The problem isn't getting on early enough to squeeze an oversize bag into the overhead bin. It's someone else with an oversize bag getting on before you and hogging up all the overhead space, forcing you to put your medium-sized bag underneath the seat in front of you where it cuts into your foot room, or having a flight attendant put your bag into an overhead space way in the back so you'll have to wait for everyone to disembark before you can get your bag and get off.
Basically, a lot of the problem could be mitigated if the airlines would start to strictly enforce the carry-on size limits, or even reduce the carry-on size limit. They're just afraid to because a lot of their best-paying customers are business travelers who pack all their overnight or multi-day clothes and supplies into a single large carry-on.
Disney feels that what they sold was the movie. You have two ways of watching it--disk or download. But the movie remains the same and that's what you paid for.
I'll agree with this line of reasoning when Disney upgrades my VHS collection of Disney movies to digital at no charge. After all, by the reasoning above, I already paid for the movies, and the form they're in doesn't matter, right?
1929 Gt is the absolute loss, not the net gain/loss. From the first page of the paper:
1 Introduction
The Antarctic ice sheet receives roughly 2000 Gt (â¼ 5.5 mm
sea-level equivalent) of precipitation each year with > 90 %
of this mass leaving as solid ice discharge to the ocean and
the remaining [less than] 10 % leaving in the form of sublimation,
wind-driven snow transport, meltwater runoff and basal melt.
2000 Gt gain > 1929 Gt loss. The uncertainty over how much is lost via sublimation and water runoff clouds whether Antarctica has a net gain or loss of ice.
The last study I saw on this (from 2015 based on satellite data) concluded the net effect is Antarctica is gaining ice.
Actually, that's a good argument for reducing the length of copyright. Copyright exists to allow content creators to profit from their works for a temporary time. If these game companies no longer feel they can profit from these games after approx 20 years and have shut down the servers, then clearly the duration of copyright is too long. The copyright holder's own actions constitute testimony that the length of copyright is too long and needs to be reduced to about 20 years.
The question is if it will create more new (different) jobs than it destroys. The bulk of historical evidence says it creates more than it destroys. The burden of proof is thus upon those advocating that this time it will destroy more than it creates to prove their case. And no, a fictional short story does not constitute proof.
They're all dumb speakers connected to microphones which transmit a recording of your voice to some Internet-based server.
A true smart speaker would have the voice recognition built into it. If a PC in the 1980s could do it, surely a modern ARM processor can. Then based on what was spoken, it would turn a light on/off, turn on the TV and start a movie, use your Spotify account to play a song, etc. It would only send your query for cloud processing if you specifically asked. e.g. Convert "what time does the closest Panera close?" to a text-based Google search query, get the answer back, and speak the answer. It would never send a recording of the audio in your house to the Internet unless you specifically asked for it (e.g. "what's the name of this song?").
Such a product doesn't exist yet. Because everyone is tripping over themselves to harvest data from users.
I dunno about the Wallet -> Android Pay transition. But this Android Pay -> Google Pay transition is pretty obvious and expected. Google is putting the finishing touches on Chrome OS. Genericizing their pay system so it's not Android-centric is completely logical and to be expected.
BTW, there's probably going to be another consolidation transition in the future. Their online shopping/payment system is under Google Express. These probably started as different projects ("pay for stuff online" versus "pay with your phone"), but are growing to where their convergence makes a lot of sense. Like cell phones and PDAs.
Interesting line of reasoning. Unfortunately, proving it relies on proving this:
It is a very poorly kept secret that Trump didn't want to win: he got into the election for the lulz, but didn't want the responsibility.
Which would actually be harder to prove than any sort of conspiracy, since now you're talking about motivations which resided entirely inside someone's head.
You have to bear in mind what was going on when Windows on ARM came out. The PC market was shrinking, while the mobile market was exploding (both phones and tablets). Intel processors still concentrated mostly on performance, not low power consumption. So everything on mobile used ARM processors. As a result, nobody knew if mobile was just a fad, or if Intel was doomed as ARM ate into its share of the processor market.
Windows on ARM was Microsoft's hedge against the latter scenario. If Intel imploded, it wouldn't take their Windows franchise with it. The possibility of losing their biggest software platform to ARM also put enormous pressure on Intel to reduce the power consumption of the CPUs. Which they did, and as a result current Intel quad core laptops have just a 15W TDP and can run circles around ARM devices.
