Note that "strength" in this context is per cross sectional area. So taking a block of wood, and compressing it down doesn't change its absolute strength (it can support the same weight as before), but increases its measured strength (load per square mm of cross sectional area before failure). One of the attractions of metals like steel is their isotropic properties - they have the same properties regardless of which direction you load them. Fibrous materials are anisotropic - stronger in certain directions than others.
Glass fibers are also stronger than steel in tension, but they're weaker in compression and absolutely suck in shear (loading perpendicular to the fibers). The fibers just bend sideways instead of offering any resistance. So we embed them in a matrix of plastic (polyester or epoxy) to create fiberglass. Tensile and compressive strength are reduced, but shear strength improves substantially - enough to where you can walk on a fiberglass board whereas raw glass fibers would simply flop over and let you fall through. Where a fiber used to bend, the plastic matrix absorbs and transmits those forces to other fibers, converting shear forces into tension and compression (the board bows downward in the middle, compressing in the top half, stretching in the bottom half).
It sounds like what this team has done is taken wood, and cooked it so the cellulose fibers remain but much of the matrix which holds them together has been removed. That has little consequence in tension, but could weaken shear strength to where the material is structurally useless except as rope/cable.
The problems with potable water are entirely self-made. People want to live where there isn't enough, or political borders prevent people from moving away from areas where there isn't enough to areas where there is enough. Anyone or any corporation exploiting lack of cheap water can only do it because of these two things.
So for example having a nuclear plant close to a desalination plant. The nuclear plant can use the waste water from the desalination plant, so you recover the energy that the nuclear plant would otherwise us to pump water.
You have that backwards. You can use the waste heat from the nuclear plant (about 2/3 of the energy it produces) to drive thermal evaporative desalination at a lower electrical cost than reverse osmosis. Unfortunately people have this irrational hangup over the word "nuclear" and don't want to drink water desalinated via heat from a nuclear plant, even if it's less radioactive than natural fresh water sources. So we needlessly throw away 2/3 of the energy our nuclear and fossil fuel plants generate in the form of waste heat.
That would be too much nanny state for me, if you want to spend real world cash on virtual trinkets you should be allowed to do that. We don't generally restrict obsessive real world collectors either.
Psychologists have known for decades that the more you can disassociate the purchase from the actual transfer of cash, the more people will spend. People have a tendency to spend more carelessly (and thus spend more) when you disassociate the act of purchasing from the physical act of real cash leaving your possession.
Marketers know this and try to exploit it to generate more sales. This is why Disney likes to sell things in Disney Dollars, why casinos use chips, why some people get in trouble with credit card debt, why you can accidentally overspend when visiting a foreign country and paying with foreign cash. Regulators know it too and cast a wary eye towards anything which exploits it, especially if it involves gambling in the virtual currency.
I'm libertarian and pretty anti-nanny state too. But preventing exploitation of faults in basic human nature which causes people to harm themselves by acting irrationally is precisely one of the things government should be doing. We want to go see the wild rushing river during a flood despite the danger, so the government sends police to keep people away from it. We can get addicted to certain substances, so government regulates or prohibits its distribution. We enjoy the thrill of tempting death by bungee jumping, sky diving, or riding roller coasters. So the government regulates these things to assume minimum safety standards are met. And virtual currencies tend to exacerbate gambling problems, so the government keeps it on a short leash to prevent its widespread exploitation.
What they should ban - and I really think this is deserving of a blanket ban - is the randomized rewards. You want to sell the loot in the loot boxes individually, so people can see the actual price of what they're buying that's fine. If you want to sell loot boxes then you go under all the same rules and restrictions as lotteries and gambling sites.
That changes the game from being non-deterministic to deterministic. Randomized rewards (e..g loot drop from game bosses, whether a basketball player can make that basket, whether a billiards player can make that shot, what hand you're dealt in poker, etc) are what makes a game non-deterministic. And for many (most) people, are the only thing that makes the game interesting. Eliminate randomness and you're basically playing glorified tic tac toe (chess is deterministic, and is only challenging because the number of possible outcomes exceeds our ability to simultaneously comprehend).
a deep hole with lots of mechanical support because of simple leverage
You have it backwards. The length of the jack reduces the leverage on the internal components. The leverage an outside force has depends on the length of the headphone jack outside the device. The length of the jack inside the device increases the leverage of the internal components, increasing their ability to resist torque from something outside yanking on the headphone cable..
it takes up more space that could be dedicated to battery or another function.
Yes, that space is sooooo valuable that when Apple removed the headphone jack, they filled the space with a piece of molded plastic.
If GW alarmists want to use Tortuga as a poster boy case because "sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average," then GW deniers can use Tortuga as a poster boy case for islands growing faster than they're sinking.
If you try to sway public opinion by using extreme and corner cases to alarm them, then it's hypocritical to cry foul when extreme and corner cases are used to refute you. Stick to using median and mean data and you won't have this problem.
But then people wouldn't have to hire lawyers to help them understand the laws they're supposed to obey. You're forgetting that laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers to read, to benefit lawyers. It's like the coder who deliberately writes obfuscated code and doesn't comment it to guarantee he can't be fired and replaced.
If Ayn Rand is actually your mother, dedicate your book to âoeto Ayn Rand, my mother, and to Godâ.
