91748 zip code not far from downtown Los Angeles. It's unincorporated - informally called Rowland Heights, but not a city. Services are provided by the county government (Los Angeles County). It's fairly close to Newegg's HQ (City of Industry) so by no means is it in the sticks. The county awarded Verizon the local phone monopoly, and Time Warner the local cable monopoly. Large portions of the community are low-income, so Time Warner never bothered laying out cable to many areas.
Verizon was thus left with an internet monopoly for a large percentage of the population. Since there was no competition, they opted to simply leave the existing phone infrastructure in place and rape everyone for Internet access. The maximum DSL speed available was 3 Mbps, but that was only possible with about 1 in 10 phone lines. Most lines could only get 1.5 Mbps at best. Verizon charged $30/mo for 768/128 kbps, $40/mo for 1 Mbps/256 kbps, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps/384kbps, and if you were fortunate to have one of the phone lines which were capable of it, you could pay $70/mo for 3 Mbps/768 kbps. Those were best case speeds too. The phone lines were so old and full of noise that service was spotty and would often go in and out like a poor wireless connection. For comparison, the lowest priced Internet I saw in neighboring cities was about $20/mo (rising to $24/mo recently) for 6 Mbps DSL.
This was the situation from about 2002-2016. Not once did Verizon use any of the money they were making hand over fist from their zero investment in infrastructure to upgrade the phone lines or roll out FIOS (which was available a couple miles to the east in Walnut). In 2016 they sold their phone service contract to Frontier, who kept the prices the same yet somehow managed to make service worse. Now instead of the service sucking when the phone lines experience noise, it simply stops working entirely. Residents and business tenants I talk to frequently end up accessing the Internet on their phones. (Sprint upgraded a tower recently so 4G cellular Internet became an option a couple years ago if you could cope with the price and data cap.)
After the Time Warner / Charter merger, the new company - Spectrum - has been much more aggressive about expanding service. I dunno if this is due to government regulators setting conditions for their merger, or if Spectrum just as a different philosophy about service coverage. But since 2017, 100 Mbps cable Internet is finally becoming an option in many parts of this zip code. Many of the businesses owners I talk to didn't just switch their Internet to Spectrum, but also their phone service as well - Verizon/Frontier's price gouging also extended to phone service. One doctor I spoke to recently was paying Frontier over $300/mo for 4 phone lines + 1.5 Mbps Internet.
These government-granted service monopolies really need to be prohibited.
There are services small businesses can subscribe to which will provide a database of sales tax rates for different zip codes and addresses, which is updated regularly. It might affect a small mom and pop shop doing a few dozen interstate orders a month. But any business with a reasonable volume of interstate sales can easily cope with the patchwork mess of sales tax rates.
The problem is none of these services will indemnify the business against their screw ups. If their database gets a sales tax rate wrong, and the business ends up collecting insufficient sales tax for some of their transactions, the business has to pay for it, not the company providing the sales tax database.
What really needs to happen is for the government to set up a central database of these sales tax rates. The burden would then be upon state and local governments to update this database with any changes they make to their sales tax rates. Any business in the country could then query this database for each sale, and be guaranteed that they are charging the correct amount of sales tax. If there's ever any error in the database, then the fault lies with the state or local government which should've made sure their database entry was correct. And thus the penalty for such errors falls directly upon the party making the error. Not the crazy system we have right now where the penalty is passed on to businesses who have little to no capability to verify thousands of sales tax rates across the country.
If a resident of another stayed buys something, why should that other state collect the money?
Income tax is a tax on money being given to a person or entity.
Sales tax is a tax on money being spent by the person or entity.
So if the purchase is being made from the person's home, it makes sense for the sales tax to be collected by the state where the person's home is located, since sales tax is a tax on money leaving the person at whatever location it's leaving him/her. If the jurisdiction where the business is located wants to collect more taxes on the money the business is receiving from sales then all you have to do is raise the income tax on businesses in your state/county/city. We just have businesses collect sales taxes because there's less accounting work and less risk of cheating if you do it that way. (Otherwise, you have to rely on buyers self-reporting their purchases and sending in sales/use tax.)
In the old days, both parties needed to be in close physical proximity to conduct a business transaction. So there was no debate over which jurisdiction should get to collect sales tax. The problem first cropped up with mail order businesses, where the buyer and seller no longer needed to be in proximity. The courts decided that the interstate commerce clause prohibited sales tax on mail order transactions. There's really nothing fundamentally different about online transactions from mail order transactions. The states are just trying to use "on the Internet" as an excuse to bring the same case before the courts again.
There's really no reason this has to be decided by the courts. There's a perfectly reasonable legislative solution available - Congress simply has to pass a law allowing states to collect sales tax on interstate transactions (online and mail order). The catch is that states with low or no sales tax don't want such a law, while states with high sales taxes do, which reduces the chances such legislation will be passed. However, this is how it should be. Tax differentials like this are a natural check on the power of the state to recklessly raise taxes. If a state raises taxes too much, business, people, and business transactions will flee to neighboring states to escape those taxes. This encourages state and local governments to solve fiscal problems via other means than simply raising taxes.
They let you get status updates on the devices or control them from elsewhere on the Internet. e.g. A friend has a IoT security camera whose video feed he can access from his phone at any time from anywhere, if say he gets a notification from his alarm company that someone has broken in.
Of course, if you really want this sort of functionality, the device should be restricted to your home or business LAN, and your phone should be using a VPN to connect to that LAN to communicate with the device. These devices have absolutely no business accessing the Internet on their own.
aka price negotiation. It simply moves it between sellers, instead of within a seller. That is, each buyer gets the same price from a particular seller, but different sellers can have different prices. Thus the market requirement for price negotiation is preserved.
It's worth noting that the equivalent of haggling is also creeping back into online stores, where merchants will charge different prices to different customers to help them better gauge how close they are to the true market price. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn't pure price gouging. Profit is maximized at the market price. If your prices are lower than market price, your sales are increased but the lower profit per item results in a net profit decrease. But if your prices are higher than market price, the effect of reduced sales outweighs the higher profit margin, resulting in a decrease in your overall profit. So a merchant exploring demand at different prices this way can actually end up concluding that lowering their regular price for everyone is better. Increasing prices result in increased profit all the time only if your product is a necessity or almost a necessity, and you have a monopoly so buyers can't get the product from another seller.
