Campaign contributions typically favor the party in power (scroll down to the historical party split and historical average contributions), which is currently Republicans. A fact conveniently omitted by journalists who cherry-pick data to try to make the party they oppose look like bad guys.
Historically, telecom contributions have slightly favored the Democrats. The only reason Democrats are making a fuss about net neutrality is because they consider it to be an issue they can leverage for votes. If they truly believed in net neutrality on principle, they could've easily passed it during Obama's first term when they held the Presidency and both branches of Congress with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The problem has always been local governments granting monopolies for cable and phone service. Both parties are complicit in this and neither seems willing to change it. Passing net neutrality is putting on a band-aid to hide festering gangrene caused by these government-granted monopolies these telecom companies enjoy. A way to placate the voters by pretending to be on their side, while making sure the monopolies awarded to their campaign contributors (the telecom companies) continue undisturbed.
As I've said before, I believe the best strategy for fighting this type of privacy invasion is to simply pollute their incoming data. Figure out which triggers they're using to initiate the recording (e.g. inaudible audio signal at the beginning of a commercial), and duplicate it and program your phone and other speakers to play them back anywhere and everywhere. The mall, the park, stadiums, restaurants, concerts, movie theaters, amusement parks, traffic jams (over your car stereo with your windows rolled down), YouTube videos, etc.
There's an apocryphal story that at the end of the Cold War, members of the KGB and CIA got together for beer and to swap war stories. The CIA spooks lamented how hard their job had been. They had to struggle just to get anyone into the country since the Soviet Union was such a closed society, while the KGB could simply enter on a tourist visa and drive up to (and even take a tour of) most targets in the U.S. The KGB spooks disagreed, saying that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that they had to devote huge resources to sift through it all to figure out which was credible and which was not. e.g. If the National Enquirer published a story about the USAF testing a captured UFO at Area 51, they had to figure out if it was made-up or if there was really something to it.
I *want* to separate my recyclables into metal, glass, paper, and plastic. That's the way I was taught to do it. It takes almost no additional effort for me to throw my recyclables into one of four boxes I used to have set up for these categories, versus a lot of effort for some poor schmuck who has to be paid to sort through a huge mount of mixed recyclables.
My trash hauling service (who has a monopoly service contract with my city) however insists on mixing them all up. If I give them three boxes with the recyclables all sorted, they simply dump them into a single bin on the collection truck. The story they told me is that they pay prisoners to sort it for them, as they found that was cheaper than designing hauling trucks with 3/4 separate bins and making sure the curbside recycling bins were dumped into the correct bin on the truck. (Which if true should make you think twice about recycling old paper bills and such - they go into my shredder now.)
So no, it's not just a matter of people getting off their asses and doing it.
But Samsung had a hard time selling their smartphones until they copied Apple. The End.
Samsung has held a large chunk of the smartphone market since 1999. Their recent increase in their market share (2008-2013) coincides with Nokia's demise.
FYI, the center pic in your link should be of an LG Prada, not an iPhone. The Prada was the first smartphone to go without a keyboard or keypad, not the iPhone. As I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw a feature was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it.
Samsung already had phones in their internal design pipeline prior to the iPhone's release which looked very iPhone-like. They just weren't allowed to present them in court because they missed a filing deadline. The judge in the case opted to prioritize a legal deadline over the truth, which makes sense if a lawyer is exhibiting a pattern of missing deadlines, but not when potentially a billion dollars is at stake. The truth is the industry was already transitioning towards touch and away from physical keyboards by the time the iPhone rolled out. The iPhone did not create this new paradigm, it just happened to make the biggest splash with it.
Samsung missed no deadlines in the similar case over the iPad's design. So they were able to successfully argue that the concept of a tablet existed long before the iPad, and that the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design actually borrowed from their digital picture frame which pre-dates the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter). And the jury ruled for Samsung in the tablet design patent case. They weren't jerks about it either - they didn't sue Apple for stealing their picture frame design for the iPad.
Why is it the airlines who need to adapt? Why do rockets get priority over airliners so the airliners have to reroute around rocket launches? Why aren't rocket launches being scheduled for the middle of the night when there is less air traffic?
Rocket launches are given priority and the airspace closed because they're rare events. The one-time closure imposes only a small economic hardship onto other industries for the year overall. But if rocket launches become commonplace, then the logic behind giving them priority no longer holds. You'll need to treat them as equals, giving them equal priority to others wishing to use the same airspace.
If some trucking company needs to haul an historic house down your street to move it to a new location, a one-time closure of your street to regular traffic is acceptable. But if the trucking company is doing these types of moves every few days, the city needs to come up with a better solution than shutting down the street every time.
The thing I didn't like about that XKCD comic was that for the numbers to be comparable, you need to divide by the number of people participating in that activity. For example, a helluva lot more people ride elevators than go surfing or skateboarding. So even though elevators kill more people overall, the number of fatalities per participant is a lot lower for elevators.
