Samsung is pretty much the only Android tablet maker taking the large tablet form factor seriously. Their top-of-the-line model (Tab S4) is probably overpriced for most people's tastes. Their low-end model (Tab A 10.5, latest mode was released last year) is decent for the price, but most will probably find it lacking. They're scheduled to release a new mid-tier model (Tab S5e) in the next few months, that looks like it'll be a promising in-between tablet.
Google pretty much stopped supporting tablet features in Android, so stock Android on a large tablet is not that great an experience. Like using a giant phone. Tablet makers have had to make their own modifications to Android to take advantage of the larger screen space (e.g. running multiple apps side-by-side).
Apple didn't use the space saved by removing the headphone jack for anything. They just filled the space with a plastic insert. (The barometric reason Apple fed people is B.S. spouted by marketing doing damage control. You don't need a space to measure barometric pressure. You just need air since it'll all be at the same pressure, and there's plenty of air inside the rest of the iPhone.)
That's a rather convenient argument. When regulation succeeds, you laud it. When regulation fails, you blame it on deregulation. Therefore regulation can never fail and is thus always good. Brilliant. Successful regulation requires proper implementation of regulations. Failure to implement those regulations properly is a regulatory failure, not a failure due to deregulation.
It should be noted that lots of other regulationors offload the work (and thus the cost) of implementing those regulations onto the companies being regulated. The EPA doesn't test the mileage of every car model that's made to come up with the official EPA mileage ratings. The leave it up to the car companies to do that themselves. The EPA only double-checks the mileage of a few random car model to keep the car companies honest. You may recall the scandal a few years back when Kia and Hyundai were caught cheating on these MPG ratings.
Likewise, Americans calculate their own tax returns. The IRS only does some basic cross-checking of your return (the W-2 from your employer), and does a few random in-depth audits to keep people honest. By your reasoning car fuel mileage and tax returns are deregulated, and thus the EPA mileage ratings and IRS tax returns are useless?
In cases like this where implementation of the regulation is mostly left up to the entity being regulated, it's done as a cost-saving measure. You accept that occasionally someone will cheat while self-regulating, because over time the cost of that occasional cheating is less than the cost of regulating with an iron fist and having regulators duplicate all the testing/calculating work that the company/individual did to comply with the regulation. If you insist that regulation be so ironclad that there is zero incidence of cheating, the cost of implementing the regulation balloons far in excess of the gain from eliminating occasional cheating. That is, the marginal decrease in cheating for each additional dollar spent enforcing regulation becomes smaller as the incident rate of cheating approaches 0%. So the most cost-effective regulatory point is not at zero cheating.
So while it's regrettable that lives were lost due to this cheating incident, overall, airliner travel remains the safest mode of transportation by far. So I'd say the FAA's approach of judiciously allowing self-regulation has on the balance been successful. Understand that if you opt for more stringent FAA regulation, that higher cost will show up both as higher taxes (to fund the FAA) and higher airfares (manufacturers, airlines, and airports having to do more work to comply with the more stringent enforcement). Sometimes this is worth it, sometimes it is not. In the case of air travel, IMHO the money would be much better spent on improving regulation of the most dangerous form of transportation - passenger cars and motorcycles.
Despite what it may seem like for those of us who buy nearly everything online, eCommerce is still more hype than reality. Retail sales (i.e. sales in brick and mortar stores) still exceed online sales by a 6 to 1 margin. While Amazon has captured a large fraction of online sales, it's still a small portion of all sales. Walmart alone has more than 3x the sales of Amazon. We still have probably 2-3 more decades to go before eCommerce matures and peaks. Plenty of time for someone to dethrone Amazon.
It's also worth noting that the ancient Egyptians also witnessed large meteor events and used the material to create jewelry for royalty and ceremonial weapons.
Extremely difficult when the timestamps aren't in sync, or when the logger is behind and the logger is the one adding the timestamps to its messages.
The timestamps have to be in sync because ATM transactions interact with other servers at the bank and at other banks (for credit card ATM withdrawals). If the clocks on all those computers and ATM aren't in sync, it creates the possibility of withdrawing (say) $100 multiple times from an account which only contains $100.
That's not new, and it has a simple solution. You know the "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters you see in westerns? They were only reserved for the worst criminals. The standard wanted poster was for capturing the criminal alive - as in you wouldn't get the reward if the criminal was killed. So all you have to do is give out the reward for information leading to the ransomware author's capture, no reward if he's killed.
the Federal Communications Commission has been asking U.S. phone companies to filter calls and police their own systems to keep out robo-calls. It hasn't worked, mainly because it's too costly and technically difficult for phone companies to do that. It's hard to detect fake Caller ID information, and wrongly blocking a legitimate call could cause them legal problems.
No it's not. The phone companies don't depend on caller ID. They know exactly who is making the call - that's how they know to bill them, or to allow the call to go through if the subscriber has an unlimited calling plan. The problem is they're refusing to share that info with the number being called. The reason they won't share is because the robocallers and telemarketers constitute a substantial percentage of their revenue. And they're afraid that if they let us filter out those calls, that revenue will dry up.
