar system, where if a service you subscribe to carries a movie, then they will stream it to you after confirming your subscription.
What we need now is some master app which coordinates all this. Right now if you try to stream like this directly from all the channels, you'll have to go through a login procedure for each channel, where they redirect you to your subscription service and you have to login. You have to repeat this every few months. What's needed is something which automates this step, automatically verifying your subscription whenever you try to access a channel's stream. That would make the entire procedure seamless and transparent.
The only remaining troublesome feature would then be compiling a list of which channels each subscription service gives you, so you can compare them and decide which ones to subscribe to. For some reason they don't make it easy to compare channel offerings. I've had to get channel lists from news websites, and those lists rapidly go out of date as channels are added or removed. If each service would just offer their current channel list in xml format on their website, it'd be trivial to create a website which automatically compares them. You could pre-select which channels were must-have, might-watch, and never-watch, and the website could figure out which single service was best for you, or which multiple services gave you what you wanted with fewest subscriptions, or for lowest subscription price.
No, the third pilot's disassociated viewpoint had nothing to do with it. He simply knew the plane's checklist. That's a bunch of standard procedures every pilot is supposed to know of what to do when they encounter a specific type of problem on that specific model plane. When you hear that a pilot has been trained on a certain plane model, that's what they're talking about - they're leaning all these checklists. If a pilot can't remember it exactly, the entire book of checklists is available aboard the plane for the pilots to reference in a Quick Reference Handbook. Any time the pilots face a situation aboard the plane which puzzles them and they don't recall the resolution from their training, they should reach for the QRH. One of them flys the plane, the other looks up the problem in the QRH.
The third pilot knew the checklist for the 737 Max. He instructed the other pilots to perform the manufacturer's specified procedure to resolve the problem, and it did resolve the problem. The pilots in the two planes which crashed apparently did not know the checklist, and did not reference the QRH. (Speculating here a bit since we don't know yet what happened - maybe they performed the proper reset procedure and the problem didn't go away.)
Contrary to the way most people here seem to be interpreting it, the third pilot's anecdote actually absolves Boeing and places blame for the crashes primarily upon the four pilots. This is looking like a pilot training problem. Boeing is still culpable for designing an automatic safety system which was prone to fail multiple times in just months of operation, and for making it so hard and non-obvious to override. But based on the third pilot's anecdote, primary culpability would be upon the pilots of the two other planes for not knowing the plane's checklists, and not bothering to crack open the QRH to double-check if they were addressing the problem properly.
Planes are incredibly complicated and it's unreasonable to expect a pilot to understand how all of its systems interact. The checklists in the QRH are made by the engineers who designed the plane. They do understand all of the plane's systems and how they interact. They come up with every possible problem they can think of which a pilot might encounter, and write checklists to resolve every possible cause they can think of for those problems. The checklist procedure for this problem fixed it in the third pilot's case. If the four pilots did not follow that procedure, then the crashes were their fault, not Boeing's.
The decryption is done inside an encrypted virtual machine, which is coded to pass the resulting video and audio directly to the GPU and audio hardware. This is why your phone can play Netflix using the Netflix app, but not Netflix in a browser. The former is done using the phone's GPU to decode the video. The latter is decoded using the phone's CPU, and most phone processors aren't powerful enough to do it in real time. Hollywood distinguishes between dedicated video playback hardware (Blu-ray players, Rokus, phones, tablets, etc are allowed to run an app which decodes using hardware acceleration) from general purpose computing devices (PCs, which are required to decode inside an encrypted virtual machine). Since iTunes/Netflix/etc. pass the decrypted video directly to the display hardware, in theory there's no way to capture the intermediate decrypted video stream.
I suppose you could bypass it if you played iTunes in a virtual machine, and intercepted the screen output of the VM. iTunes would still think it's writing directly to the screen GPU. When in actuality its writing to a virtualized GPU whose output you could then capture on the host machine. There are so many ways you can poke holes in DRM if you really wanted to.