Microsoft never intended to sell Windows for x86 and Windows for ARM beside each other. It was an either/or hedge based on performance per Watt, and x86 won out. The only reason it's resurfacing again is because laptop prices have been dropping. You can get a decent baseline model for less than $500 now, which used to be a good sale price for an about-to-be-discontinued model a few years ago. As the price drops, something has to give. Most of the hardware has already been pared down to razor-thin margins. The only two remaining pieces of fat left in modern laptop prices are:
the Intel processor (frequently $50-$100 of the price, vs about $5-$20 for ARM processors with the same silicon surface area)
the OS (about $50 of the price)
Microsoft isn't gonna give up the OS slice of that pie, so they're gonna wave around Windows on ARM in a threatening manner to see if they can pressure Intel into giving up some of their slice of the pie.
I agree with you that the best solution is not to allow governments to prohibit speech. But it should be pointed out and Germany and Vietnam actions are not entirely indefensible. The problem is the same thing as with Wikipedia edits. You have a small group of hardcore people who sit on "their" articles, undoing helpful edits by other casual users, and making sure the article reflects what they want it to say rather than what the population at large wants it to say.
Likewise, the people behind these "hate speech" sites have a vested interest in publicizing and spreading what they're saying. Moreso than those who oppose them have an interest in refuting or publicizing opposing viewpoints. The net result is that the online presence of the message from these hate speech sites on the web is disproportionately larger than their actual presence in terms of population.
I'm not sure what the solution is. If it were easy, Wikipedia would've already implemented it. But like Wikipedia, Germany and Vietnam have decided their solution will be to appoint certain people to oversee everything and try to stop this when they see it occurring. The fly in the ointment being that those people are themselves vulnerable to bias and corruption.
(Vietnam's (and China's) case is also a bit different in that the minority viewpoint exhibiting disproportionate control can be the government's. That's a problem faced by all governments not subject to popular election.)
You're actually paying for it via a slightly elevated electric bill, making it an extremely inefficient way to transfer money.
You -> electric company -> heat generated on your computer -> bitcoin -> website -> bitcoin exchange -> cash to website
If you're ok with paying for the website you're visiting, just cut out everything in the middle, save your computer some wear and tear, and prevent a little bit of global warming by simply transferring money:
I don't know what was wrong with inline ads - print magazines and newspapers did just fine with those for centuries.
What's happened is some marketer did research comparing inline ads to some other type of (more annoying) ad, and found the more annoying type generated more click-throughs. But their research was based on assuming one person viewing each ad. It didn't account for people avoiding the site because of the annoying ads, or using an ad blocker because of the risk of malware ads. Factor those in and I'll bet that the tried-and-true simple, nonobtrusive inline ads generate the most net revenue. But marketers refuse to accept this because theirs is an industry based on one-upping each other to win advertising contracts over other advertising agencies. It's the tragedy of the commons with a population who is always trying to elevate themselves even at the expense of others.
In a way, it's the same problem as net neutrality, where the amount of bandwidth remains the same so it makes no sense to try to increase revenue by selectively allocating it. Regardless of the type of ads you use, the number of eyeballs that are viewing all articles remains the same, the amount of discretionary income they have remains the same. So you cannot increase net revenue across the entire industry by using different types of ads. All changing the ads do is shift revenue from some ads to other ads. So if all marketers would just stick to simple, non-intrusive ads they'd make just as much money as they currently do without pissing off 95% of visitors.
The largest ship has a displacement (weight empty) of 100,000 tons. I'll ignore buildings since TFA is talking about machines. Current launch costs to LEO bottom out at about $4000/kg, though it could drop to $2000/kg in the near future (have to see if Falcon Heavy's costs hold up).
So getting enough materials into LEO to duplicate the largest machine currently built would cost (100,000 tons)*(1000 kg/ton)*($4000/kg) = $400 billion. Never mind the cost of fabrication and assembly.
but I have never met anyone who uses an ASUS laptop who will do $600,000,000 worth of work in their lifetimes.
Damages in U.S. civil suits are broken down into:
Compensatory - to compensate the victim for financial losses suffered.