The end-game here is pretty obvious - the end of the POTS (plain old telephone system). It's not like email where you can scan the entire message before putting it in the inbox, thus filtering out spam emails. A phone call actually has to be connected before you can scan its content to filter it out. Meaning either the person has to manually answer and filter out the calls, or we'd have to develop some sort of sophisticated voice recognition voicemail system which would be annoying for legitimate calls to navigate through (would you make phone calls if you had to complete a captcha before each call?). Instead, what's more likely is that we won't have phone numbers anymore. Everyone will instead have some sort of Internet identifier. All phone calls will be VoIP calls. Your ID will probably use some sort of private/public key system so others cannot spoof a call pretending to be you. There will be public whitelists of known good callers (people and businesses) which you can load into your phone, and the phone will allow calls from those numbers to go through. If an ID somehow gets hijacked by telemarketers, it'll be reported and blacklisted within a few hundred if not a few dozen calls, and the telemarketer won't be able to get through to anyone using that ID.
The phone companies will have put themselves out of business by not addressing the spam and telemarketer problem.
The same type of laws are present in all 50 states. Most of the states have had those laws for 50+ years, with a few going back 100 years. A few stragglers joined in the last 30 years, with Texas being the last one. So those accusing Texas of doing this because of some anti-Tesla agenda should read up on history, and look into their own states' laws before throwing stones. It'll be a helluva lot more productive towards repealing these laws or updating them to reflect how cars are purchased and repaired in the 21st century.
Compared to unmanned spacecraft, landers, and rovers, sending people into space incurs enormous additional costs completely disproportional to the small increase in science gained. If/when we can get launch and life support costs down to something reasonable (currently it costs nearly 50 people's lifetime productivity just to send one person into space once), then we can begin manned space exploration in earnest. But in the meantime, unmanned space exploration gives us much better bang for the buck.
Fair use allows using parts of copyrighted works without permission for the purpose of reviews, or when only a small portion of the copyrighted work is used, or how transformative the use is (are you just regurgitating the copyrighted work, or using part of it to create something entirely new).
Unfortunately, Youtube's demonitization policy completely ignores fair use. If you use a 5 second snippet of a copyrighted song in your 15 minute video, the copyright holder can get your video demonitized (all the money the video makes goes to them instead of to you). At the very least, the system should limit the demonitization to the duration of the copyrighted clip, so 5 seconds of a song in a 15 minute video only results in the song copyright holder getting just 0.6% of the ad revenue.
Read the first comment in the link to the slashdot discussion on 5e.
Most of the bonus stacking rules are gone, replaced by a mechanic called "advantage/disadvantage". If you have advantage or disadvantage on a roll, you roll 2d20 and take the higher or lower respectively. If you have neither or both, you roll normally. Most things that used to be +2-+4 bonuses of various types are now "advantage", and most things that used to be penalties are now "disadvantage". In practice, you get similar results with a lot less addition, and without having to check the bonus types of 8 different modifiers to figure out which ones stack.
Basically they dumbed down the rules to make it quicker and simpler to appeal to a wider audience. Those who liked the complexity were horrified, but like with Linux these people comprise less than 1% of the population. By dumbing it down*, they made it more accessible to the other 99% of the population. Same as what Android did with Linux (Android uses the Linux kernel if you didn't know). And small growth among the 99% makes a much bigger difference than a huge decline among the 1%.
* (Calling it dumbed down may be a bit harsh. The forte of PnP gaming has always been the group storytelling. Better storytellers (e.g. fiction authors) could weave good stories without any rules to constrain them. But most of us need some help to keep our imaginations from doing stupid things (e.g. Lucas). The D&D rules just provide a framework upon which we can weave our own stories. But too often the rules could get in the way of a good time - witness all the tropes about rules lawyers. By simplifying the rules, they shifted emphasis back to the storytelling, instead of the minutiae of the rules.)
Agree on polluting the ecosystem. But nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries. Some developed nations like Japan are even experiencing a population decrease (which can have interesting effects on things like the housing market). Even in the U.S. with its minuscule 0.6% population growth last year (among the highest in developed countries), roughly half of that is due to immigration, only half due to natural population growth.
Economic development and progress in science and technology are the solution to overpopulation - it makes people stop having as many kids.
Not buying cloud services from Amazon is NOT going to keep them from disrupting your business or intruding on your business.
Actually it will/did. Until the last couple years, AWS was what was keeping Amazon afloat. Amazon's online retail business was losing money. So Amazon was using profit from AWS to bolster and support their online store. Their online store is finally beginning to make some profit, but the bulk of their operating income continues to come from AWS. It made more money than their store last year, despite having less than 1/8th the revenue.
So it would've been stupid for competing online stores to use AWS. They would've literally been bankrolling their competition. I get what you're saying about picking the best product. It works when the company you're paying keeps financial and operational separation between their divisions (e.g. Samsung Semiconductor giving preferential treatment to Apple over Samsung Mobile because Apple was paying them more). But Amazon was literally using money made by AWS to bankroll the growth of the Amazon store.
A friend of mine ran a commercial building in Chicago. He was constantly getting fined for obscure and trivial building code violations, like a cracked window or burnt out light bulb (someone might trip and get hurt at night if they're walking around inside an unrented warehouse space where the lights aren't even turned on at night!). I happened to accompany him during one of the inspections, and it was obvious the inspector was expecting a bribe. He stated the problems he found and how much the fine would be, then he paused to give my friend a chance to respond. When my friend missed the unspoken message and asked how much time he would have to fix everything, the inspector didn't answer the question, reiterated the amount of the fine again, and paused. My friend's problem was that he was too principled to bribe anyone. It never even occurred to him that an inspector would expect a bribe.