Before dedicated social networks we used mailing lists, Usenet and forums. They were great because you could meet interesting, like-minded people, and they didn't harvest your personal data.
I stopped posting on Usenet when spammers began harvesting email addresses from posts, and I was too principled to fake my email address.
The problem isn't social media. The problem is people, or rather a subset of the population. Any time you do anything non-anonymously in public, there are people out there who will try to twist and abuse it for their own benefit. Whether it be social media, or Usenet posts, or for sale ads in the newspaper (phone number added to robocall lists, creepy callers), or posting for sale ads on a public bulletin board at the supermarket (same problem with your phone number), or doing anything in public (people spreading gossip about who you were out with, what you were wearing, what you were doing). Social media allows you to leverage databases, networks, and automation to abuse it on a scale never seen before, but at its very root it's the same problem people have been grappling with for millenia.
Too much of basic human interaction is so reliant on this stuff that I don't think you can outright ban it. If you tried, you'd basically make it impossible for strangers to meet, and we'd die off when our birth rate dropped to zero. You have to identify the most egregious abuses and prohibit it. Unfortunately, those engaged in those abuses have the benefit of their part mostly happening in private so it can be hard to figure out exactly who is behind it (e.g. copying Usenet post email addresses to sell to spammers, or making crank calls to phone numbers on for sale ads, or spreading juicy gossip).
It's also important to note that proportional representation does not result in proportional decision-making power. Consider four states with 1, 3, 4, and 5 representatives (in proportion to their population). There are 13 reps so 7 are needed for a majority.
3+4 makes a majority
3+5 makes a majority
4+5 makes a majority
The 1 rep state has 8.3% of the population and representatives, but has zero power. It has absolutely no influence on the outcome of any decisions made by this hypothetical proportional representation government. The 3 larger states can authoritatively make all decisions by themselves (can always generate a majority). The 1 rep state may as well not exist.
Creating a second legislative branch not based on proportional representation was the founding fathers' way to prevent this type of situation.
Hyperlinking is one part of what makes the WWW possible. TCP/IP, HTTP, etc. are all critical components. Despite those earlier examples of hyperlinking, they did not lead to anything remotely resembling a global inter-network of linked servers.
You've got cause and effect reversed. By the time I got to college in the late 1980s the major networks (NSFNet, ARPANet, Bitnet) were being interlinked so servers (email, ftp, WAIS, archie, gopher, etc) were readily accessible worldwide. WAIS, archie, and later gopher were the best ways to search and request files back then for the simple reason that most Internet nodes were not connected 24/7. You found the file you wanted using those indexing services, queued up a file transfer request, and next time your server got onto the Internet it transmitted the file transfer request to the site hosting the file. USENET works the same way - store and forward. Email did too (which is a large part of the reason why it's so horrendously insecure - compatibility was a greater concern than security back then). The last remaining vestige of servers not being connected 24/7 is probably DNS - it's still structured as a cascading series of caches in order to get around the problem not not everything being connected 24/7/
The concepts for true hyperlinking were all there, just a real-time implementation wasn't feasible because servers weren't linked 24/7. Most of the services I listed are the best implementation of hyperlinking you can create if the nodes are not always online. If you'd tried to implement something like HTTP back in the 1980s, the majority of the sites you'd try to visit would've resulted in 503 errors for the simple reason that the server you were trying to reach was probably offline at that exact moment. It was schools and companies moving from dialup to dedicated connections which led to true hyperlinked services (of which the WWW is just one). Not the other way around. The WWW succeeded because it (along with the browser) was graphical - it allowed you to place pictures inline with text, as well as adjust the size and type of text. All the other services I listed were text-only command-line tools. Granted some of them had very fancy text interfaces by making use of VT100 display terminal formatting commands, but none were as free-form as HTTP.
And I'm not sure where Berners-Lee gets off complaining the WWW is being weaponized. Like GPS, the whole Internet began as a tool for war. TCP/IP was invented as a DOD project to make a nationwide military computer network which could survive a nuclear attack. The routing algorithms which allowed it to operate even if you took out large chunks of its connectivity (e.g. if those sites were nuked) also happened to make it easy to expand the network. You could add subnodes onto it any way you wanted, instead of having to plan the whole thing out in advance.
The whole obsession with analog formats (and super-digital formats like SACD) stems from lay people's fundamental misunderstanding of digital sampling. It's not intuitively obvious that a series of discrete digital samples at 2x the highest frequency you want to capture only has a single valid analog mathematical solution, and so the digital sample is a perfect representation of the original analog waveform. Because it's not intuitively obvious, people convince themselves that the digital sample must somehow be missing something that the analog sample captures.
Below may be easier in ideal conditions. But in real-life conditions, above is easier because crud doesn't build up, and things traveling on the road don't hit the transfer mechanism.
The U.S. is a major, in some cases the largest, trading partner with these countries. While a trade agreement among themselves was desirable, the U.S. was and still is the big fish. This isn't like dating, where you can hold a grudge and totally ignore someone who jilted you. There are deep economic ties between these countries which continue to exist with or without a trade agreement, and stand to be improved with a good agreement. They will want to include the U.S. in the trade agreement if the U.S. is willing.
I'm the last person to want to defend Faacebook. But across a user base of 2 billion people, just by random chance alone some of them will see ads related to something they talked about recently next to an electronic device. Facebook represents such a huge sampling population that if you allow self-selection, even rare phenomenon will pop out due to self-selection bias.
have millions of drivers become mini electricity traders, charging up when rates are cheap and pumping energy back into the grid during peak hours
Transportation accounts for about 70% as much energy consumption as electricity. If you convert all those ICE cars into EVs, the electric rates won't be cheap during the night when they're charging. Overnight will become the new peak consumption hours, when electricity is most expensive.