That is actually one of the problems with statistical significance. It's only relevant if you're reporting one single result. If you're reporting multiple results, then that creates a second layer of statistical significance, where on average you expect several of those results to surpass your single-sample threshold of significance just by random chance. And so your findings are only noteworthy if you get more than a certain number of results which surpass your single-sample threshold.
If you've got just one result, the confidence level in that result is 95%. If you've got two and one is "statistically significant", the confidence level drops to 90%. If you've got three it drops to 86%. etc. It converges on 1/e when the number of results you're reporting equals the single-confidence level. i.e. For statistical significance, since your threshold is a 1 in 20 chance of obtaining the result by random chance, the odds of getting one "statistically significant" result from 20 results is 1/e. (This might be easier to see in lottery tickets, where if you've go a 1 in 1 million chance of winning, and you buy a million random tickets, your odds of winning are 1/e.) When reporting larger numbers of results, you actually expect more than a single result to surpass your 95% threshold, so the odds of finding just one or even no "statistically significant" results begin to approach zero.
The 1/e value is the only constant point in all these probabilities. The chance for everything else varies depending on your threshold level and the number of results. So the threshold for "statistical significance" actually varies with the number of results you're reporting. But scientists report their results using the single-sample threshold for everything, as if that's the constant point, not 1/e. Which I'm guessing is what TFA (didn't read) is complaining about.
You can read the Canada Supreme Court decision that Monsato won over Percy Schmeiser (first link in the references). It was pretty obvious that he was innocent. The Court even reduced his fine to $1 (a fact scrubbed from the wiki page, probably by Monsanto-paid editors) because they determined that he didn't benefit in any way from planting the RoundUp Ready seeds (he never sprayed RoundUp on his crops).
The Court only decided in favor of Monsanto because they did have a patent, and they determined Schmeiser violated that patent by planting seeds with the patented gene. And even that determination is suspect because the Court bought Monsanto's argument that there was no way for plants to develop resistance to RoundUp on their own. So Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the canola plants he found in the gutters by his field that survived spraying with RoundUp were from Monsanto's patented seeds. This argument was later disproven when weeds were found which had developed resistance to RoundUp on their own, meaning Schmeiser was right when he argued that he believed the Canola in his gutters had developed resistance on their own.
MPG is actually the inverse of fuel consumption. That is, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is consumed. This has the effect of exaggerating people's perception of the effect of high-MPG vehicles on fuel consumption. Most people are surprised to learn that upgrading from a 14 MPG SUV to a 20 MPG SUV saves more fuel than upgrading from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. How can a +6 MPG improvement save more fuel than a +25 MPG improvement? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, meaning a +x MPG delta doesn't represent the same fuel savings throughout the entire MPG range. Say you drive 100 miles.
14 MPG SUV = 7.14 gallons
20 MPG SUV = 5.0 gallons
2.14 gallons saved per 100 miles
25 MPG sedan = 4.0 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2.0 gallons
2.0 gallons saved per 100 miles.
So +6 MPG @ 14 MPG results in more fuel savings than +25 MPG @ 25 MPG. A +x MPG improvement represents more fuel savings at lower MPG than it does higher MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. That's a direct measure of fuel consumption, not an inverse.
This means econoboxes are actually the worst vehicle to convert to a hybrid. They already use very little fuel, so the potential fuel savings by converting them to a hybrid is even smaller. And you're spending a lot of money on a hybrid drivetrain for a very small fuel savings. The hybrid SUVs that environmentalists scoffed at are actually the best personal vehicles for converting into hybrids. Likewise, you get the biggest fuel savings when you convert pickup trucks, buses, and tractor trailers to hybrids or electric. Musk understood this, which is why he produced an electric semi-trailer truck. There are roughly 2 million semi-trucks in the U.S. vs 250 million cars. Yet the semi-trucks consume nearly as much fuel as the cars.