Actually, that's still ambiguous if "my mother" is modifying "Ayn Rand" or is the second item in a list. I think that sort of in-line aside is better handled with a hyphen: "to my mother - Ayn Rand - and God."
The comma is, unfortunately, overloaded with several different uses. That's what causes the ambiguity in "to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God," not the Oxford comma per se. So in situations where it's ambiguous which function the comma is performing, it's better to substitute a different punctuation mark. Same reason why we substitute a semicolon for a comma in compound lists. e.g. "The members of the project teams were Tom, Dick, and Harry; Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe; Larry, Curly, and Moe; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Because although using a comma for all the separators would work, it'd be too damn confusing.
That's really the end-goal here - clarity. So the rule shouldn't be to always use the Oxford comma or to never use it. The rule should be to write whatever conveys the intended meaning with the least ambiguity.
Is that lack of net neutrality works both ways. The websites can gang up and do unto the ISPs what the ISPs want to do to them. The major websites (Google, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Netflix, etc) could agree that if they detected an ISP throttling any one of them, all of them would throttle that ISP. Then the ISPs would have the power to throttle websites, but would be afraid to use it for fear of signing their own Internet death warrant.
Silicon neurons can switch 10 million times faster, and unlike biological brains, an AI would not be encumbered by the detritus of millions of years of sub-optimal evolutionary local maxima.
Have you wondered why people and animals have a relatively limited lifespan? Clearly biology is capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. Why does it do it via offspring instead of self-sustaining? Why do we age and die off?
After watching human behavior for several decades, I'm convinced the limitation is intellectual, not biological. My grandmother lived through WWII. Japanese soldiers forced her to watch as they raped and killed her sister and niece, all as a ploy to pressure her husband (a doctor) to treat one of their officers. She hated the Japanese to her dying day, even though by that time the vast majority of them had been born well after the war.
A problem we've discovered with neural net AI is hardening. You train the neural net by feeding it data. It detects patterns in the data, learns from them, and changes itself to "expect" the pattern. But as you feed it more data, the neural net loses plasticity. Those patterns get reinforced, and while that makes the neural net better able to cope with expected situations, it simultaneously becomes less able to cope with situations which fall outside expectations. In effect, it becomes prejudiced based on the patterns in its past experiences, making it incapable (or less capable) of adapting to environmental changes which cause new data to no longer fit the patterns it's been trained on.
Our solution to this has been to lock the neutral net after a certain amount of training. When it's gotten good enough to recognize the patterns we want it to recognize, but before it's lost flexibility to deal with situations slightly outside the expected, we freeze it (at which point you can convert it from software to silicon). This prevents further hardening, but it also stops additional learning. This isn't a problem when you're talking about AI for a toaster trained to cook bread to an even brown crust every time. But it is when you're trying to make a machine which constantly learns and thinks for itself.
I suspect old age and death is biology's way of dealing with this problem. It wasn't able to find an easy solution to retraining old neural nets. So it just disposes of them via death, to make room for newer neural nets which are still plastic. Unburdened by having learned things from the past which are no longer applicable (like seeing your sister and niece being raped and killed), it can more quickly learn and adapt to more relevant things here and now.
If I'm right, any silicon AI which can learn 10 million times faster will just reach this state 10 million times quicker, and become so "set in its ways" as to become useless as a learning, thinking entity. Unless you ask it to do something which never changes, like making perfect toast.
The home 3 houses down from mine is a short-term rental. The lawn is unkept and full of dandelions, there's a noticeable increase in the amount of garbage as you walk past it (sometimes including needles used for shooting up drugs), the house's paint is dilapidated and peeling off, and there are regularly 4-6 cars staying there which overflow onto the street regularly depriving the 4 houses around it of street parking. I seem to have gotten lucky and am just outside their sphere of influence, but the two neighbors near me who are closer complain about it all the time. So yes, there are problems associated with short-term rentals that could cause residents to try to ban them via their local government or HOA.
I'm sure there are responsible rental owners too. But the lack of laws governing such rentals means the irresponsible owners can give them a bad name. (And no, the typical AirBnB listing is not someone renting out their home while they're on vacation. The vast majority of listings are by landlords who own multiple units and rent them out short-term year round. If you're going to rent one, try VRBO instead. The landlords I asked (when I was looking for one for the eclipse) said VRBO's referral fees are lower than AirBnB's, and they were willing to pass most of the savings on to me.)
If you get rid of renting homes, then where do you propose people live if they haven't yet saved up enough for a down payment on a house?
Aside from areas with limited housing (either limited by space or by short-sighted zoning restrictions), the logical response to investors buying up houses and parking their money in real estate isn't to outlaw rentals. It's to build more homes. That increases the supply of homes, drives down the price of housing, and devalues money investors have parked in real estate, thereby discouraging buying extra homes as an investment, further increasing the supply of homes, lowing their price further, forcing more investors out.
Evaluating a country's military spending in absolute dollars makes as little sense as evaluating the food budget of a household while ignoring their income and how many people live there. If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP.
The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP. Cutting the U.S. military budget in half would actually put us (currently 3.3%) below the world average (2.2%). And if you factor in that the U.S. is obligated by the treaties ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense, our military spending as percent of the combined GDP drops to 2.6% - not much higher than the world average. Subtract NATO and we'd probably be right around the world average.