Punitive - to discourage the perpetrator from engaging in improper or illegal activities in the future. Punitive awards are usually scaled to be proportional to the company's revenue, to guarantee that it will sting. If you made it a fixed fine, a large company could just pay it off and count it as a cost of doing business.
$600 million is a little high, but doesn't seem like an unreasonable starting point for punitive awards against a company the size of Microsoft. (There's a problem with who receives the punitive award. Right now it goes to the person(s) who filed the lawsuit and their lawyer, when in reality it should be returned to all citizens since the company is being fined for crimes against society. I always suggest it and all similar awards, traffic fines, code violation fines, etc. should be held in escrow then distributed as a credit on everyone's annual taxes. But that's a different argument.)
A capitalist free market is an excellent (arguably the best) method for searching vast solution spaces to find the most effective solution to a problem. It works. If you believe in evolution, then you also believe capitalism works. They're the same thing.
The issue here is insuring that any solutions proferred by an "expert" surpasses some minimum threshold of safety and effectiveness. Regulation accomplishes that.
The two are not incompatible. Where you get into trouble is when you believe so much in regulation that you start imposing regulations on things that haven't been tried before or hasn't proven to be a problem before - that ends up impeding the market's ability to find new innovative and unconventional solutions. e.g. the EU mandating GSM, thereby preventing EU companies from trying what turned out to be the better solution - CDMA (which turned out to be so much better that the EU had to incorporate it into the GSM spec for 3G data). Or when you believe so much in the free market that you start repealing basic regulations which have safeguarded the market against activities which had proven to be a problem in the past. e.g. the U.S. repealing the regulation separating savings banks from investment banks, thereby exacerbating the housing bubble.
This isn't an either/or choice. In fact the people presenting it as an either/or choice (on both sides) are the ones causing the problems. The licenses TFA calls a "charade" really aren't. Stylists don't just put on makeup, they can also apply caustic chemicals to your hair or skin. Likewise, bartenders mix substances which are consumed - do you really want someone merely pretending to be a bartender to mix something you'll end up drinking? Food service workers (cooks, chefs, waiters and waitresses) must pass a food handling exam for the same reason. All this is to guarantee that someone working in these fields have at least been taught basic pitfalls and mistakes to avoid.
Hopefully this can be applied to anti-shake filters where existing solutions do a really poor job of inventing blurry missing data.
The data is actually still there, not missing. It's just smeared across several pixels instead of each point in space corresponding to a single pixel. You can use a deconvolution filter to un-smear it. Same goes for out-of-focus photos.
In the case of camera shake, if the camera would record its movements while the photo was being taken and included that info in the photo, you could apply a perfect deconvolution filter that would almost completely eliminate the blur (it becomes less accurate near the edges because you've permanently lost info when parts of the photo moved out of the frame).
Photoshop CC already includes this filter. I suspect the only reason it isn't yet built into phones to automatically de-blur photos with camera shake is because it's fairly processor intensive, making it easier just to take another photo. (Samsung's strategy is to take multiple photos held in a temporary memory buffer, then the phone determines which is sharpest, and lets you choose if you want to keep it, then deletes the others.)
Automakers actually came up with the strategy of refreshing the car's styling every few years in order to drive new car sales despite there being no significant mechanical improvements. They basically turned cars into fashion accessories.
I recommend 2011 as the cutoff. That's when Intel released Sandy Bridge, which was the first architecture (outside of mobile processors) where they took reducing power consumption seriously. A Sandy Bridge system will idle down around 35-40 Watts (vs. about 20-25 Watts for a modern system). Nehalem and Core 2 were closer to 100 Watts, 70 Watts if you really worked to pick out low-power components.
By a remarkable coincidence, if you pay the U.S. average electricity rate of 11.5 cents/kWh, then every Watt consumed by a device left on 24/7 will cost you almost exactly $1 in a year. So a Core 2 Duo system left on 24/7 will burn (100-40) = 60 Watts = $60 more per year than a Sandy Bridge system, $75 more per year than a modern system. Over the 7 years since Sandy Bridge has been out, that amounts to $420+ extra you've paid for electricity because you didn't upgrade.