That's probably what's going on here. The guy running this composting business either refused to or doesn't know he's supposed to bribe the city officials.
That renewables are not going to save us. And that we need to switch to nuclear ASAP in order to save the planet? How much longer are they going to oppose nuclear power, insisting that the only way to fix things is with renewables? Because their opposition is really the only thing stopping us from solving the CO2-induced global warming problem once and for all. None of the climate change skeptics have a problem with nuclear power (well, maybe the coal and oil industries do). It's only the environmentalists preventing us from solving global warming.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the endgame. After we've replaced fossil fuels with nuclear power, we can still work on developing renewables (and battery tech). And as they become more capable, we can shut down nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. But what's important here and now is to get us off of fossil fuels ASAP. And right now that means replacing all our base load fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants.
Typical comercial PV panels are rated at about 125-165 Watts/m^2. So panels 1.66 x 1 meters yielding 210 Watts would correspond with 125 W/m^2 panels.
If the 210 Watts were after the 15% efficiency of electrolysis, then your panel would be producing 210W/0.15 = 1400 Watts. That exceeds the amount of solar energy the sun puts out. The solar constant (total energy of sunlight reaching the Earth) is only 1362 W/m^2. And that's out in space. The Earth's atmosphere absorbs roughly half that, leaving about 750 W/m^2 of total solar energy to reach your solar panel. The panel's efficiency (typically around 16%-21%) drops that to 125-165 Watt/m^2 of electricity generated from the sunlight.
So there's no way the 210 W figure is after accounting for the 15% efficiency of the electrolysis process. 210W is how much power you get from the panels. And the 15% efficiency of the electrolysis drops it to 31.5 Watts put into cracking water.
If you've done nothing, then hard work has an enormous influence on improving your life. The more hard work you do, the better your life becomes, but the more low-hanging fruit you pick off, and the less return you get for each additional unit of hard work you do. Eventually all the low-hanging fruit is gone, and the benefits of additional hard work becomes vanishingly small. At this point, luck begins to play a greater role in your fate. But you can only get to this point after you put in a lot of hard work.
So the end result is that it's not a binary proposition where one is always better than the other. It's a continuous scale with a maximum somewhere in the middle. At the start, merit yields tremendous benefits. But as you implement it more, you reach a point where additional benefits become so small they're swamped out by random luck. And eventually there's no point giving merit additional weight because it won't yield a significant benefit.
People like these researchers - who look only at the extreme end-state of a meritocracy and proclaim that merit has no benefit and everything is based on luck - are in fact the ones responsible for causing the people who believe them to languish in poverty. They convince those people that there's no point trying, so those people don't try, and entrap themselves in poverty.
The same problem of people misidentifying a continuous scale as binary occurs in lots of other areas.
Salt makes your food taste better when it has no salt. The more salt you put into it, the better it tastes. Up to a point, after which the food starts to taste bad. Beyond that point, the more salt you put in, the worse it tastes. So it's not a question of "do you like salt" or "do you dislike salt"?. It's a question of finding the right amount of salt to put in your food to make it taste best.
Taxation works well if you're implementing them for the first time. There are valuable social services a government can provide, and taxes let you pay for them. As government becomes bigger, the easily cost-effective services get fulfilled, and the benefit of additional services becomes smaller. Eventually you reach a point where government is performing so many services, that the cost of implementing additional services exceeds the benefit of just leaving the money with the people. And additional taxation actually harms the economy. If you're beyond this point, then lowering taxes helps the country. If you're below this point, then lowering taxes hurts the country. But for some reason the country has polarized into people who think more taxes always help, and people who thing lower taxes always help.
Capitalism works tremendously well if you haven't implemented it. It picks off the low-hanging fruit - easy-to-address economic inefficiencies The more capitalistic you become, the fewer easy-to-address inefficiencies are left, and the less benefit there is to it. At some point capitalism makes your economy so efficient that luck begins to play a larger role than your individual economic decisions. But people who look only at this end state and declare capitalism is useless fail to understand that you can only arrive at that end state via capitalism. Likewise, people who worship capitalism declare that more capitalism (i.e. more deregulation) is always better, and so end up implementing changes with no or a negative effect on the economy.
Immigration is helpful if your country has no immigration. On the other hand, if you had completely open borders and allowed anyone and everyone to immigrate, they would overwhelm your social services and tank your economy. So too much immigration is bad. Draw a line connecting these two points, and it's obvious that at some point immigration transitions from being good to being bad for the country. So it's not a question of being pro-immigrants or anti-immigrants. Certain levels of immigration are good for the country, certain levels of immigration are bad for the country.
The solar panel measures 1.65 meters long -- roughly the height of a kitchen refrigerator, or this reporter -- and has a rated power output of about 210 watts. The system can convert 15 percent of the solar energy it receives into hydrogen, the team says.
So decomposing 1 liter of water (1 kg) into elemental H2 and O2 requires -(-237.14 kJ/mole) * (1000 g/kg) / (18.015 g/mole) = 13163 kJ/kg = 13.163 MJ/kg.