You have to divide it by how much revenue the company takes in. Otherwise a small company which spends a large percentage of its income on R&D (e.g. Celgene) can be eclipsed by a huge company which spends a pithy percentage on R&D (e.g. Apple). Pulling numbers from TFA and wikipedia, the top 16 in R&D spending sorted by percentage are:
1. Celgene - $5.9b R&D spending on $12.973b in revenue, or 45.5%
2. Qualcomm - $5.5b on $22.291b, or 24.7%
3. Merck - $9.6b on $40.122b, or 23.9%
4. Intel - $13.1b on $62.76b, or 20.8%
5. Facebook - $7.8b on $40.653b, or 19.2%
6. Amazon - $22.6b on $117.86b, or 19.2%
7. Oracle - $6.2b on $37.73b, or 16.4%
8. Alphabet - $16.6b on $110.85b, or 15.0%
9. Pfizer - $7.6b on $52.546b, or 14.5%
10. Microsoft - $12.3b on $89.95b, or 13.7%
11. Johnson & Johnson - $10.4b on $76.45b, or 13.6%
12. Cisco - $6.1b on $48.005b, or 12.7%
13. IBM - $5.4b on $79.193b, or 6.8%
14. Ford - $8.0b on $156.776b, or 5.1%
15. Apple - $11.6b on $229.234b, or 5.1%
16. GM - $7.3b on $148.588b, or 4.9%
The list is also limited to U.S. companies. Generally biotech and pharmaceutical companies top the list, followed by semiconductor companies, then tech companies.
There's no legitimate reason that corporations can make campaign contributions.
Sure there is. Do you believe in no taxation without representation?
If so, do you believe in taxing corporations?
If you said yes to both, then you also believe in giving corporations representation in government. And since they're not allowed to vote, the only form of representation they can have is campaign contributions.
Personally, I think we should just eliminate corporate taxes. Corporations don't end up paying corporate taxes because income is a representation of productivity, and corporations don't generate any productivity - their employees do. So corporate taxes just end up being passed on as lower employee wages, reduced stockholder dividends, and higher customer prices. If you instead shift corporate taxes to one or all of those three (most people would probably opt for a higher tax rate on dividends), then you can justify prohibiting corporations from making campaign contributions.
If there's a political issue which is important to a corporation, it can stress the importance to its employees, stockholders, and customers, who can then make the calls to their representatives and spread the word among other voters.
That's only if the car is traveling directly towards the pedestrian. If the pedestrian is off to the side (as it seems to have been in this case), it's a perfectly acceptable passing distance. If we used your standard, a car traveling 45 MPH would need to keep a bubble of at least 66 feet in radius (1 second) clear of pedestrians at all times. Which is impossible since most local roads aren't 130 feet wide.
The more interesting aspect of this case is that the human driver is liable for the ticket issued for something the autonomous car decided to do. That's a policy that could have huge implications for the public acceptance of this technology.
That ethanol kills many germs isn't disputed, but it doesn't kill enough of them to really sanitize, and leaves the bacteria's food source, just smeared around.
It's like if you scrape off most of the mold on a piece of cheese, smearing it around a bit in the process. What do you think happens then?
It's not supposed to sanitize. That would be just silly. Your body is completely covered in bacteria, and any process which could get rid of all of them would kill you. And you can't get rid of the food source because that would also kill you (it literally is you).
All the ethanol is supposed to do is knock the bacteria population down enough to where it'll take them a while to build up enough in numbers again to spread every time you touch something. That's why they advertise things like "kills 99.99% of germs." Not 100%. You're trying to keep the bacteria population in the flat bottom portion of the exponential growth curve. That maximizes the time when their population is low, and thus minimizes the chances of spreading them around. It's impossible to reduce them to zero, but there's a lot to be gained by reducing them close to zero.
I agree the extent to which marketers have pushed hand sanitizers onto OCD people is ridiculous, and that washing is more effective. But there isn't always a faucet and soap handy, and hand sanitizers are a good second line of defense.
And in public facilities, turn off the tap with a paper towel, not your hand, and open the door with your foot or elbow, not your still moist hand.
That's a pet peeve of mine. Most bathroom doors are designed backwards - they open inward. That forces you to grab the handle to open them when you leave.
Another are those tongs for picking up bread at cafeterias. I always avoid them and pick up the bread with my hand. If I accidentally brush another piece of bread with my hand while doing this, that's one person whose bacteria has gotten onto someone else's bread. But if everyone uses the tongs, then everyone's bacteria has gotten onto everyone else's hands. And since most people eat bread with their hands, that means everyone's bacteria has gotten onto everyone's bread. Unless you wash your hands before eating your bread (or eat your bread with a knife and fork), tongs are much more effective at spreading bacteria around than just having everyone pick up a bread with their hand.
It's even more fundamental than that. If you were wrongfully accused or your conviction was later overturned, then I can totally understand wanting records of your accusation or conviction stricken from the public record. But if you really were convicted of the crime, then "right to be forgotten" = "right to hide the truth".
Anything which makes it a crime to reveal the truth is treading on extremely dangerous ground, undermining the very basis of a civilized society. The whole basis of society is that people can accomplish more by cooperating with each other than by acting on their own. But cooperation requires trust, and trust requires truth. If you remove the ability to tell the truth, then the most effective remaining form of society becomes a dictatorship, where a ruler can coerce cooperation by forcing people to do what he wishes.
The Post Office can't hire extra real folks - because they're held to a crazy (Republican) demand that every employee get an absurd portion of their benefits completely pre-paid for life into a pool - way more than any other organization is held to - just as one of many attempts to strangle the organization.
That is the way pensions should be funded. The employer should pay their incremental increase in pension obligation at the same time they pay the employee. At that point it's reserved for the employee and untouchable by anyone else.