The use of eminent domain to take land for commercial purposes is possible because of a Supreme Court decision in 2005. Prior to that decision, eminent domain could only be used to obtain land for government use and public works projects (e.g. freeways). Note that all the conservative justices dissented against the majority decision.
Walker didn't make the rules - the liberal wing of the SCotUS did. Walker is simply using the law as liberals intended it. That's the problem with expanding the powers of government - it by definition diminishes the people's ability to complain about the (ab)use of said power. I believe the relevant idiom here is: You made your bed, now lie in it.
Isn't it time to get some new laws on the books that recognize an individual's rights to be a superuser on their own equipment?
Not necessarily. You can rent or lease equipment.
What needs to happen is a clear legal delineation between a purchase agreement and a lease agreement. If you buy your phone, you should have full superuser rights to it, the ability to repair it without the manufacturing designing in pitfalls to coerce you into buying a new replacement instead, the ability to change or modify the software to your liking.
OTOH if the manufacturers want to control the software on your devices and restrict your ability to repair it (or who you take it to for repairs) after "purchase," then they're looking to lease the equipment to you. In that case, the warranty should last the full term of the lease agreement (they'll repair the device or swap it for a fully functional equivalent if it stops working through no fault of the user). This includes wear and tear like battery life decreasing (you're essentially paying for depreciation when you lease, so you've already paid for wear and tear, and it's the manufacturer's duty to provide you with a product which works according to the initial lease terms throughout the term of the lease).
What's going on today with phones is some bastardization where the manufacturers want to retain control of the device as if it were leased, but want the buyer to bear full liability for failures as if it were a purchase.
You're seriously positing that Robin Williams committed suicide because he was unable to afford healthcare?
The long-term suicide rate in the U.S. has been fairly consistent, while much of the EU's was nearly twice as high in comparison, until it came down in the last three decades. So if there's any correlation to nationalized healthcare, it's negative. There are lots of good arguments for nationalized healthcare, but this isn't one of them.
In most of the world, you have the right to control your own image. Someone can't create a likeness of you and distribute it without your permission. That's why reality shows blur out the faces of people walking around in the background.
If someone using this app got the celebrity's written permission before pasting their face onto a porn star's (and permission of the original movie copyright holder), I'm sure Reddit wouldn't have a problem with it. But likely all of this is being done and distributed without the consent of the people whose faces are being used. That makes it a huge liability for Reddit to allow its distribution via their site, and they're wisely taking steps to keep themselves from being sued into oblivion in what are pretty clearly open and shut cases..
The future you cite can still happen. But the actor you pick for your customizable movie has to have given consent before their likeness can legally be used in the movie. And you can still do it as much as you like and to anyone whom you wish in the privacy of your own home. You just can't distribute it.
I'm conservative and disagree with almost everything Bernie believes in. But I would've voted for him over Trump. Bernie was pretty much the only candidate with a shot to win the nomination that I felt was genuinely honest. And I'd rather have someone honest that I disagree with as President, than someone who'll lie and cheat to win the office. (Since the choice ended up being Clinton and Trump, I ended up voting third party).
However, I think it's fascinating that you seem to have accepted all this propaganda about Russian manipulation. I'd been wondering how well that story had been playing among the Democratic faithful. Aside from the DNC emails (which are really what should've been the news, not who the messenger was), the evidence I've seen of Russian manipulation of the election has been extremely thin. A few tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads (much of which was spent in 2015) in an election where billions of dollars were spent. A little over a thousand fake accounts on a platform which claims billions of accounts. A bit over a million page views on a site where the average person sees 8000 pages per year, means with 214 million users in the U.S. a million views of Russian propaganda pages in 2016 amounted to 0.00006% of the average American's FB pages viewed.
These things are far more likely to be statistical noise than a real conspiracy. IMHO the problem isn't little two-bit sites spreading fake news conspiracy theories over social media. It's when the mainstream media starts spreading fake news conspiracy theories.
It is harder to trick college educated people into believing false statements.
It is harder to trick people with experience in a topic into believing false statements about that topic. Come up with seductive false statements about blue collar jobs, and college educated people will believe it just as easily as blue collar workers will believe seductive false statements about white collar jobs. Likewise, after having managed and run businesses for 10 years, I've found many college graduates and academics with no real-world business experience to be astonishingly naive in their beliefs about how business works.
The problem isn't primarily lack of education as you've concluded. The problem is once people want to believe something (like believing education is the primary distinguishing factor), they stop being objective. Once they want to believe something, they've already decided a certain conclusion is desirable. Any evidence they see will be filtered through that desire. Conforming data will be accepted with little to no skepticism. Contradictory data will be sifted with a fine-toothed comb and the tiniest flaw will be seen as permission to disbelieve the whole thing even if that flaw has minimal impact on its veracity. You're supposed to review the data, and use it to reach a conclusion. But it's human nature to jump to a conclusion, then pick out the data which supports that conclusion.
Very few people I've met are honest enough with themselves to accept contradictory data at face value. Real world experience is one of the few things that can force people to accept contradictory data, and usually they still need to be kicked in the pants by it several times before they'll start to accept that it might actually be correct. Education based on that experience can be useful, but outside of STEM I've found a lot of education is just selecting and presenting the subset of data which supports the viewpoint the instructor believes.
