So cost per mile:
ICE: $3/gallon * (1 gallon / 25 miles) = $0.120/mile
Tesla: $0.24/kWh * (35kWh/100miles) = $0.084/mile
Not quite.
Average gas price for the U.S. is $2.53 per gallon. And on top of that, 49.4 cents is fuel taxes (again, average for the country). Basically, EVs are driving on our roads for free, without having to pay to help maintain the roads (currently paid for by fuel taxes). If you imagine a future where all cars are EVs, then they're going to have to pay for road maintenance somehow. So to correct for this and do an apples to apples comparison, you have to subtract fuel taxes. That gives you:
It implies we don't have the right to do what we want with the products we own, unless the state gives us that right. Nobody that right to us - it is ours by virtue of the fact that we own the device.
What this really is is a law to prohibit companies from using manufacturing process and designs which deliberately impede the owner's ability to tinker with a product. And Apple products are not the most egregious violator. It's printers with chipped ink cartridges which refuse to operate unless you buy a new cartridge from that specific manufacturer. (Software is worse, but it gets a pass because you typically buy a software license, not the software itself.)
The net effect is the same. They want to be in the same time zone as the U.S. East coast during daylight savings (EDT), but move to the same time zone as Nova Scotia (AST) when Daylight Savings is not in effect. You can think of this as being in EST but always observing Daylight Savings as TFA does, or being in AST and not observing Daylight Savings as you are doing. They're the same thing.
EST = UTC - 5 hours
EDT = UTC - 4 hours
AST = UTC - 4 hours
ADT = UTC - 3 hours
What Florida wants = UTC -4 hours all the time
Florida sits in the middle of the EST/EDT time zone so this move is a bit unusual, since for part of the year it will put them an hour ahead of states whose longitude is east of them. They basically want sunrise/sunset to happen later in the day (as measured by their clocks). So the mornings will be darker (sunrise happens later according to the clock), and the evenings brighter (sunset happens later according to the clock). My guess is this is at the whim of retired people who like to sleep in.
Direct or indirect conversion is irrelevant. What matters (from an energy standpoint) is the efficiency.
Steam turbines have a maximum efficiency of about 40%-43%. In real-world use, they are typically about 33% efficient (2/3rds of the energy becomes waste heat).
Photovoltaic conversion is been pushed up to about 44% in the lab. But PV cells commonly in commercial production are about 14%-19% efficient. The rest of the sunlight is either reflected or heats up the PV cell.
Wind turbines have a theoretical maximum of 59% efficiency, with real-world turbines getting about 45% conversion efficiency. The rest of the energy goes into heating up the turbine and air.
Gas turbines generators are about 50%-55% efficient, with some of the newer ones in commercial production hitting 60% efficiency.
The only shining star in efficiency is fuel cells. Research labs have gotten them up to 90% efficiency, with ones in commercial use frequently hitting 60%-70% efficiency. Their problem is the fuel - if they need to run on hydrogen, then you also have to add the energy losses of generating the hydrogen (about 50% best-case) into the net efficiency.
For reference, cellular respiration (conversion of energy stored in glucose into usable mechanical energy) is about 39% efficient.
Cost is layered on top of this, and likewise cost per unit energy generated can be driven down by increasing efficiency. The hope with fusion is that because the energy can be created on demand and the cost is mostly in constructing the reactor, that the efficiency won't matter.
Do note that the "waste heat" can often be repurposed for other uses, which can raise the overall net efficiency. This is most easily done with steam generators, and can raise net efficiency up to about 45%. Although if your desired goal is to heat something (like the interior of a building in winter), net efficiency can approach 100%.
No they haven't. That case has just reached the U.S. Supreme Court, with previous lower courts ruling against the U.S. government trying to apply U.S. law overseas. In fact, that was the whole point of putting POWs from the Afghanistan war in a prison in Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. base there is actually in Cuba, on lease since the Spanish-American War. The Bush administration knew if they brought these POWs into the U.S., they'd automatically get U.S. Constitutional rights - numerous Supreme Court rulings have stated that everyone in U.S. soil enjoys Constitutional protection, even illegal aliens, but that that protection ends at the border. So Bush hoped to prevent that by keeping them outside U.S. soil. - because U.S. law does not apply outside U.S. territory. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually decided since the U.S. had total control over what happened in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, it was the same thing as U.S. soil even if the U.S. didn't actually own it.)
It's France which is spearheading the effort to apply national laws to the rest of the world. Their case is under consideration by the top EU court, so a decision in favor of France would make the EU complicit as well.
Agreed we need good trains. But regular railway track through rural areas costs about $1.5 to $3 million per mile.
This stretch of track is going to cost $10.6 billion / 119 miles = $89 million per mile.
