A physical injury reduces the country's productivity. A financial injury also reduces the country's productivity. There's a tendency for people to think one is morally superior to the other, but the real-world effect can be identical.
I'm not saying this particular case has or doesn't have merit (I don't know enough about it to form a conclusion yet). But the point of regulation is to increase the country's productivity by prohibiting activities which cause productivity loss (people out of work due to physical injury, additional medical expenses and premature death due to pollution, theft which deprives people who legitimately generated productivity of the pay for that productivity, etc). If the regulation itself is causing productivity loss (economic cost of compliance outweighs the economic benefits), then it is a bad regulation and should be repealed.
So it is in fact possible for the harm of an "injury" to the wallet to be worse than the harm of a physical injury. e.g. The lifetime productivity of the average American is about $2 million. If complying with a regulation costs $4 million per life the regulation saves, then you are basically wasting two people's worth of lifetime productivity to save a single lifetime. And the regulation does more harm than good. It's like assigning two people to do nothing their entire lives but to follow one other person around to keep them safe.
Comcast is, in areas where they have a monopoly, a government-granted monopoly. You don't have to split them up, which can take over a decade of court proceedings and rulings. All the local governments have to do is allow other cable companies to offer service in their areas. That can be done in a matter of days.
Back then domain names were $100 for 2 years. Hosting was an additional $10/mo or so, if you weren't fortunate enough to be at a school or work someplace which let you set up your own web server (I had one for myself, and another for my dog - IPv4 addresses were plentiful back then too).
Those costs are what drove people to "free" web services like GeoCities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. You can justify the cost to set up your own domain and website if it's going to be a business venture or a major part of your online profile. But for the vast majority of people, it wasn't worth it. Which is what allowed the personal-info-harvesting vultures to swoop in and take over the web as we know it today. In some ways I think it was actually better before the web, when simply having an account on an Internet service automatically gave you a finger profile you could fill out however you wanted at no additional cost.
Nowadays most ISPs also give you some free web space (and an email address) with your account. But it's too little, too late.
Being a typical nerd in school (straight A student except for PE), I thought the sports requirement in school was superfluous too. But after having worked for a couple decades, I now realize that those sports activities taught teamwork. That's a skill which is just as if not more important than academic achievement (a good team of average people can outproduce a single intellectual genius in many tasks).
Also, at the college level, intercollegiate sports are a huge driver for alumni donations. So a few hundred thousand dollars "wasted" on a sports scholarship for a star athlete can actually result in millions of dollars in alumni donations which can be used to fund scholarships for purely academic students.
Why artificially constrain your definition of "opportunity" to the kids? What about the opportunity for wealthier parents to spend more money on their kids' education if they wish?
The fundamental problem here is there is no "fair" solution. Either you make everyone's education equal by prohibiting people in wealthier school districts from spending more than poorer districts could ever afford, thus unfairly limiting their kids to an inferior education compared to what they could really afford to pay for. Or you allow education spending to scale based on a district's resident's ability to pay, resulting in unfairly inferior education in poorer school districts.
No matter which solution to this issue you pick, it is unfair in some way - you're artificially limiting someone's opportunity. Any self-proclaimed "fairest" solution isn't actually fairer, the reasoning behind it just downplays the unfairness it creates that the other solution(s) address. We want the world to be nice and orderly, with each problem having a single "best" solution. But it turns out that for many problems, no such best solution exists.
Sometimes, equality (i.e. perfect fairness) is mathematically unobtainable. If a large man and a small child are stuck on a life raft and have to try to stretch their rations, which is fairer? Dividing the rations equally? Or dividing the rations according to body mass?
The obsession with analog audio stems from a gross misunderstanding of what digital audio is. People see digital sampling as a partial capture of the analog waveform, and thus conclude analog must be superior. Digital sampling is not a partial capture. It's an exact capture of the analog waveform within the frequency range (22 kHz in most cases - well beyond what most people can hear). The part that's not intuitively obvious which trips most people up is that if you take a digital sample of an analog waveform, there is only one possible analog waveform which passes through all those digital samples while not exceeding the frequency cutoff. So the digital sample ends up being a perfect reproduction of the analog waveform (within the frequency range of interest).
You can demonstrate this by taking an analog waveform, feeding it into a digital sampler, then converting that digital sample back into an analog waveform. The beginning and ending waveforms will be identical despite the latter one having been converted to digital and back to analog.
All the "warmth" and "richness" of analog audio is nothing more than distortion.
A Playstation 4's GPU is roughly on par with a GTX 590 or Radeon 7970. You can find those on eBay for about $80-$150, unaffected by the cryptocurrency craze (they're so old and inefficient that any miner using them would lose money).
You get a console for the exclusive game titles. You get a gaming PC if you want graphics performance and/or resolution better than an 6 year old GPU.
It was implemented after the "Wild West" style of domain name registration, ownership, and transfer in the 1990s. The dispute goes through ICANN and is resolved by ICANN, not some French court. There's a section of the domain name dispute resolution policy specifically earmarked for trademarks. The trademark holder files the claim with ICANN, who receives evidence from both sides and grinds the wheels for a while, before deciding who ultimately gets the domain name. At that point, the registrar transfers ownership. France using the French court decision to pressure web.com to turn over ownership to them is probably illegal, even if they are correct that they own the trademark on "France".
(Also, I seriously doubt the French government holds a legitimate claim to the International trademark on "France". If that were possible, then China could register "China" as a trademark, and force all websites to cease using the word "China" in ways the Chinese government didn't like.)
