A weak spot is usually something the laptop maker skimped on to reduce cost, like a small battery, or a cheap screen, or HDD storage in the SSD era..
The new Macbook keyboard is a deliberately created new feature. Apple came up with a new keyboard mechanism which reduces key travel in order to try to make the laptop a little thinner (like laptops need to be any thinner). It bombed, plain and simple. What's the point of making the laptop 3mm thinner if it forces you to add a can of compressed air to your laptop bag?
You've basically described Amazon Locker, except the crate is bought and owned by Amazon, and they give you a key code to open it instead of using a key. It's available in my city and is pretty convenient for returns (my neighborhood is safe enough I don't mind packages being left at my door). The closest locker is just a block away, so is much quicker than a trip to Staples to drop off a UPS package. The biggest problem is it's so popular the nearest locker is frequently full, so I often have to go to the second closest which is about the same distance as Staples. But I can put the package I'm returning into the locker immediately, whereas I usually have to wait 3-10 minutes for a Staples employee to show up to scan and process my UPS package.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree) of separation. There's some debate over exactly what that means. This resolution chart on this site is based it meaning 60 pixels per degree. Others argue it means 120 pixels per degree (two pixels needed per arc-minute to show two white lines separated by one arc-minute with a black line in between). But since that's just doubling the 60 pixels per degree standard, you can just halve the resolutions on the chart (i.e. the 1080p section corresponds to 4k, the 4k section corresponds to 8k).
I also like to point out that holograms require a resolution of about 600-1000 pixels per mm. So this isn't a pointless resolution race we're on. It'll take a few more decades, but GPU and display resolution are slowly creeping up to the point where they'll be able to generate and display holograms in real-time. An 8k display shrunk down would correspond to about a 10x5 mm hologram. (If you don't know how holograms work, this would appear as a 10x5mm "window" that you could look through to view the 3D image "behind" it.)
So, it can be patched, but sounds like a bit of a pain
It's less of a pain than re-keying locks which use physical keys.
The overall security issue here is being overblown because people are incorrectly comparing to a non-existent base state - that if hotel locks were somehow impervious to hacking. You need to compare to the next best alternative. In this case, electronic key cards replaced physical keys. Hotels with physical lock keys also had master keys (that's how maids got into every room to clean them), which were just as vulnerable to theft and copying. Replacing them with electronic key cards, even with their flaws and vulnerabilities, was still an improvement in security. It's only a decrease in security if you incorrectly assumed the system was somehow perfect.
It probably wouldn't have been fine though, he was still distributing copies of software without the copyright owner's permission.
I don't think that was the issue at all. Is it copyright infringement to distribute software which the copyright holder is already distributing for free? If someone is giving away their ebook for free, are you prohibited from making a copy to give to your friend? I'd have to say no, otherwise I'm in a heap of trouble for all the copies of Office I've installed on systems I've built for customers. I downloaded the Office installer once and put a copy on my server, and used that copy (along with the install key the customer bought) to install it for them - essentially giving them a copy from my copy.
I think the issue here was he was charging for the discs. I charge for the service of prepping the computer and installing/updating the software. I don't charge for the copy of Office I've pre-downloaded.
Agreed. But the key here is that once you put a satellite in orbit, you're stuck with that hardware for however many years or decades the satellite continues to operate. I can easily imagine some satellites are 1995-era. Their hardware may not be able to cope with modern encryption algorithms in a timely manner, resulting in it being easier to hack their streams and control channels using modern computers on the ground.
An OCA server host the entire Netflix library so Netflix bandwidth no longer has to go through the ISP's upstream provider. Netflix gives them away for free, which would make it sound like an easy win-win for any ISP wishing to reduce its upstream bandwidth bill. But the larger ISPs have been obstinate and insisting that Netflix pay them for maintenance and electricity to run these servers, even though they're the ones benefiting from them. This is a lack of competition issue, not a net neutrality issue (since once an OCA CDN is in place, the content is technically no longer going over the Internet). If these ISPs had competition, then their most primal goal would be to reduce costs in order to compete better, which is exactly what the OCA servers do. So they'd accept the free OCA servers with a big Thank You to Netflix. But because there's no competition, they're able to refuse the OCA servers and intentionally degrade Netflix performance - because they know upset customers cannot switch to a different ISP.
Just end the government-granted ISP monopolies, and any ISP which tries to treat websites like channels will go out of business as all their customers flee to competing ISPs. That's the only reason net neutrality is even an issue - the government-granted artificial monopolies limiting most Americans to a "choice" of just 1 or 2 ISPs. The only reason ISPs try BS like this is because they know their customers can't leave.
The golden ratio (convergence of the Fibonacci sequence for those of you who think this ratio is just some stupid artists creation) is good for passively consuming content.
For creating content or actively doing things, you need a little extra space for menus and information display (e.g. taskbar or dock) extraneous to the content you're viewing. Since these are typically on the top or bottom, if you make your content portal (e.g. area of a browser showing web content) the golden ratio, you need a little extra vertical space for these other elements. 3:2 thus ends up being better.
