Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.
The effect of legal prostitution on human trafficking inflows is stronger in high-income countries than middle-income countries. Because trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation requires that clients in a potential destination country have sufficient purchasing power, domestic supply acts as a constraint.
Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization.
The type of legalization of prostitution does not matter â" it only matters whether prostitution is legal or not. Whether third-party involvement (persons who facilitate the prostitution businesses, i.e, âoepimpsâ) is allowed or not does not have an effect on human trafficking inflows into a country. Legalization of prostitution itself is more important in explaining human trafficking than the type of legalization.
Democracies have a higher probability of increased human-trafficking inflows than non-democratic countries. There is a 13.4% higher probability of receiving higher inflows in a democratic country than otherwise.
At the same time movie attendance has been falling, the number of movie sequels has been climbing, hitting an all-time high of 40 in 2017. Not saying the relationship is causal (correlation and all that), but Hollywood might want to consider that possibility before it blames it all on piracy or home streaming or some other thing that's not their own fault.
Actually the biggest impediment I've found to merging recently is that most people no longer let you in when you signal. When I learned to drive back in the 1980s, you would signal, the person in the next lane behind you would usually slow down (or at least not speed up), and you would merge into their lane.
Nowadays, I signal and I'd estimate about 80% of the drivers use my signaling as an opportunity to speed up to prevent me from merging in front of them. A slight slowdown to allow someone to merge in front of you is vastly preferable to the person having to slow down almost to a stop before he merges because his merge lane is ending and nobody is letting him merge. When he eventually merges at slow speed, he'll cause a massive backlog behind him compared to if someone had just let him merge at high speed.
No, the moral of the story is no matter what you do, you're probably going to get killed by the police.
Given the large number of swatting incidents that have been reported, and the fact that this is the first time someone has actually been killed by police, that would suggest that you're actually probably not going to get killed by the police. And that the vast majority of the time the police respond appropriately and correctly determine that it's a hoax.
the police WERE TOLD THAT they were rolling on a murder and hostage situation (hostage in danger of murder as well)
Fixed that for you.
The problem began with the bad intel. While the police bear some of the blame due to their over-aggressive response, your characterization removes blame entirely from the original intel source - the prankster.
Bear in mind that even if the police respond appropriately, this sort of pranking still incurs a cost onto society. If there's no pranking (or a small chance of it), police can assume the intel is probably correct and barge in ASAP to neutralize the situation. But if pranking is common, they have to take more time to assess the situation once they arrive on-site, increasing the possibility that (had it been an actual murder/hostage situation) the hostage-taker will notice what's up, decide there's no escape, and kill the hostage and himself.
The prankster needs to go on trial for destroying two lives. The guy who was killed, and the police officer who now has to live with knowing he killed an innocent. That's independent of whether or not you want the police officer to go on trial.
The way TFA it explains it is pretty silly. Keeping the same distance to the car behind you just means the car behind you is keeping the same distance from you as you are from the car in front of you. i.e. the cars are all equally spaced. Things like one car tapping its brakes, failing to maintain speed, or merging into the lane causes the cars behind it to slow down. If the cars behind this one car are bunched up, it exacerbates the slowdown. The optimal way to space the cars to minimize this slowdown (without knowing ahead of time which car will slow or merge) is to equally space all of them. Simple as that. (If the slowdown happens when the cars aren't bunched up the impact is smaller than when equally spaced. But on balance the bunched up slowdown outweighs the non-bunched slowdown. Like swimming upstream then downstream back to your start point at a constant speed relative to the water is slower than swimming the same distance when there's no current, because with a current the slowdown on the upstream leg exceeds the speedup on the downstream leg.)
The capacity of a road is how many cars can pass a fixed point per hour. You can increase this by widening the roads, but that involves a lot of eminent domain and construction work. The alternative is to increase the speed of the cars. Double the speed and you double the number of cars that pass a fixed point per hour.
Except we have a safety rule which says to keep a 2 second gap between you and the car in front of you (because braking distance increases with speed while human reaction time remains constant) . When there's a lot of traffic, that rule effectively cancels out the flowrate benefit of speeding up. Twice the speed, twice the gap, same number of cars pass a fixed point per hour. That's why traffic engineers have been so interested in autonomous cars, adaptive cruise control, and automatic braking systems. If you can increase the speed without increasing the distance (shrink the gap to significantly less than 2 seconds), you increase the capacity of the road and thus increase its ability to handle more traffic. As for problems merging when the gaps between cars is smaller, it's been proposed that cars on the highway form a train - a block of a dozen or so cars on cruise control radar-locked bumper to bumper - with larger spaces in front of and behind the train where new cars can merge into.