If you have the computer on only 8 hours/day (office tasks, games, web browsing), that gets cut to a third. $20-$25 extra per year. Or $140+ extra you've paid in electricity over the last 7 years because you haven't upgraded. If you live in an area where electricity prices are higher, then the amount of money you're wasting by not upgrading is correspondingly higher.
While older systems (especially Core 2) are still powerful enough for modern use, I don't consider them cost-effective to keep around unless you take other steps to reduce their power consumption (e.g. enable sleep after x minutes). The really inefficient systems like Pentium 4 (130+ Watts idle) should be sent straight to the landfill, not donated for people in developing countries to use.
So 25 years ago when GLBT people were still seen as "queer" by the majority, you would've been OK with businesses shunning people who were overtly pro-GLBT?
70 years ago when interracial marriages were frowned upon by the majority, you would've been OK with businesses shunning interracial couples?
100 years ago when women didn't have the right to vote, you would've been OK with businesses shunning people who thought women should be able to vote?
160 years ago when slavery was the norm in half the country, you would've been OK with businesses shunning anyone advocating freeing the slaves?
See, the problem with basing acceptance on what's deemed "normal" by the masses is that "normal" changes over time. People are fickle, and tend to follow what's popular, not necessarily what's right. What's normal today won't be what's normal 25, 50, 100 years from now.
Democracy's strength doesn't come from the majority imposing its will upon the minority. Its strength comes from allowing a wide variety of viewpoints to coexist. That allows it to find and take advantage of better ideas more quickly. Other systems of government may not even consider that idea because they've suppressed and subjugated the minority who would've brought it up for consideration. Minorities like people who were anti-slavery in the early 1800s, pro women's suffrage in the late 1800s, for racial integration in the first half of the 20th century, and opposed to discrimination against GLBT people in the second half of the 20th century.
Democracy's strength comes from preserving that minority, even if you disagree with it. Especially if you disagree with it. If democracy hadn't protected people with those ideas when they were unpopular, those reforms never would've happened. That's why we don't discriminate against people based on how they voted (secret ballot), or their political opinions, or their religious views, or their race, or gender, or a myriad of other things which simply aren't relevant to running a business. Sure if you don't like that racist, you don't have to go camping with him. But discriminating against people in an activity which is completely orthogonal to the reason you dislike them - that is destroying the fundamental basis of democracy.
The whole point of democracy is protecting and preserving people's right to disagree. Advocating discrimination against people who hold a different opinion than yours, for no other reason than because they hold a different opinion, makes you a bigot. What, you thought that term only applied to racists? Perhaps you should look up its definition in the dictionary. Take away the right to disagree (while still living a normal life) and you've gutted democracy.
Tolerance doesn't mean accepting only people who hold the same beliefs you do. It means accepting and coexisting with and even defending people who hold different beliefs than you do.
"'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If it would take more effort to convince managers/owners/IP holders that DRM is pointless, then going ahead and implementing DRM, then circumventing it is actually the more cost-effective approach.
The assumption that if we didn't use DRM, everything else would be the the same except there would be no DRM, is based on a misunderstanding (non-understanding) of opportunity cost. You have to compare to the nearest viable alternative, not some idealized utopian fantasy (e.g. Congress bans DRM).. So in this case the alternative is probably managers/owners/IP holders try to implement some other crazy scheme to protect their work, which may in fact end up being more costly to circumvent.
Google Maps is able to provide constant map updates because they're constantly harvesting data from you, which they then sell to marketers to make money. Standalone GPSes like Garmin's don't send data about you back to the mothership, so they can only make money from product sales. A map update more or less negates a new product sale, so they have to make up that lost revenue somehow. So you either have to pay for map updates, or pay extra to get a unit with lifetime map updates.
If we fear it and kill the first alien visitor, they will turn out to be peaceful and friendly, and our hostile reaction will cause galactic civilizations to shun and ostracize us.
If we welcome it and greet the first alien visitor with open arms, they will turn out to be conquerors who will ruthlessly subjugate the planet, enslaving half the population and eating the other half.
The science on biological differences between men and women has been settled for almost half a century now.
No it hasn't.
When the story first broke, I didn't even bother checking Damore's exact references on the science. A quick google search will turn up tens of thousands of journal articles substantiating that the gender differences he specified do in fact exist.
If you can come up a similar list of empirical studies which show no gender difference, then you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise you are using your preconceptions and biases to subvert scientific facts.