The big test will be in 2036. That's when we hit 70 years from Walt Disney's death. That year, under current copyright law, anything Disney published before 1941 (secondary term of 95 years since first publication) falls into the public domain.
If merely copying the restore disks is copyright infringement, then there's no need for serial keys and the DMCA provision criminalizing bypassing encryption meant to protect copyright.
If copyright is being protected by serial keys or DMCA-protected encryption, then copying the media without bypassing those copyright protection mechanisms isn't copyright infringement. All the person has done by redistributing such unaltered software is reduce the copyright holder's costs by doing the work of duplication and distribution for them.
From what I've read, his "financial gain" was 25 cents per disk, designed to recoup his cost of optical media and burning the software to the disks. By comparison, most movie studios charge $7-$9 for replacement blu-ray disks, meaning the amount he was charging was completely in line with recouping his material costs.
The only mistake he made based on my reading of the case was stamping the DVDs to make them look like authentic Microsoft disks.
Any computer that's old enough to have shipped with Windows 7 or older is likely using a processor older than Sandy Bridge (released 2011, vs Windows 8's 2012 release date). Sandy Bridge was the first time Intel took reducing power consumption seriously - a typical Sandy Bridge processor idles at around 35 Watts, with a peak power draw of around 90 Watts. Previous processors like Core 2 Duo would idle around 70 Watts, peaking at 100 Watts.
By a remarkable coincidence, if you pay the U.S. average electricity price of 11.5 cents/kWh, if a device is left on 24/7 for a year, each Watt it consumes translates almost exactly into $1 for the year. So if you own a Core 2 Duo computer and leave it on 24/7 drawing 90 Watts for the system at idle, it will cost you an extra $65 of electricity than if you replaced it with a modern system which draws 25 Watts while idling. It doesn't take many years for that extra electricity cost to exceed the cost of a new computer.
So as much as I love to berate Microsoft and Windows 10, the financial argument against them here is rather weak. Upgrading to a newer computer doesn't just make Microsoft and Intel more money. It also saves the buyer more money over the long term (via lower electricity bills).
CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service. The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card. You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they take turns talking with the tower. This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important. You ended up wasting bandwidth on phones which didn't need the bandwidth of their full timeslice, or didn't even need any bandwidth at all that particular timeslice. You also lost bandwidth to the padding added to the ends of each timeslice to compensate for the finite speed of lite (to insure the signal of a phone distant from the tower doesn't spill over into the next timeslice).
CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time, and uses orthogonal codes to tell their transmissions apart. Kinda like writing on a piece of paper, then turning it 90 degrees to write on it again. Even though the letters overlap, they're distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which letters are horizontal and which are vertical, and ignore the ones not in the direction you're reading. All phones see other transmitting phones as noise, so more phones transmitting means a lower signal to noise ratio, and bandwidth to each phone is automatically reduced based on the number of transmitting phones. This means CDMA's bandwidth is automatically divided evenly between the number of phones which need it at any given moment.
This is why CDMA services got 3G data about a year before GSM services. GSM ended up throwing in the towel, licensing CDMA, and amended the GSM spec to include wideband CDMA for data service. And this is why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio which could do voice or data, but not both simultaneously. It wasn't because GSM was superior, it was because GSM was inferior and needed a second radio to compete.
LTE service is mostly based on OFDMA - similar to CDMA but using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea where everyone transmits at the same time stomping over each others' signals actually worked when expanded out into a nationwide cellular network. If CDMA hadn't happened first, researchers and companies would've been much less confident about OFDMA, and it's possible we might've still been waiting for LTE to even roll out today. If the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and required GSM, then the global adoption of inferior TDMA technology would've meant that cellular data service today would probably be stuck down around 1 Mbps or slower. So you should be thanking CDMA for giving us the 50+ Mbps cellular data speeds we enjoy today.
North Korea's history books state that South Korea and the U.S. invaded the North to start the Korean War. It was actually a UN police action approved following North Korea's invasion. But by this time, 95% of the North's population, including Kim Jong Un, will have had their version of history drilled into their heads in school as being the truth. It's actually the cornerstone of their philosophy of blaming everything on the U.S.
The Korean War was a UN police action, like the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Taiwan held China's vote in the UN Security Council at the time, and the USSR was boycotting the UN that week so wasn't present to veto the UN Security Council authorization to intervene in Korea to counter North Korea's invasion. (North Korea concocted the fantasy that the South invaded the North, though enough time has passed that the vast majority of its population has been taught this as truth.)
The U.S. troops in South Korea number fewer than 24,000, vs North Korea's standing army of 1.2 million (4th largest in the world), and would be inconsequential in any hypothetical invasion of North Korea. The U.S. troops are present for one simple reason - to be overrun and die if North Korea should invade again, thereby giving the U.S. an excuse to intervene on South Korea's behalf without having to go through the UN again. The troops there are fully aware of this - they call themselves "speed bumps".
Withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea would require some sort of ironclad guarantee that North Korea would not invade again, or a guarantee of immediate UN authorization for the U.S. to intervene again, or South Korea unilaterally deciding to give up the deterrence of having U.S. troops present.
Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2.
The problem is, CO2 holds the atoms at a very low energy state. So you get energy out of creating CO2, and converting CO2 into a different form usually involves putting in energy. But if that energy came from burning fossil fuels, then the second law of thermodynamics says you're creating more CO2 than you're capturing. So most of these ideas for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere involve putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere to generate the materials used to pull out the CO2.