The original argument for widescreen monitors was on desktops, where they let you put two documents side by side (this was back in the day when websites targeted their content to fit comfortably in an 800x600 display; it's not so true anymore since they now mostly target 1024 pixels or wider). But laptop screens are so small you can't really do this and comfortably read the content most of the time. The real reason laptops went with 16:9 or 16:10 is because it's closer to the aspect ratio dictated by having a keyboard and trackpad, and thus maximizes screen size (minimizes bezels), while minimizing cost (surface area of glass for a x-inch diagonal display is smaller the more the aspect ratio deviates from a square) and maximizing advertised screen size.
Yes they do. Cell phones have become bigger because people want a bigger display, but have bumped into the size limit of pocketability. The obvious solution is some sort of portable display technology, which would allow the processing bits of your mobile computer (your smartphone) to remain small enough to fit in your pocket, without sacrificing screen size. The pressure to increase smartphone screen size is so great that manufacturers have been clamoring to eliminate bezels, and use dead space to display additional info.
The advantage of putting the display in glasses is that it's not really the physical screen size which matters. It's the apparent screen size - a combination of physical size and viewing distance. By putting the display right next to the eye, you can create a display with a massive apparent size even though its physical size is tiny. You avoid the drawbacks of a large physical screen size (loss of portability, easier to break, greater battery consumption).
The only solutions I've seen to this problem are a foldable/rollable display, a projection display, or a display mounted close to your eye via glasses.
The problem with raising the Federal minimum wage is that it's the minimum. The lowest any employer can pay anywhere in the country. In other words, you can't set it based on what someone in a city, or even the average American needs to make to live above poverty. You have to set it at a level which makes a business feasible in the poorest, lowest income, rural part of the country. If you try to set the Federal minimum wage based on city costs or average American costs, you basically make labor unaffordable for business in regions which fall below that point in the bell curve of living costs.
So the Federal minimum wage needs to be realistic for the lowest income area in the entire country. States whose lowest income regions are better off can have a higher state minimum wage. Counties and cities whose lowest income regions are even more better off can set their minimum wage higher. If you're going to make a rule which applies everywhere, you need to make sure it's realistic everywhere.
As for the argument that raising the minimum wage will raise the income of those low-income areas, not if it drives businesses to bankruptcy it won't. You can't just double the minimum wage and expect things to keep working. You need to raise it a little, and let the effect of the additional income in the community trickle out to local businesses (residents spend more). Once the businesses are making more money, then you can raise the minimum wage more, and give some time for the effect of that increase to trickle back to local businesses. Repeat. If you try to raise it in one big jump, you'll just kill off all the businesses, and the low income region will become a no income region. (This is the flip side of automation taking over jobs. Automation in itself isn't bad, but you need to roll it out slowly enough to give assembly line workers time to retrain for new jobs which take advantage of that automation. If you automate all the local businesses at once, suddenly everyone is out of work, and there's nobody left who can afford to buy what your automated factory is producing.)
I can run my basics for 4-5 days off the battery and overcast alone(2KWh/day avg)
The electricity consumption of the average Canadian household is 11,879 kWh/yr, or 32.5 kWh/day. You're able to live off the grid with your system because your electricity consumption is 1/16th that of the average Canadian home. Your electricity consumption is 21% the world's household average, and 40% the household average for the thriftiest OECD member nation (Mexico, which has a 46% poverty rate).
Any typical household in the developed world would have to make serious and drastic compromises to their lifestyle to live off a system such as yours.
But here's the thing - properly funding public research is WAY cheaper than these ruthless extortion tactics we've turned healthcare into for the past few decades.
That's only true if you compare public and and private funding for research of the exact same thing - you use 20/20 hindsight to filter out failed research. Without some sort of profit motive to indicate which research has greater benefit to society, public research ends up going off the rails and wasting resources investigating silly things with little value. Both public and private research have their role in contributing to the sum of human knowledge.
The extortion tactics here are possible because of IP law, and the huge barrier to entry of FDA approval (about a billion dollars per drug, whether it fails or succeeds) which greatly reduces the number of possible drugs which are ever tested. Janssen and Pharmacyclics can hike up the price only because it has a government-granted monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly like Microsoft or Standard Oil). It's a failure of government regulation, not a market failure.
To their credit, she did manage to get more votes than Trump - he won only because the electoral collage system ensures that while all Americans get to vote, some votes matter more than others.
Actually, the Electoral College worked in 2016 (not by design, but by chance). Clinton got more votes than Trump, but conservative parties got more votes than liberal parties. I was upset with the EC in 2000 when Gore lost to Bush, but not in 2016. Gore + Nader got a majority of the popular votes in 2000 (51.12%). But in 2016, liberal parties only got 49.29% of the vote. Conservative parties got 50.04% of the vote.
So in 2016, the Electoral College happened to prevent someone whose ideology lost the popular vote, but who happened to win a plurality (was the individual highest vote-getter) from stealing the election. This is a major weakness of the plurality-wins election system the U.S. uses. If the opposition splits their vote, someone who is opposed by the majority of voters can wind up winning. The EC by chance prevented that from happening in 2016. Better-designed election system do not award elections based on a plurality. If no single candidate gets a majority, there are run-offs with less-popular candidates being excluded until someone gets a majority.