The problem is XP is vulnerable to a lot of hacks shared with XP/Vista/7/8/10. If malware which exploits it should get onto your PACS or RIS server, it could conceivably spread itself to your XP box over your LAN. Your servers will get security and anti-virus updates which detect and remove the malware, but not your XP box.
The bigger problem I've run across with clients still running XP (isolated from the Internet) is that Microsoft no longer allows you to update it over the Internet (aside from a registry hack to trick Microsoft into thinking it's an embedded system). So if you ever need to wipe and reinstall, you end up with an older version of XP and no way to update it automatically. You have to know to manually download the last service pack and install it yourself. And I'm not sure how to install any updates which were released after the last service pack.
This really makes me worry about how well supported Windows 8/10 will be after they're replaced. Those have no service packs - you can only update them via Windows Update. If Microsoft continues dropping update support after extended support for the OS ends, there's going to be no way to update them. Microsoft really needs to make available install media for these older obsoleted OSes available with all updates slipstreamed in. (I've had similar problems with Office 2003 and 2007 - Microsoft's website to download Office updates disappeared and now redirects you to buy a subscription to Office 365. As best as I can tell, the only way to get updates for Office 2003/2007 is now also through Windows Update. Or if you know to search for and download the service packs.)
The problem isn't the item or their network capability. These things would be fine if you were only able to access and control them over your LAN. The problem is some idiot thought it would be cool to be able to access them over the Internet. As a result the devices connect to some server on the Internet (no doubt allowing the manufacturer to collect marketing info), waiting for your smartphone app to contact the server and connect to the devices remotely.
The way they should work is they should never connect to the Internet, and should limit their network activity to your LAN. If you want to control them from outside your home, you should set up a VPN server on your router (many of them come with one built-in now), and use the VPN client on your phone to access your LAN from the Internet, giving you access to those devices.
Unfortunately, this is beyond the technical capabilities of the vast majority of users, and they don't want to learn how to do it, so we end up with these IoT devices which access the Internet directly. Same reason everyone sells their soul and shares their news and photos on Facebook, instead of setting up their own personal website/blog.
This is why Microsoft is doing it. The realized they are not beholden to Intel. They made Windows RT (port of Win32 to ARM) so if the Intel x86-64 ship ever sank, it wouldn't take Windows down with it. They don't need it to sell like hotcakes; heck they don't need it to sell at all. They just need to to be there and ready if ARM overtakes Intel. It's insurance - a hedge against Intel imploding. If that should happen, they'll just transition to Windows for ARM, and all the software companies making Windows apps will (more or less) simply recompile their programs for ARM64, and Windows will carry on as if Intel never existed.
Actually, nuclear plants only convert about a third of the energy they generate into electricity (the generator is basically hooked up to a steam engine). The rest of the energy becomes waste heat which must be dissipated, usually by dumping it into a river or ocean. So the obvious thing to do would be to build nuclear reactors near the ocean, and use the waste thermal energy for desalination. (The same holds for fossil fuel plants - about 60% of the energy from coal and about 40% of the energy from natural gas becomes waste heat.)
eBay, etsy, and Amazon can have millions of items for sale, and millions of customers, but can't keep track of a few thousand tax jurisdictions? That's bullshit.
It's not that simple. It's about 12,000 tax jurisdiction (many of them overlapping), each with different tax rates and items which are and aren't taxed. So the end result is a huge database of 12,000 * 3 possible overlaps (city, county, state) * millions of items = on the order of a hundred billion possible tax combinations. (It's not a true combination permutation because of the geographic limitations of the overlaps, and no they don't always align with zip codes.)
There are plenty of services that do it already. We like Taxcloud.com. A quick Google pulls up quite a few more.
While there are a lot of services which collect and provide tax rate information for every jurisdiction, Taxcloud is the only one which will indemnify the merchant against errors. With the other services, if they screw up and give the merchant wrong info, the merchant has to pay for any shortfall in taxes collected. (Some of the pay services will indemnify, but only for a limited amount.)
Taxcloud is set up by the states, and will indemnify the merchant in certain states. The Federal government really needs to step up and require all tax jurisdictions to participate and indemnify merchants against errors in the Taxcloud database. That way Taxcloud ends up as a central repository. A tax jurisdiction reports its taxes to Taxcloud, and a merchant looks up the taxes on Taxcloud. If Taxcloud has a wrong tax rate, then it's the fault of the taxing jurisdiction (reported the wrong rate to Taxcloud) and the merchant is indemnified. If Taxcloud has the correct rate but the merchant read it wrong, then it's the merchant who's at fault and they're liable for uncollected taxes.