Quality of life matters more than longevity. While it's fun to compare countries by life expectancy, is having a longer lifespan really "better" if you're going to spend that extra 5 years (83 for Japan, 78 for the U.S.) confined to a nursing home needing someone's assistance for all your basic needs and bodily functions?
Maybe "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long" is really the way we should be approaching this. AARP forgive me, but maybe we should decrease or stop funding for research against illnesses which typically afflict us when we're elderly, and concentrate instead on combating diseases which can strike us down in childhood to middle age.
You also need to pay for longer lifespan by working longer (retiring later) if you want to maintain the same standard of living. Is it really worth giving up 3-4 years (retirement at 68-69 instead of 65), in order to gain 5 years of extra life at 78?
Not exactly sure I'd liken this to 60% off a laptop battery. Apple is still making a ton of money off these battery replacements. It's just that the amount they were making has dropped from obscene to huge.
Laptop batteries are typically 30-50 Watt-hours. The iPhone 6 and earlier use about 1500 mAh batteries at 3.8 V, which is 5.7 Watt-hours. By comparison a Samsung Galaxy S5 battery is nearly twice the size - 2800 mAh (10.78 Wh) but costs just $9. I suppose you could say the extra $20 pays for the labor to do the battery swap, if you believe Apple Store workers make $600 an hour.
For all its problems, the U.S. system is still better than Korea's. This type of corruption is part of the reason Korea's GDP per capita is still below $30k (below $40k in PPP), while the U.S. is approaching $60k (that is, the average American is about twice as productive as the average Korean). Corruption diverts money away from where the market wants to send it, decreasing productivity and thus lowering GDP per capita. Mind you, Korea has come a long way in the last 25 years. A spate of building and bridge collapses led to cleaning up a lot of the corruption surrounding government permits and inspections. But it still has a ways to go to genuinely achieve first-world levels of productivity (roughly $40k+).
The "release date" isn't really comparable to iOS release dates. Google releasing Oreo is just the starting point of the development cycle. The phone manufacturers then get it (in its final form) and adapt it to work with their hardware. Then the carriers get the phones and modify it again to their liking (they shouldn't be able to do this, but that's the way it currently works - Apple managed to negotiate contracts which prevents carriers from messing with the OS). The date when the carriers release the update to the phones on their network is the equivalent of the release date when Apple puts out an iOS release.
Google got Oreo out on their Nexus and Pixel phones because they control both the software and hardware on those (like Apple does with the iPhones). That's the 1%. The phone manufacturers are mostly still working on adapting Oreo to their phones. If your phone is rooted, you'll be able to install the update then. If it's not rooted, you'll have to wait yet again for your carrier to mess around with it before it's finally released to your phone over their network. So technically, for the vast majority of Android users, Oreo still hasn't truly been released yet.
I believe that the government has no business meddling with an ISP's class of service configuration. The government does not own the infrastructure, and does not pay for the operations.
Actually, the bone of contention here is that the ISP's lines go through (government-mandated and controlled) public easements. Without the government clearing the way for the easement, each ISP would have to negotiate with thousands if not millions of private landowners for rights to send their wires through their land. You might not be able to get any cable or phone service because the homeowner at the corner of your street refused to let any companies lay down wire through his property.
Since it's the govenrment which allows ISPs access to all customers, the government also has the power to regulate it.
Most importantly, if there is a market for a certain business model where one stream of traffic gets priority over another: let the market handle it.
The market can't handle it because in most places there isn't any market. The local government has granted the cable and phone companies local monopolies. There is no competition. Customers cannot make their displeasure known by switching to a different ISP if both of them decide to throttle services which don't pay them. Like you, I think this is something better left up to the market to decide. But for that to happen, we first need to get rid of the local monopolies so that there's actually competition. Barring that, net neutrality is a good alternative.
I do prefer the way it's happening now - each state is deciding for itself how it wants to handle this. That's kinda the whole point of having states instead of a single Federal government deciding everything like in most other countries. We can try multiple solutions in different states, and get a better idea which ones work and which ones don't. Then we can pick the best solution and implement it at the Federal level. That's a far better process than some Federal official deciding all by himself, without evidence nor data to back him up, based solely on philosophical or ideological grounds, that net neutrality is the way to go, and forcing the entire country to go along with his decision.
If you want to argue from an energy efficiency standpoint, gas ICE vehicles are about 20%-25% efficient. That is, 20%-25% of the energy in the gasoline gets to the wheels to push the car forward.
Electric vehicles are almost the same. The average coal plant and gas plant are about 33% and 43% efficient respectively. Power line transmission losses are about 5%. Battery charging efficiency is about 85% (that is, to put 85 kWh into a battery requires about 100 kWh from the wall socket). Electric motor efficiency about 90%. Battery discharge efficiency about 80%. Multiply these together and you get (33% to 43%)*(95%)*(85%)*(90%)*(80%) = 19% to 25%. So just as with ICE vehicles, only about 20%-25% of the energy in the coal or natural gas makes it to the wheels to push the EV forward.
The primary reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles isn't because they're more efficient. It's because gasoline is an order of magnitude more expensive per megajoule than coal or natural gas.
Coal is about $50 per ton, which at 24 GJ/ton works out to 0.21 cents/MJ.