Of course, my response is if the optimal solution is a train, then just use a train. Create railroad cars which automobiles can drive onto, which depart at regular intervals between common distant destinations, like a roll-on roll-off ferry. People can stay in their cars during the trip. Watch TV, play games, enjoy the scenery, browse the web. And the car engines can be off during the trip so only the train locomotive needs to burn energy, which would put the fuel efficiency of the entire train at around 200 MPG (at 2 tons per vehicle).
Usenet posts could be canceled. That was a message distributed the same way as Usenet posts directing servers to delete another Usenet post (usually after discussion in one of the net-abuse groups). Only admins were authorized to send a cancel notice, and the admin of an individual server didn't have to set it to honor cancel requests (most didn't). But it's not exactly true that Usenet was complete and unrestricted freedom of speech.
Europe is blessed with a massive shallow ocean all around its periphery. Most of it is less than 100 meters in depth, making it relatively easy to build offshore structures like offshore wind farms. The UK and Ireland aren't so much islands, are they are parts of the European continent which just happened to have their surroundings flooded. Scotland and the coast of Spain have some of the strongest and most consistent offshore winds in the world, and the shallow water depth makes it relatively cheap to build offshore wind turbines to harvest that wind energy.
In contrast, the U.S. west coast (where winds from the ocean are strongest and most consistent) pretty much has no continental shelf. I'm in Southern California, and when I go fishing, by the time I'm a half km from shore, the water is already deeper than the North Sea. By about 3-5 km offshore, the water is a half kilometer deep. The east coast is better off, with a continental shelf that extends about 50-100 km out that's about 100-200 meters deep. But the wind blows predominantly from west to east, meaning the wind on this continental shelf is mostly spoiled by land, so is inconsistent and doesn't blow as strongly as off Europe. That's why most of the offshore wind in the U.S. has concentrated off the coast of Massachusetts - the land there makes a sharp turn to the east, providing about 200 km of continental shelf with wind unspoiled by land to the west.
low-information taxpayers who have never figured out how little they spend subsidizing renewables, and how much they spend subsidizing oil, gas, and coal.
The subsidy on oil and gas, if attributed entirely to gasoline alone, works out to about 2.3 cents per gallon. Even if you take the high estimates some people like to use (which includes things like low income assistance to purchase home heating oil), it works out to about 10 cents per gallon. The Federal fuel tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon, plus about 30 cents per gallon at the state and local level. So there's no net subsidy for fossil fuels. Rather there's a huge tax on it (albeit not as big as in other countries). Huge enough to more than swamp out the coal subsidies (which are only about 1/4 that of oil and gas subsidies).
So low-information or not, they're still right. The people complaining about the "huge" subsidies fossil fuels get always look at total dollar amounts. The total amount is huge because the vast majority of our energy is still derived from fossil fuels. If you instead look at the subsidy per unit of energy generated (i.e. how much the subsidy skews the price, depending on the energy source), you can see how massive renewable subsidies are compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
There's nothing wrong with this - you want to subsidize technologies you wish to develop more quickly. But arguing rewewables subsidies are underfunded compared to fossil fuels based on total dollar amount is just plain ignorant. It's like complaining that California gets $4 billion in federal highway funding while Wyoming only gets $360 million. It's not because Wyoming is being short-changed, it's because California has a lot more roads (and cars) than Wyoming. The proper comparison in that case would be federal highway dollars per mile of road (or perhaps miles driven on said roads). Just like the proper comparison for energy subsidies is per kWh or per megajoule.
That's actually the way pensions should be funded. Not as nebulous future payouts based on unrealistically optimistic projections of investment returns, which saddle future generations with debt when the actual returns fall short of those projections. It was literally Wimpy's "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" ad infinitium. The Republicans caught a lot of flak for changing the requirement, but they correctly saw that the pension funds were being abused to shift debt from the present into the future (instead of giving the union a wage increase, you promise them a bigger pension). They changed the funding requirement to stop that abuse cold. You can no longer promise the postal union barrels of free beer in their retirement, and leave it up to future generations to figure out how to pay for it. You make the promise today, you have to pay for it today. This was crucially needed because without it, wage negotiations amounted to unions demanding the world, and managers agreeing to give it to them because they knew they'd be retired by the time anyone had to figure out how to fulfill their concessions.