By all rights, compilation of tax jurisdiction rates is an industry which shouldn't exist. The whole point of government is to eliminate wasteful redundancies like this. But they've failed to set up a central tax rate database, which has resulted in a lot of unnecessary duplicated work in the private sector by companies establishing their own rate databases. That's why they're calling on Congress to clean up this mess. It's like if the IRS published different tax forms on paper only in different areas of the country, and relied on private companies to collect all those different forms and make them available to all taxpayers across the country. It's just simpler, more reliable, and cheaper if the IRS makes all the forms available directly.
It's a problem if you're trying to obtain an absolute measurement of customer satisfaction. e.g. Waiter A is 1.5x better than waiter B.
If you're trying to obtain a relative measure of customer satisfaction (e.g. do customers like waiter A or waiter B more?), then it's a valid measure as long as your sample size (number of customer surveys per waiter) is large enough that these individual deviations in rate scaling average out. Ratings at sites like IMDB and Netflix have to deal with the same problem. But their sample size is large enough that the best movies do end up percolating to the top ratings.
Yeah, I don't see what the fuss is. This is zero-sum in terms of employment. For ever work-hour someone lost, someone else gained a work-hour. If you're on the short end, you need to step up your game.
In terms of customer service, it's positive-sum. Customers get more time with better waiters, less time with poor waiters. Restaurant improves its overall service. Better waiters get rewarded. Bad waiters get a feedback indicating how they need to improve. It's win-win-win-win, unless you're an obstinate bad waiter who refuses to change and are upset at losing work hours.
I'm reminded of efforts to stamp out sickle cell anemia. Then it was discovered that carriers of the gene for sickle cell anemia were highly resistant to malaria. Are they sure the snippet of DNA they're deleting doesn't confer some benefit which (on an evolutionary level) outweighs the disadvantage of vulnerability to this disease?
The NSA collection is under the (tenuous) rationale that the phone conversations they record are of people outside the U.S., and thus persons who do not enjoy 4th Amendment protection. (The fly in the ointment is that the other half of the conversation is with someone in the U.S. who enjoys 4th Amendment protection.)
This case is the wireless equivalent of "Can the government search your garbage without a warrant after you've put it on the street corner for pickup?" The issue here wasn't if the government needed a warrant to track you as you're mischaracterizing it. It's if the government needed a warrant to obtain personal information you've already willingly given up to a third party. Unlike possessions inside your home or car or on your person, it is not at all obvious that these things enjoy 4th Amendment protection.
At one extreme, this would be your cell phone location data. But the issue was much broader and more complex than you're making it out to be. An opposite extreme could be if a police officer would need to obtain a warrant before they can ask a hotel if anyone resembling a suspect had checked in recently.
To be fair (I don't use twitter), most of the twitter links I see in news stories are links to the original source. e.g. "So-and-so tweeted that..." or "So-and-so tweeted a photo/video of..." Not retweets or re-links. It's certainly much better than the news articles themselves, where I usually have to dig through 3-5 layers of links to get to the original source article, or just give up and search for the source on Google.
In that respect, most of the journalists seem to be doing their jobs when it comes to Twitter - drilling down to the original source tweet and linking to it directly, instead of the countless re-tweets. Contrast this with YouTube, where often the original copyright holder's upload may get a few tens of thousands of views, while someone who copied the video and re-uploaded it on their channel gets tens of millions of views and all the ad revenue. (If you ever have a video go viral, don't give news organizations permission to reproduce your video on their YouTube channel. Tell them you give them permission to link to your original video. It's all being served by YouTube either way.)
The original source article is much more informative about the causes. Basically it's a confluence of at least 4 different events. Seasonal low demand for ammonia fertilizer (whose production produces CO2 as a byproduct). Several of the plants being down for maintenance (because the seasonal low ammonia demand). Unusually high demand for carbonated beverages due to hot weather and the World Cup. And prioritization for CO2 use in dry ice production for chilling food, and slaughterhouses to stun meat animals, meaning fizzy drinks end up bearing the brunt of any shortfall.
There is apparently plenty of CO2 available in Southern Europe. The shortage is just not yet bad enough to warrant paying to have those supplies trucked to Northern Europe, meaning market forces haven't even come into play yet.
Technically, if his employment contract needed renewal, he wasn't an employee. He was a contractor. And the system correctly noted his contract as expired when a replacement contract wasn't entered into the system.
It's not so weird when you realize this case aligns those in favor of strong state rights (typically conservatives) with those in favor of strong government power (typically liberals).
If Scalia had lived, the Court probably would've ruled 5-4 the other way. Scalia favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution, meaning in his opinion the clause prohibiting taxes on interstate commerce probably would've prevailed. Also, the side against sales taxes on Internet sales lost its biggest proponent several years ago, when Amazon entered into agreements with several large states to collect taxes there. Amazon didn't have a physical presence in those states so nexus didn't originally apply, but they had plans to put warehouses (and now lockers) in those states so probably agreed to collect taxes since they were going to gain nexus eventually. But once Amazon entered the agreements, they flipped from no to taxes on interstate commerce, to "if we have to collect these taxes then it'd be great if everyone else had to collect them too."