Natural gas is about $4 per 1000 cubic feet, which at 1.094 GJ per 1000 cubic feet works out to 0.37 cents per MJ.
Gasoline is about $3 per gallon, which at 130 MJ/gallon works out to 2.3 cents/MJ.
There are good advantages to EVs (concentrates fossil fuel combustion at a few plants which you can equip with super-clean filters, are power source-agnostic so can substitute nuclear or renewables for fossil fuel without any change to the car, recapture about 30% of braking energy via regenerative braking, quieter, produce gobs of torque at a standstill). But the claims of better efficiency and lower (zero) carbon emissions are simply untrue, founded on misconceptions by advocates who either haven't or don't know how to do the math. Measuring EV energy use at the battery is like measuring ICE energy use at the engine shaft. The ICE car gets that shaft energy by burning gasoline in the engine. The EV gets that battery power mostly from a coal or gas plant burning those fuels.
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Note that "strength" in this context is per cross sectional area. So taking a block of wood, and compressing it down doesn't change its absolute strength (it can support the same weight as before), but increases its measured strength (load per square mm of cross sectional area before failure). One of the attractions of metals like steel is their isotropic properties - they have the same properties regardless of which direction you load them. Fibrous materials are anisotropic - stronger in certain directions than others.
Glass fibers are also stronger than steel in tension, but they're weaker in compression and absolutely suck in shear (loading perpendicular to the fibers). The fibers just bend sideways instead of offering any resistance. So we embed them in a matrix of plastic (polyester or epoxy) to create fiberglass. Tensile and compressive strength are reduced, but shear strength improves substantially - enough to where you can walk on a fiberglass board whereas raw glass fibers would simply flop over and let you fall through. Where a fiber used to bend, the plastic matrix absorbs and transmits those forces to other fibers, converting shear forces into tension and compression (the board bows downward in the middle, compressing in the top half, stretching in the bottom half).
It sounds like what this team has done is taken wood, and cooked it so the cellulose fibers remain but much of the matrix which holds them together has been removed. That has little consequence in tension, but could weaken shear strength to where the material is structurally useless except as rope/cable.
Too bad potable water doesn't grow on trees. Or fall from the sky.
The problems with potable water are entirely self-made. People want to live where there isn't enough, or political borders prevent people from moving away from areas where there isn't enough to areas where there is enough. Anyone or any corporation exploiting lack of cheap water can only do it because of these two things.
You have that backwards. You can use the waste heat from the nuclear plant (about 2/3 of the energy it produces) to drive thermal evaporative desalination at a lower electrical cost than reverse osmosis. Unfortunately people have this irrational hangup over the word "nuclear" and don't want to drink water desalinated via heat from a nuclear plant, even if it's less radioactive than natural fresh water sources. So we needlessly throw away 2/3 of the energy our nuclear and fossil fuel plants generate in the form of waste heat.
Psychologists have known for decades that the more you can disassociate the purchase from the actual transfer of cash, the more people will spend. People have a tendency to spend more carelessly (and thus spend more) when you disassociate the act of purchasing from the physical act of real cash leaving your possession.
Marketers know this and try to exploit it to generate more sales. This is why Disney likes to sell things in Disney Dollars, why casinos use chips, why some people get in trouble with credit card debt, why you can accidentally overspend when visiting a foreign country and paying with foreign cash. Regulators know it too and cast a wary eye towards anything which exploits it, especially if it involves gambling in the virtual currency.
I'm libertarian and pretty anti-nanny state too. But preventing exploitation of faults in basic human nature which causes people to harm themselves by acting irrationally is precisely one of the things government should be doing. We want to go see the wild rushing river during a flood despite the danger, so the government sends police to keep people away from it. We can get addicted to certain substances, so government regulates or prohibits its distribution. We enjoy the thrill of tempting death by bungee jumping, sky diving, or riding roller coasters. So the government regulates these things to assume minimum safety standards are met. And virtual currencies tend to exacerbate gambling problems, so the government keeps it on a short leash to prevent its widespread exploitation.
That changes the game from being non-deterministic to deterministic. Randomized rewards (e..g loot drop from game bosses, whether a basketball player can make that basket, whether a billiards player can make that shot, what hand you're dealt in poker, etc) are what makes a game non-deterministic. And for many (most) people, are the only thing that makes the game interesting. Eliminate randomness and you're basically playing glorified tic tac toe (chess is deterministic, and is only challenging because the number of possible outcomes exceeds our ability to simultaneously comprehend).
You have it backwards. The length of the jack reduces the leverage on the internal components. The leverage an outside force has depends on the length of the headphone jack outside the device. The length of the jack inside the device increases the leverage of the internal components, increasing their ability to resist torque from something outside yanking on the headphone cable..
Yes, that space is sooooo valuable that when Apple removed the headphone jack, they filled the space with a piece of molded plastic.
If GW alarmists want to use Tortuga as a poster boy case because "sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average," then GW deniers can use Tortuga as a poster boy case for islands growing faster than they're sinking.
If you try to sway public opinion by using extreme and corner cases to alarm them, then it's hypocritical to cry foul when extreme and corner cases are used to refute you. Stick to using median and mean data and you won't have this problem.
But then people wouldn't have to hire lawyers to help them understand the laws they're supposed to obey. You're forgetting that laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers to read, to benefit lawyers. It's like the coder who deliberately writes obfuscated code and doesn't comment it to guarantee he can't be fired and replaced.