That's just the problem. Those two requirements are mutually exclusive. You can have language that's clear (i.e. explains exactly and precisely what you're consenting to), or you can have language that's plain (simple to read and understand). Except for a few broad, general cases, you can't have both.
e.g. Consider the EULA terms for a photo sharing service. Your photos are protected by your copyright, but the service needs to be able to keep a copy.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos."
But wait, it's not enough just to keep a copy of the photo. For the photo to be shared, another copy needs to be produced on the visitor's computer.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos, and to make and distribute additional copies for the purposes of providing the service."
But wait, the service right now is a photo sharing service. What if they decide to change in the future into something more? So you can't just call it 'service', you have to define exactly what that service is.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos, and to make and distribute additional copies for the purposes of providing the service of distributing photos to other users whom User has given permission to view."
But wait, what if one of those other users decides to keep a copy of said photo? The service doesn't want to be sued for such actions since that's out of its control.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos, and to make and distribute additional copies for the purposes of providing the service of distributing photos to other users whom User has given permission to view. User understands that copies made to provide the service will be on devices outside of Service's control, and Service cannot guarantee such copies will not be retained or further distributed against User's wishes. User indemnifies Service against responsibility for copyright violations by other users, and will not sue Service for the actions of other users."
But wait, what if some of those users are employed by the service? That creates a loophole where the service could hire third parties to sell and distribute unauthorized copies, free from fear of being sued for copyright infringement.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos, and to make and distribute additional copies for the purposes of providing the service of distributing photos to other users whom User has given permission to view. User understands that copies made to provide the service will be on devices outside of Service's control, and Service cannot guarantee such copies will not be retained or further distributed against User's wishes. User indemnifies Service against responsibility for copyright violations by other users, and will not sue Service for the actions of other users, except in the case of users who are employees or agents of Service."
But wait, the service needs to keep backups of these photos in case they suffer a storage device failure. Such backups are prudent but not necessary to provide the service. And the clause you've just added makes the admin making the backups liable for copyright violation.
"User (copyright holder) grants Service a license to keep a copy of copyrighted photos, and to make and distribute additional copies for the purposes of providing the service of distributing photos to other users whom User has given permission to view. User understands that copies made to provide the service will be on devices outside of Service's control, and Service cannot guarantee such copies wil
The average standard of living is simply the total productivity of a country's population, divided by the number of people.
Capitalism increases standard of living by rewarding people who increase productivity with more money, in order to encourage people to do more productive things. Its problems mainly stem from there not being a strict 1:1 correlation between money and productivity - e.g. a scam artist, thief, or CEO with an overdeveloped sense of self-worth can gain a lot of money while doing little or nothing productive, by simply taking money from the people who are generating the actual productivity.
Communism tried to increase productivity by forcing people to do what a few unelected officials thought would increase productivity, not what the people themselves thought would increase productivity. It failed because these officials' estimated state of the world deviated too much from the actual state, due to their isolation from reality (they lived in ivory towers and rarely saw what regular people had to deal with) and adherence to dogma over empirical real-world data.
The UBI (in its most generous form) basically gives up on the idea of encouraging people to increase their productivity altogether. Its proponents want to use the UBI to eliminate suffering due to poverty. But people's dislike of that suffering is what gets them to generate productivity in the first place. If you can develop a method of generating productivity which isn't reliant on people working (e.g. the Star Trek model where computers and machines do all the work), then you can divert some of that productivity into a UBI. But trying to implement a UBI before we've achieved people-independent productivity generation is putting the cart before the horse.
That is actually the original purpose of Flash. It was developed back in the dialup days when playing raw video would take too long to stream, and it was quicker to transmit animated movies as backgrounds and sprites which were then animated locally.
Flash was only hijacked for its scripting capabilities because the W3C dragged their feet on adding the media playback and scripting capabilities that web developers were clamoring for. HTML versions 1-4 were released in quick succession from 1993-1999. Then the W3C basically stopped adding any new capability to HTML. They were so beholden to the idea of the web being a passive media consumption platform as Berners-Lee originally envisioned, that they refused to update HTML to incorporate interactive capabilities that were becoming popular. That forced web developers to resort to things like Flash, CSS, and PHP to get the functionality they wanted. HTML 5 wasn't formally adopted until 2014. The only other thing in the computer industry I can think of which had a 15 year gap between major updates was Duke Nukem Forever.
Actually, studies have found that people prefer to use landmarks to get around rather than street names. When I first learned that (in the 1990s - before Google Maps and GPS), I began giving people directions with both names and landmarks. e.g. Turn right on Main St. That's the one with the Shell gas station on the corner. Once I began doing that, I noticed that the number of people who were late arriving at my house or to events I planned because "we got lost" dropped almost to zero.