The way most of the government and companies do it - pay the employee now, worry about the pension later - leads to situations like GM retirees possibly losing their pension when GM was in danger of going bankrupt. Because GM didn't put aside enough money to pay all their retirees, they were siphoning off current operating funds to pay their pension obligations, meaning if the company went under those pension payments would cease. Not incrementally funding pension obligations as you go is like floating checks - the check is written but there may not be enough funds to allow the pensioner to cash it. Because there's up to a 45 year lag between when the pension check is written and when it can be cashed, that creates a huge amount of risk due to insolvency, mismanagement, or abuse. The company or government can renege on the pension that was promised to the employee or go bankrupt. Or, because the pension fund is still under the control of the government/company instead of being an independent fund, someone with fiscal control can embezzle the funds or divert them to other operations, leaving pensioners holding an empty bag. California's government is in a pension crisis because instead of actually paying money into the pension funds it was promising, it's been artificially inflating the value of those funds with overly optimistic estimates of fund growth over the next few decades. The housing recession caused that house of cards to collapse, and now they're having to not only pay for current pensions but also make up those past pension payments they avoided via those inflated estimates.
This is the problem with Social Security too. The money you pay into SS isn't held in some account waiting for your retirement. It's paid out to current retirees (with about a 7 year buffer, that the government abuses to try to make the national debt look smaller than it really is). And when you retire, your SS benefits will be payments made by people working while you're retired. It's done this way because when SS was first implemented, the then-retirees got payments even though they never paid a dime into SS. This is why SS is often accused of being a ponzi scheme (which is somewhat different). And gets into danger of default whenever a disproportionate number of people retire (e.g. baby boomers). And is sensitive to increases in the average lifespan (which changes the ratio of retirees receiving money to working citizens paying money, requiring the age of retirement be increased to restore the ratio to a healthy level).
Pensions really should be funded like a 401k. The employee should pick their investment fund and create an account in their own name, and the government or company employing them should pre-pay their pension into it every month of continued employment. That way the pensioner is guaranteed to get his/her money upon retirement regardless of what happens to the employer. To account for premature death, the employer can be listed as beneficiary upon death (after spouse or spouse+kids if the pension agreement includes them). So any unclaimed funds are returned to the employer upon death. If everyone did it this way (similar to the way the USPS now has to do it) all of the possible problems described above - risk of loss of pension through bankruptcy or altering the pension
seven-year grants of either $350,000 a year or $1 million a year. It's part of a campaign by numerous countries to attract scholars unhappy with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and other political trends, sweetened with unusually generous research conditions.
So unhappy they need a $350k-$1 million per year incentive to move.
That's actually one of the differences between working as an employee or a contractor. Everyone likes to trash talk contractor jobs, but if you're an employee then any IP you create belongs to your employer. If you're working as a contractor and come up with something on your own that's outside the scope of what you were contracted to do (i.e. not a work for hire), then it belongs to you. A company could try weaseling a clause into your contract saying any IP you develop belongs to them, but intellectual property is one of the benchmarks the IRS uses to determine employee or contractor classification. So any company doing that risks an IRS audit determining you were an employee and not a contractor, and being on the hook for back pay and benefits.
It's the standard risk-reward tradeoff. Being an employee is low risk (guaranteed paycheck), but likewise the reward is low (stuff you create belongs to your employer). A contractor (basically a small business owner) is high risk (pay is on a per-job basis and not guaranteed), but likewise the reward is high (you own what you create unless you were specifically commissioned to create it).
Unless the plants generating that renewable energy were built specifically to provide power for Google (i.e. they wouldn't have been built if not for Google), then all this will have had zero effect on the amount of renewable energy being used. All Google will have done is purchased renewable energy which someone else was going to purchase anyway, and driven those people to purchase non-renewable energy instead.
The way to change the makeup of energy which is consumed is to build renewable capacity. If you change consumption without changing capacity, all you do when you buy renewable energy is force others to buy exactly as much non-renewable energy as you bought renewable. Person A used to buy non-renewable energy (or didn't use energy) while person B bought renewable. But now Person A buys the renewable energy, forcing person B to buy non-renewable. The total amount of renewable energy generated doesn't change when you change consumption or allocation. It only changes when you change capacity.
(I don't think they're really copying, given that proximity is a basic universal concept and thus an obvious choice for an interface. But I figured I'd use the term in honor of Apple fans throwing "copying" around at everything and everyone who does anything remotely similar to what Apple does, even if they did it before Apple.)
100 years ago, the belief was that war could be ended if there were only more powerful weapons. Those weapons were created, and their creators went on to regret creating them.
Considering the U.S. and Soviet Union never went to direct war against each other, and that the eventual resolution to the Cold War was based on economics and politics, it seems to have worked. If you look at all the wars since Nagasaki was bombed, they've between two non-nuclear states, or between a nuclear state and a non-nuclear state. The nuclear states have steadfastly avoided direct war against each other. Even when one forcibly invades and annexes territory which belongs to a non-nuclear state that other nuclear states have sworn to defend (ironically in exchange for giving up their nukes).
History has taught us, war is a zero sum game. The only way to win is not to play.
War is a zero sum game. But choosing not to play does not mean you're no longer a player - it does not raise an invincible shield around you. You simply get attacked and conquered by someone who plays, and the effect of your choice is nullified when you cease to exist. Your assets and resources get transferred to your conquerer. Choosing not to play doesn't mean you don't participate in the zero sum the game; it means you end up guaranteed to in the negative half of the zero sum game. It's like thermodynamics. Everyone likes to dream of all the things that are possible if you could simply quit the game. But the reality is that you're not allowed to quit. Even if every country and every person on Earth disarmed, all it would take is for one person to sharpen a stick and mug someone with it to start the process all over again.
War exists because of a simple economic reality - it's often cheaper to simply take assets and resources from your neighbors rather than work to build them up yourself. If you abstain from preparing for war, you do nothing to change that fundamental economic incentive. The way to avoid war is to make it more expensive for someone to take your assets and resources from you, than they stand to gain by taking them.
I became an engineer to make the world better, not to tear it apart.
From an engineering perspective, you strive to make the world a better place, and to protect the better place you've made. If your government chooses to misuse the tools you've created to wage unjust wars, then the solution to that is a political modification of your government, not abstention. Abstention means someone who doesn't share your ideals invades and takes everything you've created for themselves.