Actually, that's still ambiguous if "my mother" is modifying "Ayn Rand" or is the second item in a list. I think that sort of in-line aside is better handled with a hyphen: "to my mother - Ayn Rand - and God."
The comma is, unfortunately, overloaded with several different uses. That's what causes the ambiguity in "to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God," not the Oxford comma per se. So in situations where it's ambiguous which function the comma is performing, it's better to substitute a different punctuation mark. Same reason why we substitute a semicolon for a comma in compound lists. e.g. "The members of the project teams were Tom, Dick, and Harry; Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe; Larry, Curly, and Moe; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Because although using a comma for all the separators would work, it'd be too damn confusing.
That's really the end-goal here - clarity. So the rule shouldn't be to always use the Oxford comma or to never use it. The rule should be to write whatever conveys the intended meaning with the least ambiguity.
Is that lack of net neutrality works both ways. The websites can gang up and do unto the ISPs what the ISPs want to do to them. The major websites (Google, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Netflix, etc) could agree that if they detected an ISP throttling any one of them, all of them would throttle that ISP. Then the ISPs would have the power to throttle websites, but would be afraid to use it for fear of signing their own Internet death warrant.
Have you wondered why people and animals have a relatively limited lifespan? Clearly biology is capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. Why does it do it via offspring instead of self-sustaining? Why do we age and die off?
After watching human behavior for several decades, I'm convinced the limitation is intellectual, not biological. My grandmother lived through WWII. Japanese soldiers forced her to watch as they raped and killed her sister and niece, all as a ploy to pressure her husband (a doctor) to treat one of their officers. She hated the Japanese to her dying day, even though by that time the vast majority of them had been born well after the war.
A problem we've discovered with neural net AI is hardening. You train the neural net by feeding it data. It detects patterns in the data, learns from them, and changes itself to "expect" the pattern. But as you feed it more data, the neural net loses plasticity. Those patterns get reinforced, and while that makes the neural net better able to cope with expected situations, it simultaneously becomes less able to cope with situations which fall outside expectations. In effect, it becomes prejudiced based on the patterns in its past experiences, making it incapable (or less capable) of adapting to environmental changes which cause new data to no longer fit the patterns it's been trained on.
Our solution to this has been to lock the neutral net after a certain amount of training. When it's gotten good enough to recognize the patterns we want it to recognize, but before it's lost flexibility to deal with situations slightly outside the expected, we freeze it (at which point you can convert it from software to silicon). This prevents further hardening, but it also stops additional learning. This isn't a problem when you're talking about AI for a toaster trained to cook bread to an even brown crust every time. But it is when you're trying to make a machine which constantly learns and thinks for itself.
I suspect old age and death is biology's way of dealing with this problem. It wasn't able to find an easy solution to retraining old neural nets. So it just disposes of them via death, to make room for newer neural nets which are still plastic. Unburdened by having learned things from the past which are no longer applicable (like seeing your sister and niece being raped and killed), it can more quickly learn and adapt to more relevant things here and now.
If I'm right, any silicon AI which can learn 10 million times faster will just reach this state 10 million times quicker, and become so "set in its ways" as to become useless as a learning, thinking entity. Unless you ask it to do something which never changes, like making perfect toast.
The home 3 houses down from mine is a short-term rental. The lawn is unkept and full of dandelions, there's a noticeable increase in the amount of garbage as you walk past it (sometimes including needles used for shooting up drugs), the house's paint is dilapidated and peeling off, and there are regularly 4-6 cars staying there which overflow onto the street regularly depriving the 4 houses around it of street parking. I seem to have gotten lucky and am just outside their sphere of influence, but the two neighbors near me who are closer complain about it all the time. So yes, there are problems associated with short-term rentals that could cause residents to try to ban them via their local government or HOA.
I'm sure there are responsible rental owners too. But the lack of laws governing such rentals means the irresponsible owners can give them a bad name. (And no, the typical AirBnB listing is not someone renting out their home while they're on vacation. The vast majority of listings are by landlords who own multiple units and rent them out short-term year round. If you're going to rent one, try VRBO instead. The landlords I asked (when I was looking for one for the eclipse) said VRBO's referral fees are lower than AirBnB's, and they were willing to pass most of the savings on to me.)
If you get rid of renting homes, then where do you propose people live if they haven't yet saved up enough for a down payment on a house?
Aside from areas with limited housing (either limited by space or by short-sighted zoning restrictions), the logical response to investors buying up houses and parking their money in real estate isn't to outlaw rentals. It's to build more homes. That increases the supply of homes, drives down the price of housing, and devalues money investors have parked in real estate, thereby discouraging buying extra homes as an investment, further increasing the supply of homes, lowing their price further, forcing more investors out.
Evaluating a country's military spending in absolute dollars makes as little sense as evaluating the food budget of a household while ignoring their income and how many people live there. If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP.
The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP. Cutting the U.S. military budget in half would actually put us (currently 3.3%) below the world average (2.2%). And if you factor in that the U.S. is obligated by the treaties ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense, our military spending as percent of the combined GDP drops to 2.6% - not much higher than the world average. Subtract NATO and we'd probably be right around the world average.