210 Watts peak * 15% efficiency = 31.5 Watts going into decomposing water at peak production.
So if you could magically hold this panel under the noon sun for 24 hours a day in cloudless weather, it would take (13.163 MJ) / (31.5 Watts) = 417873 seconds = 4.836 days to decompose 1 liter of water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Under realistic conditions (i.e. fixed panel, sun moves across sky, weather), the average capacity factor for PV solar in the continental U.S. is about 0.145. So this panel would on average put only (31.5 Watts)*(0.145) = 4.57 Watts into cracking water. And it would take 33.4 days to convert 1 liter of water into H2 and O2 gas.
So you're gonna want to hook up thousands of these to some power lines, and transmit the electricity they generate to a large, expensive electrolysis plant. That plant will use the aggregate power from a thousand panels to to generate H2 gas in a more timely fashion. 48 minutes per liter of water.
This $31 million judgment is coming the day after a preliminary ruling against Qualcomm that says they owe Apple all $1 billion in rebates that they promisedâ"but failedâ" to pay Apple. That's the case that matters.
No, that's not the case that matters. The $1 billion awarded to Apple was money that Qualcomm was supposed to reimburse to Apple in exchange for Apple not suing them. I haven't been following that one closely so I don't know the judge's reasoning. But it ultimately has nothing to do with patents. It was a case about how the payments were structured.
The patent cases (including these) are the ones that matter. Apple has withheld about $1 billion in royalty payments to Qualcomm pending the outcome of the patent cases. So if the rest of the cases go Qualcomm's way, Apple will have to pay approx $1 billion for past sales, and more for all future sales.
And no, I'm not being anti-Apple. Qualcomm's argument is that the royalties for their patents should be a percentage of the device's price, not a percentage of the component's price. That's insane. If Qualcomm wins, if a truck manufacturer decided to integrate cellular connectivity to their trucks using a $10 Qualcomm cellular modem so the trucking company could track the location of all their trucks, Qualcomm would be entitled to thousands of dollars per truck in royalty payments, instead of a few tens of cents per modem. Insane. I'm completely on Apple's side on this one.
If Google took Android security seriously, they'd add a lot more permissions, and they'd make default permission setting "lie to the app and tell it that it has the permission it requested, and then just let it fail silently / return all zeros."
That is in fact what Android has done since Marshmallow (version 6.0, released 2015). When you install an app, it has no permissions unless the user explicitly grants them. Marshmallow had a somewhat clumsy app permission settings interface. But later versions pop up a dialog asking whether or not you want to grant a permission the first time an app tries to do something needing that permission. If you don't grant it, the OS lets the app proceed as if it has permission, and it will either fail silently and work, or return all zeros and crash. Depends on how the author coded the app.
The only major permission that's allowed by default and cannot be blocked is network access. Probably because giving the user control of that turns ad-driven apps into free apps (at least that's what happens when I deny network permission to apps on my rooted Android phone). Clipboard access is currently allowed, but apparently that's going away (TFA doesn't make clear if it's going to be prohibited entirely, or become user-selectable with Q).
Specifically NorCal water being redirected to Southern California and particularly LA.
[...]
The drought scam in California has been entirely fictional, and mostly related to the mega-cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles stealing all the water from the eastern range [...] The same applies to Southern California agriculture
BS. Cities and towns only use about 10% of the water. The vast majority of water is used for agriculture and for environmental reasons (keeping rivers flowing, wetlands wet, and preventing saltwater inundation in bays). Yes most of the water used by LA metro residents is piped in from elsewhere. But it's a tiny fraction of the water that's redirected around the state. Southern California has very little agriculture - a few orange groves and scattered ground crops. The vast majority of agriculture is in central California (note that the Bay Area is actually in the middle of the state, not Northern California as its generally called, and is adjacent to most of this agricultural productivity).
What needs to happen is for the price of agricultural products grown in California to increase to truly reflect the scarcity of water. Agriculture contributes only 2% to California's GDP, but consumes 80% of its non-environmental water use. California's agriculture industry needs to be charged full price for the water it uses. People in other states will then either pay the higher prices for California crops and livestock, allowing California farmers to afford to buy water from sources in other states. Or they'll refuse to pay the higher prices, allowing production to move to states where it makes more economic sense to grow those crops and livestock. Both of these alleviate the endemic water shortages. But as long as the state government insists on subsidizing its agriculture industry with cheap water, it'll result in water shortages for residents outside of the agricultural areas. That's what happens when you subsidize something - it distorts the economy causing shortages elsewhere.
I don't have a problem with fines per se. But the problem with the EU approach is they don't state exactly how to stop the behavior. They instead require companies to propose a solution, and they will reply whether or not they think the solution is good enough. If they don't think it's good enough, the company has to go back to the drawing board, come up with a new solution, and propose that. Repeat.
If you're going to fine a behavior, then you need to exactly define what behavior will cause the fine. That way companies can avoid that precise behavior to avoid the fine. If you don't want companies collecting personal info, but collecting personal info is a requisite for doing business (e.g. credit card payments), then either you need to state exactly under what situations and for how long you can collect personal info, or you need to prohibit the practice (and credit card payments) entirely. You can't just say "don't be evil" and expect companies to be able to comply.
The EU approach allows a degree of capriciousness on the part of government regulators which makes it extremely difficult for companies to come into and remain in compliance with EU anti-trust laws. I can understand why the EU wants to do it that way - it prevents loopholes. But the economic drag caused by that uncertainty about what exactly is/isn't allowed by the law far outweighs the benefit of not having loopholes.