Many states are implementing use taxes illegally, or at least illogically.
With a sales tax, the tax is on the amount of the sale. New or used.
With a use tax, the tax is purported on the use the buyer gets out of the item. States try to call them use taxes to get around the prohibition on taxes on interstate commerce - a sales tax applies to the transaction, a use tax applies to where the item will be used. But many of them (e.g. California) also apply use taxes to sales of used items like cars. This is illogical, if not illegal. Say you bought a car for $30,000 and paid use taxes on $30,000, then sold the car for $20,000. Currently these states then charge the buyer use taxes on the $20,000 used car. But the correct (logical) way to implement it would be they charge the buyer use taxes on $20,000, then reimburse you for use taxes on $20,000 since you only "used" $10,000 of value from the car ($30,000 to $20,000).
This creates a logical inconsistency where one vehicle bought for $30,000 and used for 10 years can result in $3,000 use tax revenue (10%). While another identical vehicle also sold for $30,000 and also used for 10 years can result in $8,000 use tax revenue.
$3,000 use tax revenue on initial sale
$2,000 use tax revenue when it's sold 2 years later for $20,000
$1,500 use tax revenue when it's sold 2 years later for $15,000
$1,000 use tax revenue when it's sold 2 years later for $10,000
$500 use tax revenue when it's sold 2 years later for $5,000.
If your state assesses a use tax on used items and doesn't reimburse the previous owner for unused value, then it's not a use tax, it's a sales tax.
I've been saying for years that net neutrality is a top-down solution to a bottom-up problem. The cable monopolies aren't natural monopolies. They were given their monopolies by local governments. So it's kinda silly to try to deal with this government-created problem as if they were a natural monopoly which need to be reined in by national or state anti-trust regulations. All you have to do is vote for local city council members who'll allow more than one cable company to service your town.
When I lived in a suburb of Boston in the 1990s, my city council voted to allow a second cable company. The day before a second cable company was scheduled to begin offering service, the existing cable company rolled out 50% speed increases and cut their prices by $10/mo across all plans. Competition works. The only reason Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc. have the audacity to try to degrade Netflix if Netflix doesn't pay them, is because they know their customers cannot flee to another ISP which doesn't degrade Netflix. If the customers can flee to a competing ISP, then any ISP which intentionally degrades service is shooting themselves in the foot.
Neither. They're just the market price at that time of day. Your phrasing implies the price is somehow higher or lower than market price, and that someone is manipulating the prices to be higher or lower. It's the market price itself which is fluctuating throughout the day - fewer riders but more drivers means lower prices, more riders but fewer drivers means higher prices. The change in price is what dampens the fluctuations in wait time. Higher prices encourage more drivers to give rides, helping work through the backlog of unusually large numbers of people wanting rides at that time. Lower prices encourages drivers who don't need to drive to get off the road, so as not to create the situation of a long line of taxis waiting in line at the airport for a handful of riders.
Uber is now just giving riders the option to see those fluctuations (at least the ones which make consistent patterns, like time of day) so they can opt to save a few bucks by riding at a different time if their schedule allows. I dislike Uber, but I think this is a great new feature. It helps Uber and drivers too since shifting riders from high-demand times to low-demand times results in lower average wait time for riders, and less downtime for drivers (waiting for a rider to appear) during low-demand times. Everyone wins - riders, drivers, and Uber.
It's the same as how ticket sites like Kayak/Orbitz/Expedia give you a grid of fares on different days, so you can pick a cheaper fare if it turns out the original date you picked is rather expensive and your schedule is flexible enough to travel on a different day. Most people who fly a lot have figured out by now that airfares tend to be higher on Mondays and Fridays (when business fly employees to/back from off-site locations, resulting in fewer seats available for leisure travelers). Or the power company telling you that your electricity rates are lower between 10 pm to 6 am. This is Uber now telling you that it'd be cheaper if rode at a different time.
The "media companies" are the ones fighting for this law - in the hope Google and Facebook will pay them for the right to link to their stories.
It's going to really funny to watch their faces after Google and Facebook stop linking to them.
And it's going to result in a bunch of sites currently with small market share explicitly offering a no-fee linking license. Google, Facebook, etc. will link to those sites instead, resulting in those sites gobbling up the market share currently owned by the sites wanting to be paid. And everything will go right back to the way it is now. Except Google et al will now have explicit permission to link for free. And the sites wanting to be paid for linking will have disappeared into obscurity, hoisted by their own petard.