The use of eminent domain to take land for commercial purposes is possible because of a Supreme Court decision in 2005. Prior to that decision, eminent domain could only be used to obtain land for government use and public works projects (e.g. freeways). Note that all the conservative justices dissented against the majority decision.
Walker didn't make the rules - the liberal wing of the SCotUS did. Walker is simply using the law as liberals intended it. That's the problem with expanding the powers of government - it by definition diminishes the people's ability to complain about the (ab)use of said power. I believe the relevant idiom here is: You made your bed, now lie in it.
Not necessarily. You can rent or lease equipment.
What needs to happen is a clear legal delineation between a purchase agreement and a lease agreement. If you buy your phone, you should have full superuser rights to it, the ability to repair it without the manufacturing designing in pitfalls to coerce you into buying a new replacement instead, the ability to change or modify the software to your liking.
OTOH if the manufacturers want to control the software on your devices and restrict your ability to repair it (or who you take it to for repairs) after "purchase," then they're looking to lease the equipment to you. In that case, the warranty should last the full term of the lease agreement (they'll repair the device or swap it for a fully functional equivalent if it stops working through no fault of the user). This includes wear and tear like battery life decreasing (you're essentially paying for depreciation when you lease, so you've already paid for wear and tear, and it's the manufacturer's duty to provide you with a product which works according to the initial lease terms throughout the term of the lease).
What's going on today with phones is some bastardization where the manufacturers want to retain control of the device as if it were leased, but want the buyer to bear full liability for failures as if it were a purchase.
You're seriously positing that Robin Williams committed suicide because he was unable to afford healthcare?
The long-term suicide rate in the U.S. has been fairly consistent, while much of the EU's was nearly twice as high in comparison, until it came down in the last three decades. So if there's any correlation to nationalized healthcare, it's negative. There are lots of good arguments for nationalized healthcare, but this isn't one of them.
In most of the world, you have the right to control your own image. Someone can't create a likeness of you and distribute it without your permission. That's why reality shows blur out the faces of people walking around in the background.
If someone using this app got the celebrity's written permission before pasting their face onto a porn star's (and permission of the original movie copyright holder), I'm sure Reddit wouldn't have a problem with it. But likely all of this is being done and distributed without the consent of the people whose faces are being used. That makes it a huge liability for Reddit to allow its distribution via their site, and they're wisely taking steps to keep themselves from being sued into oblivion in what are pretty clearly open and shut cases..
The future you cite can still happen. But the actor you pick for your customizable movie has to have given consent before their likeness can legally be used in the movie. And you can still do it as much as you like and to anyone whom you wish in the privacy of your own home. You just can't distribute it.
The thruster on the car overshot. It's now headed for an orbit reaching into the asteroid belt.
I'm conservative and disagree with almost everything Bernie believes in. But I would've voted for him over Trump. Bernie was pretty much the only candidate with a shot to win the nomination that I felt was genuinely honest. And I'd rather have someone honest that I disagree with as President, than someone who'll lie and cheat to win the office. (Since the choice ended up being Clinton and Trump, I ended up voting third party).
However, I think it's fascinating that you seem to have accepted all this propaganda about Russian manipulation. I'd been wondering how well that story had been playing among the Democratic faithful. Aside from the DNC emails (which are really what should've been the news, not who the messenger was), the evidence I've seen of Russian manipulation of the election has been extremely thin. A few tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads (much of which was spent in 2015) in an election where billions of dollars were spent. A little over a thousand fake accounts on a platform which claims billions of accounts. A bit over a million page views on a site where the average person sees 8000 pages per year, means with 214 million users in the U.S. a million views of Russian propaganda pages in 2016 amounted to 0.00006% of the average American's FB pages viewed.
These things are far more likely to be statistical noise than a real conspiracy. IMHO the problem isn't little two-bit sites spreading fake news conspiracy theories over social media. It's when the mainstream media starts spreading fake news conspiracy theories.
It is harder to trick people with experience in a topic into believing false statements about that topic. Come up with seductive false statements about blue collar jobs, and college educated people will believe it just as easily as blue collar workers will believe seductive false statements about white collar jobs. Likewise, after having managed and run businesses for 10 years, I've found many college graduates and academics with no real-world business experience to be astonishingly naive in their beliefs about how business works.
The problem isn't primarily lack of education as you've concluded. The problem is once people want to believe something (like believing education is the primary distinguishing factor), they stop being objective. Once they want to believe something, they've already decided a certain conclusion is desirable. Any evidence they see will be filtered through that desire. Conforming data will be accepted with little to no skepticism. Contradictory data will be sifted with a fine-toothed comb and the tiniest flaw will be seen as permission to disbelieve the whole thing even if that flaw has minimal impact on its veracity. You're supposed to review the data, and use it to reach a conclusion. But it's human nature to jump to a conclusion, then pick out the data which supports that conclusion.
Very few people I've met are honest enough with themselves to accept contradictory data at face value. Real world experience is one of the few things that can force people to accept contradictory data, and usually they still need to be kicked in the pants by it several times before they'll start to accept that it might actually be correct. Education based on that experience can be useful, but outside of STEM I've found a lot of education is just selecting and presenting the subset of data which supports the viewpoint the instructor believes.