The feature itself isn't a bad idea. A trusted third party confirms the identity of both the store and the user wishing to login to the store, and can do it for all stores and all users. Done right, you could replace the hundreds of different passwords I currently maintain in my password manager, with a single password (passphrase) and key + certificate. It's basically what already happens with SSL (HTTPS connections), except instead of authenticating a browser for a single session, you authenticate a user for multiple sessions.
It's when trusted third party unnecessarily collects gobs of info about every user, what sites they're logging into, and what they're doing on those sites which causes the problem. "The exploit lets these trackers gather a user's username" is a non-story.
I'll add that most of the rest of the crew are there to fix stuff when it breaks while at sea. If costs could be lowered by reducing the number of crew and adding redundancy and shortening maintenance schedules so there's nearly zero chance of any critical systems failing during a 1 month trans-oceanic voyage, shipping lines would've done it already.
Ship crews are what they are because it's turned out to be cheaper to have ships staffed 24/7 by crew who can repair the exact item which breaks in-transit. This may not be obvious if you think of this from the standpoint of home or auto repair, where the cost of parts range from a few hours to a few days worth of labor. But on something as large as a ship, a part might cost several decades worth of a mariner's salary. And it ends up being cheaper to have someone aboard who can fix things, than to design all the systems to be redundant (add expensive backups) or swap out expensive working parts during maintenance because you're afraid they might fail during the next month-long voyage.
I'm one of those people who liked to write down everything I came across that was interesting or I thought I might find useful later - phone numbers, addresses, directions, procedures for problems I'd solved, comparisons I did when shopping, etc. This was long before web browsers, bookmarks, and search engines. I used to jot all this down in a small notebook I carried everywhere, and went through about 1-2 notebooks a month. The problems I had with jotting all this info down on paper were:
You can't rearrange things if the original order wasn't optimal (e.g. sorting phone numbers by area code).
You can't delete info which becomes obsolete.
After a few years you have a large pile of notebooks, and it can be a pain trying to remember which notebook contains the info you know you wrote down. The only way you can search through them is chronological.
The Palm Pilot was a good substitute for certain info like phone numbers and addresses. But it didn't have the flexibility nor the capacity for the massive number of notes I generated. Before the Palm Pilot, I used an HP 200 LX (basically a palmtop version of the original IBM PC). When I ran across OneNote, it was the perfect solution for all my note-taking.
If you have exceptionally good memory (mine is good, but it's good enough that I know when I've forgotten stuff), or don't mind doing things again if you can't remember (I hate repeating work that I've already done), then you probably won't care about it. But if you like to keep details of everything you've done for future reference, almost like a diary, it's indispensable. It's a good central place where I can write nearly anything down, and be able to rearrange, delete, and search the contents quickly and easily.
Flipping through a few pages of my OneNote notebook, I have things like the exact sequence of commands needed to manually map one of my raw drives to a virtual one on my ESXi server, my phone's IMEI (which has long since rubbed off the back) and MSL code to unlock it, list of static IP addresses I've given devices on my LAN, GPS coordinates for ocean fishing spots (so they're not stuck on my chartplotter), how to modify the Windows registry so focus follows the mouse like in X Window, hardware specs for my custom-built server so I don't have to open it or go digging through old receipts to find model numbers, all the info (contacts, addresses, rentals, airport schedules, price comparisons, travel schedules, etc) for the eclipse trip I planned in 2017 for friends and family, a list of charitable donations I've made for the year (for tax purposes), and on and on. All there in one place, semi-organized, and easily modifiable and searchable.
"The government" is the one responsible for the horrid state of the power grid in Puerto Rico, both structurally and financially. The power company is publicly owned (i.e. government controlled) and they prohibit anyone else from selling power.
Any time you create a situation like that, there's a risk the people managing the utility will become complacent about doing their jobs or in some cases simply not doing their jobs, because there's no way for them to lose their jobs. There's nothing wrong with government-owned utilities and programs so long as you're careful to monitor for and stomp out such complacency. But if you fail to do so, you wind up with a sub-par infrastructure which costs far more to operate than it should.
That's the thing most people don't seem to get about the public/private debate. It isn't that public ownership is always better than private ownership, or private is always better than public. It's that sometimes public is better than private, and sometimes private is better than public. Depending on the problems you're experiencing, it can be beneficial to make a publicly-owned company private. Or make a privately-owned company public. The key is to take the right action depending on the exact circumstances which are causing problems. Both have their advantages, and both have their failure modes.
Unfortunately, we've developed philosophies where people think public ownership is always superior, or private is always superior. Meaning the people will keep voting for the very people who caused the situation they're suffering with, and the problem never gets fixed. That's the Achilles heel of democracy - it relies on the public being informed to function properly. A deceived public can steer a democracy straight into the ground (or in this case, into bankruptcy).
The blades spin at such high RPM that each one has more rotational energy than a moving car. The engine casing is designed to absorb all that energy (or at least try to) in a failure, but there's a significant amount of distortion and violence in the process. The parts you see missing are mostly cosmetic - they're there mainly to smooth the airflow over the internal parts of the engine.