The car analogy is that these media sites think of Internet traffic as cars on a road, and Google as a company which puts up a Google News billboard in front of their store, blocking people who are traveling the road from seeing their actual store. So they're demanding that Google pay them. What they don't realize is that Google isn't putting up a billboard. Google is the road. And if they demand Google et al pay them, those companies are simply going to move the road so it no longer goes in front of their store.
Slashdot Mirror
Campaign contributions typically favor the party in power (scroll down to the historical party split and historical average contributions), which is currently Republicans. A fact conveniently omitted by journalists who cherry-pick data to try to make the party they oppose look like bad guys.
Historically, telecom contributions have slightly favored the Democrats. The only reason Democrats are making a fuss about net neutrality is because they consider it to be an issue they can leverage for votes. If they truly believed in net neutrality on principle, they could've easily passed it during Obama's first term when they held the Presidency and both branches of Congress with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The problem has always been local governments granting monopolies for cable and phone service. Both parties are complicit in this and neither seems willing to change it. Passing net neutrality is putting on a band-aid to hide festering gangrene caused by these government-granted monopolies these telecom companies enjoy. A way to placate the voters by pretending to be on their side, while making sure the monopolies awarded to their campaign contributors (the telecom companies) continue undisturbed.
As I've said before, I believe the best strategy for fighting this type of privacy invasion is to simply pollute their incoming data. Figure out which triggers they're using to initiate the recording (e.g. inaudible audio signal at the beginning of a commercial), and duplicate it and program your phone and other speakers to play them back anywhere and everywhere. The mall, the park, stadiums, restaurants, concerts, movie theaters, amusement parks, traffic jams (over your car stereo with your windows rolled down), YouTube videos, etc.
There's an apocryphal story that at the end of the Cold War, members of the KGB and CIA got together for beer and to swap war stories. The CIA spooks lamented how hard their job had been. They had to struggle just to get anyone into the country since the Soviet Union was such a closed society, while the KGB could simply enter on a tourist visa and drive up to (and even take a tour of) most targets in the U.S. The KGB spooks disagreed, saying that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that they had to devote huge resources to sift through it all to figure out which was credible and which was not. e.g. If the National Enquirer published a story about the USAF testing a captured UFO at Area 51, they had to figure out if it was made-up or if there was really something to it.
I *want* to separate my recyclables into metal, glass, paper, and plastic. That's the way I was taught to do it. It takes almost no additional effort for me to throw my recyclables into one of four boxes I used to have set up for these categories, versus a lot of effort for some poor schmuck who has to be paid to sort through a huge mount of mixed recyclables.
My trash hauling service (who has a monopoly service contract with my city) however insists on mixing them all up. If I give them three boxes with the recyclables all sorted, they simply dump them into a single bin on the collection truck. The story they told me is that they pay prisoners to sort it for them, as they found that was cheaper than designing hauling trucks with 3/4 separate bins and making sure the curbside recycling bins were dumped into the correct bin on the truck. (Which if true should make you think twice about recycling old paper bills and such - they go into my shredder now.)
So no, it's not just a matter of people getting off their asses and doing it.
Samsung has held a large chunk of the smartphone market since 1999. Their recent increase in their market share (2008-2013) coincides with Nokia's demise.
FYI, the center pic in your link should be of an LG Prada, not an iPhone. The Prada was the first smartphone to go without a keyboard or keypad, not the iPhone. As I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw a feature was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it.
The pics on the left and right are also cherry-picked to make it look like the iPhone was the progenitor of the modern smartphone design. Here's what the pic looks like if you cherry-pick phones to make the comparison favorable to Samsung.
Samsung already had phones in their internal design pipeline prior to the iPhone's release which looked very iPhone-like. They just weren't allowed to present them in court because they missed a filing deadline. The judge in the case opted to prioritize a legal deadline over the truth, which makes sense if a lawyer is exhibiting a pattern of missing deadlines, but not when potentially a billion dollars is at stake. The truth is the industry was already transitioning towards touch and away from physical keyboards by the time the iPhone rolled out. The iPhone did not create this new paradigm, it just happened to make the biggest splash with it.
Samsung missed no deadlines in the similar case over the iPad's design. So they were able to successfully argue that the concept of a tablet existed long before the iPad, and that the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design actually borrowed from their digital picture frame which pre-dates the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter). And the jury ruled for Samsung in the tablet design patent case. They weren't jerks about it either - they didn't sue Apple for stealing their picture frame design for the iPad.
Why is it the airlines who need to adapt? Why do rockets get priority over airliners so the airliners have to reroute around rocket launches? Why aren't rocket launches being scheduled for the middle of the night when there is less air traffic?
Rocket launches are given priority and the airspace closed because they're rare events. The one-time closure imposes only a small economic hardship onto other industries for the year overall. But if rocket launches become commonplace, then the logic behind giving them priority no longer holds. You'll need to treat them as equals, giving them equal priority to others wishing to use the same airspace.