The problem is school administration. The number of non-teaching administrative staff has more than doubled in 45 years, far outpacing growth in number of teachers or students. They control how funds for education are spent. Basically every time we increase spending on education, the administrators use it raise their own pay, hire more administrators, and buy useless but high-profile bling like iPads. Every time we cut spending on education, the administrators make sure it goes straight to the teachers. The teachers then get lots of media coverage complaining about how they're underpaid and under-supplied. Which leads to further increases in education spending which the administrators sop up again, passing only a token amount down to the teachers.
If you've got a proposal for how to selectively reduce spending on only administrative staff in public schools, I'd love to hear it. If not, the only alternative we have that we know works is competition. Which means charter schools, even with all their warts.
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91748 zip code not far from downtown Los Angeles. It's unincorporated - informally called Rowland Heights, but not a city. Services are provided by the county government (Los Angeles County). It's fairly close to Newegg's HQ (City of Industry) so by no means is it in the sticks. The county awarded Verizon the local phone monopoly, and Time Warner the local cable monopoly. Large portions of the community are low-income, so Time Warner never bothered laying out cable to many areas.
Verizon was thus left with an internet monopoly for a large percentage of the population. Since there was no competition, they opted to simply leave the existing phone infrastructure in place and rape everyone for Internet access. The maximum DSL speed available was 3 Mbps, but that was only possible with about 1 in 10 phone lines. Most lines could only get 1.5 Mbps at best. Verizon charged $30/mo for 768/128 kbps, $40/mo for 1 Mbps/256 kbps, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps/384kbps, and if you were fortunate to have one of the phone lines which were capable of it, you could pay $70/mo for 3 Mbps/768 kbps. Those were best case speeds too. The phone lines were so old and full of noise that service was spotty and would often go in and out like a poor wireless connection. For comparison, the lowest priced Internet I saw in neighboring cities was about $20/mo (rising to $24/mo recently) for 6 Mbps DSL.
This was the situation from about 2002-2016. Not once did Verizon use any of the money they were making hand over fist from their zero investment in infrastructure to upgrade the phone lines or roll out FIOS (which was available a couple miles to the east in Walnut). In 2016 they sold their phone service contract to Frontier, who kept the prices the same yet somehow managed to make service worse. Now instead of the service sucking when the phone lines experience noise, it simply stops working entirely. Residents and business tenants I talk to frequently end up accessing the Internet on their phones. (Sprint upgraded a tower recently so 4G cellular Internet became an option a couple years ago if you could cope with the price and data cap.)
After the Time Warner / Charter merger, the new company - Spectrum - has been much more aggressive about expanding service. I dunno if this is due to government regulators setting conditions for their merger, or if Spectrum just as a different philosophy about service coverage. But since 2017, 100 Mbps cable Internet is finally becoming an option in many parts of this zip code. Many of the businesses owners I talk to didn't just switch their Internet to Spectrum, but also their phone service as well - Verizon/Frontier's price gouging also extended to phone service. One doctor I spoke to recently was paying Frontier over $300/mo for 4 phone lines + 1.5 Mbps Internet.
These government-granted service monopolies really need to be prohibited.
There are services small businesses can subscribe to which will provide a database of sales tax rates for different zip codes and addresses, which is updated regularly. It might affect a small mom and pop shop doing a few dozen interstate orders a month. But any business with a reasonable volume of interstate sales can easily cope with the patchwork mess of sales tax rates.
The problem is none of these services will indemnify the business against their screw ups. If their database gets a sales tax rate wrong, and the business ends up collecting insufficient sales tax for some of their transactions, the business has to pay for it, not the company providing the sales tax database.
What really needs to happen is for the government to set up a central database of these sales tax rates. The burden would then be upon state and local governments to update this database with any changes they make to their sales tax rates. Any business in the country could then query this database for each sale, and be guaranteed that they are charging the correct amount of sales tax. If there's ever any error in the database, then the fault lies with the state or local government which should've made sure their database entry was correct. And thus the penalty for such errors falls directly upon the party making the error. Not the crazy system we have right now where the penalty is passed on to businesses who have little to no capability to verify thousands of sales tax rates across the country.
So if the purchase is being made from the person's home, it makes sense for the sales tax to be collected by the state where the person's home is located, since sales tax is a tax on money leaving the person at whatever location it's leaving him/her. If the jurisdiction where the business is located wants to collect more taxes on the money the business is receiving from sales then all you have to do is raise the income tax on businesses in your state/county/city. We just have businesses collect sales taxes because there's less accounting work and less risk of cheating if you do it that way. (Otherwise, you have to rely on buyers self-reporting their purchases and sending in sales/use tax.)
In the old days, both parties needed to be in close physical proximity to conduct a business transaction. So there was no debate over which jurisdiction should get to collect sales tax. The problem first cropped up with mail order businesses, where the buyer and seller no longer needed to be in proximity. The courts decided that the interstate commerce clause prohibited sales tax on mail order transactions. There's really nothing fundamentally different about online transactions from mail order transactions. The states are just trying to use "on the Internet" as an excuse to bring the same case before the courts again.
There's really no reason this has to be decided by the courts. There's a perfectly reasonable legislative solution available - Congress simply has to pass a law allowing states to collect sales tax on interstate transactions (online and mail order). The catch is that states with low or no sales tax don't want such a law, while states with high sales taxes do, which reduces the chances such legislation will be passed. However, this is how it should be. Tax differentials like this are a natural check on the power of the state to recklessly raise taxes. If a state raises taxes too much, business, people, and business transactions will flee to neighboring states to escape those taxes. This encourages state and local governments to solve fiscal problems via other means than simply raising taxes.
They let you get status updates on the devices or control them from elsewhere on the Internet. e.g. A friend has a IoT security camera whose video feed he can access from his phone at any time from anywhere, if say he gets a notification from his alarm company that someone has broken in.
