In the past, physical presence was needed to commit a crime (e.g. robbery). This had the natural result of criminals being caught in the jurisdiction in which they committed the crime. Extradition was only needed for criminals who fled the country after the crime.
The Internet changes all that. Now it's possible to reside in one jurisdiction (country), while committing a crime in another. The legal system is just coming to grips with this. c.f. the U.S. trying to get Microsoft's server data that's stored outside the country, France trying to apply its laws to the rest of the world, Kim Dotcom arrested in New Zealand at the behest of the U.S., etc.
Extradition agreements weren't really set up for suspects who fled to another country, not for this type of remote crime. So from this point on we'll be making up new stuff as we go along. It'll probably be a few more decades before it all gets settled down. If multiple judges rule as this judge has (and the same happens when some American kid hacks UK computers), I expect the U.S. and UK will negotiate new extradition treaties which specifically cover this type of case, thereby limiting the leeway the judge had in this particular case.
The tablet market just reached saturation rather quickly. Most of the new sales are replacing older tablets which broke or aren't powerful enough anymore.
The phone market would've saturated quickly too, except every few years a new phone standard comes out (2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G). You pretty much have to upgrade your phone to get the new capability. That was the whole impetus behind Google's Project Ara (phone with upgradable parts).
I find my tablet extremely useful for viewing documents, looking up things quickly on websites, showing off photos without having to lug my laptop around. i.e. Unlike your characterization, it's superior to both the phone and laptop at those tasks. Using it to watch streamed movies in bed has obviated the need for a TV in my bedroom. Lacking a keyboard, it's resistant to spills so I use it to display recipes when cooking. I'd estimate my screen time as 50% laptop, 40% tablet, 20% TV, 10% phone (more than 100% because sometimes I use two at once). It's just that it performs its job so well, that I haven't felt a need to upgrade it (got it in 2015). I did buy a second one for the boat, because I kept forgetting to pack it every time I went fishing. A laptop would've been too expensive for a trivial use like that, but a tablet was cheap enough that it was easy to justify.
Some files have names that reference fantasy elements in WoW - they don't specify, but I assume things like town names. Which would make sense for the server-side implementations of these elements. Whether they can legitimately claim copyright on those names?
If I remember right, when Phoenix reverse engineered the IBM BIOS, they had to put "Copyright IBM" in their BIOS because IBM had put it in the original and required it to operate. The judge ruled that since it was required for the reverse-engineered copy to work, that was a purely functional constraint and thus had no creative element, meaning it couldn't be copyright infringement - copyright infringement being when you have the freedom to do it differently, but you make it the same as the thing you're copying. If IBM had included "Copyright IBM" but not made it required for the BIOS to function, and the reverse-engineered copy also had "Copyright IBM" in it, then that would be a clear copyright violation. It's one of those "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" situations.
So if their client requires those specific names for the server to function, copyright law doesn't apply and the private servers can use the same names. If it doesn't require those specific names, then Blizzard can claim copyright on the names (assuming they're unique to WoW) and force private servers to come up with different names for their towns and such.
3. Vista was the first version of Windows which enforced admin/user separation. Unix-based OSes (Linux, OS X) have this built-in since Unix was designed assuming a multi-user environment. Users are given just enough privileges to run their programs, and likewise user programs are written assuming these minimal permissions. Windows was built upon DOS and the assumption that there was a single user who had total control of the computer. Consequently, even though Windows 2000 introduced the concept of admin/user separation, it was widely ignored. Most Windows programs were written assuming they had admin privileges.
When Vista took away admin privileges (for programs run from a non-admin account), lots of programs stopped running. The ones which did run triggered countless UAE elevation request dialogs - so many that users became trained to just click OK every time it popped up, which pretty much defeated the whole purpose of requiring privilege elevation. Over time, programs were modified to run limited to user privileges, which is why it isn't a problem to run Vista now. But if you had to use it when it was first introduced, it was a nightmare.
4. Microsoft's system requirements for Vista were totally unrealistic. Most XP systems at the time had 128-256 MB of RAM, with the occasional 512 MB system. 1 GB was profligate with XP. Microsoft didn't want to freak people out, so set Vista's minimum memory requirement at an unrealistic 512 MB. With that little RAM, Vista begins swapping the moment you try to start your first program. Realistically, 1 GB is the minimum, 2 GB a comfortable amount.
5. XP was developed from 1998-2001 and released in 2001. Vista was developed from 2001-2006 and released in 2007. 2004-2005 was when Intel ran headfirst into the brick wall of physics (higher clock speeds resulted in excessive leakage and power consumption) and processors stopped doubling in clock speed every 1.5 to 2 years. Based on Windows 3.x, 95, 98, and 2000, Microsoft had assumed CPU speeds would increase by a certain amount from development to release. Consequently, XP was a dog when it was being developed, but by the time it was released computers had gotten fast enough that it performed well on customer machines. Vista was a dog during development, and was still a dog when customers began buying it.
Those of you claiming Vista runs well and was unfairly maligned should try running it on period hardware - a Pentium 4 or Core Solo/Duo (not Core 2) with 512 MB of RAM. I'd say run it with period software too just so you can experience getting a UAE elevation prompt a dozen times a day, but it'll probably be tough to find period software.
Unless something has changed recently, MP3 doesn't support DRM. In fact most of the audio sound formats I've encountered don't support DRM. It's not like the case with movies, where the "video file" format is actually a container containing a video file, audio file, subtitle files, chapter index, etc, and you can insert all sorts of funny ways and conditions to play it. Pretty much all the music audio file formats I've encountered are just straight audio files - compressed, but not encrypted.
The bigger loss is that CDs, being a physical format, carried with them a perpetual license. You could bequeath your CD collection to your children upon your death. The license agreement terms for most online music/movie purchase services grant you a non-transferable license. That is, your "ownership" of the content you've "purchased" expires upon your death. The only way to allow your heirs to inherit your music or movie or ebook or game collection is to break the EULA and share your login and password with them before you expire.
I expect this will be hashed out in court over the next 40 years, as the "loss" of a loved one's or relative's online media collection upon their death becomes more commonplace. People will challenge it, and the courts will have to decide if that's really how we want online "purchases" of copyrighted media to work. In the meantime, you can completely bypass the content industry's attempts to erode our ownership rights of things we've paid money for by purchasing CDs. (Or by pirating stuff - though "pirating" is probably not the right word when it's done to take back rights we should have had from the beginning.)