If you actually cared about the science, the very first link in my search above presents in its abstract (so you only need to spend 15 seconds reading) an obvious scientific rebuttal to Damore's memo. Women score higher on neuroticism than men. Men score higher on psychoticism. You can then make the scientific argument that gender differences exist, but they tend to cancel out. Since the null theory has to be that there is no difference (you cannot prove a negative), it then becomes the scientific duty of those advocating that there is a difference to analyze the data and show that it doesn't cancel out.
But that's not what happened. That would entail admitting that gender differences exist, and the people crucifying Damore can't have that. So they did what they could to discredit the science - ask paper authors until one of them presented opinions conciliatory to their POV. They then use that singular opinion as an excuse to ignore the entire body of scientific work on the topic.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't getting on early enough to squeeze an oversize bag into the overhead bin. It's someone else with an oversize bag getting on before you and hogging up all the overhead space, forcing you to put your medium-sized bag underneath the seat in front of you where it cuts into your foot room, or having a flight attendant put your bag into an overhead space way in the back so you'll have to wait for everyone to disembark before you can get your bag and get off.
Basically, a lot of the problem could be mitigated if the airlines would start to strictly enforce the carry-on size limits, or even reduce the carry-on size limit. They're just afraid to because a lot of their best-paying customers are business travelers who pack all their overnight or multi-day clothes and supplies into a single large carry-on.
I'll agree with this line of reasoning when Disney upgrades my VHS collection of Disney movies to digital at no charge. After all, by the reasoning above, I already paid for the movies, and the form they're in doesn't matter, right?
2000 Gt gain > 1929 Gt loss. The uncertainty over how much is lost via sublimation and water runoff clouds whether Antarctica has a net gain or loss of ice.
The last study I saw on this (from 2015 based on satellite data) concluded the net effect is Antarctica is gaining ice.
Actually, that's a good argument for reducing the length of copyright. Copyright exists to allow content creators to profit from their works for a temporary time. If these game companies no longer feel they can profit from these games after approx 20 years and have shut down the servers, then clearly the duration of copyright is too long. The copyright holder's own actions constitute testimony that the length of copyright is too long and needs to be reduced to about 20 years.
The question is if it will create more new (different) jobs than it destroys. The bulk of historical evidence says it creates more than it destroys. The burden of proof is thus upon those advocating that this time it will destroy more than it creates to prove their case. And no, a fictional short story does not constitute proof.
They're all dumb speakers connected to microphones which transmit a recording of your voice to some Internet-based server.
A true smart speaker would have the voice recognition built into it. If a PC in the 1980s could do it, surely a modern ARM processor can. Then based on what was spoken, it would turn a light on/off, turn on the TV and start a movie, use your Spotify account to play a song, etc. It would only send your query for cloud processing if you specifically asked. e.g. Convert "what time does the closest Panera close?" to a text-based Google search query, get the answer back, and speak the answer. It would never send a recording of the audio in your house to the Internet unless you specifically asked for it (e.g. "what's the name of this song?").
Such a product doesn't exist yet. Because everyone is tripping over themselves to harvest data from users.
I dunno about the Wallet -> Android Pay transition. But this Android Pay -> Google Pay transition is pretty obvious and expected. Google is putting the finishing touches on Chrome OS. Genericizing their pay system so it's not Android-centric is completely logical and to be expected.
BTW, there's probably going to be another consolidation transition in the future. Their online shopping/payment system is under Google Express. These probably started as different projects ("pay for stuff online" versus "pay with your phone"), but are growing to where their convergence makes a lot of sense. Like cell phones and PDAs.
Which would actually be harder to prove than any sort of conspiracy, since now you're talking about motivations which resided entirely inside someone's head.
Windows on ARM was Microsoft's hedge against the latter scenario. If Intel imploded, it wouldn't take their Windows franchise with it. The possibility of losing their biggest software platform to ARM also put enormous pressure on Intel to reduce the power consumption of the CPUs. Which they did, and as a result current Intel quad core laptops have just a 15W TDP and can run circles around ARM devices.