Pre-funding the pension and spinning it off so the money is untouchable except by the people who are supposed to receive it prevents the possibility of pension bankruptcy. The way most pensions are set up (merely as a separate account within the company) leaves them vulnerable to abuse (embezzlement, underfunding) and bankruptcy. If the company goes bankrupt, the pensioners become merely creditors. They may not get paid until after other creditors, with the possibility of receiving only pennies on each dollar they were promised in pensions if they're far enough down the bankruptcy totem pole.
With a pre-funded pension operating independently (like a 401k or IRA), this cannot happen. The company made an obligation to pay Joe into his retirement, and they put the money to pay for it into his pension plan while he was working, thus insuring he gets paid even if the company ceases to exist. The only catch is instead of giving Joe a guaranteed fixed pension in his retirement, the pension should be defined as $x/mo being invested on his behalf while he's working, and his pension is whatever that works out to after compounding interest when he retires and begins collecting it (since his lifespan and investment growth is unpredictable).
Social Security has the same problem. The money you pay into SS is not being "saved" for your retirement. It's being used to pay current retirees (with a buffer of about a decade). Likewise, when you retire, the money you get from SS will not be money you put into it. It'll be money that the then-current generation of workers are paying into it. This happened because when SS was first enacted, the very first recipients got paid even though they'd never contributed a dime into it. (This is why SS is often accused of being a pyramid scheme, although that's slightly different.) If you want to guarantee SS solvency, you have to change it to a system that's pre-paid, like the USPS pension. Otherwise it could stay solvent or it might not, depending on inflation (cost of living), population growth, and increases in the average lifespan. Right now, there are about 2.9 workers per retiree. As that number goes down (due to decreasing birthrate and increasing lifespan), the risk of SS insolvency goes up.
Block network access on apps which don't need it (like most games). This prevents any data being sent back to the app's mothership, not just microphone data. Both iOS and Android allow you to block specific apps from using cellular data (on the premise of preventing data hog apps from using up your monthly data quota).
On Android you can go a step further and control which individual apps can use cellular data, WiFi for LAN access, or WiFi for Internet access. It may require root though. AFWall+ is one such app. (A side-effect if you've never run the app prior to blocking it can be that it can never download an ad to display.)
The problem with this type of advice is that it does not reach the people that need it.
The situation is symmetric. For the white supremacist to befriend his black neighbor, the black neighbor has to befriend his white supremacist neighbor.
Typically, the owner of the satellite(s) buys insurance. In the event of a launch accident, the insurance pays for the cost of the satellites and launch fees. The rate of launch failures is high enough (about 1 in 30) that insurance is prudent. But it's consistent enough that the insurers can make money off of it.
Given the extremely limited number of countries/companies offering launch services, I doubt any of them give you a refund if a launch fails.
It's 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound.
The reason a foot is divided into 12 inches is because it lets you divide a foot evenly in half, thirds, quarters, sixths, or twelfths (eights are also possible with only a half inch). So dividing a foot into 12 inches lets you hit 3 of the most common subdivisions (half, third, quarter), and 4 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (sixth, missing fifth) using only integers.
Dividing units into 10 only gives you 1 of the 3 most common subdivisions (half), and only 2 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (half, fifth) using only integers.
English unit subdivions weren't picked at random. They were selected because they're more practical. A foot is 12 inches for easy subdivision. The English units of volume are based on halving (easy to do if you don't have standardized containers but you do have a scale) - a gallon is 2 quarts, a quart is 2 pints, a pint is 2 cups. An acre is about how much land a peasant could work in a day, and the furlong is defined based on an acre (1 furlong x 1 furlong = 10 acres). Likewise, a mile has 5280 feet because that's 8 furlongs. You'll also note the mile subdivides as integer feet into 10 of the smallest 12 subdivisions (only a 7th and 9th of a mile is not integer feet).
Until standardized measuring instruments became cheap and commonplace, English units were simply superior. Metric is only superior today because the biggest difficulty in modern usage is doing the math by hand (or in your head), not obtaining tools to measure things accurately. Even on computers, if you're doing sequential calculations without using infinite precision, English units are superior to metric - they accrue less roundoff error. Computers store numbers in base 2, and many English unit conversions will resolve down to at least base 4 before hitting a fraction and thus losing precision in binary representation. Except for a half, metric unit conversions don't fit at all into base 2, so lose precision with almost every calculation.
And not just friends who think like you do. Get out of your comfort zone, away from your echo chamber. Find something in common with people who are different from you. Play racquetball at the gym with that liberal hippie neighbor. Go on camping trips with the conservative guy from work. Go rock climbing with your old roommate's gay cousin. Talk with them, get to know them, become friends with them.