Whether the goal is reduction of CO2 emissions, or sequestering CO2 already in the atmosphere, the solution is the same - we need to switch away from hydrocarbon-based fuels for energy. This is why decommissioning nuclear plants is extremely short-sighted. You're putting all our eggs in one basket (renewables) and gambling with the future of all life on Earth that we'll be able to develop renewable energy quickly enough before climate change reaches catastrophic levels. Why gamble when we already have a carbon-free energy source which we could ramp up within a decade or two, to provide the energy needed to power all these carbon sequestration strategies? Nuclear doesn't have to be the end-solution. We just need it to buy ourselves more time to develop renewables, then we can slowly phase out nuclear plants and replace them with renewables.
There is one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere without us having to do anything. Plants do exactly that via photosynthesis. They take the energy from sunlight, break the CO2 up into O2 (released into the atmosphere), and lock the carbon up in a hydrocarbon chain forming sugars, starches, and cellulose. Normally that carbon is released again when the plant dies and bacteria decompose it. If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition, then all we'd have to do is let forests grow, chop them down, seal the wood and bury it, and plant new trees to continue the process.
Another possibility is you leak a story to the press whining about how the Russian electronic warfare has successfully crippled your most sophisticated electronic warfare assets. When in reality they're able to operate just fine despite the jamming, and you just want to lull the opposition into a false sense of having succeeded. Those of you who grew up after the Cold War have no idea just how convoluted the disinformation game can become.
Ostensibly, the U.S. and Russia are in Syria with the same goal - to fight ISIS. But behind the curtains, the U.S. is supporting Syrian rebels who want to overthrow al-Assad, while Russia is backing al-Assad and his government forces. They tolerate each others' presence in Syria because they both agree that an ISIS-controlled Syria is worse than either an al-Assad-controlled or rebel-controlled Syria. But neither will pass up a chance to "accidentally" lob a bomb at government forces, or a rebel-held city.
In that respect, it's more akin to the U.S./UK and Soviets spying on and testing each others' capabilities during WWII. Both were fighting to defeat Hitler, but behind the scenes they had very different ideas for the future of Europe and knew they'd likely end up as adversaries after the war.
It's the administrators who control the school budget. Any time education funding is increased, they sop it up by raising their own pay and benefits and hiring more administrators, while passing a token amount down to teachers. Every time education funding is cut, they send it straight to the teachers, so they'll generate news stories about how they had to buy paper and pencils for their students out of their own wallet, to pressure legislators into increasing education funding even more. I even crunched some numbers from the Dept. of Education website a few years ago, and dividing the salary + benefits by the number of teachers yielded an overall average pay for teachers over $100,000/yr. There's no way that's possible. What probably happened is administrators shifted some of their pay and benefits into the teacher category, to try to hide how much of the school budget they were sopping up.
The problem isn't funding, it's how the funds are spent.
Since according to the MPAA you've purchased a license to see the movie, shouldn't the theater let you see it as often as you like with the same ticket^H^H^H^H^H^Hlicense as long as the showing is not sold out?
It's a combination of factors. Trump and his hardline stance giving Kim no room for belligerent talk. South Korea recently electing a very liberal President (some even call him communist). And Kim still being relatively new to the reins of power in North Korea (2011).
The combination of the three has produced a unique situation where the political stances which had been the status quo for over 50 years can be thrown out without anyone losing face. The long-term North Korean stance has been that South Korea is a puppet state of the U.S., and until now they've refused to negotiate solely with South Korea, always insisting on negotiating with the U.S. instead. The U.S. in turn has insisted that all major belligerents in the war be involved in any peace treaty talks (North and South Korea, U.S., China, and Russia). And South Korea's leadership has with a couple short exceptions been fairly conservative, and unwilling to yield almost anything to North Korea.
Trump broke with the 5-country peace treaty stance the U.S. has held for decades, and agreed to meet with Kim one-on-one. It's a Nixon-goes-to-China situation, where only a hard-line opponent could give ground on a long-held position without losing face. Kim broke with North Korea's insistence that South Korea was a puppet state and that any peace treaty be negotiated between it and the U.S., and agreed to meet Moon directly as representatives of two nations. And Moon agreed to meet Kim, which former Korean Presidents from conservative parties probably wouldn't have been able to do without being kicked out of power by their own party.
Kim also happens to be a k-pop fan. And one of the best ways I've found for reconciling two people with an acrimonious history is to start with something they both like. It sounds cheesy, but it forces you to think of the other side as being comprised of real people just like yourself, not nameless faces onto which you can project decades of ingrained stereotypes and prejudices.
The biggest U.S. military presence in Asia is in Japan. The treaties which ended WWII prohibited Japan from building up a military which it could project overseas. They're only allowed to have a self-defense force (which is why that name often shows up in Japanese anime). In exchange, the U.S. is responsible for protecting Japan from foreign attack. So by necessity it has a large military presence in Japan (though Japan has shoved most of it into Okinawa, whose people are discriminated against by mainland Japanese).
From a logistical standpoint, Japan is an easier destination to reach from the U.S. (and vice versa). A great circle route between the U.S. and South Korea takes you over part of North Korea and Russia, which has resulted in simple mistakes producing tragic consequences in the past.
He is so dumb he managed to end the Korean war today.
Trump had nothing to do with it, and there's still no peace treaty signed. The two Koreas agreed that they should end the war and pledged to work toward it, but that's happened before and they're a long way from an actual treaty.