If some trucking company needs to haul an historic house down your street to move it to a new location, a one-time closure of your street to regular traffic is acceptable. But if the trucking company is doing these types of moves every few days, the city needs to come up with a better solution than shutting down the street every time.
The thing I didn't like about that XKCD comic was that for the numbers to be comparable, you need to divide by the number of people participating in that activity. For example, a helluva lot more people ride elevators than go surfing or skateboarding. So even though elevators kill more people overall, the number of fatalities per participant is a lot lower for elevators.
The problem is XP is vulnerable to a lot of hacks shared with XP/Vista/7/8/10. If malware which exploits it should get onto your PACS or RIS server, it could conceivably spread itself to your XP box over your LAN. Your servers will get security and anti-virus updates which detect and remove the malware, but not your XP box.
The bigger problem I've run across with clients still running XP (isolated from the Internet) is that Microsoft no longer allows you to update it over the Internet (aside from a registry hack to trick Microsoft into thinking it's an embedded system). So if you ever need to wipe and reinstall, you end up with an older version of XP and no way to update it automatically. You have to know to manually download the last service pack and install it yourself. And I'm not sure how to install any updates which were released after the last service pack.
This really makes me worry about how well supported Windows 8/10 will be after they're replaced. Those have no service packs - you can only update them via Windows Update. If Microsoft continues dropping update support after extended support for the OS ends, there's going to be no way to update them. Microsoft really needs to make available install media for these older obsoleted OSes available with all updates slipstreamed in. (I've had similar problems with Office 2003 and 2007 - Microsoft's website to download Office updates disappeared and now redirects you to buy a subscription to Office 365. As best as I can tell, the only way to get updates for Office 2003/2007 is now also through Windows Update. Or if you know to search for and download the service packs.)
The problem isn't the item or their network capability. These things would be fine if you were only able to access and control them over your LAN. The problem is some idiot thought it would be cool to be able to access them over the Internet. As a result the devices connect to some server on the Internet (no doubt allowing the manufacturer to collect marketing info), waiting for your smartphone app to contact the server and connect to the devices remotely.
The way they should work is they should never connect to the Internet, and should limit their network activity to your LAN. If you want to control them from outside your home, you should set up a VPN server on your router (many of them come with one built-in now), and use the VPN client on your phone to access your LAN from the Internet, giving you access to those devices.
Unfortunately, this is beyond the technical capabilities of the vast majority of users, and they don't want to learn how to do it, so we end up with these IoT devices which access the Internet directly. Same reason everyone sells their soul and shares their news and photos on Facebook, instead of setting up their own personal website/blog.
This is why Microsoft is doing it. The realized they are not beholden to Intel. They made Windows RT (port of Win32 to ARM) so if the Intel x86-64 ship ever sank, it wouldn't take Windows down with it. They don't need it to sell like hotcakes; heck they don't need it to sell at all. They just need to to be there and ready if ARM overtakes Intel. It's insurance - a hedge against Intel imploding. If that should happen, they'll just transition to Windows for ARM, and all the software companies making Windows apps will (more or less) simply recompile their programs for ARM64, and Windows will carry on as if Intel never existed.
Actually, nuclear plants only convert about a third of the energy they generate into electricity (the generator is basically hooked up to a steam engine). The rest of the energy becomes waste heat which must be dissipated, usually by dumping it into a river or ocean. So the obvious thing to do would be to build nuclear reactors near the ocean, and use the waste thermal energy for desalination. (The same holds for fossil fuel plants - about 60% of the energy from coal and about 40% of the energy from natural gas becomes waste heat.)
It's not that simple. It's about 12,000 tax jurisdiction (many of them overlapping), each with different tax rates and items which are and aren't taxed. So the end result is a huge database of 12,000 * 3 possible overlaps (city, county, state) * millions of items = on the order of a hundred billion possible tax combinations. (It's not a true combination permutation because of the geographic limitations of the overlaps, and no they don't always align with zip codes.)
While there are a lot of services which collect and provide tax rate information for every jurisdiction, Taxcloud is the only one which will indemnify the merchant against errors. With the other services, if they screw up and give the merchant wrong info, the merchant has to pay for any shortfall in taxes collected. (Some of the pay services will indemnify, but only for a limited amount.)
Taxcloud is set up by the states, and will indemnify the merchant in certain states. The Federal government really needs to step up and require all tax jurisdictions to participate and indemnify merchants against errors in the Taxcloud database. That way Taxcloud ends up as a central repository. A tax jurisdiction reports its taxes to Taxcloud, and a merchant looks up the taxes on Taxcloud. If Taxcloud has a wrong tax rate, then it's the fault of the taxing jurisdiction (reported the wrong rate to Taxcloud) and the merchant is indemnified. If Taxcloud has the correct rate but the merchant read it wrong, then it's the merchant who's at fault and they're liable for uncollected taxes.