Once you do that, you start to learn that we all have more in common with each other than differences. A lot of the propaganda will then become transparent - the usual MO is to dehumanize the "enemy" prior to tearing them down. But if you see, no, if you know those people are human, it's impossible to dehumanize them.
Prior to 2015, they acquired all or a part of Sprint, Supercell, DramaFever. Since 2015 the list has gotten really long, including ARM, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics. I'm not sure there's any rhyme or reason to their investments. It seems more like a shotgun approach (a little of everything), and they're hoping one (or more) of them will pay off.
for the U.S. The vast majority of the world's software is made and sold by U.S. companies. If these software paranoia stories incite a global panic so that every country only "trusts" software made domestically, the biggest loser is going to be the U.S.
Dunno about 99%, but the actual problem is that a lot of solutions can be defined mathematically, and that mathematical solution implemented in a variety of ways - mechanical, electronic, or as software. There's nothing intrinsically different about the three solutions, just their form differs.
For example, the bounce animation Apple patented is familiar to almost every engineer as the system response of a slightly underdamped second order system. It overshoots slightly before settling at a new steady state value. It's been implemented for thousands of years as a mechanical spring-mass-damper (most familiar as the springs and shock absorbers supporting your car wheels), and for over a century in electronics. There was literally zero innovation implementing this well-known system response in software. But because of our broken patent system, Apple was able to get a patent for it because they were the first to apply for an obvious idea implemented in software.
This wouldn't be a problem if patents were actually being used correctly. You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent an implementation of an idea So even if it were new, nobody could patent the idea of a bounce animation when scrolling hits the end. Apple could patent a certain implementation of a bounce characteristic to iPhones, but other manufacturers could come up with different implementations which were slower, faster, bounced more, bounced less, bounced differently. Unfortunately, the courts have been way too generous in allowing patent infringement lawsuits against the same idea implemented in different ways.
A schoolmate pointed this out back in the 1980s when noise cancellation technology was first being developed. If a sound wave field has energy, and its inverse sound wave field has energy, and when you overlay the two on top of each other the sound disappears, where does the energy go?
I didn't learn the answer until grad school. The energy gets shifted from the areas experiencing destructive interference (no sound), to the areas experiencing constructive interference. It's actually the same principle that directional antennas use - sensitivity in some directions is given up in order to enhance sensitivity in other directions. It turns out the energy isn't necessarily tightly coupled to the physical waves. In fact sometimes the energy and the waves don't even move in sync - one can travel faster than the other. So you're not just limited to direction in which you can project the energy, you can also concentrate it at specific distances. With enough control, you can concentrate the transmitted energy at specific points.
Sound doesn't just travel through air. It also travels through solids, free of the constraints of the inverse square law. Things like table legs and the frame of a storage rack become an acoustic waveguide, conveying the sound with much less loss (attenuation depends on the frequency and the material). Similar natural 2D waveguides allow scientists to hear whales hundreds of km away.
That's the way I have my business security camera system set up. The SSD (250 GB - fairly large at the time I bought it) can store about 1.5 days worth of footage, which is transferred to long-term storage either overnight or whenever the SSD gets close to full. I set it up this way not to avoid sonic attacks, but because I was planning to add more cameras in the future and wasn't sure how many concurrent video streams a HDD could keep up with.
I was originally concerned about the longevity of the SSD, but it turned out not to be an issue. The cameras generate a little shy of 200 GB of video each day. Based on a conservative estimate of the NAND lasting 1000 write cycles, I estimated I'd have to replace the SSD after 2.5 years. It worked without problems for nearly 5 years before I had to replace it due to an unrelated hardware issue. The new system has a 1 TB SSD so I expect it to last 10+ years.
Either ISPs are a common carrier, or they aren't. If they're a common carrier, they're agnostic to the traffic they carry. In exchange, they're indemnified from liability for that traffic.
If ISPs argue they can throttle or assign certain traffic to fast lanes (anti-net neutrality), then they're arguing they're not common carriers. If they're not common carriers, then they're liable for the traffic they carry. They will have to track down pirates on their network and enforce copyright lest the copyright holders sue them instead of the actual pirates. They will have to monitor traffic for people plotting crimes, lest they be held liable for aiding and abetting. And if a member of a drug cartel conducts illegal banking transactions, the ISP will be on the hook for money laundering. Someone looks up ways to get away with murder, the ISP will be found complicit. If you can monitor your traffic to detect piracy, what's your excuse for not monitoring it to detect these other things?