The U.S. bet on highways in the 1940s and 1950s. While highways are probably a good idea for personal vehicles in a country the size of the U.S., they had the side-effect of subsidizing the trucking industry. The higher tire pressures of trucks cause almost all the damage to our roads and highways, but their fuel taxes only pay for about half of it. So in effect, passenger cars are subsidizing the trucking industry, dropping the economic cost of truck transport below that of rail (where you have to pay for labor to transfer cargo from a ship/truck to the train in the source city, then from the train to a truck in the destination city). That's what we need to fix if we want to spur more railway development in the U.S. Make trucks bear the true cost of the damage they do to our roads, and suddenly rail transport will be more financially attractive.
I'm curious how this would change if app authors gave you a license to both the Android and iOS version of their app when you bought it. I imagine a lot of the loyalty is actually to the person's library of apps, not the OS itself.
Macrium Reflect, EaseUS ToDo Backup, and Paragon Backup and Recovery all have free versions which support incremental or differential backups. Those will only backup the changes from previous backup(s), so will cut down backup time significantly. I still recommend a full backup about once a month.
The important (and difficult) thing is that your backup needs to be offline. If you try to use an always-online device like a NAS or permanently attached external drive as a backup, the ransomware will just encrypt your backups.
Preferably, your backup would be stored off-site as well, in case your house burns down. For that reason, I also recommend storing your backup drive at work in between backups, or using a cloud backup service. As photos and videos are usually the most precious files for most home users:
If you've got a Gmail account, Google Photos will let you make unlimited backups of photos up to 2048x2048 resolution. It also lets you make unlimited backups of certain videos, although I don't know the size limitation (used to be 1080p and 15 minutes, but they seem to have scrubbed that so I dunno what the new limits are). In addition, you get 15 GB of free Google Drive space, where you can store files which exceed these size limits.
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you also get Prime Photos. That includes unlimited cloud backups of all photos of any size.
If you subscribe to Office 365, that includes 1 TB of cloud storage on Microsoft OneDrive. You can use that for offsite backups as well.
The Fall Creators Update broke my icons. About a third of my installed programs and file association icons defaulted to a generic blank page or blank program after the update. I tried a bunch of different things to try to fix it, but the only solution I could find was to reinstall the program. I didn't have time to reinstall the about two dozen programs affected, so reverted to the previous version in hopes Microsoft would fix the problem (yes I submitted a bug report). The icons came back after reverting, indicating the problem was with the update or the update process.
Microsoft never fixed it. And a few weeks ago I got a popup message saying they were ending security updates for the version of Windows I was on, and was forcibly updated to the Fall Creators Update. The icons were still broken, so I reverted to the previous version again. Then began a week and half of update hell. Somehow, Microsoft was bypassing my usual tricks for stopping updates (disable Windows Update service, set connection as metered). The damn thing kept downloading and installing itself any time I left the computer for a couple hours. It ate up most of my remaining bandwidth quota (5GB per update), and I was forced to switch to using my phone for Internet service for a week to avoid exceeding my quota.
Until this incident, I didn't really mind the forced updates for the most part. I understand the need to keep the software at the current release level for security reasons. My only issue had been Win10's insistence on installing driver updates which didn't work over drivers which used to work fine (violating the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule). Win10 initially had a setting which let you prevent it from updating drivers, which they removed in the Oct 2016 update. I complained about that, but about a half year later it came back in a different form, allowing you to opt not to update specific drivers. So I'd been mostly content, believing that on the balance the good (preventing ignorant users from not updating) outweighed the bad. But this experience completely changed my tune. The end user must have final say over what happens to their computer, not the software company or manufacturer. You can make the default behavior to allow for automatic updates or what not. But unless you're first going to fix every problem every user has with an update before you release it, the end user has to have the option to opt out of these things.
A more mundane way of putting it is that it's easier to make up an interesting story, than it is to find a real one. If you control for how interesting a story is, I'll bet the fake one will be distributed in social media at the same rate as the true one.
That is, this isn't an A->B correlation, where the (A) story being false causes (B) story to spread faster. It's a C->A and B correlation, where (C) a story being interesting both (B) spreads faster and (A) is more likely to be false. The story being false probably has nothing to do with the rate of its spread, it's just that false stories are more likely to be interesting.
In the 1980s, Korea had a ridiculously high tax on cars to try to keep traffic under control. Hyundai was selling their base model for $9,995 in the U.S. But the same car in Korea was taxed to about $30,000. One of the 1988 Presidential candidates made an issue of it, complaining that Hyundai could sell their cars in the U.S. for $10k, but a similar Ford Escort was taxed to cost $30k in Korea (he conveniently left out that the Hyundai also cost $30k in Korea).
So which reciprocal is the right way to do it?