By all rights, compilation of tax jurisdiction rates is an industry which shouldn't exist. The whole point of government is to eliminate wasteful redundancies like this. But they've failed to set up a central tax rate database, which has resulted in a lot of unnecessary duplicated work in the private sector by companies establishing their own rate databases. That's why they're calling on Congress to clean up this mess. It's like if the IRS published different tax forms on paper only in different areas of the country, and relied on private companies to collect all those different forms and make them available to all taxpayers across the country. It's just simpler, more reliable, and cheaper if the IRS makes all the forms available directly.
It's a problem if you're trying to obtain an absolute measurement of customer satisfaction. e.g. Waiter A is 1.5x better than waiter B.
If you're trying to obtain a relative measure of customer satisfaction (e.g. do customers like waiter A or waiter B more?), then it's a valid measure as long as your sample size (number of customer surveys per waiter) is large enough that these individual deviations in rate scaling average out. Ratings at sites like IMDB and Netflix have to deal with the same problem. But their sample size is large enough that the best movies do end up percolating to the top ratings.
Yeah, I don't see what the fuss is. This is zero-sum in terms of employment. For ever work-hour someone lost, someone else gained a work-hour. If you're on the short end, you need to step up your game.
In terms of customer service, it's positive-sum. Customers get more time with better waiters, less time with poor waiters. Restaurant improves its overall service. Better waiters get rewarded. Bad waiters get a feedback indicating how they need to improve. It's win-win-win-win, unless you're an obstinate bad waiter who refuses to change and are upset at losing work hours.
I'm reminded of efforts to stamp out sickle cell anemia. Then it was discovered that carriers of the gene for sickle cell anemia were highly resistant to malaria. Are they sure the snippet of DNA they're deleting doesn't confer some benefit which (on an evolutionary level) outweighs the disadvantage of vulnerability to this disease?
The NSA collection is under the (tenuous) rationale that the phone conversations they record are of people outside the U.S., and thus persons who do not enjoy 4th Amendment protection. (The fly in the ointment is that the other half of the conversation is with someone in the U.S. who enjoys 4th Amendment protection.)
This case is the wireless equivalent of "Can the government search your garbage without a warrant after you've put it on the street corner for pickup?" The issue here wasn't if the government needed a warrant to track you as you're mischaracterizing it. It's if the government needed a warrant to obtain personal information you've already willingly given up to a third party. Unlike possessions inside your home or car or on your person, it is not at all obvious that these things enjoy 4th Amendment protection.
At one extreme, this would be your cell phone location data. But the issue was much broader and more complex than you're making it out to be. An opposite extreme could be if a police officer would need to obtain a warrant before they can ask a hotel if anyone resembling a suspect had checked in recently.
To be fair (I don't use twitter), most of the twitter links I see in news stories are links to the original source. e.g. "So-and-so tweeted that..." or "So-and-so tweeted a photo/video of..." Not retweets or re-links. It's certainly much better than the news articles themselves, where I usually have to dig through 3-5 layers of links to get to the original source article, or just give up and search for the source on Google.
In that respect, most of the journalists seem to be doing their jobs when it comes to Twitter - drilling down to the original source tweet and linking to it directly, instead of the countless re-tweets. Contrast this with YouTube, where often the original copyright holder's upload may get a few tens of thousands of views, while someone who copied the video and re-uploaded it on their channel gets tens of millions of views and all the ad revenue. (If you ever have a video go viral, don't give news organizations permission to reproduce your video on their YouTube channel. Tell them you give them permission to link to your original video. It's all being served by YouTube either way.)
The original source article is much more informative about the causes. Basically it's a confluence of at least 4 different events. Seasonal low demand for ammonia fertilizer (whose production produces CO2 as a byproduct). Several of the plants being down for maintenance (because the seasonal low ammonia demand). Unusually high demand for carbonated beverages due to hot weather and the World Cup. And prioritization for CO2 use in dry ice production for chilling food, and slaughterhouses to stun meat animals, meaning fizzy drinks end up bearing the brunt of any shortfall.
There is apparently plenty of CO2 available in Southern Europe. The shortage is just not yet bad enough to warrant paying to have those supplies trucked to Northern Europe, meaning market forces haven't even come into play yet.
Technically, if his employment contract needed renewal, he wasn't an employee. He was a contractor. And the system correctly noted his contract as expired when a replacement contract wasn't entered into the system.
It's not so weird when you realize this case aligns those in favor of strong state rights (typically conservatives) with those in favor of strong government power (typically liberals).