That's the Pandora's box the ISPs will open if they decide they don't want to be agnostic to the traffic they carry. But like most people, they're tempted by only the positives of a course of action and blindly ignore the negatives.
The potassium chloride you find in most supermarkets (in water softener tablets and as salt substitutes) will expose you to about as much radiation as nuclear waste. And heaven forbid you have a granite countertop in your home. The radiation detectors CBP has installed at border checkpoints are regularly triggered by mundane shipments like cat litter, granite, porcelain, bananas, nuts.
Optical illusions work because our visual system takes certain shortcuts to reduce the amount of processing needed to identify what it is we're looking at. e.g. We assume diagonal lines are 3-dimensional, leading to errors when we view a 2D object with diagonal lines. The only information actually provided was the horizontal line + 2 diagonal lines. Our brains extrapolated the nonexistent 3D nature of the object to create the error. (The top line looks like the the edge of a box viewed from the inside, so our brain concludes the line is further away and thus bigger than it appears; the bottom line looks like the edge of a box viewed from the outside, so our brain concludes the line is closer and thus smaller than it appears.) Likewise, the computer vision AI makes the turtle/rifle error because it's extrapolating from its very limited information subset to determine if the object is a turtle or a rifle.
These sorts of errors disappear as you add more information, thus reducing the amount of extrapolation needed. I was driving on a rural highway at night when suddenly it seemed like the road was twisting and warping. This went on for about 10 seconds until I moved into an area with fewer trees, and I realized what I thought were billboards in the distance were actually boxcars on a moving train. My brain had been assuming they were fixed points in space, when in fact they were moving. So initially it erroneously concluded the billboards were static and the road was warping, but the moment I recognized them as boxcars my brain correctly realized the "billboards" were moving and the road was static.
So in these early stages of visual AI, we're going to encounter a lot of these errors. But as the AI becomes more sophisticated and able to take into account more contextual information, these errors will begin to disappear. They probably won't disappear entirely, because you can only glean so much information from a static photo. But for real-life applications like security, the turtle/rifle error is highly unlikely to happen once the AI starts comparing the questionable object in multiple frames in a video instead of a single frame, or starts comparing it from multiple viewpoints provided by multiple cameras.
There's a company running commercials here called DealDash which advertises HDTVs for $10, laptops and tablets for $20. I was curious how they got prices that low so I investigated. It functions as an auction, kinda like eBay. Except you pay a transaction cost for every bid you make - roughly 75 cents per bid. So if a $300 TV comes up for auction and sells for $10 after 10 bid cycles, the winner will have paid $10 + 10*$0.75 = $17.50 for it. Sounds great, right?
But if you look at the total cost to society, if 50 people made a grand total of 10 bids each on it trying to win that TV, the total cost to all of them to purchase that TV is actually $10 + 50*10*$0.75 = $385. And the company makes a tidy $85 profit even though the winner only paid $17.50 for a $300 TV.
That's what you have to remember when you socialize costs. The price the individual user pays is only a fraction of the actual cost. The rest is distributed over society, paid for with your taxes. So the cost of your ambulance ride is actually $150 + whatever general tax revenue is needed to fund the system. (The price the uninsured foreigner pays is probably the marginal cost - most of the fixed costs like purchasing the ambulance has already been paid for by your citizens, and the foreigner is only paying for a few minutes of the EMT's time and equipment depreciation, and the gas.)
This is why the cost to operate an ICE vehicle isn't just the gas you buy put into it. It's the cost of the gas + the cost of the pollution caused by the emissions. Likewise, it's why EVs aren't zero emissions. All they do is displace the emissions to the power plant which generates the electricity they use. Which means if your electricity is mostly generated by coal, the overall EV efficiency (after factoring in generation, transmission, and charging losses) is about the same as for a gasoline vehicle.
You have to look at the total cost of something to all of society, not just to the individual user or in an individual instance. You can criticize the U.S. for having 2x the health care costs of the OECD average. But criticizing it on the basis of a single ambulance ride cost to the end-user is naive.
Slashdot Mirror
The data doesn't seem to support that assertation.
At the same time movie attendance has been falling, the number of movie sequels has been climbing, hitting an all-time high of 40 in 2017. Not saying the relationship is causal (correlation and all that), but Hollywood might want to consider that possibility before it blames it all on piracy or home streaming or some other thing that's not their own fault.
Actually the biggest impediment I've found to merging recently is that most people no longer let you in when you signal. When I learned to drive back in the 1980s, you would signal, the person in the next lane behind you would usually slow down (or at least not speed up), and you would merge into their lane.