Of course, if you really want this sort of functionality, the device should be restricted to your home or business LAN, and your phone should be using a VPN to connect to that LAN to communicate with the device. These devices have absolutely no business accessing the Internet on their own.
aka price negotiation. It simply moves it between sellers, instead of within a seller. That is, each buyer gets the same price from a particular seller, but different sellers can have different prices. Thus the market requirement for price negotiation is preserved.
It's worth noting that the equivalent of haggling is also creeping back into online stores, where merchants will charge different prices to different customers to help them better gauge how close they are to the true market price. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn't pure price gouging. Profit is maximized at the market price. If your prices are lower than market price, your sales are increased but the lower profit per item results in a net profit decrease. But if your prices are higher than market price, the effect of reduced sales outweighs the higher profit margin, resulting in a decrease in your overall profit. So a merchant exploring demand at different prices this way can actually end up concluding that lowering their regular price for everyone is better. Increasing prices result in increased profit all the time only if your product is a necessity or almost a necessity, and you have a monopoly so buyers can't get the product from another seller.
I stopped posting on Usenet when spammers began harvesting email addresses from posts, and I was too principled to fake my email address.
The problem isn't social media. The problem is people, or rather a subset of the population. Any time you do anything non-anonymously in public, there are people out there who will try to twist and abuse it for their own benefit. Whether it be social media, or Usenet posts, or for sale ads in the newspaper (phone number added to robocall lists, creepy callers), or posting for sale ads on a public bulletin board at the supermarket (same problem with your phone number), or doing anything in public (people spreading gossip about who you were out with, what you were wearing, what you were doing). Social media allows you to leverage databases, networks, and automation to abuse it on a scale never seen before, but at its very root it's the same problem people have been grappling with for millenia.
Too much of basic human interaction is so reliant on this stuff that I don't think you can outright ban it. If you tried, you'd basically make it impossible for strangers to meet, and we'd die off when our birth rate dropped to zero. You have to identify the most egregious abuses and prohibit it. Unfortunately, those engaged in those abuses have the benefit of their part mostly happening in private so it can be hard to figure out exactly who is behind it (e.g. copying Usenet post email addresses to sell to spammers, or making crank calls to phone numbers on for sale ads, or spreading juicy gossip).
It's also important to note that proportional representation does not result in proportional decision-making power. Consider four states with 1, 3, 4, and 5 representatives (in proportion to their population). There are 13 reps so 7 are needed for a majority.
3+4 makes a majority
3+5 makes a majority
4+5 makes a majority
The 1 rep state has 8.3% of the population and representatives, but has zero power. It has absolutely no influence on the outcome of any decisions made by this hypothetical proportional representation government. The 3 larger states can authoritatively make all decisions by themselves (can always generate a majority). The 1 rep state may as well not exist.
Creating a second legislative branch not based on proportional representation was the founding fathers' way to prevent this type of situation.
You've got cause and effect reversed. By the time I got to college in the late 1980s the major networks (NSFNet, ARPANet, Bitnet) were being interlinked so servers (email, ftp, WAIS, archie, gopher, etc) were readily accessible worldwide. WAIS, archie, and later gopher were the best ways to search and request files back then for the simple reason that most Internet nodes were not connected 24/7. You found the file you wanted using those indexing services, queued up a file transfer request, and next time your server got onto the Internet it transmitted the file transfer request to the site hosting the file. USENET works the same way - store and forward. Email did too (which is a large part of the reason why it's so horrendously insecure - compatibility was a greater concern than security back then). The last remaining vestige of servers not being connected 24/7 is probably DNS - it's still structured as a cascading series of caches in order to get around the problem not not everything being connected 24/7/
The concepts for true hyperlinking were all there, just a real-time implementation wasn't feasible because servers weren't linked 24/7. Most of the services I listed are the best implementation of hyperlinking you can create if the nodes are not always online. If you'd tried to implement something like HTTP back in the 1980s, the majority of the sites you'd try to visit would've resulted in 503 errors for the simple reason that the server you were trying to reach was probably offline at that exact moment. It was schools and companies moving from dialup to dedicated connections which led to true hyperlinked services (of which the WWW is just one). Not the other way around. The WWW succeeded because it (along with the browser) was graphical - it allowed you to place pictures inline with text, as well as adjust the size and type of text. All the other services I listed were text-only command-line tools. Granted some of them had very fancy text interfaces by making use of VT100 display terminal formatting commands, but none were as free-form as HTTP.
And I'm not sure where Berners-Lee gets off complaining the WWW is being weaponized. Like GPS, the whole Internet began as a tool for war. TCP/IP was invented as a DOD project to make a nationwide military computer network which could survive a nuclear attack. The routing algorithms which allowed it to operate even if you took out large chunks of its connectivity (e.g. if those sites were nuked) also happened to make it easy to expand the network. You could add subnodes onto it any way you wanted, instead of having to plan the whole thing out in advance.
The whole obsession with analog formats (and super-digital formats like SACD) stems from lay people's fundamental misunderstanding of digital sampling. It's not intuitively obvious that a series of discrete digital samples at 2x the highest frequency you want to capture only has a single valid analog mathematical solution, and so the digital sample is a perfect representation of the original analog waveform. Because it's not intuitively obvious, people convince themselves that the digital sample must somehow be missing something that the analog sample captures.
Below may be easier in ideal conditions. But in real-life conditions, above is easier because crud doesn't build up, and things traveling on the road don't hit the transfer mechanism.
The U.S. is a major, in some cases the largest, trading partner with these countries. While a trade agreement among themselves was desirable, the U.S. was and still is the big fish. This isn't like dating, where you can hold a grudge and totally ignore someone who jilted you. There are deep economic ties between these countries which continue to exist with or without a trade agreement, and stand to be improved with a good agreement. They will want to include the U.S. in the trade agreement if the U.S. is willing.
I'm the last person to want to defend Faacebook. But across a user base of 2 billion people, just by random chance alone some of them will see ads related to something they talked about recently next to an electronic device. Facebook represents such a huge sampling population that if you allow self-selection, even rare phenomenon will pop out due to self-selection bias.