Microsoft never intended to sell Windows for x86 and Windows for ARM beside each other. It was an either/or hedge based on performance per Watt, and x86 won out. The only reason it's resurfacing again is because laptop prices have been dropping. You can get a decent baseline model for less than $500 now, which used to be a good sale price for an about-to-be-discontinued model a few years ago. As the price drops, something has to give. Most of the hardware has already been pared down to razor-thin margins. The only two remaining pieces of fat left in modern laptop prices are:
Microsoft isn't gonna give up the OS slice of that pie, so they're gonna wave around Windows on ARM in a threatening manner to see if they can pressure Intel into giving up some of their slice of the pie.
I agree with you that the best solution is not to allow governments to prohibit speech. But it should be pointed out and Germany and Vietnam actions are not entirely indefensible. The problem is the same thing as with Wikipedia edits. You have a small group of hardcore people who sit on "their" articles, undoing helpful edits by other casual users, and making sure the article reflects what they want it to say rather than what the population at large wants it to say.
Likewise, the people behind these "hate speech" sites have a vested interest in publicizing and spreading what they're saying. Moreso than those who oppose them have an interest in refuting or publicizing opposing viewpoints. The net result is that the online presence of the message from these hate speech sites on the web is disproportionately larger than their actual presence in terms of population.
I'm not sure what the solution is. If it were easy, Wikipedia would've already implemented it. But like Wikipedia, Germany and Vietnam have decided their solution will be to appoint certain people to oversee everything and try to stop this when they see it occurring. The fly in the ointment being that those people are themselves vulnerable to bias and corruption. (Vietnam's (and China's) case is also a bit different in that the minority viewpoint exhibiting disproportionate control can be the government's. That's a problem faced by all governments not subject to popular election.)
You're actually paying for it via a slightly elevated electric bill, making it an extremely inefficient way to transfer money.
You -> electric company -> heat generated on your computer -> bitcoin -> website -> bitcoin exchange -> cash to website
If you're ok with paying for the website you're visiting, just cut out everything in the middle, save your computer some wear and tear, and prevent a little bit of global warming by simply transferring money:
You -> website
I don't know what was wrong with inline ads - print magazines and newspapers did just fine with those for centuries.
What's happened is some marketer did research comparing inline ads to some other type of (more annoying) ad, and found the more annoying type generated more click-throughs. But their research was based on assuming one person viewing each ad. It didn't account for people avoiding the site because of the annoying ads, or using an ad blocker because of the risk of malware ads. Factor those in and I'll bet that the tried-and-true simple, nonobtrusive inline ads generate the most net revenue. But marketers refuse to accept this because theirs is an industry based on one-upping each other to win advertising contracts over other advertising agencies. It's the tragedy of the commons with a population who is always trying to elevate themselves even at the expense of others.
In a way, it's the same problem as net neutrality, where the amount of bandwidth remains the same so it makes no sense to try to increase revenue by selectively allocating it. Regardless of the type of ads you use, the number of eyeballs that are viewing all articles remains the same, the amount of discretionary income they have remains the same. So you cannot increase net revenue across the entire industry by using different types of ads. All changing the ads do is shift revenue from some ads to other ads. So if all marketers would just stick to simple, non-intrusive ads they'd make just as much money as they currently do without pissing off 95% of visitors.
The largest ship has a displacement (weight empty) of 100,000 tons. I'll ignore buildings since TFA is talking about machines. Current launch costs to LEO bottom out at about $4000/kg, though it could drop to $2000/kg in the near future (have to see if Falcon Heavy's costs hold up).
So getting enough materials into LEO to duplicate the largest machine currently built would cost (100,000 tons)*(1000 kg/ton)*($4000/kg) = $400 billion. Never mind the cost of fabrication and assembly.
Damages in U.S. civil suits are broken down into:
$600 million is a little high, but doesn't seem like an unreasonable starting point for punitive awards against a company the size of Microsoft. (There's a problem with who receives the punitive award. Right now it goes to the person(s) who filed the lawsuit and their lawyer, when in reality it should be returned to all citizens since the company is being fined for crimes against society. I always suggest it and all similar awards, traffic fines, code violation fines, etc. should be held in escrow then distributed as a credit on everyone's annual taxes. But that's a different argument.)
A capitalist free market is an excellent (arguably the best) method for searching vast solution spaces to find the most effective solution to a problem. It works. If you believe in evolution, then you also believe capitalism works. They're the same thing.