The way these people weasel out of it is that if they're not targeting a specific individual, it's not considered stalking.
e.g. I ran into the same weird distinction in Everquest. Sometimes griefer players would deliberately drag mobs onto people camping a popular spawn spot to get them killed. Because they were non-discriminatory in their griefing (i.e. they targeted everyone and anyone), Sony deemed their behavior fair play and refused to stop it. But if the players trying to camp the spawn fought back and tried to do things to slow the griefer down or get him killed (non-PvP servers), that was considered targeting a specific individual and thus a violation of the game's anti-griefing rules. And Sony in their infinite wisdom promptly banned the people trying to stop the griefer for targeting a specific individual for their "harassment."
If you look at the deadliest terrorist attacks, they're mostly bombings of one sort or another. So no, guns aren't the most efficient way to kill people. If your intent is to kill a lot of people, bombs are empircally much more effective. And as Oklahoma City showed, you can make a bomb out of easily accessible chemicals (fertilizer in that case).
Given 9/11 and the truck attacks in Nice and Berlin, you could also make an argument that simply steering vehicles into people is more effective too. Good luck trying to prohibit people from getting access to vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
A weak spot is usually something the laptop maker skimped on to reduce cost, like a small battery, or a cheap screen, or HDD storage in the SSD era..
The new Macbook keyboard is a deliberately created new feature. Apple came up with a new keyboard mechanism which reduces key travel in order to try to make the laptop a little thinner (like laptops need to be any thinner). It bombed, plain and simple. What's the point of making the laptop 3mm thinner if it forces you to add a can of compressed air to your laptop bag?
You've basically described Amazon Locker, except the crate is bought and owned by Amazon, and they give you a key code to open it instead of using a key. It's available in my city and is pretty convenient for returns (my neighborhood is safe enough I don't mind packages being left at my door). The closest locker is just a block away, so is much quicker than a trip to Staples to drop off a UPS package. The biggest problem is it's so popular the nearest locker is frequently full, so I often have to go to the second closest which is about the same distance as Staples. But I can put the package I'm returning into the locker immediately, whereas I usually have to wait 3-10 minutes for a Staples employee to show up to scan and process my UPS package.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree) of separation. There's some debate over exactly what that means. This resolution chart on this site is based it meaning 60 pixels per degree. Others argue it means 120 pixels per degree (two pixels needed per arc-minute to show two white lines separated by one arc-minute with a black line in between). But since that's just doubling the 60 pixels per degree standard, you can just halve the resolutions on the chart (i.e. the 1080p section corresponds to 4k, the 4k section corresponds to 8k).
I also like to point out that holograms require a resolution of about 600-1000 pixels per mm. So this isn't a pointless resolution race we're on. It'll take a few more decades, but GPU and display resolution are slowly creeping up to the point where they'll be able to generate and display holograms in real-time. An 8k display shrunk down would correspond to about a 10x5 mm hologram. (If you don't know how holograms work, this would appear as a 10x5mm "window" that you could look through to view the 3D image "behind" it.)
It's less of a pain than re-keying locks which use physical keys.
The overall security issue here is being overblown because people are incorrectly comparing to a non-existent base state - that if hotel locks were somehow impervious to hacking. You need to compare to the next best alternative. In this case, electronic key cards replaced physical keys. Hotels with physical lock keys also had master keys (that's how maids got into every room to clean them), which were just as vulnerable to theft and copying. Replacing them with electronic key cards, even with their flaws and vulnerabilities, was still an improvement in security. It's only a decrease in security if you incorrectly assumed the system was somehow perfect.
I don't think that was the issue at all. Is it copyright infringement to distribute software which the copyright holder is already distributing for free? If someone is giving away their ebook for free, are you prohibited from making a copy to give to your friend? I'd have to say no, otherwise I'm in a heap of trouble for all the copies of Office I've installed on systems I've built for customers. I downloaded the Office installer once and put a copy on my server, and used that copy (along with the install key the customer bought) to install it for them - essentially giving them a copy from my copy.
I think the issue here was he was charging for the discs. I charge for the service of prepping the computer and installing/updating the software. I don't charge for the copy of Office I've pre-downloaded.
Agreed. But the key here is that once you put a satellite in orbit, you're stuck with that hardware for however many years or decades the satellite continues to operate. I can easily imagine some satellites are 1995-era. Their hardware may not be able to cope with modern encryption algorithms in a timely manner, resulting in it being easier to hack their streams and control channels using modern computers on the ground.
That probably just means Comcast agreed to host one of Netflix's Open Connect Appliance CDN servers.
An OCA server host the entire Netflix library so Netflix bandwidth no longer has to go through the ISP's upstream provider. Netflix gives them away for free, which would make it sound like an easy win-win for any ISP wishing to reduce its upstream bandwidth bill. But the larger ISPs have been obstinate and insisting that Netflix pay them for maintenance and electricity to run these servers, even though they're the ones benefiting from them. This is a lack of competition issue, not a net neutrality issue (since once an OCA CDN is in place, the content is technically no longer going over the Internet). If these ISPs had competition, then their most primal goal would be to reduce costs in order to compete better, which is exactly what the OCA servers do. So they'd accept the free OCA servers with a big Thank You to Netflix. But because there's no competition, they're able to refuse the OCA servers and intentionally degrade Netflix performance - because they know upset customers cannot switch to a different ISP.