Taxing imports at the same rate the originating country taxes your exports sounds like it would be fairer. But it destroys the ability to use tax policies to modify behavior unique to each country. Korea was forced to repeat their vehicle tax. Suddenly half the population was able to afford cars, and the streets immediately became gridlocked.
If you consider it fair if a country applies taxes evenly regardless of the product's origin, then a country could tax an industry with little domestic presence up the wazoo and still claim it's being fair. The U.S. imports a lot of lumber from Canada, while almost no U.S. lumber is exported to Canada. So the U.S. could impose a tax on lumber sales which would disproportionately affect Canadian imports while doing little economic harm to itself.
tl;dr - There is no right answer. A policy which is fair in one dimension is unfair in an orthogonal dimension. And vice versa. Everyone wants there to be one best, right solution. But in a lot of cases, no such solution exists.
Sellers can't increase prices. They can ask for a higher price, but they won't make any sales unless there are customers willing to pay the higher price.
Likewise, buyers can't decrease prices. They can wait for a lower price, but they won't be able to buy the item they want unless sellers begin to panic at lack of sales and lower their asking price.
This is the greatest check and balance in economics. The person wanting higher prices can't raise them. The person wanting lower prices can't lower them. They each have to wait for someone opposed to them to meet their price. So the only way landlords can do what you accuse them of, is if there are tenants willing to go along with them and pay them for it. And if there are customers willing to pay that much for crappy housing, then it indicates you have other structural problems (excess demand, inadequate supply to meet that demand) which need to be dealt with.
You cannot gentrify globally. Not enough gentry, I'd say.
Yes you can. In fact that's the whole point of a market economy - to make money (increase productivity per capita) by improving the efficiency by which resources (including housing and labor) are assigned and used. We used to live in stone caves with dirt floors. Now most of us live in constructed homes where we feel compelled to buy vacuum cleaners to keep the floors clean. That's gentrification.
Economics is not a zero sum game. You can find localized instances where it's zero sum or negative sum due to manipulation by market winners (e.g. monopolies) or overzealous regulation (e.g. rent control). But on balance, increased trade means increased productivity per capita, and a higher average standard of living. Where do you think the middle class came from? Before, it used to be just peasants and nobles.
I've long maintained that whether or not self-driving cars succeed will depend on what happens to the liability. Right now, when two drivers get into an accident, the fact that they're both people creates a natural balance. Neither side is favored, resulting in blame and liability being properly assigned.
But if there's an accident between a person and a machine, there's a natural tendency to blame things on the machine. Car suddenly accelerates out of control? It must be a malfunction with the accelerator. There's no way it could be due to the person accidentally pressing the accelerator instead of the brake. If that's how liability in accidents is going to be handled, then self-driving cars are doomed. Any car company who sells a significant number of them would be bankrupted by the liability lawsuits.
That's pretty much what TFA is describing. While road rage incidents happen between human drivers, apparently the threshold for raging is lower when the other car is self-driving because you're not hurting a person, just an unfeeling machine..
That's mostly due to Proposition 47. It was billed as a way to reduce overcrowding in jails, but did so by reducing the property theft crimes where less than $950 was stolen/damaged from a felony to a misdemeanor. In California, you can break into and steal from as many cars as you want now, and as long as you keep the property loss below $950 per incident, the only punishment you'll get (if you're caught) is a fine and maybe 1 year of jail time. In many cases the police can't be bothered to prosecute these cases anymore because it wastes more of their time and money than the thief's.
There was initially a downtick in property theft crimes in 2015-2016 (part of a 30-year downward trend), leading Prop 47 proponents to claim they were right that it wouldn't affect crime rates. But it's looking more like it just took petty thieves a couple years to get a feel for how the new law worked.
Blackberry had to get rid of their technical people to pay for the infringement lawsuit they eventually lost over NTP's nonsensical "email over cellular" patent. Crucially, that happened just as the industry was transitioning from phones with enhanced features, to smartphones (phones which could run any generic app). The timing of the lawsuit pretty much took the wind out of Blackberry's R&D sails 1-2 years before Apple introduced the iPhone.
NTP's patents were eventually overturned. But that didn't help Blackberry because they'd already entered a contract to settle the patent dispute. i.e. Their payment was to stop the lawsuit, not based on the merits of the patent. There was no way for them to get the money back.
In other words, Blackberry has been reduced to a patent lawsuit-flinging troll because they themselves were the victim of such a troll. Pity them, don't ridicule them. It could just as easily have been you if you'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If you hang a variable capacitor in the circuit and adjust it to tune the crystal close to dead-on (at your room temperature), you can achieve seconds per year.