"This is not a drill" is only to be included if it is not a drill.
Drills are to be preceded and ended by the phrase "exercise exercise exercise."
For a false alert to be sent out, both safeguards have to fail. Presumably staff are trained that either the absence of "this is not a drill" or the presence of "exercise exercise exercise" indicates a drill. In other words, it is only real if the broadcast contains the phrase "this is not a drill", AND is not begun nor ended with "exercise exercise exercise."
The first safeguard failed when a supervisor played the incorrect broadcast to staff - one which included the phrase "this is not a drill." He did however correctly include "exercise exercise exercise" at the beginning and end of the broadcast.
The second safeguard also failed. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency fired the employee because they think he ignored the "exercise exercise exercise" in the broadcast. The fired employee claims another employee cut off the phone broadcast before the ending "exercise exercise exercise" so he never heard it.
I agree they should've waited until after an investigation to fire him. But the inclusion of the phrase "this is not a drill" does not automatically absolve the employee of responsibility for the mistake. The system you're advocating only has a single safeguard, which is a really dumb way to design a system which could potentially incite panic.on a state-wide scale. They correctly designed it with multiple safeguards, and it is possible that the employee ignored the second safeguard, which would in fact make him responsible for the false alert.
ALS Scan seems to have forgotten that Cs* like Cloudflare exist to reduce costs for publishers. Instead of CNN having to pay for the network traffic from their main server for every visitor to cnn.com, the site gets cached by Cs at strategic geographic locations around the world. Visitors can then get the content from their local cache, avoiding the extra bandwidth and expense of having to transmit that redundant data thousands or millions of times over the Internet backbone between the local cache and CNN's servers.
So any "victory" in court making life harder for Cs will just result in publishers's expenses going up. If they mange to force Cs to police the content they cache for copyright violations, the Cs will simply pass the cost of that policing back to them via higher prices. If they get the court to give them a monetary award from Cs, the Cs will just pass the cost of the award back to them via higher prices. If they manage to get Cs outlawed, their network and server costs will rise by more than they had been paying the Cs. Even if the Cs could enforce copyright at no extra cost, the price they'd charge publishers would still go up - if the Cs have to stop caching copyright-infringing sites, they have to amortize their expenses over fewer customers, meaning the price for their remaining customers goes up. In other words, there's no outcome here which results in true victory for the publishers. Cs were developed as a way to cut costs for publishers, so screwing around with them by definition increases the cost to publishers.
The whole thing reminds me of the newspapers suing Google to stop Google News from using snippets of their articles, who promptly fell off the web when they "won" and Google stopped using them as a source for Google News.
* Cs = CDNs. Apparently using "CDNs" six times in a slashdot post triggers the lameness filter.
Because no government has ever funded something surreptitiously, sending the money through five offshore bank accounts and a dozen shell companies before it arrives at the intended recipient. No sirree, that has never happened in the entirety of modern history. So this move by YouTube will completely expose government-funded propaganda.
This is gonna backfire massively. The honest and "open" governments will get their content flagged as state-funded propaganda. The dishonest and lying governments will take measures to hide their funding so their propaganda isn't flagged.
The first gen of Intel's M processors was crippled in that they would only turbo boost when running on a single core. When using both cores, they were limited to their base clock speed. Since their base clock speed was 800 MHz - 1.1 GHz (turbo boosting to 2 - 2.9 GHz), this completely crippled their performance.
Subsequent generations (the m3, m5, m7 series) can turbo boost on both cores. Their performance is primarily limited by thermal throttling (since they're often used in fanless systems). Couple that with them coming with 4 MB of L3 cache as standard, vs only 3 MB for many i3 and i5 processors, and for short tasks (where they don't hit their thermal throttling limit) they can actually be faster than a dual core i5, clock for clock.
You don't want to use them to encode videos or compiling large projects or doing massive amounts of number crunching. But for bursty loads like web browsing and office tasks, they are quite good processors.
When the Cold War ended, the was an apocryphal story that a bunch of spies from the CIA and the KGB got together at a bar for drinks and to swap war stories. The CIA members lamented that due to the Soviet Union's closed society, their job had been so difficult. It was a major production just to get a single operative into the U.S.S.R. And how easy it must have been for the KGB to send agents into the U.S. to take photos of U.S. military assets at will.
The KGB members vehemently disagreed. They said that theirs had been the harder job. That while it was easy to get into the U.S., the free society produced so much information that it was difficult for them to pick out the signal from the noise. Every time the National Enquirer or some local newspaper printed a story about the U.S. government hiding a crashed UFO or someone with psychic powers or a plane invisible to radar, they had to use manpower to investigate if this was a real thing or just made-up BS.
Hiding stuff is hard. Making noise is easy. Why try to tackle the herculean task of trying to make yourself invisible to people spying on you, when you can just create the illusion of dozens of images of yourself, and leave the spies with the herculean task of trying to figure out which one is the real you? I've long advocated that the best way to fight browser tracking isn't to try to hide yourself. It's to pollute the data they're collecting about you. Someone needs to come up with a program or browser extension which when turned on follows random links on each page every few seconds (the extension can learn how long based on your actual browsing patterns), sometimes in new tabs, occasionally closing tabs, and occasionally going to google.com and searching random dictionary words to start the process over again.
Every time you step away from the computer, you can just turn that program on to pollute the data in the profile that Facebook, Google, et al have built up on you.
It's data Equifax has collected from lenders and companies you did business with in the past. Should a restaurant be allowed to freeze Yelp, preventing the site from from publicizing reviews visitors have posted of that restaurant?
In the former case, Equifax is taking "reviews" of you that companies have given it, and sharing them with other companies. You are not the customer. You are a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about you.
In the latter case, Yelp is taking reviews of the restaurant that visitors have given it, and sharing them with other visitors. The restaurant is not the customer. It is a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about it.
The court decided that "the suit failed to show a direct connection between Islamic State's use of Twitter and the fatal attack." In other words, if there had been a direct connection between the use of Twitter and the fatal attack, then Twitter may in fact have been liable.