Just end the government-granted ISP monopolies, and any ISP which tries to treat websites like channels will go out of business as all their customers flee to competing ISPs. That's the only reason net neutrality is even an issue - the government-granted artificial monopolies limiting most Americans to a "choice" of just 1 or 2 ISPs. The only reason ISPs try BS like this is because they know their customers can't leave.
The golden ratio (convergence of the Fibonacci sequence for those of you who think this ratio is just some stupid artists creation) is good for passively consuming content.
For creating content or actively doing things, you need a little extra space for menus and information display (e.g. taskbar or dock) extraneous to the content you're viewing. Since these are typically on the top or bottom, if you make your content portal (e.g. area of a browser showing web content) the golden ratio, you need a little extra vertical space for these other elements. 3:2 thus ends up being better.
The original argument for widescreen monitors was on desktops, where they let you put two documents side by side (this was back in the day when websites targeted their content to fit comfortably in an 800x600 display; it's not so true anymore since they now mostly target 1024 pixels or wider). But laptop screens are so small you can't really do this and comfortably read the content most of the time. The real reason laptops went with 16:9 or 16:10 is because it's closer to the aspect ratio dictated by having a keyboard and trackpad, and thus maximizes screen size (minimizes bezels), while minimizing cost (surface area of glass for a x-inch diagonal display is smaller the more the aspect ratio deviates from a square) and maximizing advertised screen size.
Yes they do. Cell phones have become bigger because people want a bigger display, but have bumped into the size limit of pocketability. The obvious solution is some sort of portable display technology, which would allow the processing bits of your mobile computer (your smartphone) to remain small enough to fit in your pocket, without sacrificing screen size. The pressure to increase smartphone screen size is so great that manufacturers have been clamoring to eliminate bezels, and use dead space to display additional info.
The advantage of putting the display in glasses is that it's not really the physical screen size which matters. It's the apparent screen size - a combination of physical size and viewing distance. By putting the display right next to the eye, you can create a display with a massive apparent size even though its physical size is tiny. You avoid the drawbacks of a large physical screen size (loss of portability, easier to break, greater battery consumption).
The only solutions I've seen to this problem are a foldable/rollable display, a projection display, or a display mounted close to your eye via glasses.
The problem with raising the Federal minimum wage is that it's the minimum. The lowest any employer can pay anywhere in the country. In other words, you can't set it based on what someone in a city, or even the average American needs to make to live above poverty. You have to set it at a level which makes a business feasible in the poorest, lowest income, rural part of the country. If you try to set the Federal minimum wage based on city costs or average American costs, you basically make labor unaffordable for business in regions which fall below that point in the bell curve of living costs.
So the Federal minimum wage needs to be realistic for the lowest income area in the entire country. States whose lowest income regions are better off can have a higher state minimum wage. Counties and cities whose lowest income regions are even more better off can set their minimum wage higher. If you're going to make a rule which applies everywhere, you need to make sure it's realistic everywhere.
As for the argument that raising the minimum wage will raise the income of those low-income areas, not if it drives businesses to bankruptcy it won't. You can't just double the minimum wage and expect things to keep working. You need to raise it a little, and let the effect of the additional income in the community trickle out to local businesses (residents spend more). Once the businesses are making more money, then you can raise the minimum wage more, and give some time for the effect of that increase to trickle back to local businesses. Repeat. If you try to raise it in one big jump, you'll just kill off all the businesses, and the low income region will become a no income region. (This is the flip side of automation taking over jobs. Automation in itself isn't bad, but you need to roll it out slowly enough to give assembly line workers time to retrain for new jobs which take advantage of that automation. If you automate all the local businesses at once, suddenly everyone is out of work, and there's nobody left who can afford to buy what your automated factory is producing.)
The electricity consumption of the average Canadian household is 11,879 kWh/yr, or 32.5 kWh/day. You're able to live off the grid with your system because your electricity consumption is 1/16th that of the average Canadian home. Your electricity consumption is 21% the world's household average, and 40% the household average for the thriftiest OECD member nation (Mexico, which has a 46% poverty rate).
Any typical household in the developed world would have to make serious and drastic compromises to their lifestyle to live off a system such as yours.
That's only true if you compare public and and private funding for research of the exact same thing - you use 20/20 hindsight to filter out failed research. Without some sort of profit motive to indicate which research has greater benefit to society, public research ends up going off the rails and wasting resources investigating silly things with little value. Both public and private research have their role in contributing to the sum of human knowledge.
The extortion tactics here are possible because of IP law, and the huge barrier to entry of FDA approval (about a billion dollars per drug, whether it fails or succeeds) which greatly reduces the number of possible drugs which are ever tested. Janssen and Pharmacyclics can hike up the price only because it has a government-granted monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly like Microsoft or Standard Oil). It's a failure of government regulation, not a market failure.