The issue here is insuring that any solutions proferred by an "expert" surpasses some minimum threshold of safety and effectiveness. Regulation accomplishes that.
The two are not incompatible. Where you get into trouble is when you believe so much in regulation that you start imposing regulations on things that haven't been tried before or hasn't proven to be a problem before - that ends up impeding the market's ability to find new innovative and unconventional solutions. e.g. the EU mandating GSM, thereby preventing EU companies from trying what turned out to be the better solution - CDMA (which turned out to be so much better that the EU had to incorporate it into the GSM spec for 3G data). Or when you believe so much in the free market that you start repealing basic regulations which have safeguarded the market against activities which had proven to be a problem in the past. e.g. the U.S. repealing the regulation separating savings banks from investment banks, thereby exacerbating the housing bubble.
This isn't an either/or choice. In fact the people presenting it as an either/or choice (on both sides) are the ones causing the problems. The licenses TFA calls a "charade" really aren't. Stylists don't just put on makeup, they can also apply caustic chemicals to your hair or skin. Likewise, bartenders mix substances which are consumed - do you really want someone merely pretending to be a bartender to mix something you'll end up drinking? Food service workers (cooks, chefs, waiters and waitresses) must pass a food handling exam for the same reason. All this is to guarantee that someone working in these fields have at least been taught basic pitfalls and mistakes to avoid.
Hey! It looks like you're writing a missive on how AI can be our friend.
Would you like help?
The data is actually still there, not missing. It's just smeared across several pixels instead of each point in space corresponding to a single pixel. You can use a deconvolution filter to un-smear it. Same goes for out-of-focus photos.
In the case of camera shake, if the camera would record its movements while the photo was being taken and included that info in the photo, you could apply a perfect deconvolution filter that would almost completely eliminate the blur (it becomes less accurate near the edges because you've permanently lost info when parts of the photo moved out of the frame).
Photoshop CC already includes this filter. I suspect the only reason it isn't yet built into phones to automatically de-blur photos with camera shake is because it's fairly processor intensive, making it easier just to take another photo. (Samsung's strategy is to take multiple photos held in a temporary memory buffer, then the phone determines which is sharpest, and lets you choose if you want to keep it, then deletes the others.)
Automakers actually came up with the strategy of refreshing the car's styling every few years in order to drive new car sales despite there being no significant mechanical improvements. They basically turned cars into fashion accessories.
I recommend 2011 as the cutoff. That's when Intel released Sandy Bridge, which was the first architecture (outside of mobile processors) where they took reducing power consumption seriously. A Sandy Bridge system will idle down around 35-40 Watts (vs. about 20-25 Watts for a modern system). Nehalem and Core 2 were closer to 100 Watts, 70 Watts if you really worked to pick out low-power components.
By a remarkable coincidence, if you pay the U.S. average electricity rate of 11.5 cents/kWh, then every Watt consumed by a device left on 24/7 will cost you almost exactly $1 in a year. So a Core 2 Duo system left on 24/7 will burn (100-40) = 60 Watts = $60 more per year than a Sandy Bridge system, $75 more per year than a modern system. Over the 7 years since Sandy Bridge has been out, that amounts to $420+ extra you've paid for electricity because you didn't upgrade.
If you have the computer on only 8 hours/day (office tasks, games, web browsing), that gets cut to a third. $20-$25 extra per year. Or $140+ extra you've paid in electricity over the last 7 years because you haven't upgraded. If you live in an area where electricity prices are higher, then the amount of money you're wasting by not upgrading is correspondingly higher.
While older systems (especially Core 2) are still powerful enough for modern use, I don't consider them cost-effective to keep around unless you take other steps to reduce their power consumption (e.g. enable sleep after x minutes). The really inefficient systems like Pentium 4 (130+ Watts idle) should be sent straight to the landfill, not donated for people in developing countries to use.
So 25 years ago when GLBT people were still seen as "queer" by the majority, you would've been OK with businesses shunning people who were overtly pro-GLBT?
70 years ago when interracial marriages were frowned upon by the majority, you would've been OK with businesses shunning interracial couples?
100 years ago when women didn't have the right to vote, you would've been OK with businesses shunning people who thought women should be able to vote?
160 years ago when slavery was the norm in half the country, you would've been OK with businesses shunning anyone advocating freeing the slaves?