If Scalia had lived, the Court probably would've ruled 5-4 the other way. Scalia favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution, meaning in his opinion the clause prohibiting taxes on interstate commerce probably would've prevailed. Also, the side against sales taxes on Internet sales lost its biggest proponent several years ago, when Amazon entered into agreements with several large states to collect taxes there. Amazon didn't have a physical presence in those states so nexus didn't originally apply, but they had plans to put warehouses (and now lockers) in those states so probably agreed to collect taxes since they were going to gain nexus eventually. But once Amazon entered the agreements, they flipped from no to taxes on interstate commerce, to "if we have to collect these taxes then it'd be great if everyone else had to collect them too."
With a sales tax, the tax is on the amount of the sale. New or used.
With a use tax, the tax is purported on the use the buyer gets out of the item. States try to call them use taxes to get around the prohibition on taxes on interstate commerce - a sales tax applies to the transaction, a use tax applies to where the item will be used. But many of them (e.g. California) also apply use taxes to sales of used items like cars. This is illogical, if not illegal. Say you bought a car for $30,000 and paid use taxes on $30,000, then sold the car for $20,000. Currently these states then charge the buyer use taxes on the $20,000 used car. But the correct (logical) way to implement it would be they charge the buyer use taxes on $20,000, then reimburse you for use taxes on $20,000 since you only "used" $10,000 of value from the car ($30,000 to $20,000).
This creates a logical inconsistency where one vehicle bought for $30,000 and used for 10 years can result in $3,000 use tax revenue (10%). While another identical vehicle also sold for $30,000 and also used for 10 years can result in $8,000 use tax revenue.
If your state assesses a use tax on used items and doesn't reimburse the previous owner for unused value, then it's not a use tax, it's a sales tax.
I've been saying for years that net neutrality is a top-down solution to a bottom-up problem. The cable monopolies aren't natural monopolies. They were given their monopolies by local governments. So it's kinda silly to try to deal with this government-created problem as if they were a natural monopoly which need to be reined in by national or state anti-trust regulations. All you have to do is vote for local city council members who'll allow more than one cable company to service your town.
When I lived in a suburb of Boston in the 1990s, my city council voted to allow a second cable company. The day before a second cable company was scheduled to begin offering service, the existing cable company rolled out 50% speed increases and cut their prices by $10/mo across all plans. Competition works. The only reason Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc. have the audacity to try to degrade Netflix if Netflix doesn't pay them, is because they know their customers cannot flee to another ISP which doesn't degrade Netflix. If the customers can flee to a competing ISP, then any ISP which intentionally degrades service is shooting themselves in the foot.
Neither. They're just the market price at that time of day. Your phrasing implies the price is somehow higher or lower than market price, and that someone is manipulating the prices to be higher or lower. It's the market price itself which is fluctuating throughout the day - fewer riders but more drivers means lower prices, more riders but fewer drivers means higher prices. The change in price is what dampens the fluctuations in wait time. Higher prices encourage more drivers to give rides, helping work through the backlog of unusually large numbers of people wanting rides at that time. Lower prices encourages drivers who don't need to drive to get off the road, so as not to create the situation of a long line of taxis waiting in line at the airport for a handful of riders.
Uber is now just giving riders the option to see those fluctuations (at least the ones which make consistent patterns, like time of day) so they can opt to save a few bucks by riding at a different time if their schedule allows. I dislike Uber, but I think this is a great new feature. It helps Uber and drivers too since shifting riders from high-demand times to low-demand times results in lower average wait time for riders, and less downtime for drivers (waiting for a rider to appear) during low-demand times. Everyone wins - riders, drivers, and Uber.
It's the same as how ticket sites like Kayak/Orbitz/Expedia give you a grid of fares on different days, so you can pick a cheaper fare if it turns out the original date you picked is rather expensive and your schedule is flexible enough to travel on a different day. Most people who fly a lot have figured out by now that airfares tend to be higher on Mondays and Fridays (when business fly employees to/back from off-site locations, resulting in fewer seats available for leisure travelers). Or the power company telling you that your electricity rates are lower between 10 pm to 6 am. This is Uber now telling you that it'd be cheaper if rode at a different time.
And it's going to result in a bunch of sites currently with small market share explicitly offering a no-fee linking license. Google, Facebook, etc. will link to those sites instead, resulting in those sites gobbling up the market share currently owned by the sites wanting to be paid. And everything will go right back to the way it is now. Except Google et al will now have explicit permission to link for free. And the sites wanting to be paid for linking will have disappeared into obscurity, hoisted by their own petard.
The car analogy is that these media sites think of Internet traffic as cars on a road, and Google as a company which puts up a Google News billboard in front of their store, blocking people who are traveling the road from seeing their actual store. So they're demanding that Google pay them. What they don't realize is that Google isn't putting up a billboard. Google is the road. And if they demand Google et al pay them, those companies are simply going to move the road so it no longer goes in front of their store.