Actually, the Electoral College worked in 2016 (not by design, but by chance). Clinton got more votes than Trump, but conservative parties got more votes than liberal parties. I was upset with the EC in 2000 when Gore lost to Bush, but not in 2016. Gore + Nader got a majority of the popular votes in 2000 (51.12%). But in 2016, liberal parties only got 49.29% of the vote. Conservative parties got 50.04% of the vote.
So in 2016, the Electoral College happened to prevent someone whose ideology lost the popular vote, but who happened to win a plurality (was the individual highest vote-getter) from stealing the election. This is a major weakness of the plurality-wins election system the U.S. uses. If the opposition splits their vote, someone who is opposed by the majority of voters can wind up winning. The EC by chance prevented that from happening in 2016. Better-designed election system do not award elections based on a plurality. If no single candidate gets a majority, there are run-offs with less-popular candidates being excluded until someone gets a majority.
That's just the problem. Those two requirements are mutually exclusive. You can have language that's clear (i.e. explains exactly and precisely what you're consenting to), or you can have language that's plain (simple to read and understand). Except for a few broad, general cases, you can't have both.
e.g. Consider the EULA terms for a photo sharing service. Your photos are protected by your copyright, but the service needs to be able to keep a copy.
But wait, it's not enough just to keep a copy of the photo. For the photo to be shared, another copy needs to be produced on the visitor's computer.
But wait, the service right now is a photo sharing service. What if they decide to change in the future into something more? So you can't just call it 'service', you have to define exactly what that service is.
But wait, what if one of those other users decides to keep a copy of said photo? The service doesn't want to be sued for such actions since that's out of its control.
But wait, what if some of those users are employed by the service? That creates a loophole where the service could hire third parties to sell and distribute unauthorized copies, free from fear of being sued for copyright infringement.
But wait, the service needs to keep backups of these photos in case they suffer a storage device failure. Such backups are prudent but not necessary to provide the service. And the clause you've just added makes the admin making the backups liable for copyright violation.
The average standard of living is simply the total productivity of a country's population, divided by the number of people.
Capitalism increases standard of living by rewarding people who increase productivity with more money, in order to encourage people to do more productive things. Its problems mainly stem from there not being a strict 1:1 correlation between money and productivity - e.g. a scam artist, thief, or CEO with an overdeveloped sense of self-worth can gain a lot of money while doing little or nothing productive, by simply taking money from the people who are generating the actual productivity.
Communism tried to increase productivity by forcing people to do what a few unelected officials thought would increase productivity, not what the people themselves thought would increase productivity. It failed because these officials' estimated state of the world deviated too much from the actual state, due to their isolation from reality (they lived in ivory towers and rarely saw what regular people had to deal with) and adherence to dogma over empirical real-world data.
The UBI (in its most generous form) basically gives up on the idea of encouraging people to increase their productivity altogether. Its proponents want to use the UBI to eliminate suffering due to poverty. But people's dislike of that suffering is what gets them to generate productivity in the first place. If you can develop a method of generating productivity which isn't reliant on people working (e.g. the Star Trek model where computers and machines do all the work), then you can divert some of that productivity into a UBI. But trying to implement a UBI before we've achieved people-independent productivity generation is putting the cart before the horse.
That is actually the original purpose of Flash. It was developed back in the dialup days when playing raw video would take too long to stream, and it was quicker to transmit animated movies as backgrounds and sprites which were then animated locally.
Flash was only hijacked for its scripting capabilities because the W3C dragged their feet on adding the media playback and scripting capabilities that web developers were clamoring for. HTML versions 1-4 were released in quick succession from 1993-1999. Then the W3C basically stopped adding any new capability to HTML. They were so beholden to the idea of the web being a passive media consumption platform as Berners-Lee originally envisioned, that they refused to update HTML to incorporate interactive capabilities that were becoming popular. That forced web developers to resort to things like Flash, CSS, and PHP to get the functionality they wanted. HTML 5 wasn't formally adopted until 2014. The only other thing in the computer industry I can think of which had a 15 year gap between major updates was Duke Nukem Forever.
Actually, studies have found that people prefer to use landmarks to get around rather than street names. When I first learned that (in the 1990s - before Google Maps and GPS), I began giving people directions with both names and landmarks. e.g. Turn right on Main St. That's the one with the Shell gas station on the corner. Once I began doing that, I noticed that the number of people who were late arriving at my house or to events I planned because "we got lost" dropped almost to zero.
The feature itself isn't a bad idea. A trusted third party confirms the identity of both the store and the user wishing to login to the store, and can do it for all stores and all users. Done right, you could replace the hundreds of different passwords I currently maintain in my password manager, with a single password (passphrase) and key + certificate. It's basically what already happens with SSL (HTTPS connections), except instead of authenticating a browser for a single session, you authenticate a user for multiple sessions.
It's when trusted third party unnecessarily collects gobs of info about every user, what sites they're logging into, and what they're doing on those sites which causes the problem. "The exploit lets these trackers gather a user's username" is a non-story.