I think Trump is a reckless goofball, but experts and the South Korean Foreign Minister are crediting him for pressuring North Korea to come to the table. The fact that he's a reckless goofball means you have to take the threats he makes seriously, kinda like how North Korea has been playing the West all these decades. Anyhow, we'll see if it's different this time around, or if it'll be yet another round of North Korea collecting concessions from the West, then reneging on the deal (as happened with food and energy aid in the past).
The fact that North Korea is willing to talk to South Korea alone about a formal peace treaty is in and of itself a pretty big step. Previously, North Korea refused to recognize the legitimacy of the South Korean government, calling it a puppet state, and insisting on negotiating with the U.S. (and only the U.S.) directly. That's why in the past, the U.S. has insisted on 5-way negotiations between all major countries involved in the war - North and South Korea, the U.S., China, and Russia. North Korea agreeing to meet directly with only South Korea about ending the war is already a concession on their part. (So is Trump agreeing to meet Kim without South Korea present. This may be another Nixon-in-China moment, where only a staunch opponent can pull off overturning decades of established policy, because if anyone else did it, it would be seen as giving in.)
Prime is a lot more than free shipping and streaming music, video, and ebooks. The two biggest Prime benefits IMHO which most people don't know about are
the Amazon Prime Visa card which gives 5% back on all purchases from Amazon. It's rewarded as credits you can apply to new purchases on Amazon, so has an effective 4.75% cash back rate. So if you spend more than about $2100/yr on Amazon (going up to $2500/yr @ $120 for Prime), it's actually more expensive not to get Prime.
Prime Photos which gives you unlimited cloud storage of photos of any size. Photos are the most common "irreplaceable" data that people lose when their single backup (e.g. external HDD) dies. I highly recommend a second backup to a cloud service (where the hosting company takes care of hardware failures for you). And if you're a photographer with a huge library that needs backing up, this is the only unlimited storage I've found at a reasonable price. Google's unlimited photo storage requires downsizing everything to 2048x2048 or smaller.
the sooner CDMA dies and all that old equipment is removed from service the better
Um, CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. GSM used TDMA - each phone gets its own timeslice, and they take turns talking to the tower. CDMA allows each phone to transmit whenever they want, and used orthogonal codes to separate out each phone's transmissions. The difference didn't matter much with low-bandwidth applications like voice. But when 3G data rolled out, CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM. Giving each phone a timeslice means each phone uses a fixed percentage of a tower's bandwidth, even if it doesn't need that much bandwidth, or any bandwidth. In CDMA, the bandwidth gets divided automatically between the number of phones which are transmitting. Each phone sees other phones' transmissions as noise, so the more phones which are transmitting, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and the less bandwidth each phone gets.
That's why CDMA carriers got 3G service about a year before GSM carriers. GSM couldn't compete, and within a year they threw in the towel, licensed CDMA, and added it to the GSM spec. GSM phones have a wideband CDMA radio for 3G data. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a separate CDMA radio for 3G data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio, so could only do one or the other, not both simultaneously.
You should be thanking CDMA for the data rates we enjoy today. 4G LTE mostly uses OFDMA - phones transmit at the same time, but use orthogonal frequencies (as opposed to CDMA's orthogonal codes) to distinguish each other. CDMA was the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea, where everyone talks at the same time but you can still tell them apart, actually worked when rolled out into a national network. If the U.S. had gone along with GSM and prohibited CDMA, orthogonal signaling might have been dismissed as crazy, LTE probably wouldn't have rolled out when it did, and cellular data service today would probably be limited to about 512 kbps to 1 Mbps. (WiMAX used OFDMA as well. CDMA came first because OFDMA requires more processing power to sort out the different transmissions than CDMA, so early implementations drained a phone's battery quickly. It took a few years for mobile SoC processors to drop in power consumption enough to make OFDMA power-competitive with CDMA.)
This is probably the best modern example of government-imposed regulation (GSM) sending us down the wrong technology path, while a market-driven approach (U.S. allowing CDMA to compete with GSM) arrived at a superior technological solution. Government-mandated standards are fine if you know what the optimal solution is (e.g. electricity voltages and AC vs DC, or cable networks which have pretty much all standardized on DOCSIS). But if you're not sure what the optimal solution is, it's best to leave it for the market to sort it out before you start imposing standards which eliminate research into possibly superior solution spaces.
The only difference between CDMA and GSM today is voice and legacy 3G service. Both use LTE for 4G data, both use a SIM card to enable LTE service (CDMA supports SIM card portability for LTE, but not for voice - you can put a Verizon SIM card in an unsupported Nexus 5 and get LTE data, but not voice). Most phones produced today support both CDMA and GSM (TDMA voice, wideband CDMA 3G). LTE is mostly OFDMA with a few dynamically assigned TDMA channels (including, ironically, one of Sprint's). So once you begin discontinuing 3G data, the only difference between the two will be how voice calls are handled. The bigger impediment is actually which channels (frequencies) are supported - the carriers have this thing about requesting manufacturers produce phones with channels they don't support disabled. So assuming the merger goes through, depending on which channels they decide to keep and dump, some legacy carrier-branded phones will stop working and owners will be forced to upgrade.
Bankruptcy rules don't really change the amount of student debt. If you allow private student loan debt to be discharged through bankruptcy, all that happens is the interest rate for such loans increases to compensate. Students end up paying the same overall amount either way. In the no-bankruptcy case, the bankrupt student is on the hook for the bad loan. In the bankruptcy-allowed case, the student loan that got discharged via bankruptcy is paid for by all remaining students via higher interest.