Quality of life matters more than longevity. While it's fun to compare countries by life expectancy, is having a longer lifespan really "better" if you're going to spend that extra 5 years (83 for Japan, 78 for the U.S.) confined to a nursing home needing someone's assistance for all your basic needs and bodily functions?
Maybe "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long" is really the way we should be approaching this. AARP forgive me, but maybe we should decrease or stop funding for research against illnesses which typically afflict us when we're elderly, and concentrate instead on combating diseases which can strike us down in childhood to middle age.
You also need to pay for longer lifespan by working longer (retiring later) if you want to maintain the same standard of living. Is it really worth giving up 3-4 years (retirement at 68-69 instead of 65), in order to gain 5 years of extra life at 78?
Not exactly sure I'd liken this to 60% off a laptop battery. Apple is still making a ton of money off these battery replacements. It's just that the amount they were making has dropped from obscene to huge.
Laptop batteries are typically 30-50 Watt-hours. The iPhone 6 and earlier use about 1500 mAh batteries at 3.8 V, which is 5.7 Watt-hours. By comparison a Samsung Galaxy S5 battery is nearly twice the size - 2800 mAh (10.78 Wh) but costs just $9. I suppose you could say the extra $20 pays for the labor to do the battery swap, if you believe Apple Store workers make $600 an hour.
For all its problems, the U.S. system is still better than Korea's. This type of corruption is part of the reason Korea's GDP per capita is still below $30k (below $40k in PPP), while the U.S. is approaching $60k (that is, the average American is about twice as productive as the average Korean). Corruption diverts money away from where the market wants to send it, decreasing productivity and thus lowering GDP per capita. Mind you, Korea has come a long way in the last 25 years. A spate of building and bridge collapses led to cleaning up a lot of the corruption surrounding government permits and inspections. But it still has a ways to go to genuinely achieve first-world levels of productivity (roughly $40k+).
The "release date" isn't really comparable to iOS release dates. Google releasing Oreo is just the starting point of the development cycle. The phone manufacturers then get it (in its final form) and adapt it to work with their hardware. Then the carriers get the phones and modify it again to their liking (they shouldn't be able to do this, but that's the way it currently works - Apple managed to negotiate contracts which prevents carriers from messing with the OS). The date when the carriers release the update to the phones on their network is the equivalent of the release date when Apple puts out an iOS release.
Google got Oreo out on their Nexus and Pixel phones because they control both the software and hardware on those (like Apple does with the iPhones). That's the 1%. The phone manufacturers are mostly still working on adapting Oreo to their phones. If your phone is rooted, you'll be able to install the update then. If it's not rooted, you'll have to wait yet again for your carrier to mess around with it before it's finally released to your phone over their network. So technically, for the vast majority of Android users, Oreo still hasn't truly been released yet.
Actually, the bone of contention here is that the ISP's lines go through (government-mandated and controlled) public easements. Without the government clearing the way for the easement, each ISP would have to negotiate with thousands if not millions of private landowners for rights to send their wires through their land. You might not be able to get any cable or phone service because the homeowner at the corner of your street refused to let any companies lay down wire through his property.
Since it's the govenrment which allows ISPs access to all customers, the government also has the power to regulate it.
The market can't handle it because in most places there isn't any market. The local government has granted the cable and phone companies local monopolies. There is no competition. Customers cannot make their displeasure known by switching to a different ISP if both of them decide to throttle services which don't pay them. Like you, I think this is something better left up to the market to decide. But for that to happen, we first need to get rid of the local monopolies so that there's actually competition. Barring that, net neutrality is a good alternative.
I do prefer the way it's happening now - each state is deciding for itself how it wants to handle this. That's kinda the whole point of having states instead of a single Federal government deciding everything like in most other countries. We can try multiple solutions in different states, and get a better idea which ones work and which ones don't. Then we can pick the best solution and implement it at the Federal level. That's a far better process than some Federal official deciding all by himself, without evidence nor data to back him up, based solely on philosophical or ideological grounds, that net neutrality is the way to go, and forcing the entire country to go along with his decision.
Electric vehicles are almost the same. The average coal plant and gas plant are about 33% and 43% efficient respectively. Power line transmission losses are about 5%. Battery charging efficiency is about 85% (that is, to put 85 kWh into a battery requires about 100 kWh from the wall socket). Electric motor efficiency about 90%. Battery discharge efficiency about 80%. Multiply these together and you get (33% to 43%)*(95%)*(85%)*(90%)*(80%) = 19% to 25%. So just as with ICE vehicles, only about 20%-25% of the energy in the coal or natural gas makes it to the wheels to push the EV forward.
The primary reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles isn't because they're more efficient. It's because gasoline is an order of magnitude more expensive per megajoule than coal or natural gas.
There are good advantages to EVs (concentrates fossil fuel combustion at a few plants which you can equip with super-clean filters, are power source-agnostic so can substitute nuclear or renewables for fossil fuel without any change to the car, recapture about 30% of braking energy via regenerative braking, quieter, produce gobs of torque at a standstill). But the claims of better efficiency and lower (zero) carbon emissions are simply untrue, founded on misconceptions by advocates who either haven't or don't know how to do the math. Measuring EV energy use at the battery is like measuring ICE energy use at the engine shaft. The ICE car gets that shaft energy by burning gasoline in the engine. The EV gets that battery power mostly from a coal or gas plant burning those fuels.