The distinction between this case and your Post Office example is common carrier status. The USPS is a common carrier, so they weren't liable for delivering letters with anthrax. But if they had had a policy of opening letters and packages, and refusing to deliver certain types of mail based on their own standards, then they could be liable for failing to stop the letters with anthrax.
If Twitter is agnostic towards its customers and allows anyone and everyone to use their services, then they are a common carrier and not responsible for illegal uses of their service. This is how Twitter would have to behave for your Post Office analogy to work.
If Twitter bans customers over content they post or who they follow or retweet, or selectively deletes tweets based on criteria they choose (not the customer), then they have willingly given up common carrier status and are potentially liable for the content that gets posted via their service. This is how the court considered Twitter.
A more apt Post Office analogy would be if the USPS regularly opened and read people's mail and refused certain shipments, but they did not stop delivery of a newsletter encouraging poisoning people with anthrax. And someone had been killed by an anthrax attack not delivered via the USPS.
There's a reason that the commercial software publishers (Adobe, Autodesk, etc.) are all going subscription based, hint, it's not because it's better for consumers. It's because it's much more lucrative for them
It may or may not be more lucrative. What driving the subscription model is predictability. It's the accounting department which is pushing these companies to adopt the subscription model. Their job is a lot easier if they know they have x subscribers paying $y per year, and they can model how much x will increase or decrease next year. Under the purchase model, they know they made $x from the release of last year's version, but have no clue how much they'll make from releasing next year's version.
As noble as committing corporate seppuku to uphold a principle may be, it means you're no longer around to uphold that principle anymore. You can't instill it upon others, you deprive the side advocating that principle a voice, and your example soon fades from memory. A more noble course of action would've been actively and publicly fighting the Feds' attempts to get them to release secure emails.
As General Patton put it, "I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."
Only two of the Seagate drive models (ST400DM001, ST400DM005) had excessively high failure rates, and the worst one (ST400DM005) had been in use the shortest time of all drive models in the report by far and suffered a single failure. The confidence interval chart shows this - the low end of the confidence interval of that model is 0.0% - meaning for all we know it could be the most reliable drive in the report, it just had the misfortune of a random failure soon after they began using it.
Subtract those two models, and Seagate's aggregate failure rate is lower than WD's.
Whenever Backblaze puts one of these reports out, I keep having to tell people: Every drive model tries using different components and different technologies to eek out better performance and capacity. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The way you should be using these reports is to decide which drive models to avoid, not which manufacturer. That's why Backblaze breaks it down by drive model, and apparently they've wisened up and not made a chart summarizing each manufacturer.
By withdrawing the award, specifically as a response to information about Nolan's behaviour, the GDC is not saying that Nolan wasn't influential or that he didn't achieve what he did. It's saying that his actions outside of those achievements are such that he isn't the person the GDC would like to hold up as a positive example.
As much as I respect that position, just like the award was rescinded because of conflating his behavior with his accomplishments, the rescission has now caused a schism between the meaning of the award and accomplishment.
I was a kid when the Atari VCS hit the store shelves. It was the first mass-consumer microprocessor-controlled computing device in history. Yes there were other computers for sale at the same time, some even before, many more powerful. But the Atari was the one that became ubiquitous in people's homes. It was most people's first experience with a programmable computing device at home. It was the one that introduced the masses to the idea of one device serve multiple functions (different games in this case) simply by switching the program it was running.
If the guy who made that possible isn't worthy of your lifetime achievement award in computer gaming, then your lifetime achievement award in computer gaming is pretty meaningless. It's like denying Wernher von Braun's contributions to space exploration because he originally built the V2 for the Nazis which killed thousands. Sometimes a person's achievements and contribution to advancing the state of technology completely overshadow the negative things s/he may also have done. I get the feeling the people protesting him getting the award either weren't around in the late 1970s, or didn't care about video games so completely missed what an important milestone the Atari VCS was in history.
Except instead of explicitly charging older people a higher rate based on an age cutoff, they simply offer a discount for students and children. The correlation is very close to an age-based cutoff, except you don't get in trouble for age discrimination. Kinda like how insurance companies can't charge more based on race, but they can charge more if you live in a certain zip code which just so happens to correlate strongly with race.
So what they were trying to do wasn't stupid. They just implemented it wrong.
You can back out ICE efficiency from the EVs on the road. Let's use the Nissan Leaf (you'll see why later). EPA rating of 30 kWh per 100 miles. 112 MPGe combined, 101 MPGe.highway. Top speed of 93 MPH.
30 kWh per 100 miles = 108 Megajoules per 100 miles. Since we're trying to do a comparison and ICE cars don't have regenerative braking, we need to compare the highway mileage. Since the Leaf gets 101 MPGe on the highway vs 112 MPGe combined, this works out to (112/101)*(108 MJ) = 119.8 MJ per 100 miles on the highway. Note that this is energy stored in the battery. To do the comparison, we need energy at wheels to the ground.
Electric motor + inverter efficiency is typically about 85%-93% (page 35). That's for a Prius' motor (the only one I could find detailed stats for), but they're all pretty similar at these levels of power output. Since there's no gearing, if you align the Leaf's top speed of 93 MPH with 6000 RPM, then the highway speed of 55 MPH corresponds to (55/93)*(6000 RPM) = 3550 RPM. Which puts us right around 90% efficiency.
I couldn't find any numbers for battery discharge efficiency. Battery charging efficiency for a Tesla with the home charger is about 85%. Battery discharge efficiency is typically a bit worse (even more so at higher loads, which is why jackrabbit or ludicrous mode starts kill your rnage). so go with 80%. (For those of you complaining this is too unfavorable to EVs, a lower discharge efficiency here corresponds to lower ICE efficiency later on.)
So 119.8 MJ from the battery becomes (119.8 MJ)*(90%)*(80%) = 86.3 MJ per 100 miles wheels-to-ground. The extra energy is lost as heat to the battery, wiring, inverter, and motor.
Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 MJ/L = 129.5 MJ/gallon. To figure out how many gallons were used in 100 miles, we need the MPG of a gas-powered Leaf. Fortunately we have one - the Leaf's aerodynamic and rolling resistance is almost identical to the Versa since it shares the same body and frame (I had to go back to 2014 to get the hatchback version with a regular transmission). Highway mileage is 35 MPG. Meaning (129.5 MJ/gal)*(100 miles)/(35 miles/gal) = 370 MJ worth of gasoline consumed per 100 miles.