(The same problem affects hard drives and SSDs. MB/s is actually the inverse of how we perceive drive speed. We think of speed in terms of how long we have to wait for the drive to complete an operation. So those multi-GB/s sequential speeds that NVMe SSDs can hit actually make very little difference. They're so fast the operation is completed in the blink of an eye. It's actually the smallest MB/s speeds which make the biggest difference. If your NMVe SSD can only manage 30 MB/s 4k reads, even a small number of small files which need to be read will easily make you wait for a longer time than hundreds of MB of sequential data. If you want a good SSD, ignore the sequential speeds, get something with fast 4k speeds.)
Lion Air likely didn't know there was a serious problem with the sensor. If TFA is correct, the dead-head pilot followed the correct procedure which cleared up the problem. All Lion Air's mechanics would've gotten was a note about the system malfunctioning (nobody knew the sensor was at fault until after the crash and the black box data was analyzed). And since the official resolution procedure cleared up the problem, that would've made it a low-priority fix, probably put off until the plane's next scheduled maintenance.
What's more concerning is that the dead-head pilot apparently knew something about the new plane's procedures that the regular pilots did not. That points to a training issue.
Unfortunately, because of the similarity of the 737 Max to the older 737, two aircrews apparently assumed the new plane operated the same as the old one, and they apparently didn't follow the new checklist (likely didn't realize the new checklist differed) to clear up the problem. Resulting in two plane crashes. That would make it a training problem. But culpability still falls upon Boeing for not making it clear enough to pilots that the system had changed, and for designing a sensor which fails frequently enough to cause multiple incidents in only months of operation, and for designing a flight system which made it so difficult for the pilots to override a malfunctioning automated system.
Are the slashdot editors doing their jobs on the phones now, and letting autocorrect fix their typos?
Unlike the EU, the right of the accused to know the exact nature and cause of the accusation against them is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The EU never told Google what they thought Google was doing wrong. Just that it was "anti-competitive." The way the EU handles these cases is they inform Google that they're facing an anti-trust judgement, but never state exactly what the problem behavior is. Google had to come up with a proposed solution, present it to the EU, and the EU rejected it without explaining why. Google then had to come up with a different proposal, present it to the EU, and the EU rejected that. Repeat until the deadline passed.
Don't misunderstand me Google probably did need to be taken down a peg or two. And this is the same crappy way Google treats people with their YouTube demonitization and account revocation. They'll punish you without ever explaining why you're being punished, pointing you to their generic list of suggested guidelines without bothering to explain which one you ran afoul of. But it's wrong when Google does it, and it's wrong when the EU does it. If you think someone or some company did something wrong, you need to tell them exactly what they did wrong so they can correct that behavior. You don't just say "you're wrong" and punish them.
Contrary to popular belief, the population growth rate in developed countries is nearly zero. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries, and Africa has the highest growth rate by far. So as well-intentioned as these humanitarian measures are (saving babies, food, medicine, clean water, etc), they actually exacerbate the suffering of these people. Medicine, clean water, and saving babies will cause their population to increase faster than it should be growing, forcing them to spread already-limited resources even thinner. Food aid puts local farmers out of business by depressing the market value of their crops, and discouraging others from taking up farming.
The correct way to help them is to help them develop their economies - improve their education systems (that's what the One Laptop per Child project was trying to do), help them build their civil infrastructure, keep criminals and militants in check, and promote private businesses. Then they can train their own doctors, build their own hospitals, grow their own food, pump their own clean water, and save their own babies. As barbaric as it sounds, right now the babies need to die at a high rate to keep their population growth in check. The high infant mortality rate there is symptom of their undeveloped economy. Treating the symptom with addressing the root cause just exacerbates the problem and their suffering.
Every argument you've come up with for why the top 1% of the U.S. is terrible and needs to be torn down and their wealth redistributed? Those arguments also apply to you relative to the rest of the world.
It's not a spiral to the bottom. It's lifting up the rest of the world. Unfortunately for the 1% (you and me), the process of lifting the rest of the world results in downward pressure on the 1%. That's what creating economic equality does. You're just used to always thinking about "equality" from the perspective of the underprivileged being raised up. You've never thought of it from the perspective of the privileged being brought down, even though that's your true station in the global scheme of things.