That is actually the problem. The more accurately you adjust it, the longer you have to wait for the clock to drift again so you know which way to adjust it some more. Back in the 1980s I accidentally turned the adjustment screw on my watch (thought it was a screw holding the battery assembly). Before, it would drift only about 1-2 seconds a month. After, it was drifting several minutes a month. I spent a year trying to adjust it back. I got it to within about 15 seconds a month, at which point I'd have to wait a week between adjustments to reliably tell how much and which direction it was drifting. I ended up just throwing it away and buying a new one.
With clocks regulated by AC, a single person at the power company can do the measuring and adjusting for millions of clocks. That multiplier effect makes his job worthwhile. Expending that kind of effort to adjust the tuning of a single watch crystal is a colossal waste of time. You really need to be able to connect the watch to some sort of super-accurate oscilloscope to be able to fine-tune it to seconds per year accuracy within a reasonable amount of time.
This is what causes human prejudices. We don't thoroughly analyze every situation - that would take way too much time. We take processing shortcuts which usually yield the right answer, but not always. Like "white things on green fields are usually sheep." Or "black people are usually better at sports." Or "women are usually more emotional than men."
A prejudice is simply when you apply a usually-correct general rule to an individual, without first verifying that it's actually true in that individual's case. Likewise, discrimination is when you treat that individual as if the rule were true, without first confirming that it is in fact true for that individual.
Unless Levi has a monopoly on washed jeans, their profit will actually increase if they use the reduced cost of production to lower their price to consumers. The lower price's reduction in profit per unit is more than offset by the increase in the number of units sold (at the expense of their competitors' jeans).due to the lower price.
That's the way economics works. Make a graph with price on the x-asis, and total profit on the y-axis. If you set the price at your production cost, you sell lots of units but make zero profit. If you set the price too high, you sell zero units and make zero profit. If you set your price in between these two, you sell some units at a profit, so you make some total profit. Draw a continuous line between these three points and you realize there has to be a certain price between these two zero-profit points which maximizes total profit. That maximum is where you try to set your price.
If your production costs then go down, the left end of the new curve ends up being shifted closer to zero (the origin) compared to the old curve, stretching out the curve. Your old price is no longer at the point of maximum profit. The point of maximum profit has also been shifted towards the origin due to the curve's stretching, meaning your maximum profit is now at a lower price than before. So it is actually in a company's best interest to pass along cost decreases to their customers.
So unless Levi has a monopoly, or they have someone ignorant of economics setting their prices, or jeans are not a commodity market (buyers of other brand jeans are unwilling to buy Levis instead - which is unlikely here), yes the consumer price will surely drop (or not be increased next time an inflation adjustment would have been warranted).
Nice, calm discussion about the merits of an argument. Listening to and understanding the points made by those with an opposing viewpoint. Assessing the points they make in an unbiased manner. And acknowledging when they may have a legitimate point, and re-doing your work to adjust for it.
Instead we mostly have people shouting at each other, refusing to listen to or even to interact with each other simply because they have different viewpoints. Because both sides "know" that their side is right and the other is wrong.
It's interesting to note that music schools and orchestras have regularly used blind auditions since the 1980s and 1990s. The applicant sits behind a curtain during their music audition, so the judges can only hear the music, not see the person.
One thing that always astounds me is that the people who constantly bang on about white or male privilege and how that provides unfair benefits for some always seem to want to enact policy that enshrines unfairness as a fundamental concept. If you think that unfair treatment results in people being dissatisfied or outright disgruntled, then why the hell would you think that actively creating unfair conditions wouldn't result in the same conditions. To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.
I agree. Affirmative action is supposed to help disadvantaged races and genders by providing them easier access. Instead, it's been turned into a tool to deny access to certain races and genders. Instead of eliminating discrimination, all it's done is replace one form of discrimination with another. Asians are the perfect example of the fialure. In the U.S., they were discriminated against in the past. Yet modern affirmative action polices end up punishing them as if they were the ones who were the ones who perpetrated the discrimination in the past.
The problem IMHO stems from a basic misunderstanding of science. The scientific method as taught to children (through high school) is that you make a hypothesis, think up an experiment to test it, conduct that experiment, then based on the collected data decide if the hypothesis is right or wrong.
It doesn't actually work quite like that. The real scientific method is that you must make a falsifiable hypothesis for testing. You see, you can't prove a negative. If you choose "reindeer cannot fly" as your hypothesis, you can collect a thousand reindeer and push them over a cliff. If all of them plummet to their deaths, you haven't proven that reindeer cannot fly. All you've shown is that those thousand reindeer either couldn't fly or chose not to fly. The hypothesis "reindeer cannot fly" is non-falsifiable, and therefore invalid as a scientific hypothesis.
OTOH if you choose "reindeer can fly" as your hypothesis, then all you have to do is produce a single example of a flying reindeer to prove it. Until you can prove that hypothesis, you assume it's incorrect and operate under the assumption that reindeer cannot fly.