To tackle the student debt problem, you have to address the root cause: too-generous student loan policies. Making it easier for students to time-shift future earnings into the present to pay for schools has resulted in college tuitions rising far in excess of the rate of inflation. When you subsidize something, you have the option of a supply-side or demand-side subsidy. Student loans are a demand-side subsidy, but increasing demand also increases prices. The loans need to be eliminated in favor of a supply-side subsidy - more public universities, and government grants and incentives for creating new or expanding existing private universities. When you increase supply, that decreases prices.
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A physical injury reduces the country's productivity. A financial injury also reduces the country's productivity. There's a tendency for people to think one is morally superior to the other, but the real-world effect can be identical.
I'm not saying this particular case has or doesn't have merit (I don't know enough about it to form a conclusion yet). But the point of regulation is to increase the country's productivity by prohibiting activities which cause productivity loss (people out of work due to physical injury, additional medical expenses and premature death due to pollution, theft which deprives people who legitimately generated productivity of the pay for that productivity, etc). If the regulation itself is causing productivity loss (economic cost of compliance outweighs the economic benefits), then it is a bad regulation and should be repealed.
So it is in fact possible for the harm of an "injury" to the wallet to be worse than the harm of a physical injury. e.g. The lifetime productivity of the average American is about $2 million. If complying with a regulation costs $4 million per life the regulation saves, then you are basically wasting two people's worth of lifetime productivity to save a single lifetime. And the regulation does more harm than good. It's like assigning two people to do nothing their entire lives but to follow one other person around to keep them safe.
Comcast is, in areas where they have a monopoly, a government-granted monopoly. You don't have to split them up, which can take over a decade of court proceedings and rulings. All the local governments have to do is allow other cable companies to offer service in their areas. That can be done in a matter of days.
Back then domain names were $100 for 2 years. Hosting was an additional $10/mo or so, if you weren't fortunate enough to be at a school or work someplace which let you set up your own web server (I had one for myself, and another for my dog - IPv4 addresses were plentiful back then too).
Those costs are what drove people to "free" web services like GeoCities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. You can justify the cost to set up your own domain and website if it's going to be a business venture or a major part of your online profile. But for the vast majority of people, it wasn't worth it. Which is what allowed the personal-info-harvesting vultures to swoop in and take over the web as we know it today. In some ways I think it was actually better before the web, when simply having an account on an Internet service automatically gave you a finger profile you could fill out however you wanted at no additional cost.
Nowadays most ISPs also give you some free web space (and an email address) with your account. But it's too little, too late.
Being a typical nerd in school (straight A student except for PE), I thought the sports requirement in school was superfluous too. But after having worked for a couple decades, I now realize that those sports activities taught teamwork. That's a skill which is just as if not more important than academic achievement (a good team of average people can outproduce a single intellectual genius in many tasks).
Also, at the college level, intercollegiate sports are a huge driver for alumni donations. So a few hundred thousand dollars "wasted" on a sports scholarship for a star athlete can actually result in millions of dollars in alumni donations which can be used to fund scholarships for purely academic students.
Why artificially constrain your definition of "opportunity" to the kids? What about the opportunity for wealthier parents to spend more money on their kids' education if they wish?
The fundamental problem here is there is no "fair" solution. Either you make everyone's education equal by prohibiting people in wealthier school districts from spending more than poorer districts could ever afford, thus unfairly limiting their kids to an inferior education compared to what they could really afford to pay for. Or you allow education spending to scale based on a district's resident's ability to pay, resulting in unfairly inferior education in poorer school districts.
No matter which solution to this issue you pick, it is unfair in some way - you're artificially limiting someone's opportunity. Any self-proclaimed "fairest" solution isn't actually fairer, the reasoning behind it just downplays the unfairness it creates that the other solution(s) address. We want the world to be nice and orderly, with each problem having a single "best" solution. But it turns out that for many problems, no such best solution exists.
Sometimes, equality (i.e. perfect fairness) is mathematically unobtainable. If a large man and a small child are stuck on a life raft and have to try to stretch their rations, which is fairer? Dividing the rations equally? Or dividing the rations according to body mass?
The obsession with analog audio stems from a gross misunderstanding of what digital audio is. People see digital sampling as a partial capture of the analog waveform, and thus conclude analog must be superior. Digital sampling is not a partial capture. It's an exact capture of the analog waveform within the frequency range (22 kHz in most cases - well beyond what most people can hear). The part that's not intuitively obvious which trips most people up is that if you take a digital sample of an analog waveform, there is only one possible analog waveform which passes through all those digital samples while not exceeding the frequency cutoff. So the digital sample ends up being a perfect reproduction of the analog waveform (within the frequency range of interest).
You can demonstrate this by taking an analog waveform, feeding it into a digital sampler, then converting that digital sample back into an analog waveform. The beginning and ending waveforms will be identical despite the latter one having been converted to digital and back to analog.
All the "warmth" and "richness" of analog audio is nothing more than distortion.
A Playstation 4's GPU is roughly on par with a GTX 590 or Radeon 7970. You can find those on eBay for about $80-$150, unaffected by the cryptocurrency craze (they're so old and inefficient that any miner using them would lose money).
You get a console for the exclusive game titles. You get a gaming PC if you want graphics performance and/or resolution better than an 6 year old GPU.