Nowadays, I signal and I'd estimate about 80% of the drivers use my signaling as an opportunity to speed up to prevent me from merging in front of them. A slight slowdown to allow someone to merge in front of you is vastly preferable to the person having to slow down almost to a stop before he merges because his merge lane is ending and nobody is letting him merge. When he eventually merges at slow speed, he'll cause a massive backlog behind him compared to if someone had just let him merge at high speed.
Given the large number of swatting incidents that have been reported, and the fact that this is the first time someone has actually been killed by police, that would suggest that you're actually probably not going to get killed by the police. And that the vast majority of the time the police respond appropriately and correctly determine that it's a hoax.
Fixed that for you.
The problem began with the bad intel. While the police bear some of the blame due to their over-aggressive response, your characterization removes blame entirely from the original intel source - the prankster.
Bear in mind that even if the police respond appropriately, this sort of pranking still incurs a cost onto society. If there's no pranking (or a small chance of it), police can assume the intel is probably correct and barge in ASAP to neutralize the situation. But if pranking is common, they have to take more time to assess the situation once they arrive on-site, increasing the possibility that (had it been an actual murder/hostage situation) the hostage-taker will notice what's up, decide there's no escape, and kill the hostage and himself.
The prankster needs to go on trial for destroying two lives. The guy who was killed, and the police officer who now has to live with knowing he killed an innocent. That's independent of whether or not you want the police officer to go on trial.
The way TFA it explains it is pretty silly. Keeping the same distance to the car behind you just means the car behind you is keeping the same distance from you as you are from the car in front of you. i.e. the cars are all equally spaced. Things like one car tapping its brakes, failing to maintain speed, or merging into the lane causes the cars behind it to slow down. If the cars behind this one car are bunched up, it exacerbates the slowdown. The optimal way to space the cars to minimize this slowdown (without knowing ahead of time which car will slow or merge) is to equally space all of them. Simple as that. (If the slowdown happens when the cars aren't bunched up the impact is smaller than when equally spaced. But on balance the bunched up slowdown outweighs the non-bunched slowdown. Like swimming upstream then downstream back to your start point at a constant speed relative to the water is slower than swimming the same distance when there's no current, because with a current the slowdown on the upstream leg exceeds the speedup on the downstream leg.)
The capacity of a road is how many cars can pass a fixed point per hour. You can increase this by widening the roads, but that involves a lot of eminent domain and construction work. The alternative is to increase the speed of the cars. Double the speed and you double the number of cars that pass a fixed point per hour.
Except we have a safety rule which says to keep a 2 second gap between you and the car in front of you (because braking distance increases with speed while human reaction time remains constant) . When there's a lot of traffic, that rule effectively cancels out the flowrate benefit of speeding up. Twice the speed, twice the gap, same number of cars pass a fixed point per hour. That's why traffic engineers have been so interested in autonomous cars, adaptive cruise control, and automatic braking systems. If you can increase the speed without increasing the distance (shrink the gap to significantly less than 2 seconds), you increase the capacity of the road and thus increase its ability to handle more traffic. As for problems merging when the gaps between cars is smaller, it's been proposed that cars on the highway form a train - a block of a dozen or so cars on cruise control radar-locked bumper to bumper - with larger spaces in front of and behind the train where new cars can merge into.
Of course, my response is if the optimal solution is a train, then just use a train. Create railroad cars which automobiles can drive onto, which depart at regular intervals between common distant destinations, like a roll-on roll-off ferry. People can stay in their cars during the trip. Watch TV, play games, enjoy the scenery, browse the web. And the car engines can be off during the trip so only the train locomotive needs to burn energy, which would put the fuel efficiency of the entire train at around 200 MPG (at 2 tons per vehicle).
Slashdot link:
https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/25/114201/microsoft-hotmailpassport-service-interruptedupdated
https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/28/1729233/msft-thanks-linux-programmer-for-paying-35-fee
https://slashdot.org/story/00/01/18/1645224/microsoft-hotmail-domain-reward-check-on-ebay
And because those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it:
https://slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/1540257/microsoft-forgets-to-renew-hotmailcouk
Usenet posts could be canceled. That was a message distributed the same way as Usenet posts directing servers to delete another Usenet post (usually after discussion in one of the net-abuse groups). Only admins were authorized to send a cancel notice, and the admin of an individual server didn't have to set it to honor cancel requests (most didn't). But it's not exactly true that Usenet was complete and unrestricted freedom of speech.