Likewise, you cannot prove a hypothesis that there is no discrimination. The hypothesis must always be that there is discrimination, and the burden of proof must always be upon those alleging discrimination.. If your research and tests fail to show discrimination, you must fall back upon the null hypothesis - that there is no discrimination. What's happened instead is an inversion of the scientific paradigm. People simply assume discrimination is happening without evidence, which gives those arguing against them the impossible task of proving that there is no discrimination.
If you allege that employee composition (or school applicant composition) which doesn't match the composition of the general population is the result of discrimination and not other causes, then you must first prove it. Without such proof, all you're doing is practicing a different, newer form of discrimination (bias against certain groups without evidence).
It's been unmodified for 3 years. 2015 was the last major update (CPU upgraded from Haswell to Broadwell, faster PCIe bus for SSD, Thunderbolt upgraded to Thunderbolt 2).
The "2017 update" actually just replaced the Broadwell CPU with another Broadwell CPU that's 0.2 GHz faster (and was available in 2015). You'd think they could've at least updated to Sky Lake (available late 2015) or Kaby Lake (available late 2016/early 2017). But apparently they didn't want to go through the effort of designing a new mainboard for a newer CPU, so they did the cheap and easy thing and just swapped one Broadwell CPU for another and called it a "new" model.
No... it is NOT appropriate for a CA or a reseller of a CA to retain customers' private keys in the first place
I'm guessing that was the compromise Trustico was reporting. The private keys should've been deleted immediately after they were generated for the customer. But Trustico probably found during an audit that they hadn't been deleted and were still on their servers somewhere. Since they couldn't prove that those private keys hadn't been copied, they erred on the side of caution and declared them all compromised.
That's not quite correct. If your use of the clip falls under fair use, you are free to decrypt the video to obtain the clip. The DMCA specifically says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." So the DMCA provisions and punishments do not apply if your use of copyrighted materials is fair use.
What the DMCA has done is make creation and distribution of the tools needed decrypt the video illegal. You still have the right, but you no longer the means to exercise it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
Average gas price for the U.S. is $2.53 per gallon. And on top of that, 49.4 cents is fuel taxes (again, average for the country). Basically, EVs are driving on our roads for free, without having to pay to help maintain the roads (currently paid for by fuel taxes). If you imagine a future where all cars are EVs, then they're going to have to pay for road maintenance somehow. So to correct for this and do an apples to apples comparison, you have to subtract fuel taxes. That gives you:
ICE: $2..03 * (1 gallon/25 miles) = 8.12 cents/mile
Tesla (100 kWh battery): $0.24/kWh * (35 kWh/100 miles) = 8.4 cents/mile
Tesla (60 kWh battery): $0.24/kWh * (32 kWh/100 miles) = 7.5 cents/mile
It implies we don't have the right to do what we want with the products we own, unless the state gives us that right. Nobody that right to us - it is ours by virtue of the fact that we own the device.
What this really is is a law to prohibit companies from using manufacturing process and designs which deliberately impede the owner's ability to tinker with a product. And Apple products are not the most egregious violator. It's printers with chipped ink cartridges which refuse to operate unless you buy a new cartridge from that specific manufacturer. (Software is worse, but it gets a pass because you typically buy a software license, not the software itself.)
Florida sits in the middle of the EST/EDT time zone so this move is a bit unusual, since for part of the year it will put them an hour ahead of states whose longitude is east of them. They basically want sunrise/sunset to happen later in the day (as measured by their clocks). So the mornings will be darker (sunrise happens later according to the clock), and the evenings brighter (sunset happens later according to the clock). My guess is this is at the whim of retired people who like to sleep in.
Cost is layered on top of this, and likewise cost per unit energy generated can be driven down by increasing efficiency. The hope with fusion is that because the energy can be created on demand and the cost is mostly in constructing the reactor, that the efficiency won't matter.
Do note that the "waste heat" can often be repurposed for other uses, which can raise the overall net efficiency. This is most easily done with steam generators, and can raise net efficiency up to about 45%. Although if your desired goal is to heat something (like the interior of a building in winter), net efficiency can approach 100%.
No they haven't. That case has just reached the U.S. Supreme Court, with previous lower courts ruling against the U.S. government trying to apply U.S. law overseas. In fact, that was the whole point of putting POWs from the Afghanistan war in a prison in Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. base there is actually in Cuba, on lease since the Spanish-American War. The Bush administration knew if they brought these POWs into the U.S., they'd automatically get U.S. Constitutional rights - numerous Supreme Court rulings have stated that everyone in U.S. soil enjoys Constitutional protection, even illegal aliens, but that that protection ends at the border. So Bush hoped to prevent that by keeping them outside U.S. soil. - because U.S. law does not apply outside U.S. territory. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually decided since the U.S. had total control over what happened in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, it was the same thing as U.S. soil even if the U.S. didn't actually own it.)