We won't get back to pre-equality levels of wealth and job security until after the rest of the world has become as developed as us, and the lowest-hanging economic fruit shifts back to improving our productivity. You can accept that that's our fate - how we have to "pay our fair share" to helping the rest of the world. Or you can oppose it, hypocritically demanding things from the 1% in the U.S that you yourself refuse to give up to the rest of the world.
Ignoring the latency, dropouts, and compression artifact issues. You're basically renting the GPU instead of buying it. This is taking advantage of the fact that most people's gaming GPUs sit idle for most of the day. If on average, gamers buy a GPU and use it only 20% of the time (4.8 hours/day), a streaming service like this can provide the same gaming experience for as little as 1/5th the cost, since their GPU can be used by someone else when you're not using it. So if you're used to buying a $600 top-of-the-line GPU every 2 years ($25/mo), a service like this could potentially give you the same graphical experience for $5/mo ($120 every 2 years). That huge price delta will be compelling enough to make a lot of people ignore the latency, dropouts, and compression artifacts.
The fact that Google might drop it won't matter because unlike the services you listed, the software service here is just a transparent streaming layer. You can always switch to a different streamed game service. Or even go back to buying a GPU and playing the games on your own hardware. As long as the same game titles are available, the interface will be the same, and you'll likely even be able to copy over your saved games. Like how you can cancel Netflix and switch to Hulu, and the only thing that really matters is which movies and shows are available in the library.
The "GPU is no longer important" not because the GPU isn't used, but because every modern GPU can handle 4k streams. The iGPU in Intel processors have been able to decode 4k video since Ivy Bridge (2012)). A lot of the GPUs in modern phones and tablets can do it too (one of the reasons I thought it was silly to complain about phone resolutions becoming so high). And obviously the GPU in Rokus and Fire TV sticks which support 4k and 4k smart TVs can decode 4k video streams.
The bigger issue has been support for newer codecs like h.265 and VP9 (and soon AV1). I had to start looking into upgrading from my 2014 tablet because I was running across more h.265 streams, and its GPU couldn't decode them.
Hard drives (SSDs nowadays) need a physical write lock switch. Once you set up a system so that it works like you want, you flip the switch and nothing can change it without physically flipping the switch back. OSes would need to be written so that things like log files and temporary files get written to a different drive which is write-enabled. But it would be impossible for malware to modify the core OS and programs, unless they tricked someone into flipping the physical switch. Which you can prevent by putting it behind a lock and making sure only IT has the key.
Instead we get Windows 10 with its forced automatic updates, which breaks the cardinal rule of business equipment - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Because some manager saved the company some money by having his high school nephew who's "really good at computers" write the password authentication program, instead of hiring a real programmer.
Presumably the part missing from the summary (I haven't read TFA) is that Uber offered better pay to GoCatch drivers to lure them away. And once GoCatch went bankrupt, Uber lowered the pay it offered to GoCatch drivers since they no longer needed to be competitive.
I became politically aware during Reagan and Bush1's presidency, with control of Congress split. I thought it was was the worst thing ever that Congress couldn't get anything done. Then I got to experience the Democrats controlling both branches of Congress under Bush1, Clinton, and Obama; and the Republicans controlling both branches under Clinton, Bush2, and Trump. Trust me, it's better when control is split.
See, Americans are on average centrist. Unfortunately, our plurality wins election system means the optimal solution is for there to be only 2 political parties - if you vote for a third party it's essentially a vote for the opposition party, as it takes away a vote away from the major party you more closely agree with. So when one of the two major parties has complete control, it results in laws and policies being passed which are either to the left or right of what Americans on average want. Worse yet, the extreme left and right are disproportionately effective at controlling both parties because those in the middle are split between two parties so their influence is halved, and each party is completely missing the opposite opposing viewpoints needed to balance out the extreme positions.
So as bad as do-nothing split control is, it's preferable to one party being in control and passing stuff which is far to the left or right of what most Americans really want. The only real fix is some sort of instant runoff voting system, which allows you to vote for the candidate you really want, without fear of wasting your vote if that candidate doesn't really have a shot at winning.