The problem with the BBC model for journalism is that it creates a huge monolithic organization for news. That promotes groupthink. You need to have a way for small, unconventional, and extremist views to be publicized, so those ideas can spread as long as a sufficient portion of the public who listens agrees with what they're saying. The acceptability of "news" should not be based on getting the approval of some editor or influential journalists who can decide what is or isn't newsworthy. Grass-roots journalism very much needs a way to get the ear of the public so it can spread and flourish. Once upon a time, the idea that women should be allowed to vote was radical and unconventional. Once upon a time, you had to be an idiot to think that racial minorities should be treated the same as whites Once upon a time, marijuana was viewed as an evil gateway drug to hardcore drug abuse. Once upon a time, the LGBT community was ridiculed and the butt of discriminatory jokes. These reforms all started off as small, minority views, and gradually grew to become accepted by the majority. They either would not have come about with the BBC model, or would have taken much longer to come about.
Therein lies the motivation to institute some level of public subsidy for journalism.
No, that just gives government power over journalism, which is the last thing you want. The whole point of having a free press is that it's free to criticize the government. The press can no longer do that if the government is controlling its purse strings.
The real solution here is actually the same as the solution to the anti-vaxx movement and to fake news. Educate the public. Teach people how to think critically and rationally. Once you do that, the people themselves will make the correct decisions. They will review the anti-vaxx arguments and decide it's a bunch of baloney. They will review the basis for fake news reports and decide it's propaganda or based on flawed reasoning or insufficient research by the journalist. Ultimate power then resides with the individual people, which is the whole point of Democracy - you trust that the people will on average make the correct decision.
These other proposed solutions - panels at companies and in government tasked with reviewing information to stamp it as true or fake, a panel in government to decide which press organizations get a subsidy - are just ways for people in power to further consolidate their power over the population. You should only support these things if you believe fascism is better than democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Samsung is pretty much the only Android tablet maker taking the large tablet form factor seriously. Their top-of-the-line model (Tab S4) is probably overpriced for most people's tastes. Their low-end model (Tab A 10.5, latest mode was released last year) is decent for the price, but most will probably find it lacking. They're scheduled to release a new mid-tier model (Tab S5e) in the next few months, that looks like it'll be a promising in-between tablet.
Google pretty much stopped supporting tablet features in Android, so stock Android on a large tablet is not that great an experience. Like using a giant phone. Tablet makers have had to make their own modifications to Android to take advantage of the larger screen space (e.g. running multiple apps side-by-side).
Apple didn't use the space saved by removing the headphone jack for anything. They just filled the space with a plastic insert. (The barometric reason Apple fed people is B.S. spouted by marketing doing damage control. You don't need a space to measure barometric pressure. You just need air since it'll all be at the same pressure, and there's plenty of air inside the rest of the iPhone.)
That's a rather convenient argument. When regulation succeeds, you laud it. When regulation fails, you blame it on deregulation. Therefore regulation can never fail and is thus always good. Brilliant. Successful regulation requires proper implementation of regulations. Failure to implement those regulations properly is a regulatory failure, not a failure due to deregulation.
It should be noted that lots of other regulationors offload the work (and thus the cost) of implementing those regulations onto the companies being regulated. The EPA doesn't test the mileage of every car model that's made to come up with the official EPA mileage ratings. The leave it up to the car companies to do that themselves. The EPA only double-checks the mileage of a few random car model to keep the car companies honest. You may recall the scandal a few years back when Kia and Hyundai were caught cheating on these MPG ratings.
Likewise, Americans calculate their own tax returns. The IRS only does some basic cross-checking of your return (the W-2 from your employer), and does a few random in-depth audits to keep people honest. By your reasoning car fuel mileage and tax returns are deregulated, and thus the EPA mileage ratings and IRS tax returns are useless?
In cases like this where implementation of the regulation is mostly left up to the entity being regulated, it's done as a cost-saving measure. You accept that occasionally someone will cheat while self-regulating, because over time the cost of that occasional cheating is less than the cost of regulating with an iron fist and having regulators duplicate all the testing/calculating work that the company/individual did to comply with the regulation. If you insist that regulation be so ironclad that there is zero incidence of cheating, the cost of implementing the regulation balloons far in excess of the gain from eliminating occasional cheating. That is, the marginal decrease in cheating for each additional dollar spent enforcing regulation becomes smaller as the incident rate of cheating approaches 0%. So the most cost-effective regulatory point is not at zero cheating.
So while it's regrettable that lives were lost due to this cheating incident, overall, airliner travel remains the safest mode of transportation by far. So I'd say the FAA's approach of judiciously allowing self-regulation has on the balance been successful. Understand that if you opt for more stringent FAA regulation, that higher cost will show up both as higher taxes (to fund the FAA) and higher airfares (manufacturers, airlines, and airports having to do more work to comply with the more stringent enforcement). Sometimes this is worth it, sometimes it is not. In the case of air travel, IMHO the money would be much better spent on improving regulation of the most dangerous form of transportation - passenger cars and motorcycles.
Despite what it may seem like for those of us who buy nearly everything online, eCommerce is still more hype than reality. Retail sales (i.e. sales in brick and mortar stores) still exceed online sales by a 6 to 1 margin. While Amazon has captured a large fraction of online sales, it's still a small portion of all sales. Walmart alone has more than 3x the sales of Amazon. We still have probably 2-3 more decades to go before eCommerce matures and peaks. Plenty of time for someone to dethrone Amazon.