I'll add that most of the rest of the crew are there to fix stuff when it breaks while at sea. If costs could be lowered by reducing the number of crew and adding redundancy and shortening maintenance schedules so there's nearly zero chance of any critical systems failing during a 1 month trans-oceanic voyage, shipping lines would've done it already.
Ship crews are what they are because it's turned out to be cheaper to have ships staffed 24/7 by crew who can repair the exact item which breaks in-transit. This may not be obvious if you think of this from the standpoint of home or auto repair, where the cost of parts range from a few hours to a few days worth of labor. But on something as large as a ship, a part might cost several decades worth of a mariner's salary. And it ends up being cheaper to have someone aboard who can fix things, than to design all the systems to be redundant (add expensive backups) or swap out expensive working parts during maintenance because you're afraid they might fail during the next month-long voyage.
The Palm Pilot was a good substitute for certain info like phone numbers and addresses. But it didn't have the flexibility nor the capacity for the massive number of notes I generated. Before the Palm Pilot, I used an HP 200 LX (basically a palmtop version of the original IBM PC). When I ran across OneNote, it was the perfect solution for all my note-taking.
If you have exceptionally good memory (mine is good, but it's good enough that I know when I've forgotten stuff), or don't mind doing things again if you can't remember (I hate repeating work that I've already done), then you probably won't care about it. But if you like to keep details of everything you've done for future reference, almost like a diary, it's indispensable. It's a good central place where I can write nearly anything down, and be able to rearrange, delete, and search the contents quickly and easily.
Flipping through a few pages of my OneNote notebook, I have things like the exact sequence of commands needed to manually map one of my raw drives to a virtual one on my ESXi server, my phone's IMEI (which has long since rubbed off the back) and MSL code to unlock it, list of static IP addresses I've given devices on my LAN, GPS coordinates for ocean fishing spots (so they're not stuck on my chartplotter), how to modify the Windows registry so focus follows the mouse like in X Window, hardware specs for my custom-built server so I don't have to open it or go digging through old receipts to find model numbers, all the info (contacts, addresses, rentals, airport schedules, price comparisons, travel schedules, etc) for the eclipse trip I planned in 2017 for friends and family, a list of charitable donations I've made for the year (for tax purposes), and on and on. All there in one place, semi-organized, and easily modifiable and searchable.
"The government" is the one responsible for the horrid state of the power grid in Puerto Rico, both structurally and financially. The power company is publicly owned (i.e. government controlled) and they prohibit anyone else from selling power.
Any time you create a situation like that, there's a risk the people managing the utility will become complacent about doing their jobs or in some cases simply not doing their jobs, because there's no way for them to lose their jobs. There's nothing wrong with government-owned utilities and programs so long as you're careful to monitor for and stomp out such complacency. But if you fail to do so, you wind up with a sub-par infrastructure which costs far more to operate than it should.
That's the thing most people don't seem to get about the public/private debate. It isn't that public ownership is always better than private ownership, or private is always better than public. It's that sometimes public is better than private, and sometimes private is better than public. Depending on the problems you're experiencing, it can be beneficial to make a publicly-owned company private. Or make a privately-owned company public. The key is to take the right action depending on the exact circumstances which are causing problems. Both have their advantages, and both have their failure modes.
Unfortunately, we've developed philosophies where people think public ownership is always superior, or private is always superior. Meaning the people will keep voting for the very people who caused the situation they're suffering with, and the problem never gets fixed. That's the Achilles heel of democracy - it relies on the public being informed to function properly. A deceived public can steer a democracy straight into the ground (or in this case, into bankruptcy).
The blades spin at such high RPM that each one has more rotational energy than a moving car. The engine casing is designed to absorb all that energy (or at least try to) in a failure, but there's a significant amount of distortion and violence in the process. The parts you see missing are mostly cosmetic - they're there mainly to smooth the airflow over the internal parts of the engine.
The way these people weasel out of it is that if they're not targeting a specific individual, it's not considered stalking.
e.g. I ran into the same weird distinction in Everquest. Sometimes griefer players would deliberately drag mobs onto people camping a popular spawn spot to get them killed. Because they were non-discriminatory in their griefing (i.e. they targeted everyone and anyone), Sony deemed their behavior fair play and refused to stop it. But if the players trying to camp the spawn fought back and tried to do things to slow the griefer down or get him killed (non-PvP servers), that was considered targeting a specific individual and thus a violation of the game's anti-griefing rules. And Sony in their infinite wisdom promptly banned the people trying to stop the griefer for targeting a specific individual for their "harassment."
If you look at the deadliest terrorist attacks, they're mostly bombings of one sort or another. So no, guns aren't the most efficient way to kill people. If your intent is to kill a lot of people, bombs are empircally much more effective. And as Oklahoma City showed, you can make a bomb out of easily accessible chemicals (fertilizer in that case).
Given 9/11 and the truck attacks in Nice and Berlin, you could also make an argument that simply steering vehicles into people is more effective too. Good luck trying to prohibit people from getting access to vehicles.