Overall highway efficiency of the ICE and drivetrain is then energy wheels-to-ground vs energy in the gasoline. (86.3 MJ)/(370 MJ) = 23.3%. It's rated at 26 MPG city, so overall efficiency in city driving is (26/35)*(23.3%) = 17.3%. A far cry from the 12% you came up with.
We can also calculate overall efficiency for the EV, from energy source to wheels-to-ground, just like we calculated it for the ICE vehicle from energy source (gasoline) to wheels-to-ground. The average efficiency of a coal plant is about 33%. The average efficiency of a natural gas plant is about 43%. Power line transmission losses are about 5%. As mentioned before, charging efficiency (for a home charger) is around 85%, discharge efficiency around 80%, motor efficiency around 90%. To get an overall efficiency of (33% or 43%)*(95%)*(85%)*(80%)*(90%) = 19.2% or 25%. If you use a fast charger like a Supercharger station, it's even worse, since the charging efficiency is even lower (more of the electricity is lost as heat) the more quickly you charge the battery.
So an EV powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels isn't any more energy efficient than an ICE vehicle. The reason it's cheaper to charge an EV is almost entirely because gasoline is damn expensive for an energy source. Coal costs about $50/ton and contains ab
Nuclear plants are typically run at max capacity, and renewables can't willfully increase the amount of electricity they generate. So any excess electricity generation has to come from fossil fuels. So buying electricity from a renewable plant doesn't change the total amount of renewable energy generated. If this wind farm was going to sell all the electricity it produced even if T-Mobile didn't buy any of it, then there's been no net change in the amount of fossil fuels consumed to generate electricity. All T-Mobile has done is cause a bunch of people who would've bought electricity from this wind farm, to buy electricity from a coal or gas plant instead.
Before
100 MWh generated by fossil fuels
20 MWh generated by wind farm
T-Mobile consumes 10 MWh of fossil fuel electricity, everyone else consumes 90 MWh of fossil fuel electricity
Everyone else consumes 20 MWh of wind electricity.
After:
100 MWh generated by fossil fuels
20 MWh generated by wind farm
T-Mobile consumes 10 MWh of wind electricity, everyone else consumes 10 MWh of wind electricity.
Everyone else consumes 100 MWh of fossil fuel electricity.
No net change in fossil fuel consumption. Assuming your energy consumption remains the same, to cause a real reduction in fossil fuel use, you have to use renewable energy which otherwise wasn't going to be generated e.g. If T-Mobile decided to install new wind turbines on property they owned, that would result in:
90 MWh generated by fossil fuels
20 MWh generated by wind farm, 10 MWh generated by T-Mobile's wind turbines
T-Mobile consumes 10 MWh of wind electricity, everyone else consumes 20 MWh of wind electricity
Eveyrone else consumes 90 MWh of fossil fuel electricity
That's a net 10 MWh of fossil fuel electricity consumption. Real changes in renewable energy use comes from adding renewable generation. Not from buying your electricity from a renewable source that was going to sell it all whether or not you bought form them. Likewise, charging your EV with solar panels on your house doesn't reduce the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels. It only reduces it if the only reason you installed the panels was because you got the EV (that is, if you hadn't gotten the EV you wouldn't have installed the panels). If you were going to install the panels anyway, all you've done is shift solar electricity that was going to be used to your house, to be used your EV instead.
For the same reason, it's important to realize that energy conservation has the same impact regardless of whether you live in an area which gets most of its electricity from renewables or from fossil fuels. The entire electrical grid interconnected. Electricity generated by renewables that is not used locally is transmitted to other areas, where it causes a reduction in the amount of energy that needs to be generated by fossil fuel plants
These are people who think that they can establish what's true based on faith and feelings, not research and facts. To them, preponderance of evidence means "what does your gut tell you".
Everyone processes information that way. It's a shortcut our brains take to reduce the amount of processing necessary to interpret what's going on in the world. When you're driving, you don't look at every tree you pass in detail, examine the leaves, branches, and trunk, and decide "yup that's a tree, better steer clear of it." That would take way too much time and we wouldn't be able to drive faster than 5 MPH if we processed information that way. Instead, you see something that looks vaguely tree-like out of the corner of your eye, and decide better safe than sorry and immediately classify it as a tree. And when it turns out not to be a tree, but is a kid with a patterned shirt standing next to a telephone poll with a bush behind him who unexpectedly jumps into the street in front of you, you have an accident.
By attributing the problem to "these people" instead of "we", you are excluding yourself as if you're somehow immune to this. Yes, some of us are better at avoiding jumping to conclusions like this, but all of us do it. It's just our brains handle situations that would otherwise require making hundreds or thousands of decisions every second. Pretending you're immune to it just makes yourself blind to when you do it.
Stereotyping and discrimination have the same cause. Rather than take the time to categorize every individual chair we encounter, we develop a mental model of a generic "chair" and the attributes it should possess. Then we assume all chairs we encounter have those attributes. That way we can treat a chair correctly 98% of the time at a much reduced mental workload. The problems caused by the 2% when our mental model is wrong is preferable to the additional workload that would be needed to process the other 98% of chairs. The problem comes about when we take attributes that are true of, say, 70% of a race or gender, and assume they apply to all members of that race or gender. You have to be cognizant of the times when such over-generalization will fail safe, vs fail dangerously.
I know this is a mental shortcut my brain takes, and I still catch myself doing it several times every day. If you somehow think they're above making these mistakes, you're just blissfully ignorant of the times when you do. Just like the people you're criticizing.
Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat.
The turnout was as expected. The discrepancy was that people likely to vote for Trump were unlikely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump due to public shaming of Trump supporters by the media. That USC/LA Times poll was pretty much the only one to predict a Trump victory. They reached that conclusion when they noticed that Trump supporters reported they were very uncomfortable telling pollsters that they were Trump supporters. They tweaked their model to account for that (that more Trump supporters weren't telling pollsters who they were voting for, than Clinton supporters).