They're actually fairly common, with about 20-40 air bursts occurring each year. They're pretty evenly distributed. Russia just seems to get a disproportionate number because it has the most land area of any country by almost a factor of 2. It's also got a large population spread throughout that very large land area. The country covers pretty much the same latitude as Canada (second-largest country), but Canada is mostly deserted at higher latitutdes. So that increases the chances of a meteor being seen/recorded over Russia.
It's also worth noting that the ancient Egyptians also witnessed large meteor events and used the material to create jewelry for royalty and ceremonial weapons.
The timestamps have to be in sync because ATM transactions interact with other servers at the bank and at other banks (for credit card ATM withdrawals). If the clocks on all those computers and ATM aren't in sync, it creates the possibility of withdrawing (say) $100 multiple times from an account which only contains $100.
That's not new, and it has a simple solution. You know the "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters you see in westerns? They were only reserved for the worst criminals. The standard wanted poster was for capturing the criminal alive - as in you wouldn't get the reward if the criminal was killed. So all you have to do is give out the reward for information leading to the ransomware author's capture, no reward if he's killed.
No it's not. The phone companies don't depend on caller ID. They know exactly who is making the call - that's how they know to bill them, or to allow the call to go through if the subscriber has an unlimited calling plan. The problem is they're refusing to share that info with the number being called. The reason they won't share is because the robocallers and telemarketers constitute a substantial percentage of their revenue. And they're afraid that if they let us filter out those calls, that revenue will dry up.
The end-game here is pretty obvious - the end of the POTS (plain old telephone system). It's not like email where you can scan the entire message before putting it in the inbox, thus filtering out spam emails. A phone call actually has to be connected before you can scan its content to filter it out. Meaning either the person has to manually answer and filter out the calls, or we'd have to develop some sort of sophisticated voice recognition voicemail system which would be annoying for legitimate calls to navigate through (would you make phone calls if you had to complete a captcha before each call?). Instead, what's more likely is that we won't have phone numbers anymore. Everyone will instead have some sort of Internet identifier. All phone calls will be VoIP calls. Your ID will probably use some sort of private/public key system so others cannot spoof a call pretending to be you. There will be public whitelists of known good callers (people and businesses) which you can load into your phone, and the phone will allow calls from those numbers to go through. If an ID somehow gets hijacked by telemarketers, it'll be reported and blacklisted within a few hundred if not a few dozen calls, and the telemarketer won't be able to get through to anyone using that ID.
The phone companies will have put themselves out of business by not addressing the spam and telemarketer problem.
The same type of laws are present in all 50 states. Most of the states have had those laws for 50+ years, with a few going back 100 years. A few stragglers joined in the last 30 years, with Texas being the last one. So those accusing Texas of doing this because of some anti-Tesla agenda should read up on history, and look into their own states' laws before throwing stones. It'll be a helluva lot more productive towards repealing these laws or updating them to reflect how cars are purchased and repaired in the 21st century.
I wasn't aware that the U.S. government gave up on space.
Compared to unmanned spacecraft, landers, and rovers, sending people into space incurs enormous additional costs completely disproportional to the small increase in science gained. If/when we can get launch and life support costs down to something reasonable (currently it costs nearly 50 people's lifetime productivity just to send one person into space once), then we can begin manned space exploration in earnest. But in the meantime, unmanned space exploration gives us much better bang for the buck.
Fair use allows using parts of copyrighted works without permission for the purpose of reviews, or when only a small portion of the copyrighted work is used, or how transformative the use is (are you just regurgitating the copyrighted work, or using part of it to create something entirely new).
Unfortunately, Youtube's demonitization policy completely ignores fair use. If you use a 5 second snippet of a copyrighted song in your 15 minute video, the copyright holder can get your video demonitized (all the money the video makes goes to them instead of to you). At the very least, the system should limit the demonitization to the duration of the copyrighted clip, so 5 seconds of a song in a 15 minute video only results in the song copyright holder getting just 0.6% of the ad revenue.
Basically they dumbed down the rules to make it quicker and simpler to appeal to a wider audience. Those who liked the complexity were horrified, but like with Linux these people comprise less than 1% of the population. By dumbing it down*, they made it more accessible to the other 99% of the population. Same as what Android did with Linux (Android uses the Linux kernel if you didn't know). And small growth among the 99% makes a much bigger difference than a huge decline among the 1%.
* (Calling it dumbed down may be a bit harsh. The forte of PnP gaming has always been the group storytelling. Better storytellers (e.g. fiction authors) could weave good stories without any rules to constrain them. But most of us need some help to keep our imaginations from doing stupid things (e.g. Lucas). The D&D rules just provide a framework upon which we can weave our own stories. But too often the rules could get in the way of a good time - witness all the tropes about rules lawyers. By simplifying the rules, they shifted emphasis back to the storytelling, instead of the minutiae of the rules.)
Agree on polluting the ecosystem. But nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries. Some developed nations like Japan are even experiencing a population decrease (which can have interesting effects on things like the housing market). Even in the U.S. with its minuscule 0.6% population growth last year (among the highest in developed countries), roughly half of that is due to immigration, only half due to natural population growth.