Transportation accounts for about 70% as much energy consumption as electricity. If you convert all those ICE cars into EVs, the electric rates won't be cheap during the night when they're charging. Overnight will become the new peak consumption hours, when electricity is most expensive.
You have to divide it by how much revenue the company takes in. Otherwise a small company which spends a large percentage of its income on R&D (e.g. Celgene) can be eclipsed by a huge company which spends a pithy percentage on R&D (e.g. Apple). Pulling numbers from TFA and wikipedia, the top 16 in R&D spending sorted by percentage are:
1. Celgene - $5.9b R&D spending on $12.973b in revenue, or 45.5%
2. Qualcomm - $5.5b on $22.291b, or 24.7%
3. Merck - $9.6b on $40.122b, or 23.9%
4. Intel - $13.1b on $62.76b, or 20.8%
5. Facebook - $7.8b on $40.653b, or 19.2%
6. Amazon - $22.6b on $117.86b, or 19.2%
7. Oracle - $6.2b on $37.73b, or 16.4%
8. Alphabet - $16.6b on $110.85b, or 15.0%
9. Pfizer - $7.6b on $52.546b, or 14.5%
10. Microsoft - $12.3b on $89.95b, or 13.7%
11. Johnson & Johnson - $10.4b on $76.45b, or 13.6%
12. Cisco - $6.1b on $48.005b, or 12.7%
13. IBM - $5.4b on $79.193b, or 6.8%
14. Ford - $8.0b on $156.776b, or 5.1%
15. Apple - $11.6b on $229.234b, or 5.1%
16. GM - $7.3b on $148.588b, or 4.9%
The list is also limited to U.S. companies. Generally biotech and pharmaceutical companies top the list, followed by semiconductor companies, then tech companies.
Sure there is. Do you believe in no taxation without representation?
If so, do you believe in taxing corporations?
If you said yes to both, then you also believe in giving corporations representation in government. And since they're not allowed to vote, the only form of representation they can have is campaign contributions.
Personally, I think we should just eliminate corporate taxes. Corporations don't end up paying corporate taxes because income is a representation of productivity, and corporations don't generate any productivity - their employees do. So corporate taxes just end up being passed on as lower employee wages, reduced stockholder dividends, and higher customer prices. If you instead shift corporate taxes to one or all of those three (most people would probably opt for a higher tax rate on dividends), then you can justify prohibiting corporations from making campaign contributions.
If there's a political issue which is important to a corporation, it can stress the importance to its employees, stockholders, and customers, who can then make the calls to their representatives and spread the word among other voters.
That's only if the car is traveling directly towards the pedestrian. If the pedestrian is off to the side (as it seems to have been in this case), it's a perfectly acceptable passing distance. If we used your standard, a car traveling 45 MPH would need to keep a bubble of at least 66 feet in radius (1 second) clear of pedestrians at all times. Which is impossible since most local roads aren't 130 feet wide.
The more interesting aspect of this case is that the human driver is liable for the ticket issued for something the autonomous car decided to do. That's a policy that could have huge implications for the public acceptance of this technology.
It's not supposed to sanitize. That would be just silly. Your body is completely covered in bacteria, and any process which could get rid of all of them would kill you. And you can't get rid of the food source because that would also kill you (it literally is you).
All the ethanol is supposed to do is knock the bacteria population down enough to where it'll take them a while to build up enough in numbers again to spread every time you touch something. That's why they advertise things like "kills 99.99% of germs." Not 100%. You're trying to keep the bacteria population in the flat bottom portion of the exponential growth curve. That maximizes the time when their population is low, and thus minimizes the chances of spreading them around. It's impossible to reduce them to zero, but there's a lot to be gained by reducing them close to zero.
I agree the extent to which marketers have pushed hand sanitizers onto OCD people is ridiculous, and that washing is more effective. But there isn't always a faucet and soap handy, and hand sanitizers are a good second line of defense.
That's a pet peeve of mine. Most bathroom doors are designed backwards - they open inward. That forces you to grab the handle to open them when you leave.
Another are those tongs for picking up bread at cafeterias. I always avoid them and pick up the bread with my hand. If I accidentally brush another piece of bread with my hand while doing this, that's one person whose bacteria has gotten onto someone else's bread. But if everyone uses the tongs, then everyone's bacteria has gotten onto everyone else's hands. And since most people eat bread with their hands, that means everyone's bacteria has gotten onto everyone's bread. Unless you wash your hands before eating your bread (or eat your bread with a knife and fork), tongs are much more effective at spreading bacteria around than just having everyone pick up a bread with their hand.
It's even more fundamental than that. If you were wrongfully accused or your conviction was later overturned, then I can totally understand wanting records of your accusation or conviction stricken from the public record. But if you really were convicted of the crime, then "right to be forgotten" = "right to hide the truth".
Anything which makes it a crime to reveal the truth is treading on extremely dangerous ground, undermining the very basis of a civilized society. The whole basis of society is that people can accomplish more by cooperating with each other than by acting on their own. But cooperation requires trust, and trust requires truth. If you remove the ability to tell the truth, then the most effective remaining form of society becomes a dictatorship, where a ruler can coerce cooperation by forcing people to do what he wishes.
That is the way pensions should be funded. The employer should pay their incremental increase in pension obligation at the same time they pay the employee. At that point it's reserved for the employee and untouchable by anyone else.
The way most of the government and companies do it - pay the employee now, worry about the pension later - leads to situations like GM retirees possibly losing their pension when GM was in danger of going bankrupt. Because GM didn't put aside enough money to pay all their retirees, they were siphoning off current operating funds to pay their pension obligations, meaning if the company went under those pension payments would cease. Not incrementally funding pension obligations as you go is like floating checks - the check is written but there may not be enough funds to allow the pensioner to cash it. Because there's up to a 45 year lag between when the pension check is written and when it can be cashed, that creates a huge amount of risk due to insolvency, mismanagement, or abuse. The company or government can renege on the pension that was promised to the employee or go bankrupt. Or, because the pension fund is still under the control of the government/company instead of being an independent fund, someone with fiscal control can embezzle the funds or divert them to other operations, leaving pensioners holding an empty bag. California's government is in a pension crisis because instead of actually paying money into the pension funds it was promising, it's been artificially inflating the value of those funds with overly optimistic estimates of fund growth over the next few decades. The housing recession caused that house of cards to collapse, and now they're having to not only pay for current pensions but also make up those past pension payments they avoided via those inflated estimates.