The press broke the #1 rule of reporting news - do it in an unbiased manner so you don't affect the story with your presence. By not only participating in but apparently gleefully encouraging the shaming of Trump supporters, they caused said supporters to disappear from their own polls, creating the "surprise" Trump win in 2016.
To be clear, without the emoticon, the meaning behind the phrase in question was already ambiguous (as short, written statements like you find on forums often are). The emoticon pushed it from the "could be misinterpreted as defamation" category to "not defamation."
So contrary to the way TFA is presenting this, the emoticon actually clarified the meaning of the written statement. Which if you think about it, is the entire reason emoticons were invented in the first place. The cases TFA cites where the meaning of the emoticon is ambiguous are cases where the meaning/intent of the written statement was already ambiguous, and the emoticon didn't clarify the meaning enough.
According to your link, that bill didn't become law until 2016. Opioid overdose deaths began to skyrocket in 2013, long before the bill was even written.
Based on your link, the more likely culprit was lobbying by pharmaceutical companies getting the bigwigs at the DEA to change enforcement policies.
In 2011, more than 17,000 Americans died from opioid prescription overdoses. That same year Cardinal Health, the second largest distributor, started pushing back at Joe Rannazzisi. The companies' attorneys went over his head and called his bosses at the Justice Department, who called in Rannazzisi to have him explain his tactics.
JOE RANNAZZISI: And it in-- infuriated me that I was over there, trying to explain what my motives were or why I was going after these corporations? And when I went back to the office, and I sat down with my staff, I basically said, "You know, I just got questioned on why we're doing-- why we're doing what we're doing. This is-- this-- this is-- now this is war. We're going after these people and we're not going to stop.
[...]
Rannazzisi says the drug industry used that money and influence to pressure top lawyers at the DEA to take a softer approach. Former DEA attorney Jonathan Novak said it divided the litigation office. He said in 2013, he noticed a sea change in the way prosecutions of big distributors were handled. Cases his supervisors once would have easily approved, now weren't good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
In the past, physical presence was needed to commit a crime (e.g. robbery). This had the natural result of criminals being caught in the jurisdiction in which they committed the crime. Extradition was only needed for criminals who fled the country after the crime.
The Internet changes all that. Now it's possible to reside in one jurisdiction (country), while committing a crime in another. The legal system is just coming to grips with this. c.f. the U.S. trying to get Microsoft's server data that's stored outside the country, France trying to apply its laws to the rest of the world, Kim Dotcom arrested in New Zealand at the behest of the U.S., etc.
Extradition agreements weren't really set up for suspects who fled to another country, not for this type of remote crime. So from this point on we'll be making up new stuff as we go along. It'll probably be a few more decades before it all gets settled down. If multiple judges rule as this judge has (and the same happens when some American kid hacks UK computers), I expect the U.S. and UK will negotiate new extradition treaties which specifically cover this type of case, thereby limiting the leeway the judge had in this particular case.
The tablet market just reached saturation rather quickly. Most of the new sales are replacing older tablets which broke or aren't powerful enough anymore.
The phone market would've saturated quickly too, except every few years a new phone standard comes out (2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G). You pretty much have to upgrade your phone to get the new capability. That was the whole impetus behind Google's Project Ara (phone with upgradable parts).
I find my tablet extremely useful for viewing documents, looking up things quickly on websites, showing off photos without having to lug my laptop around. i.e. Unlike your characterization, it's superior to both the phone and laptop at those tasks. Using it to watch streamed movies in bed has obviated the need for a TV in my bedroom. Lacking a keyboard, it's resistant to spills so I use it to display recipes when cooking. I'd estimate my screen time as 50% laptop, 40% tablet, 20% TV, 10% phone (more than 100% because sometimes I use two at once). It's just that it performs its job so well, that I haven't felt a need to upgrade it (got it in 2015). I did buy a second one for the boat, because I kept forgetting to pack it every time I went fishing. A laptop would've been too expensive for a trivial use like that, but a tablet was cheap enough that it was easy to justify.
If I remember right, when Phoenix reverse engineered the IBM BIOS, they had to put "Copyright IBM" in their BIOS because IBM had put it in the original and required it to operate. The judge ruled that since it was required for the reverse-engineered copy to work, that was a purely functional constraint and thus had no creative element, meaning it couldn't be copyright infringement - copyright infringement being when you have the freedom to do it differently, but you make it the same as the thing you're copying. If IBM had included "Copyright IBM" but not made it required for the BIOS to function, and the reverse-engineered copy also had "Copyright IBM" in it, then that would be a clear copyright violation. It's one of those "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" situations.
So if their client requires those specific names for the server to function, copyright law doesn't apply and the private servers can use the same names. If it doesn't require those specific names, then Blizzard can claim copyright on the names (assuming they're unique to WoW) and force private servers to come up with different names for their towns and such.
3. Vista was the first version of Windows which enforced admin/user separation. Unix-based OSes (Linux, OS X) have this built-in since Unix was designed assuming a multi-user environment. Users are given just enough privileges to run their programs, and likewise user programs are written assuming these minimal permissions. Windows was built upon DOS and the assumption that there was a single user who had total control of the computer. Consequently, even though Windows 2000 introduced the concept of admin/user separation, it was widely ignored. Most Windows programs were written assuming they had admin privileges.
When Vista took away admin privileges (for programs run from a non-admin account), lots of programs stopped running. The ones which did run triggered countless UAE elevation request dialogs - so many that users became trained to just click OK every time it popped up, which pretty much defeated the whole purpose of requiring privilege elevation. Over time, programs were modified to run limited to user privileges, which is why it isn't a problem to run Vista now. But if you had to use it when it was first introduced, it was a nightmare.
4. Microsoft's system requirements for Vista were totally unrealistic. Most XP systems at the time had 128-256 MB of RAM, with the occasional 512 MB system. 1 GB was profligate with XP. Microsoft didn't want to freak people out, so set Vista's minimum memory requirement at an unrealistic 512 MB. With that little RAM, Vista begins swapping the moment you try to start your first program. Realistically, 1 GB is the minimum, 2 GB a comfortable amount.