In contrast, the U.S. west coast (where winds from the ocean are strongest and most consistent) pretty much has no continental shelf. I'm in Southern California, and when I go fishing, by the time I'm a half km from shore, the water is already deeper than the North Sea. By about 3-5 km offshore, the water is a half kilometer deep. The east coast is better off, with a continental shelf that extends about 50-100 km out that's about 100-200 meters deep. But the wind blows predominantly from west to east, meaning the wind on this continental shelf is mostly spoiled by land, so is inconsistent and doesn't blow as strongly as off Europe. That's why most of the offshore wind in the U.S. has concentrated off the coast of Massachusetts - the land there makes a sharp turn to the east, providing about 200 km of continental shelf with wind unspoiled by land to the west.
The subsidy on oil and gas, if attributed entirely to gasoline alone, works out to about 2.3 cents per gallon. Even if you take the high estimates some people like to use (which includes things like low income assistance to purchase home heating oil), it works out to about 10 cents per gallon. The Federal fuel tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon, plus about 30 cents per gallon at the state and local level. So there's no net subsidy for fossil fuels. Rather there's a huge tax on it (albeit not as big as in other countries). Huge enough to more than swamp out the coal subsidies (which are only about 1/4 that of oil and gas subsidies).
So low-information or not, they're still right. The people complaining about the "huge" subsidies fossil fuels get always look at total dollar amounts. The total amount is huge because the vast majority of our energy is still derived from fossil fuels. If you instead look at the subsidy per unit of energy generated (i.e. how much the subsidy skews the price, depending on the energy source), you can see how massive renewable subsidies are compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
There's nothing wrong with this - you want to subsidize technologies you wish to develop more quickly. But arguing rewewables subsidies are underfunded compared to fossil fuels based on total dollar amount is just plain ignorant. It's like complaining that California gets $4 billion in federal highway funding while Wyoming only gets $360 million. It's not because Wyoming is being short-changed, it's because California has a lot more roads (and cars) than Wyoming. The proper comparison in that case would be federal highway dollars per mile of road (or perhaps miles driven on said roads). Just like the proper comparison for energy subsidies is per kWh or per megajoule.
That's actually the way pensions should be funded. Not as nebulous future payouts based on unrealistically optimistic projections of investment returns, which saddle future generations with debt when the actual returns fall short of those projections. It was literally Wimpy's "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" ad infinitium. The Republicans caught a lot of flak for changing the requirement, but they correctly saw that the pension funds were being abused to shift debt from the present into the future (instead of giving the union a wage increase, you promise them a bigger pension). They changed the funding requirement to stop that abuse cold. You can no longer promise the postal union barrels of free beer in their retirement, and leave it up to future generations to figure out how to pay for it. You make the promise today, you have to pay for it today. This was crucially needed because without it, wage negotiations amounted to unions demanding the world, and managers agreeing to give it to them because they knew they'd be retired by the time anyone had to figure out how to fulfill their concessions.
Pre-funding the pension and spinning it off so the money is untouchable except by the people who are supposed to receive it prevents the possibility of pension bankruptcy. The way most pensions are set up (merely as a separate account within the company) leaves them vulnerable to abuse (embezzlement, underfunding) and bankruptcy. If the company goes bankrupt, the pensioners become merely creditors. They may not get paid until after other creditors, with the possibility of receiving only pennies on each dollar they were promised in pensions if they're far enough down the bankruptcy totem pole.
With a pre-funded pension operating independently (like a 401k or IRA), this cannot happen. The company made an obligation to pay Joe into his retirement, and they put the money to pay for it into his pension plan while he was working, thus insuring he gets paid even if the company ceases to exist. The only catch is instead of giving Joe a guaranteed fixed pension in his retirement, the pension should be defined as $x/mo being invested on his behalf while he's working, and his pension is whatever that works out to after compounding interest when he retires and begins collecting it (since his lifespan and investment growth is unpredictable).
Social Security has the same problem. The money you pay into SS is not being "saved" for your retirement. It's being used to pay current retirees (with a buffer of about a decade). Likewise, when you retire, the money you get from SS will not be money you put into it. It'll be money that the then-current generation of workers are paying into it. This happened because when SS was first enacted, the very first recipients got paid even though they'd never contributed a dime into it. (This is why SS is often accused of being a pyramid scheme, although that's slightly different.) If you want to guarantee SS solvency, you have to change it to a system that's pre-paid, like the USPS pension. Otherwise it could stay solvent or it might not, depending on inflation (cost of living), population growth, and increases in the average lifespan. Right now, there are about 2.9 workers per retiree. As that number goes down (due to decreasing birthrate and increasing lifespan), the risk of SS insolvency goes up.