It was implemented after the "Wild West" style of domain name registration, ownership, and transfer in the 1990s. The dispute goes through ICANN and is resolved by ICANN, not some French court. There's a section of the domain name dispute resolution policy specifically earmarked for trademarks. The trademark holder files the claim with ICANN, who receives evidence from both sides and grinds the wheels for a while, before deciding who ultimately gets the domain name. At that point, the registrar transfers ownership. France using the French court decision to pressure web.com to turn over ownership to them is probably illegal, even if they are correct that they own the trademark on "France".
(Also, I seriously doubt the French government holds a legitimate claim to the International trademark on "France". If that were possible, then China could register "China" as a trademark, and force all websites to cease using the word "China" in ways the Chinese government didn't like.)
The big test will be in 2036. That's when we hit 70 years from Walt Disney's death. That year, under current copyright law, anything Disney published before 1941 (secondary term of 95 years since first publication) falls into the public domain.
If merely copying the restore disks is copyright infringement, then there's no need for serial keys and the DMCA provision criminalizing bypassing encryption meant to protect copyright.
If copyright is being protected by serial keys or DMCA-protected encryption, then copying the media without bypassing those copyright protection mechanisms isn't copyright infringement. All the person has done by redistributing such unaltered software is reduce the copyright holder's costs by doing the work of duplication and distribution for them.
From what I've read, his "financial gain" was 25 cents per disk, designed to recoup his cost of optical media and burning the software to the disks. By comparison, most movie studios charge $7-$9 for replacement blu-ray disks, meaning the amount he was charging was completely in line with recouping his material costs.
The only mistake he made based on my reading of the case was stamping the DVDs to make them look like authentic Microsoft disks.
Any computer that's old enough to have shipped with Windows 7 or older is likely using a processor older than Sandy Bridge (released 2011, vs Windows 8's 2012 release date). Sandy Bridge was the first time Intel took reducing power consumption seriously - a typical Sandy Bridge processor idles at around 35 Watts, with a peak power draw of around 90 Watts. Previous processors like Core 2 Duo would idle around 70 Watts, peaking at 100 Watts.
By a remarkable coincidence, if you pay the U.S. average electricity price of 11.5 cents/kWh, if a device is left on 24/7 for a year, each Watt it consumes translates almost exactly into $1 for the year. So if you own a Core 2 Duo computer and leave it on 24/7 drawing 90 Watts for the system at idle, it will cost you an extra $65 of electricity than if you replaced it with a modern system which draws 25 Watts while idling. It doesn't take many years for that extra electricity cost to exceed the cost of a new computer.
So as much as I love to berate Microsoft and Windows 10, the financial argument against them here is rather weak. Upgrading to a newer computer doesn't just make Microsoft and Intel more money. It also saves the buyer more money over the long term (via lower electricity bills).
CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service. The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card. You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they take turns talking with the tower. This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important. You ended up wasting bandwidth on phones which didn't need the bandwidth of their full timeslice, or didn't even need any bandwidth at all that particular timeslice. You also lost bandwidth to the padding added to the ends of each timeslice to compensate for the finite speed of lite (to insure the signal of a phone distant from the tower doesn't spill over into the next timeslice).
CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time, and uses orthogonal codes to tell their transmissions apart. Kinda like writing on a piece of paper, then turning it 90 degrees to write on it again. Even though the letters overlap, they're distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which letters are horizontal and which are vertical, and ignore the ones not in the direction you're reading. All phones see other transmitting phones as noise, so more phones transmitting means a lower signal to noise ratio, and bandwidth to each phone is automatically reduced based on the number of transmitting phones. This means CDMA's bandwidth is automatically divided evenly between the number of phones which need it at any given moment.
This is why CDMA services got 3G data about a year before GSM services. GSM ended up throwing in the towel, licensing CDMA, and amended the GSM spec to include wideband CDMA for data service. And this is why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio which could do voice or data, but not both simultaneously. It wasn't because GSM was superior, it was because GSM was inferior and needed a second radio to compete.
LTE service is mostly based on OFDMA - similar to CDMA but using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea where everyone transmits at the same time stomping over each others' signals actually worked when expanded out into a nationwide cellular network. If CDMA hadn't happened first, researchers and companies would've been much less confident about OFDMA, and it's possible we might've still been waiting for LTE to even roll out today. If the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and required GSM, then the global adoption of inferior TDMA technology would've meant that cellular data service today would probably be stuck down around 1 Mbps or slower. So you should be thanking CDMA for giving us the 50+ Mbps cellular data speeds we enjoy today.
North Korea's history books state that South Korea and the U.S. invaded the North to start the Korean War. It was actually a UN police action approved following North Korea's invasion. But by this time, 95% of the North's population, including Kim Jong Un, will have had their version of history drilled into their heads in school as being the truth. It's actually the cornerstone of their philosophy of blaming everything on the U.S.
The Korean War was a UN police action, like the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Taiwan held China's vote in the UN Security Council at the time, and the USSR was boycotting the UN that week so wasn't present to veto the UN Security Council authorization to intervene in Korea to counter North Korea's invasion. (North Korea concocted the fantasy that the South invaded the North, though enough time has passed that the vast majority of its population has been taught this as truth.)
The U.S. troops in South Korea number fewer than 24,000, vs North Korea's standing army of 1.2 million (4th largest in the world), and would be inconsequential in any hypothetical invasion of North Korea. The U.S. troops are present for one simple reason - to be overrun and die if North Korea should invade again, thereby giving the U.S. an excuse to intervene on South Korea's behalf without having to go through the UN again. The troops there are fully aware of this - they call themselves "speed bumps".
Withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea would require some sort of ironclad guarantee that North Korea would not invade again, or a guarantee of immediate UN authorization for the U.S. to intervene again, or South Korea unilaterally deciding to give up the deterrence of having U.S. troops present.
The problem is, CO2 holds the atoms at a very low energy state. So you get energy out of creating CO2, and converting CO2 into a different form usually involves putting in energy. But if that energy came from burning fossil fuels, then the second law of thermodynamics says you're creating more CO2 than you're capturing. So most of these ideas for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere involve putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere to generate the materials used to pull out the CO2.
Whether the goal is reduction of CO2 emissions, or sequestering CO2 already in the atmosphere, the solution is the same - we need to switch away from hydrocarbon-based fuels for energy. This is why decommissioning nuclear plants is extremely short-sighted. You're putting all our eggs in one basket (renewables) and gambling with the future of all life on Earth that we'll be able to develop renewable energy quickly enough before climate change reaches catastrophic levels. Why gamble when we already have a carbon-free energy source which we could ramp up within a decade or two, to provide the energy needed to power all these carbon sequestration strategies? Nuclear doesn't have to be the end-solution. We just need it to buy ourselves more time to develop renewables, then we can slowly phase out nuclear plants and replace them with renewables.
There is one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere without us having to do anything. Plants do exactly that via photosynthesis. They take the energy from sunlight, break the CO2 up into O2 (released into the atmosphere), and lock the carbon up in a hydrocarbon chain forming sugars, starches, and cellulose. Normally that carbon is released again when the plant dies and bacteria decompose it. If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition, then all we'd have to do is let forests grow, chop them down, seal the wood and bury it, and plant new trees to continue the process.
Another possibility is you leak a story to the press whining about how the Russian electronic warfare has successfully crippled your most sophisticated electronic warfare assets. When in reality they're able to operate just fine despite the jamming, and you just want to lull the opposition into a false sense of having succeeded. Those of you who grew up after the Cold War have no idea just how convoluted the disinformation game can become.
Ostensibly, the U.S. and Russia are in Syria with the same goal - to fight ISIS. But behind the curtains, the U.S. is supporting Syrian rebels who want to overthrow al-Assad, while Russia is backing al-Assad and his government forces. They tolerate each others' presence in Syria because they both agree that an ISIS-controlled Syria is worse than either an al-Assad-controlled or rebel-controlled Syria. But neither will pass up a chance to "accidentally" lob a bomb at government forces, or a rebel-held city.
In that respect, it's more akin to the U.S./UK and Soviets spying on and testing each others' capabilities during WWII. Both were fighting to defeat Hitler, but behind the scenes they had very different ideas for the future of Europe and knew they'd likely end up as adversaries after the war.
U.S.public spending on education is already the second-highest of any OECD country. The problem isn't funding. The problem is most of the increase in education funding over the last 50 years has gone to ballooning non-teaching administrative staff.
It's the administrators who control the school budget. Any time education funding is increased, they sop it up by raising their own pay and benefits and hiring more administrators, while passing a token amount down to teachers. Every time education funding is cut, they send it straight to the teachers, so they'll generate news stories about how they had to buy paper and pencils for their students out of their own wallet, to pressure legislators into increasing education funding even more. I even crunched some numbers from the Dept. of Education website a few years ago, and dividing the salary + benefits by the number of teachers yielded an overall average pay for teachers over $100,000/yr. There's no way that's possible. What probably happened is administrators shifted some of their pay and benefits into the teacher category, to try to hide how much of the school budget they were sopping up.
The problem isn't funding, it's how the funds are spent.
Since according to the MPAA you've purchased a license to see the movie, shouldn't the theater let you see it as often as you like with the same ticket^H^H^H^H^H^Hlicense as long as the showing is not sold out?
It's a combination of factors. Trump and his hardline stance giving Kim no room for belligerent talk. South Korea recently electing a very liberal President (some even call him communist). And Kim still being relatively new to the reins of power in North Korea (2011).
The combination of the three has produced a unique situation where the political stances which had been the status quo for over 50 years can be thrown out without anyone losing face. The long-term North Korean stance has been that South Korea is a puppet state of the U.S., and until now they've refused to negotiate solely with South Korea, always insisting on negotiating with the U.S. instead. The U.S. in turn has insisted that all major belligerents in the war be involved in any peace treaty talks (North and South Korea, U.S., China, and Russia). And South Korea's leadership has with a couple short exceptions been fairly conservative, and unwilling to yield almost anything to North Korea.
Trump broke with the 5-country peace treaty stance the U.S. has held for decades, and agreed to meet with Kim one-on-one. It's a Nixon-goes-to-China situation, where only a hard-line opponent could give ground on a long-held position without losing face. Kim broke with North Korea's insistence that South Korea was a puppet state and that any peace treaty be negotiated between it and the U.S., and agreed to meet Moon directly as representatives of two nations. And Moon agreed to meet Kim, which former Korean Presidents from conservative parties probably wouldn't have been able to do without being kicked out of power by their own party.
Kim also happens to be a k-pop fan. And one of the best ways I've found for reconciling two people with an acrimonious history is to start with something they both like. It sounds cheesy, but it forces you to think of the other side as being comprised of real people just like yourself, not nameless faces onto which you can project decades of ingrained stereotypes and prejudices.
The biggest U.S. military presence in Asia is in Japan. The treaties which ended WWII prohibited Japan from building up a military which it could project overseas. They're only allowed to have a self-defense force (which is why that name often shows up in Japanese anime). In exchange, the U.S. is responsible for protecting Japan from foreign attack. So by necessity it has a large military presence in Japan (though Japan has shoved most of it into Okinawa, whose people are discriminated against by mainland Japanese).