It's France which is spearheading the effort to apply national laws to the rest of the world. Their case is under consideration by the top EU court, so a decision in favor of France would make the EU complicit as well.
Agreed we need good trains. But regular railway track through rural areas costs about $1.5 to $3 million per mile.
This stretch of track is going to cost $10.6 billion / 119 miles = $89 million per mile.
The U.S. bet on highways in the 1940s and 1950s. While highways are probably a good idea for personal vehicles in a country the size of the U.S., they had the side-effect of subsidizing the trucking industry. The higher tire pressures of trucks cause almost all the damage to our roads and highways, but their fuel taxes only pay for about half of it. So in effect, passenger cars are subsidizing the trucking industry, dropping the economic cost of truck transport below that of rail (where you have to pay for labor to transfer cargo from a ship/truck to the train in the source city, then from the train to a truck in the destination city). That's what we need to fix if we want to spur more railway development in the U.S. Make trucks bear the true cost of the damage they do to our roads, and suddenly rail transport will be more financially attractive.
I'm curious how this would change if app authors gave you a license to both the Android and iOS version of their app when you bought it. I imagine a lot of the loyalty is actually to the person's library of apps, not the OS itself.
The important (and difficult) thing is that your backup needs to be offline. If you try to use an always-online device like a NAS or permanently attached external drive as a backup, the ransomware will just encrypt your backups.
Preferably, your backup would be stored off-site as well, in case your house burns down. For that reason, I also recommend storing your backup drive at work in between backups, or using a cloud backup service. As photos and videos are usually the most precious files for most home users:
The Fall Creators Update broke my icons. About a third of my installed programs and file association icons defaulted to a generic blank page or blank program after the update. I tried a bunch of different things to try to fix it, but the only solution I could find was to reinstall the program. I didn't have time to reinstall the about two dozen programs affected, so reverted to the previous version in hopes Microsoft would fix the problem (yes I submitted a bug report). The icons came back after reverting, indicating the problem was with the update or the update process.
Microsoft never fixed it. And a few weeks ago I got a popup message saying they were ending security updates for the version of Windows I was on, and was forcibly updated to the Fall Creators Update. The icons were still broken, so I reverted to the previous version again. Then began a week and half of update hell. Somehow, Microsoft was bypassing my usual tricks for stopping updates (disable Windows Update service, set connection as metered). The damn thing kept downloading and installing itself any time I left the computer for a couple hours. It ate up most of my remaining bandwidth quota (5GB per update), and I was forced to switch to using my phone for Internet service for a week to avoid exceeding my quota.
Until this incident, I didn't really mind the forced updates for the most part. I understand the need to keep the software at the current release level for security reasons. My only issue had been Win10's insistence on installing driver updates which didn't work over drivers which used to work fine (violating the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule). Win10 initially had a setting which let you prevent it from updating drivers, which they removed in the Oct 2016 update. I complained about that, but about a half year later it came back in a different form, allowing you to opt not to update specific drivers. So I'd been mostly content, believing that on the balance the good (preventing ignorant users from not updating) outweighed the bad. But this experience completely changed my tune. The end user must have final say over what happens to their computer , not the software company or manufacturer. You can make the default behavior to allow for automatic updates or what not. But unless you're first going to fix every problem every user has with an update before you release it, the end user has to have the option to opt out of these things.
A more mundane way of putting it is that it's easier to make up an interesting story, than it is to find a real one. If you control for how interesting a story is, I'll bet the fake one will be distributed in social media at the same rate as the true one.
That is, this isn't an A->B correlation, where the (A) story being false causes (B) story to spread faster. It's a C->A and B correlation, where (C) a story being interesting both (B) spreads faster and (A) is more likely to be false. The story being false probably has nothing to do with the rate of its spread, it's just that false stories are more likely to be interesting.
So which reciprocal is the right way to do it?
tl;dr - There is no right answer. A policy which is fair in one dimension is unfair in an orthogonal dimension. And vice versa. Everyone wants there to be one best, right solution. But in a lot of cases, no such solution exists.
Sellers can't increase prices. They can ask for a higher price, but they won't make any sales unless there are customers willing to pay the higher price.
Likewise, buyers can't decrease prices. They can wait for a lower price, but they won't be able to buy the item they want unless sellers begin to panic at lack of sales and lower their asking price.
This is the greatest check and balance in economics. The person wanting higher prices can't raise them. The person wanting lower prices can't lower them. They each have to wait for someone opposed to them to meet their price. So the only way landlords can do what you accuse them of, is if there are tenants willing to go along with them and pay them for it. And if there are customers willing to pay that much for crappy housing, then it indicates you have other structural problems (excess demand, inadequate supply to meet that demand) which need to be dealt with.
i.e. Higher rents are a symptom, not the problem.