5. XP was developed from 1998-2001 and released in 2001. Vista was developed from 2001-2006 and released in 2007. 2004-2005 was when Intel ran headfirst into the brick wall of physics (higher clock speeds resulted in excessive leakage and power consumption) and processors stopped doubling in clock speed every 1.5 to 2 years. Based on Windows 3.x, 95, 98, and 2000, Microsoft had assumed CPU speeds would increase by a certain amount from development to release. Consequently, XP was a dog when it was being developed, but by the time it was released computers had gotten fast enough that it performed well on customer machines. Vista was a dog during development, and was still a dog when customers began buying it.
Those of you claiming Vista runs well and was unfairly maligned should try running it on period hardware - a Pentium 4 or Core Solo/Duo (not Core 2) with 512 MB of RAM. I'd say run it with period software too just so you can experience getting a UAE elevation prompt a dozen times a day, but it'll probably be tough to find period software.
Unless something has changed recently, MP3 doesn't support DRM. In fact most of the audio sound formats I've encountered don't support DRM. It's not like the case with movies, where the "video file" format is actually a container containing a video file, audio file, subtitle files, chapter index, etc, and you can insert all sorts of funny ways and conditions to play it. Pretty much all the music audio file formats I've encountered are just straight audio files - compressed, but not encrypted.
The bigger loss is that CDs, being a physical format, carried with them a perpetual license. You could bequeath your CD collection to your children upon your death. The license agreement terms for most online music/movie purchase services grant you a non-transferable license. That is, your "ownership" of the content you've "purchased" expires upon your death. The only way to allow your heirs to inherit your music or movie or ebook or game collection is to break the EULA and share your login and password with them before you expire.
I expect this will be hashed out in court over the next 40 years, as the "loss" of a loved one's or relative's online media collection upon their death becomes more commonplace. People will challenge it, and the courts will have to decide if that's really how we want online "purchases" of copyrighted media to work. In the meantime, you can completely bypass the content industry's attempts to erode our ownership rights of things we've paid money for by purchasing CDs. (Or by pirating stuff - though "pirating" is probably not the right word when it's done to take back rights we should have had from the beginning.)
For a false alert to be sent out, both safeguards have to fail. Presumably staff are trained that either the absence of "this is not a drill" or the presence of "exercise exercise exercise" indicates a drill. In other words, it is only real if the broadcast contains the phrase "this is not a drill", AND is not begun nor ended with "exercise exercise exercise."
The first safeguard failed when a supervisor played the incorrect broadcast to staff - one which included the phrase "this is not a drill." He did however correctly include "exercise exercise exercise" at the beginning and end of the broadcast.
The second safeguard also failed. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency fired the employee because they think he ignored the "exercise exercise exercise" in the broadcast. The fired employee claims another employee cut off the phone broadcast before the ending "exercise exercise exercise" so he never heard it.
I agree they should've waited until after an investigation to fire him. But the inclusion of the phrase "this is not a drill" does not automatically absolve the employee of responsibility for the mistake. The system you're advocating only has a single safeguard, which is a really dumb way to design a system which could potentially incite panic.on a state-wide scale. They correctly designed it with multiple safeguards, and it is possible that the employee ignored the second safeguard, which would in fact make him responsible for the false alert.
ALS Scan seems to have forgotten that Cs* like Cloudflare exist to reduce costs for publishers. Instead of CNN having to pay for the network traffic from their main server for every visitor to cnn.com, the site gets cached by Cs at strategic geographic locations around the world. Visitors can then get the content from their local cache, avoiding the extra bandwidth and expense of having to transmit that redundant data thousands or millions of times over the Internet backbone between the local cache and CNN's servers.
So any "victory" in court making life harder for Cs will just result in publishers's expenses going up. If they mange to force Cs to police the content they cache for copyright violations, the Cs will simply pass the cost of that policing back to them via higher prices. If they get the court to give them a monetary award from Cs, the Cs will just pass the cost of the award back to them via higher prices. If they manage to get Cs outlawed, their network and server costs will rise by more than they had been paying the Cs. Even if the Cs could enforce copyright at no extra cost, the price they'd charge publishers would still go up - if the Cs have to stop caching copyright-infringing sites, they have to amortize their expenses over fewer customers, meaning the price for their remaining customers goes up. In other words, there's no outcome here which results in true victory for the publishers. Cs were developed as a way to cut costs for publishers, so screwing around with them by definition increases the cost to publishers.
The whole thing reminds me of the newspapers suing Google to stop Google News from using snippets of their articles, who promptly fell off the web when they "won" and Google stopped using them as a source for Google News.
* Cs = CDNs. Apparently using "CDNs" six times in a slashdot post triggers the lameness filter.
Because no government has ever funded something surreptitiously, sending the money through five offshore bank accounts and a dozen shell companies before it arrives at the intended recipient. No sirree, that has never happened in the entirety of modern history. So this move by YouTube will completely expose government-funded propaganda.
This is gonna backfire massively. The honest and "open" governments will get their content flagged as state-funded propaganda. The dishonest and lying governments will take measures to hide their funding so their propaganda isn't flagged.
The first gen of Intel's M processors was crippled in that they would only turbo boost when running on a single core. When using both cores, they were limited to their base clock speed. Since their base clock speed was 800 MHz - 1.1 GHz (turbo boosting to 2 - 2.9 GHz), this completely crippled their performance.
Subsequent generations (the m3, m5, m7 series) can turbo boost on both cores. Their performance is primarily limited by thermal throttling (since they're often used in fanless systems). Couple that with them coming with 4 MB of L3 cache as standard, vs only 3 MB for many i3 and i5 processors, and for short tasks (where they don't hit their thermal throttling limit) they can actually be faster than a dual core i5, clock for clock.
You don't want to use them to encode videos or compiling large projects or doing massive amounts of number crunching. But for bursty loads like web browsing and office tasks, they are quite good processors.
When the Cold War ended, the was an apocryphal story that a bunch of spies from the CIA and the KGB got together at a bar for drinks and to swap war stories. The CIA members lamented that due to the Soviet Union's closed society, their job had been so difficult. It was a major production just to get a single operative into the U.S.S.R. And how easy it must have been for the KGB to send agents into the U.S. to take photos of U.S. military assets at will.
The KGB members vehemently disagreed. They said that theirs had been the harder job. That while it was easy to get into the U.S., the free society produced so much information that it was difficult for them to pick out the signal from the noise. Every time the National Enquirer or some local newspaper printed a story about the U.S. government hiding a crashed UFO or someone with psychic powers or a plane invisible to radar, they had to use manpower to investigate if this was a real thing or just made-up BS.