This is the problem with Social Security too. The money you pay into SS isn't held in some account waiting for your retirement. It's paid out to current retirees (with about a 7 year buffer, that the government abuses to try to make the national debt look smaller than it really is). And when you retire, your SS benefits will be payments made by people working while you're retired. It's done this way because when SS was first implemented, the then-retirees got payments even though they never paid a dime into SS. This is why SS is often accused of being a ponzi scheme (which is somewhat different). And gets into danger of default whenever a disproportionate number of people retire (e.g. baby boomers). And is sensitive to increases in the average lifespan (which changes the ratio of retirees receiving money to working citizens paying money, requiring the age of retirement be increased to restore the ratio to a healthy level).
Pensions really should be funded like a 401k. The employee should pick their investment fund and create an account in their own name, and the government or company employing them should pre-pay their pension into it every month of continued employment. That way the pensioner is guaranteed to get his/her money upon retirement regardless of what happens to the employer. To account for premature death, the employer can be listed as beneficiary upon death (after spouse or spouse+kids if the pension agreement includes them). So any unclaimed funds are returned to the employer upon death. If everyone did it this way (similar to the way the USPS now has to do it) all of the possible problems described above - risk of loss of pension through bankruptcy or altering the pension
So unhappy they need a $350k-$1 million per year incentive to move.
That's actually one of the differences between working as an employee or a contractor. Everyone likes to trash talk contractor jobs, but if you're an employee then any IP you create belongs to your employer. If you're working as a contractor and come up with something on your own that's outside the scope of what you were contracted to do (i.e. not a work for hire), then it belongs to you. A company could try weaseling a clause into your contract saying any IP you develop belongs to them, but intellectual property is one of the benchmarks the IRS uses to determine employee or contractor classification. So any company doing that risks an IRS audit determining you were an employee and not a contractor, and being on the hook for back pay and benefits.
It's the standard risk-reward tradeoff. Being an employee is low risk (guaranteed paycheck), but likewise the reward is low (stuff you create belongs to your employer). A contractor (basically a small business owner) is high risk (pay is on a per-job basis and not guaranteed), but likewise the reward is high (you own what you create unless you were specifically commissioned to create it).
Unless the plants generating that renewable energy were built specifically to provide power for Google (i.e. they wouldn't have been built if not for Google), then all this will have had zero effect on the amount of renewable energy being used. All Google will have done is purchased renewable energy which someone else was going to purchase anyway, and driven those people to purchase non-renewable energy instead.
The way to change the makeup of energy which is consumed is to build renewable capacity. If you change consumption without changing capacity, all you do when you buy renewable energy is force others to buy exactly as much non-renewable energy as you bought renewable. Person A used to buy non-renewable energy (or didn't use energy) while person B bought renewable. But now Person A buys the renewable energy, forcing person B to buy non-renewable. The total amount of renewable energy generated doesn't change when you change consumption or allocation. It only changes when you change capacity.
So basically, Samsung's Air View which they introduced in 2013.
(I don't think they're really copying, given that proximity is a basic universal concept and thus an obvious choice for an interface. But I figured I'd use the term in honor of Apple fans throwing "copying" around at everything and everyone who does anything remotely similar to what Apple does, even if they did it before Apple.)
Considering the U.S. and Soviet Union never went to direct war against each other, and that the eventual resolution to the Cold War was based on economics and politics, it seems to have worked. If you look at all the wars since Nagasaki was bombed, they've between two non-nuclear states, or between a nuclear state and a non-nuclear state. The nuclear states have steadfastly avoided direct war against each other. Even when one forcibly invades and annexes territory which belongs to a non-nuclear state that other nuclear states have sworn to defend (ironically in exchange for giving up their nukes).
War is a zero sum game. But choosing not to play does not mean you're no longer a player - it does not raise an invincible shield around you. You simply get attacked and conquered by someone who plays, and the effect of your choice is nullified when you cease to exist. Your assets and resources get transferred to your conquerer. Choosing not to play doesn't mean you don't participate in the zero sum the game; it means you end up guaranteed to in the negative half of the zero sum game. It's like thermodynamics. Everyone likes to dream of all the things that are possible if you could simply quit the game. But the reality is that you're not allowed to quit. Even if every country and every person on Earth disarmed, all it would take is for one person to sharpen a stick and mug someone with it to start the process all over again.
War exists because of a simple economic reality - it's often cheaper to simply take assets and resources from your neighbors rather than work to build them up yourself. If you abstain from preparing for war, you do nothing to change that fundamental economic incentive. The way to avoid war is to make it more expensive for someone to take your assets and resources from you, than they stand to gain by taking them.
From an engineering perspective, you strive to make the world a better place, and to protect the better place you've made. If your government chooses to misuse the tools you've created to wage unjust wars, then the solution to that is a political modification of your government, not abstention. Abstention means someone who doesn't share your ideals invades and takes everything you've created for themselves.
Spending per public school pupil has roughly tripled in the last 45 years (inflation-adjusted). The U.S. now spends more per student than any other OECD nation except Switzerland.
The problem is school administration. The number of non-teaching administrative staff has more than doubled in 45 years, far outpacing growth in number of teachers or students. They control how funds for education are spent. Basically every time we increase spending on education, the administrators use it raise their own pay, hire more administrators, and buy useless but high-profile bling like iPads. Every time we cut spending on education, the administrators make sure it goes straight to the teachers. The teachers then get lots of media coverage complaining about how they're underpaid and under-supplied. Which leads to further increases in education spending which the administrators sop up again, passing only a token amount down to the teachers.
If you've got a proposal for how to selectively reduce spending on only administrative staff in public schools, I'd love to hear it. If not, the only alternative we have that we know works is competition. Which means charter schools, even with all their warts.