Yes you can. In fact that's the whole point of a market economy - to make money (increase productivity per capita) by improving the efficiency by which resources (including housing and labor) are assigned and used. We used to live in stone caves with dirt floors. Now most of us live in constructed homes where we feel compelled to buy vacuum cleaners to keep the floors clean. That's gentrification.
Economics is not a zero sum game. You can find localized instances where it's zero sum or negative sum due to manipulation by market winners (e.g. monopolies) or overzealous regulation (e.g. rent control). But on balance, increased trade means increased productivity per capita, and a higher average standard of living. Where do you think the middle class came from? Before, it used to be just peasants and nobles.
I've long maintained that whether or not self-driving cars succeed will depend on what happens to the liability. Right now, when two drivers get into an accident, the fact that they're both people creates a natural balance. Neither side is favored, resulting in blame and liability being properly assigned.
But if there's an accident between a person and a machine, there's a natural tendency to blame things on the machine. Car suddenly accelerates out of control? It must be a malfunction with the accelerator. There's no way it could be due to the person accidentally pressing the accelerator instead of the brake. If that's how liability in accidents is going to be handled, then self-driving cars are doomed. Any car company who sells a significant number of them would be bankrupted by the liability lawsuits.
That's pretty much what TFA is describing. While road rage incidents happen between human drivers, apparently the threshold for raging is lower when the other car is self-driving because you're not hurting a person, just an unfeeling machine..
That's mostly due to Proposition 47. It was billed as a way to reduce overcrowding in jails, but did so by reducing the property theft crimes where less than $950 was stolen/damaged from a felony to a misdemeanor. In California, you can break into and steal from as many cars as you want now, and as long as you keep the property loss below $950 per incident, the only punishment you'll get (if you're caught) is a fine and maybe 1 year of jail time. In many cases the police can't be bothered to prosecute these cases anymore because it wastes more of their time and money than the thief's.
There was initially a downtick in property theft crimes in 2015-2016 (part of a 30-year downward trend), leading Prop 47 proponents to claim they were right that it wouldn't affect crime rates. But it's looking more like it just took petty thieves a couple years to get a feel for how the new law worked.
Blackberry had to get rid of their technical people to pay for the infringement lawsuit they eventually lost over NTP's nonsensical "email over cellular" patent. Crucially, that happened just as the industry was transitioning from phones with enhanced features, to smartphones (phones which could run any generic app). The timing of the lawsuit pretty much took the wind out of Blackberry's R&D sails 1-2 years before Apple introduced the iPhone.
NTP's patents were eventually overturned. But that didn't help Blackberry because they'd already entered a contract to settle the patent dispute. i.e. Their payment was to stop the lawsuit, not based on the merits of the patent. There was no way for them to get the money back.
In other words, Blackberry has been reduced to a patent lawsuit-flinging troll because they themselves were the victim of such a troll. Pity them, don't ridicule them. It could just as easily have been you if you'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That is actually the problem. The more accurately you adjust it, the longer you have to wait for the clock to drift again so you know which way to adjust it some more. Back in the 1980s I accidentally turned the adjustment screw on my watch (thought it was a screw holding the battery assembly). Before, it would drift only about 1-2 seconds a month. After, it was drifting several minutes a month. I spent a year trying to adjust it back. I got it to within about 15 seconds a month, at which point I'd have to wait a week between adjustments to reliably tell how much and which direction it was drifting. I ended up just throwing it away and buying a new one.
With clocks regulated by AC, a single person at the power company can do the measuring and adjusting for millions of clocks. That multiplier effect makes his job worthwhile. Expending that kind of effort to adjust the tuning of a single watch crystal is a colossal waste of time. You really need to be able to connect the watch to some sort of super-accurate oscilloscope to be able to fine-tune it to seconds per year accuracy within a reasonable amount of time.
This is what causes human prejudices. We don't thoroughly analyze every situation - that would take way too much time. We take processing shortcuts which usually yield the right answer, but not always. Like "white things on green fields are usually sheep." Or "black people are usually better at sports." Or "women are usually more emotional than men."
A prejudice is simply when you apply a usually-correct general rule to an individual, without first verifying that it's actually true in that individual's case. Likewise, discrimination is when you treat that individual as if the rule were true, without first confirming that it is in fact true for that individual.
Maybe they were stolen by gamers frustrated with the high price of gaming GPUs due to cryptocurrency miners driving up the price.
Unless Levi has a monopoly on washed jeans, their profit will actually increase if they use the reduced cost of production to lower their price to consumers. The lower price's reduction in profit per unit is more than offset by the increase in the number of units sold (at the expense of their competitors' jeans).due to the lower price.