Economic development and progress in science and technology are the solution to overpopulation - it makes people stop having as many kids.
Actually it will/did. Until the last couple years, AWS was what was keeping Amazon afloat. Amazon's online retail business was losing money. So Amazon was using profit from AWS to bolster and support their online store. Their online store is finally beginning to make some profit, but the bulk of their operating income continues to come from AWS. It made more money than their store last year, despite having less than 1/8th the revenue.
So it would've been stupid for competing online stores to use AWS. They would've literally been bankrolling their competition. I get what you're saying about picking the best product. It works when the company you're paying keeps financial and operational separation between their divisions (e.g. Samsung Semiconductor giving preferential treatment to Apple over Samsung Mobile because Apple was paying them more). But Amazon was literally using money made by AWS to bankroll the growth of the Amazon store.
A friend of mine ran a commercial building in Chicago. He was constantly getting fined for obscure and trivial building code violations, like a cracked window or burnt out light bulb (someone might trip and get hurt at night if they're walking around inside an unrented warehouse space where the lights aren't even turned on at night!). I happened to accompany him during one of the inspections, and it was obvious the inspector was expecting a bribe. He stated the problems he found and how much the fine would be, then he paused to give my friend a chance to respond. When my friend missed the unspoken message and asked how much time he would have to fix everything, the inspector didn't answer the question, reiterated the amount of the fine again, and paused. My friend's problem was that he was too principled to bribe anyone. It never even occurred to him that an inspector would expect a bribe.
That's probably what's going on here. The guy running this composting business either refused to or doesn't know he's supposed to bribe the city officials.
That renewables are not going to save us. And that we need to switch to nuclear ASAP in order to save the planet? How much longer are they going to oppose nuclear power, insisting that the only way to fix things is with renewables? Because their opposition is really the only thing stopping us from solving the CO2-induced global warming problem once and for all. None of the climate change skeptics have a problem with nuclear power (well, maybe the coal and oil industries do). It's only the environmentalists preventing us from solving global warming.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the endgame. After we've replaced fossil fuels with nuclear power, we can still work on developing renewables (and battery tech). And as they become more capable, we can shut down nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. But what's important here and now is to get us off of fossil fuels ASAP. And right now that means replacing all our base load fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants.
Typical comercial PV panels are rated at about 125-165 Watts/m^2. So panels 1.66 x 1 meters yielding 210 Watts would correspond with 125 W/m^2 panels.
If the 210 Watts were after the 15% efficiency of electrolysis, then your panel would be producing 210W/0.15 = 1400 Watts. That exceeds the amount of solar energy the sun puts out. The solar constant (total energy of sunlight reaching the Earth) is only 1362 W/m^2. And that's out in space. The Earth's atmosphere absorbs roughly half that, leaving about 750 W/m^2 of total solar energy to reach your solar panel. The panel's efficiency (typically around 16%-21%) drops that to 125-165 Watt/m^2 of electricity generated from the sunlight.
So there's no way the 210 W figure is after accounting for the 15% efficiency of the electrolysis process. 210W is how much power you get from the panels. And the 15% efficiency of the electrolysis drops it to 31.5 Watts put into cracking water.
So the end result is that it's not a binary proposition where one is always better than the other. It's a continuous scale with a maximum somewhere in the middle. At the start, merit yields tremendous benefits. But as you implement it more, you reach a point where additional benefits become so small they're swamped out by random luck. And eventually there's no point giving merit additional weight because it won't yield a significant benefit.
People like these researchers - who look only at the extreme end-state of a meritocracy and proclaim that merit has no benefit and everything is based on luck - are in fact the ones responsible for causing the people who believe them to languish in poverty. They convince those people that there's no point trying, so those people don't try, and entrap themselves in poverty.
The same problem of people misidentifying a continuous scale as binary occurs in lots of other areas.
So decomposing 1 liter of water (1 kg) into elemental H2 and O2 requires -(-237.14 kJ/mole) * (1000 g/kg) / (18.015 g/mole) = 13163 kJ/kg = 13.163 MJ/kg.
So if you could magically hold this panel under the noon sun for 24 hours a day in cloudless weather, it would take (13.163 MJ) / (31.5 Watts) = 417873 seconds = 4.836 days to decompose 1 liter of water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Under realistic conditions (i.e. fixed panel, sun moves across sky, weather), the average capacity factor for PV solar in the continental U.S. is about 0.145. So this panel would on average put only (31.5 Watts)*(0.145) = 4.57 Watts into cracking water. And it would take 33.4 days to convert 1 liter of water into H2 and O2 gas.
So you're gonna want to hook up thousands of these to some power lines, and transmit the electricity they generate to a large, expensive electrolysis plant. That plant will use the aggregate power from a thousand panels to to generate H2 gas in a more timely fashion. 48 minutes per liter of water.
No, that's not the case that matters. The $1 billion awarded to Apple was money that Qualcomm was supposed to reimburse to Apple in exchange for Apple not suing them. I haven't been following that one closely so I don't know the judge's reasoning. But it ultimately has nothing to do with patents. It was a case about how the payments were structured.
The patent cases (including these) are the ones that matter. Apple has withheld about $1 billion in royalty payments to Qualcomm pending the outcome of the patent cases. So if the rest of the cases go Qualcomm's way, Apple will have to pay approx $1 billion for past sales, and more for all future sales.