Hiding stuff is hard. Making noise is easy. Why try to tackle the herculean task of trying to make yourself invisible to people spying on you, when you can just create the illusion of dozens of images of yourself, and leave the spies with the herculean task of trying to figure out which one is the real you? I've long advocated that the best way to fight browser tracking isn't to try to hide yourself. It's to pollute the data they're collecting about you. Someone needs to come up with a program or browser extension which when turned on follows random links on each page every few seconds (the extension can learn how long based on your actual browsing patterns), sometimes in new tabs, occasionally closing tabs, and occasionally going to google.com and searching random dictionary words to start the process over again.
Every time you step away from the computer, you can just turn that program on to pollute the data in the profile that Facebook, Google, et al have built up on you.
It's data Equifax has collected from lenders and companies you did business with in the past. Should a restaurant be allowed to freeze Yelp, preventing the site from from publicizing reviews visitors have posted of that restaurant?
In the former case, Equifax is taking "reviews" of you that companies have given it, and sharing them with other companies. You are not the customer. You are a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about you.
In the latter case, Yelp is taking reviews of the restaurant that visitors have given it, and sharing them with other visitors. The restaurant is not the customer. It is a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about it.
The distinction between this case and your Post Office example is common carrier status. The USPS is a common carrier, so they weren't liable for delivering letters with anthrax. But if they had had a policy of opening letters and packages, and refusing to deliver certain types of mail based on their own standards, then they could be liable for failing to stop the letters with anthrax.
A more apt Post Office analogy would be if the USPS regularly opened and read people's mail and refused certain shipments, but they did not stop delivery of a newsletter encouraging poisoning people with anthrax. And someone had been killed by an anthrax attack not delivered via the USPS.
It may or may not be more lucrative. What driving the subscription model is predictability. It's the accounting department which is pushing these companies to adopt the subscription model. Their job is a lot easier if they know they have x subscribers paying $y per year, and they can model how much x will increase or decrease next year. Under the purchase model, they know they made $x from the release of last year's version, but have no clue how much they'll make from releasing next year's version.
As noble as committing corporate seppuku to uphold a principle may be, it means you're no longer around to uphold that principle anymore. You can't instill it upon others, you deprive the side advocating that principle a voice, and your example soon fades from memory. A more noble course of action would've been actively and publicly fighting the Feds' attempts to get them to release secure emails.
As General Patton put it, "I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."
Only two of the Seagate drive models (ST400DM001, ST400DM005) had excessively high failure rates, and the worst one (ST400DM005) had been in use the shortest time of all drive models in the report by far and suffered a single failure. The confidence interval chart shows this - the low end of the confidence interval of that model is 0.0% - meaning for all we know it could be the most reliable drive in the report, it just had the misfortune of a random failure soon after they began using it.
Subtract those two models, and Seagate's aggregate failure rate is lower than WD's.
Whenever Backblaze puts one of these reports out, I keep having to tell people: Every drive model tries using different components and different technologies to eek out better performance and capacity. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The way you should be using these reports is to decide which drive models to avoid, not which manufacturer. That's why Backblaze breaks it down by drive model, and apparently they've wisened up and not made a chart summarizing each manufacturer.
As much as I respect that position, just like the award was rescinded because of conflating his behavior with his accomplishments, the rescission has now caused a schism between the meaning of the award and accomplishment.
I was a kid when the Atari VCS hit the store shelves. It was the first mass-consumer microprocessor-controlled computing device in history. Yes there were other computers for sale at the same time, some even before, many more powerful. But the Atari was the one that became ubiquitous in people's homes. It was most people's first experience with a programmable computing device at home. It was the one that introduced the masses to the idea of one device serve multiple functions (different games in this case) simply by switching the program it was running.
If the guy who made that possible isn't worthy of your lifetime achievement award in computer gaming, then your lifetime achievement award in computer gaming is pretty meaningless. It's like denying Wernher von Braun's contributions to space exploration because he originally built the V2 for the Nazis which killed thousands. Sometimes a person's achievements and contribution to advancing the state of technology completely overshadow the negative things s/he may also have done. I get the feeling the people protesting him getting the award either weren't around in the late 1970s, or didn't care about video games so completely missed what an important milestone the Atari VCS was in history.
Except instead of explicitly charging older people a higher rate based on an age cutoff, they simply offer a discount for students and children. The correlation is very close to an age-based cutoff, except you don't get in trouble for age discrimination. Kinda like how insurance companies can't charge more based on race, but they can charge more if you live in a certain zip code which just so happens to correlate strongly with race.
So what they were trying to do wasn't stupid. They just implemented it wrong.
You can back out ICE efficiency from the EVs on the road. Let's use the Nissan Leaf (you'll see why later). EPA rating of 30 kWh per 100 miles. 112 MPGe combined, 101 MPGe.highway. Top speed of 93 MPH.
30 kWh per 100 miles = 108 Megajoules per 100 miles. Since we're trying to do a comparison and ICE cars don't have regenerative braking, we need to compare the highway mileage. Since the Leaf gets 101 MPGe on the highway vs 112 MPGe combined, this works out to (112/101)*(108 MJ) = 119.8 MJ per 100 miles on the highway. Note that this is energy stored in the battery. To do the comparison, we need energy at wheels to the ground.
Electric motor + inverter efficiency is typically about 85%-93% (page 35). That's for a Prius' motor (the only one I could find detailed stats for), but they're all pretty similar at these levels of power output. Since there's no gearing, if you align the Leaf's top speed of 93 MPH with 6000 RPM, then the highway speed of 55 MPH corresponds to (55/93)*(6000 RPM) = 3550 RPM. Which puts us right around 90% efficiency.
I couldn't find any numbers for battery discharge efficiency. Battery charging efficiency for a Tesla with the home charger is about 85%. Battery discharge efficiency is typically a bit worse (even more so at higher loads, which is why jackrabbit or ludicrous mode starts kill your rnage). so go with 80%. (For those of you complaining this is too unfavorable to EVs, a lower discharge efficiency here corresponds to lower ICE efficiency later on.)