See, the problem with basing acceptance on what's deemed "normal" by the masses is that "normal" changes over time. People are fickle, and tend to follow what's popular, not necessarily what's right. What's normal today won't be what's normal 25, 50, 100 years from now.
Democracy's strength doesn't come from the majority imposing its will upon the minority. Its strength comes from allowing a wide variety of viewpoints to coexist. That allows it to find and take advantage of better ideas more quickly. Other systems of government may not even consider that idea because they've suppressed and subjugated the minority who would've brought it up for consideration. Minorities like people who were anti-slavery in the early 1800s, pro women's suffrage in the late 1800s, for racial integration in the first half of the 20th century, and opposed to discrimination against GLBT people in the second half of the 20th century.
Democracy's strength comes from preserving that minority, even if you disagree with it. Especially if you disagree with it. If democracy hadn't protected people with those ideas when they were unpopular, those reforms never would've happened. That's why we don't discriminate against people based on how they voted (secret ballot), or their political opinions, or their religious views, or their race, or gender, or a myriad of other things which simply aren't relevant to running a business. Sure if you don't like that racist, you don't have to go camping with him. But discriminating against people in an activity which is completely orthogonal to the reason you dislike them - that is destroying the fundamental basis of democracy.
The whole point of democracy is protecting and preserving people's right to disagree. Advocating discrimination against people who hold a different opinion than yours, for no other reason than because they hold a different opinion, makes you a bigot. What, you thought that term only applied to racists? Perhaps you should look up its definition in the dictionary. Take away the right to disagree (while still living a normal life) and you've gutted democracy.
Tolerance doesn't mean accepting only people who hold the same beliefs you do. It means accepting and coexisting with and even defending people who hold different beliefs than you do.
"'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Someone who asks for a higher salary may have it adjusted upward.
If a smaller percentage of women ask for a higher salary, then they'll effectively be applying a downward factor to themselves.
If it would take more effort to convince managers/owners/IP holders that DRM is pointless, then going ahead and implementing DRM, then circumventing it is actually the more cost-effective approach.
The assumption that if we didn't use DRM, everything else would be the the same except there would be no DRM, is based on a misunderstanding (non-understanding) of opportunity cost. You have to compare to the nearest viable alternative, not some idealized utopian fantasy (e.g. Congress bans DRM).. So in this case the alternative is probably managers/owners/IP holders try to implement some other crazy scheme to protect their work, which may in fact end up being more costly to circumvent.
Google Maps is able to provide constant map updates because they're constantly harvesting data from you, which they then sell to marketers to make money. Standalone GPSes like Garmin's don't send data about you back to the mothership, so they can only make money from product sales. A map update more or less negates a new product sale, so they have to make up that lost revenue somehow. So you either have to pay for map updates, or pay extra to get a unit with lifetime map updates.
Remember: If you're getting it for free, you're not the customer, you're the product.
If we fear it and kill the first alien visitor, they will turn out to be peaceful and friendly, and our hostile reaction will cause galactic civilizations to shun and ostracize us.
If we welcome it and greet the first alien visitor with open arms, they will turn out to be conquerors who will ruthlessly subjugate the planet, enslaving half the population and eating the other half.
When the story first broke, I didn't even bother checking Damore's exact references on the science. A quick google search will turn up tens of thousands of journal articles substantiating that the gender differences he specified do in fact exist.
If you can come up a similar list of empirical studies which show no gender difference, then you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise you are using your preconceptions and biases to subvert scientific facts.
If you actually cared about the science, the very first link in my search above presents in its abstract (so you only need to spend 15 seconds reading) an obvious scientific rebuttal to Damore's memo. Women score higher on neuroticism than men. Men score higher on psychoticism. You can then make the scientific argument that gender differences exist, but they tend to cancel out. Since the null theory has to be that there is no difference (you cannot prove a negative), it then becomes the scientific duty of those advocating that there is a difference to analyze the data and show that it doesn't cancel out.
But that's not what happened. That would entail admitting that gender differences exist, and the people crucifying Damore can't have that. So they did what they could to discredit the science - ask paper authors until one of them presented opinions conciliatory to their POV. They then use that singular opinion as an excuse to ignore the entire body of scientific work on the topic.