From a logistical standpoint, Japan is an easier destination to reach from the U.S. (and vice versa). A great circle route between the U.S. and South Korea takes you over part of North Korea and Russia, which has resulted in simple mistakes producing tragic consequences in the past.
I think Trump is a reckless goofball, but experts and the South Korean Foreign Minister are crediting him for pressuring North Korea to come to the table. The fact that he's a reckless goofball means you have to take the threats he makes seriously, kinda like how North Korea has been playing the West all these decades. Anyhow, we'll see if it's different this time around, or if it'll be yet another round of North Korea collecting concessions from the West, then reneging on the deal (as happened with food and energy aid in the past).
The fact that North Korea is willing to talk to South Korea alone about a formal peace treaty is in and of itself a pretty big step. Previously, North Korea refused to recognize the legitimacy of the South Korean government, calling it a puppet state, and insisting on negotiating with the U.S. (and only the U.S.) directly. That's why in the past, the U.S. has insisted on 5-way negotiations between all major countries involved in the war - North and South Korea, the U.S., China, and Russia. North Korea agreeing to meet directly with only South Korea about ending the war is already a concession on their part. (So is Trump agreeing to meet Kim without South Korea present. This may be another Nixon-in-China moment, where only a staunch opponent can pull off overturning decades of established policy, because if anyone else did it, it would be seen as giving in.)
Um, CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. GSM used TDMA - each phone gets its own timeslice, and they take turns talking to the tower. CDMA allows each phone to transmit whenever they want, and used orthogonal codes to separate out each phone's transmissions. The difference didn't matter much with low-bandwidth applications like voice. But when 3G data rolled out, CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM. Giving each phone a timeslice means each phone uses a fixed percentage of a tower's bandwidth, even if it doesn't need that much bandwidth, or any bandwidth. In CDMA, the bandwidth gets divided automatically between the number of phones which are transmitting. Each phone sees other phones' transmissions as noise, so the more phones which are transmitting, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and the less bandwidth each phone gets.
That's why CDMA carriers got 3G service about a year before GSM carriers. GSM couldn't compete, and within a year they threw in the towel, licensed CDMA, and added it to the GSM spec. GSM phones have a wideband CDMA radio for 3G data. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a separate CDMA radio for 3G data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio, so could only do one or the other, not both simultaneously.
You should be thanking CDMA for the data rates we enjoy today. 4G LTE mostly uses OFDMA - phones transmit at the same time, but use orthogonal frequencies (as opposed to CDMA's orthogonal codes) to distinguish each other. CDMA was the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea, where everyone talks at the same time but you can still tell them apart, actually worked when rolled out into a national network. If the U.S. had gone along with GSM and prohibited CDMA, orthogonal signaling might have been dismissed as crazy, LTE probably wouldn't have rolled out when it did, and cellular data service today would probably be limited to about 512 kbps to 1 Mbps. (WiMAX used OFDMA as well. CDMA came first because OFDMA requires more processing power to sort out the different transmissions than CDMA, so early implementations drained a phone's battery quickly. It took a few years for mobile SoC processors to drop in power consumption enough to make OFDMA power-competitive with CDMA.)
This is probably the best modern example of government-imposed regulation (GSM) sending us down the wrong technology path, while a market-driven approach (U.S. allowing CDMA to compete with GSM) arrived at a superior technological solution. Government-mandated standards are fine if you know what the optimal solution is (e.g. electricity voltages and AC vs DC, or cable networks which have pretty much all standardized on DOCSIS). But if you're not sure what the optimal solution is, it's best to leave it for the market to sort it out before you start imposing standards which eliminate research into possibly superior solution spaces.
The only difference between CDMA and GSM today is voice and legacy 3G service. Both use LTE for 4G data, both use a SIM card to enable LTE service (CDMA supports SIM card portability for LTE, but not for voice - you can put a Verizon SIM card in an unsupported Nexus 5 and get LTE data, but not voice). Most phones produced today support both CDMA and GSM (TDMA voice, wideband CDMA 3G). LTE is mostly OFDMA with a few dynamically assigned TDMA channels (including, ironically, one of Sprint's). So once you begin discontinuing 3G data, the only difference between the two will be how voice calls are handled. The bigger impediment is actually which channels (frequencies) are supported - the carriers have this thing about requesting manufacturers produce phones with channels they don't support disabled. So assuming the merger goes through, depending on which channels they decide to keep and dump, some legacy carrier-branded phones will stop working and owners will be forced to upgrade.
Bankruptcy rules don't really change the amount of student debt. If you allow private student loan debt to be discharged through bankruptcy, all that happens is the interest rate for such loans increases to compensate. Students end up paying the same overall amount either way. In the no-bankruptcy case, the bankrupt student is on the hook for the bad loan. In the bankruptcy-allowed case, the student loan that got discharged via bankruptcy is paid for by all remaining students via higher interest.
To tackle the student debt problem, you have to address the root cause: too-generous student loan policies. Making it easier for students to time-shift future earnings into the present to pay for schools has resulted in college tuitions rising far in excess of the rate of inflation. When you subsidize something, you have the option of a supply-side or demand-side subsidy. Student loans are a demand-side subsidy, but increasing demand also increases prices. The loans need to be eliminated in favor of a supply-side subsidy - more public universities, and government grants and incentives for creating new or expanding existing private universities. When you increase supply, that decreases prices.