That's the way economics works. Make a graph with price on the x-asis, and total profit on the y-axis. If you set the price at your production cost, you sell lots of units but make zero profit. If you set the price too high, you sell zero units and make zero profit. If you set your price in between these two, you sell some units at a profit, so you make some total profit. Draw a continuous line between these three points and you realize there has to be a certain price between these two zero-profit points which maximizes total profit. That maximum is where you try to set your price.
If your production costs then go down, the left end of the new curve ends up being shifted closer to zero (the origin) compared to the old curve, stretching out the curve. Your old price is no longer at the point of maximum profit. The point of maximum profit has also been shifted towards the origin due to the curve's stretching, meaning your maximum profit is now at a lower price than before. So it is actually in a company's best interest to pass along cost decreases to their customers.
So unless Levi has a monopoly, or they have someone ignorant of economics setting their prices, or jeans are not a commodity market (buyers of other brand jeans are unwilling to buy Levis instead - which is unlikely here), yes the consumer price will surely drop (or not be increased next time an inflation adjustment would have been warranted).
Nice, calm discussion about the merits of an argument. Listening to and understanding the points made by those with an opposing viewpoint. Assessing the points they make in an unbiased manner. And acknowledging when they may have a legitimate point, and re-doing your work to adjust for it.
Instead we mostly have people shouting at each other, refusing to listen to or even to interact with each other simply because they have different viewpoints. Because both sides "know" that their side is right and the other is wrong.
I agree. Affirmative action is supposed to help disadvantaged races and genders by providing them easier access. Instead, it's been turned into a tool to deny access to certain races and genders. Instead of eliminating discrimination, all it's done is replace one form of discrimination with another. Asians are the perfect example of the fialure. In the U.S., they were discriminated against in the past. Yet modern affirmative action polices end up punishing them as if they were the ones who were the ones who perpetrated the discrimination in the past.
The problem IMHO stems from a basic misunderstanding of science. The scientific method as taught to children (through high school) is that you make a hypothesis, think up an experiment to test it, conduct that experiment, then based on the collected data decide if the hypothesis is right or wrong.
It doesn't actually work quite like that. The real scientific method is that you must make a falsifiable hypothesis for testing. You see, you can't prove a negative. If you choose "reindeer cannot fly" as your hypothesis, you can collect a thousand reindeer and push them over a cliff. If all of them plummet to their deaths, you haven't proven that reindeer cannot fly. All you've shown is that those thousand reindeer either couldn't fly or chose not to fly. The hypothesis "reindeer cannot fly" is non-falsifiable, and therefore invalid as a scientific hypothesis.
OTOH if you choose "reindeer can fly" as your hypothesis, then all you have to do is produce a single example of a flying reindeer to prove it. Until you can prove that hypothesis, you assume it's incorrect and operate under the assumption that reindeer cannot fly.
Likewise, you cannot prove a hypothesis that there is no discrimination. The hypothesis must always be that there is discrimination, and the burden of proof must always be upon those alleging discrimination.. If your research and tests fail to show discrimination, you must fall back upon the null hypothesis - that there is no discrimination. What's happened instead is an inversion of the scientific paradigm. People simply assume discrimination is happening without evidence, which gives those arguing against them the impossible task of proving that there is no discrimination.
If you allege that employee composition (or school applicant composition) which doesn't match the composition of the general population is the result of discrimination and not other causes, then you must first prove it. Without such proof, all you're doing is practicing a different, newer form of discrimination (bias against certain groups without evidence).
It's been unmodified for 3 years. 2015 was the last major update (CPU upgraded from Haswell to Broadwell, faster PCIe bus for SSD, Thunderbolt upgraded to Thunderbolt 2).
The "2017 update" actually just replaced the Broadwell CPU with another Broadwell CPU that's 0.2 GHz faster (and was available in 2015). You'd think they could've at least updated to Sky Lake (available late 2015) or Kaby Lake (available late 2016/early 2017). But apparently they didn't want to go through the effort of designing a new mainboard for a newer CPU, so they did the cheap and easy thing and just swapped one Broadwell CPU for another and called it a "new" model.
I'm guessing that was the compromise Trustico was reporting. The private keys should've been deleted immediately after they were generated for the customer. But Trustico probably found during an audit that they hadn't been deleted and were still on their servers somewhere. Since they couldn't prove that those private keys hadn't been copied, they erred on the side of caution and declared them all compromised.
That's not quite correct. If your use of the clip falls under fair use, you are free to decrypt the video to obtain the clip. The DMCA specifically says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." So the DMCA provisions and punishments do not apply if your use of copyrighted materials is fair use.
What the DMCA has done is make creation and distribution of the tools needed decrypt the video illegal. You still have the right, but you no longer the means to exercise it.