So 119.8 MJ from the battery becomes (119.8 MJ)*(90%)*(80%) = 86.3 MJ per 100 miles wheels-to-ground. The extra energy is lost as heat to the battery, wiring, inverter, and motor.
Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 MJ/L = 129.5 MJ/gallon. To figure out how many gallons were used in 100 miles, we need the MPG of a gas-powered Leaf. Fortunately we have one - the Leaf's aerodynamic and rolling resistance is almost identical to the Versa since it shares the same body and frame (I had to go back to 2014 to get the hatchback version with a regular transmission). Highway mileage is 35 MPG. Meaning (129.5 MJ/gal)*(100 miles)/(35 miles/gal) = 370 MJ worth of gasoline consumed per 100 miles.
Overall highway efficiency of the ICE and drivetrain is then energy wheels-to-ground vs energy in the gasoline. (86.3 MJ)/(370 MJ) = 23.3%. It's rated at 26 MPG city, so overall efficiency in city driving is (26/35)*(23.3%) = 17.3%. A far cry from the 12% you came up with.
We can also calculate overall efficiency for the EV, from energy source to wheels-to-ground, just like we calculated it for the ICE vehicle from energy source (gasoline) to wheels-to-ground. The average efficiency of a coal plant is about 33%. The average efficiency of a natural gas plant is about 43%. Power line transmission losses are about 5%. As mentioned before, charging efficiency (for a home charger) is around 85%, discharge efficiency around 80%, motor efficiency around 90%. To get an overall efficiency of (33% or 43%)*(95%)*(85%)*(80%)*(90%) = 19.2% or 25%. If you use a fast charger like a Supercharger station, it's even worse, since the charging efficiency is even lower (more of the electricity is lost as heat) the more quickly you charge the battery.
So an EV powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels isn't any more energy efficient than an ICE vehicle. The reason it's cheaper to charge an EV is almost entirely because gasoline is damn expensive for an energy source. Coal costs about $50/ton and contains ab
Before
After:
No net change in fossil fuel consumption. Assuming your energy consumption remains the same, to cause a real reduction in fossil fuel use, you have to use renewable energy which otherwise wasn't going to be generated e.g. If T-Mobile decided to install new wind turbines on property they owned, that would result in:
That's a net 10 MWh of fossil fuel electricity consumption. Real changes in renewable energy use comes from adding renewable generation. Not from buying your electricity from a renewable source that was going to sell it all whether or not you bought form them. Likewise, charging your EV with solar panels on your house doesn't reduce the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels. It only reduces it if the only reason you installed the panels was because you got the EV (that is, if you hadn't gotten the EV you wouldn't have installed the panels). If you were going to install the panels anyway, all you've done is shift solar electricity that was going to be used to your house, to be used your EV instead.
For the same reason, it's important to realize that energy conservation has the same impact regardless of whether you live in an area which gets most of its electricity from renewables or from fossil fuels. The entire electrical grid interconnected. Electricity generated by renewables that is not used locally is transmitted to other areas, where it causes a reduction in the amount of energy that needs to be generated by fossil fuel plants
Everyone processes information that way. It's a shortcut our brains take to reduce the amount of processing necessary to interpret what's going on in the world. When you're driving, you don't look at every tree you pass in detail, examine the leaves, branches, and trunk, and decide "yup that's a tree, better steer clear of it." That would take way too much time and we wouldn't be able to drive faster than 5 MPH if we processed information that way. Instead, you see something that looks vaguely tree-like out of the corner of your eye, and decide better safe than sorry and immediately classify it as a tree. And when it turns out not to be a tree, but is a kid with a patterned shirt standing next to a telephone poll with a bush behind him who unexpectedly jumps into the street in front of you, you have an accident.
By attributing the problem to "these people" instead of "we", you are excluding yourself as if you're somehow immune to this. Yes, some of us are better at avoiding jumping to conclusions like this, but all of us do it. It's just our brains handle situations that would otherwise require making hundreds or thousands of decisions every second. Pretending you're immune to it just makes yourself blind to when you do it.
Stereotyping and discrimination have the same cause. Rather than take the time to categorize every individual chair we encounter, we develop a mental model of a generic "chair" and the attributes it should possess. Then we assume all chairs we encounter have those attributes. That way we can treat a chair correctly 98% of the time at a much reduced mental workload. The problems caused by the 2% when our mental model is wrong is preferable to the additional workload that would be needed to process the other 98% of chairs. The problem comes about when we take attributes that are true of, say, 70% of a race or gender, and assume they apply to all members of that race or gender. You have to be cognizant of the times when such over-generalization will fail safe, vs fail dangerously.
I know this is a mental shortcut my brain takes, and I still catch myself doing it several times every day. If you somehow think they're above making these mistakes, you're just blissfully ignorant of the times when you do. Just like the people you're criticizing.
The turnout was as expected. The discrepancy was that people likely to vote for Trump were unlikely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump due to public shaming of Trump supporters by the media. That USC/LA Times poll was pretty much the only one to predict a Trump victory. They reached that conclusion when they noticed that Trump supporters reported they were very uncomfortable telling pollsters that they were Trump supporters. They tweaked their model to account for that (that more Trump supporters weren't telling pollsters who they were voting for, than Clinton supporters).
The press broke the #1 rule of reporting news - do it in an unbiased manner so you don't affect the story with your presence. By not only participating in but apparently gleefully encouraging the shaming of Trump supporters, they caused said supporters to disappear from their own polls, creating the "surprise" Trump win in 2016.
Isn't disgust usually indicated by a puke emoji? Or is your forum missing that one?
To be clear, without the emoticon, the meaning behind the phrase in question was already ambiguous (as short, written statements like you find on forums often are). The emoticon pushed it from the "could be misinterpreted as defamation" category to "not defamation."
So contrary to the way TFA is presenting this, the emoticon actually clarified the meaning of the written statement. Which if you think about it, is the entire reason emoticons were invented in the first place. The cases TFA cites where the meaning of the emoticon is ambiguous are cases where the meaning/intent of the written statement was already ambiguous, and the emoticon didn't clarify the meaning enough.
because they're born old?
Based on your link, the more likely culprit was lobbying by pharmaceutical companies getting the bigwigs at the DEA to change enforcement policies.