And no, I'm not being anti-Apple. Qualcomm's argument is that the royalties for their patents should be a percentage of the device's price, not a percentage of the component's price. That's insane. If Qualcomm wins, if a truck manufacturer decided to integrate cellular connectivity to their trucks using a $10 Qualcomm cellular modem so the trucking company could track the location of all their trucks, Qualcomm would be entitled to thousands of dollars per truck in royalty payments, instead of a few tens of cents per modem. Insane. I'm completely on Apple's side on this one.
That is in fact what Android has done since Marshmallow (version 6.0, released 2015). When you install an app, it has no permissions unless the user explicitly grants them. Marshmallow had a somewhat clumsy app permission settings interface. But later versions pop up a dialog asking whether or not you want to grant a permission the first time an app tries to do something needing that permission. If you don't grant it, the OS lets the app proceed as if it has permission, and it will either fail silently and work, or return all zeros and crash. Depends on how the author coded the app.
The only major permission that's allowed by default and cannot be blocked is network access. Probably because giving the user control of that turns ad-driven apps into free apps (at least that's what happens when I deny network permission to apps on my rooted Android phone). Clipboard access is currently allowed, but apparently that's going away (TFA doesn't make clear if it's going to be prohibited entirely, or become user-selectable with Q).
BS. Cities and towns only use about 10% of the water. The vast majority of water is used for agriculture and for environmental reasons (keeping rivers flowing, wetlands wet, and preventing saltwater inundation in bays). Yes most of the water used by LA metro residents is piped in from elsewhere. But it's a tiny fraction of the water that's redirected around the state. Southern California has very little agriculture - a few orange groves and scattered ground crops. The vast majority of agriculture is in central California (note that the Bay Area is actually in the middle of the state, not Northern California as its generally called, and is adjacent to most of this agricultural productivity).
What needs to happen is for the price of agricultural products grown in California to increase to truly reflect the scarcity of water. Agriculture contributes only 2% to California's GDP, but consumes 80% of its non-environmental water use. California's agriculture industry needs to be charged full price for the water it uses. People in other states will then either pay the higher prices for California crops and livestock, allowing California farmers to afford to buy water from sources in other states. Or they'll refuse to pay the higher prices, allowing production to move to states where it makes more economic sense to grow those crops and livestock. Both of these alleviate the endemic water shortages. But as long as the state government insists on subsidizing its agriculture industry with cheap water, it'll result in water shortages for residents outside of the agricultural areas. That's what happens when you subsidize something - it distorts the economy causing shortages elsewhere.
I don't have a problem with fines per se. But the problem with the EU approach is they don't state exactly how to stop the behavior. They instead require companies to propose a solution, and they will reply whether or not they think the solution is good enough. If they don't think it's good enough, the company has to go back to the drawing board, come up with a new solution, and propose that. Repeat.
If you're going to fine a behavior, then you need to exactly define what behavior will cause the fine. That way companies can avoid that precise behavior to avoid the fine. If you don't want companies collecting personal info, but collecting personal info is a requisite for doing business (e.g. credit card payments), then either you need to state exactly under what situations and for how long you can collect personal info, or you need to prohibit the practice (and credit card payments) entirely. You can't just say "don't be evil" and expect companies to be able to comply.
The EU approach allows a degree of capriciousness on the part of government regulators which makes it extremely difficult for companies to come into and remain in compliance with EU anti-trust laws. I can understand why the EU wants to do it that way - it prevents loopholes. But the economic drag caused by that uncertainty about what exactly is/isn't allowed by the law far outweighs the benefit of not having loopholes.
The problem with the BBC model for journalism is that it creates a huge monolithic organization for news. That promotes groupthink. You need to have a way for small, unconventional, and extremist views to be publicized, so those ideas can spread as long as a sufficient portion of the public who listens agrees with what they're saying. The acceptability of "news" should not be based on getting the approval of some editor or influential journalists who can decide what is or isn't newsworthy. Grass-roots journalism very much needs a way to get the ear of the public so it can spread and flourish. Once upon a time, the idea that women should be allowed to vote was radical and unconventional. Once upon a time, you had to be an idiot to think that racial minorities should be treated the same as whites Once upon a time, marijuana was viewed as an evil gateway drug to hardcore drug abuse. Once upon a time, the LGBT community was ridiculed and the butt of discriminatory jokes. These reforms all started off as small, minority views, and gradually grew to become accepted by the majority. They either would not have come about with the BBC model, or would have taken much longer to come about.
No, that just gives government power over journalism, which is the last thing you want. The whole point of having a free press is that it's free to criticize the government. The press can no longer do that if the government is controlling its purse strings.
The real solution here is actually the same as the solution to the anti-vaxx movement and to fake news. Educate the public. Teach people how to think critically and rationally. Once you do that, the people themselves will make the correct decisions. They will review the anti-vaxx arguments and decide it's a bunch of baloney. They will review the basis for fake news reports and decide it's propaganda or based on flawed reasoning or insufficient research by the journalist. Ultimate power then resides with the individual people, which is the whole point of Democracy - you trust that the people will on average make the correct decision.
These other proposed solutions - panels at companies and in government tasked with reviewing information to stamp it as true or fake, a panel in government to decide which press organizations get a subsidy - are just ways for people in power to further consolidate their power over the population. You should only support these things if you believe fascism is better than democracy.