Block network access on apps which don't need it (like most games). This prevents any data being sent back to the app's mothership, not just microphone data. Both iOS and Android allow you to block specific apps from using cellular data (on the premise of preventing data hog apps from using up your monthly data quota).
On Android you can go a step further and control which individual apps can use cellular data, WiFi for LAN access, or WiFi for Internet access. It may require root though. AFWall+ is one such app. (A side-effect if you've never run the app prior to blocking it can be that it can never download an ad to display.)
The situation is symmetric. For the white supremacist to befriend his black neighbor, the black neighbor has to befriend his white supremacist neighbor.
Typically, the owner of the satellite(s) buys insurance. In the event of a launch accident, the insurance pays for the cost of the satellites and launch fees. The rate of launch failures is high enough (about 1 in 30) that insurance is prudent. But it's consistent enough that the insurers can make money off of it.
Given the extremely limited number of countries/companies offering launch services, I doubt any of them give you a refund if a launch fails.
It's 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound.
The reason a foot is divided into 12 inches is because it lets you divide a foot evenly in half, thirds, quarters, sixths, or twelfths (eights are also possible with only a half inch). So dividing a foot into 12 inches lets you hit 3 of the most common subdivisions (half, third, quarter), and 4 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (sixth, missing fifth) using only integers.
Dividing units into 10 only gives you 1 of the 3 most common subdivisions (half), and only 2 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (half, fifth) using only integers.
English unit subdivions weren't picked at random. They were selected because they're more practical. A foot is 12 inches for easy subdivision. The English units of volume are based on halving (easy to do if you don't have standardized containers but you do have a scale) - a gallon is 2 quarts, a quart is 2 pints, a pint is 2 cups. An acre is about how much land a peasant could work in a day, and the furlong is defined based on an acre (1 furlong x 1 furlong = 10 acres). Likewise, a mile has 5280 feet because that's 8 furlongs. You'll also note the mile subdivides as integer feet into 10 of the smallest 12 subdivisions (only a 7th and 9th of a mile is not integer feet).
Until standardized measuring instruments became cheap and commonplace, English units were simply superior. Metric is only superior today because the biggest difficulty in modern usage is doing the math by hand (or in your head), not obtaining tools to measure things accurately. Even on computers, if you're doing sequential calculations without using infinite precision, English units are superior to metric - they accrue less roundoff error. Computers store numbers in base 2, and many English unit conversions will resolve down to at least base 4 before hitting a fraction and thus losing precision in binary representation. Except for a half, metric unit conversions don't fit at all into base 2, so lose precision with almost every calculation.
And not just friends who think like you do. Get out of your comfort zone, away from your echo chamber. Find something in common with people who are different from you. Play racquetball at the gym with that liberal hippie neighbor. Go on camping trips with the conservative guy from work. Go rock climbing with your old roommate's gay cousin. Talk with them, get to know them, become friends with them.
Once you do that, you start to learn that we all have more in common with each other than differences. A lot of the propaganda will then become transparent - the usual MO is to dehumanize the "enemy" prior to tearing them down. But if you see, no, if you know those people are human, it's impossible to dehumanize them.
Prior to 2015, they acquired all or a part of Sprint, Supercell, DramaFever. Since 2015 the list has gotten really long, including ARM, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics. I'm not sure there's any rhyme or reason to their investments. It seems more like a shotgun approach (a little of everything), and they're hoping one (or more) of them will pay off.
for the U.S. The vast majority of the world's software is made and sold by U.S. companies. If these software paranoia stories incite a global panic so that every country only "trusts" software made domestically, the biggest loser is going to be the U.S.
Dunno about 99%, but the actual problem is that a lot of solutions can be defined mathematically, and that mathematical solution implemented in a variety of ways - mechanical, electronic, or as software. There's nothing intrinsically different about the three solutions, just their form differs.
For example, the bounce animation Apple patented is familiar to almost every engineer as the system response of a slightly underdamped second order system. It overshoots slightly before settling at a new steady state value. It's been implemented for thousands of years as a mechanical spring-mass-damper (most familiar as the springs and shock absorbers supporting your car wheels), and for over a century in electronics. There was literally zero innovation implementing this well-known system response in software. But because of our broken patent system, Apple was able to get a patent for it because they were the first to apply for an obvious idea implemented in software.
This wouldn't be a problem if patents were actually being used correctly. You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent an implementation of an idea So even if it were new, nobody could patent the idea of a bounce animation when scrolling hits the end. Apple could patent a certain implementation of a bounce characteristic to iPhones, but other manufacturers could come up with different implementations which were slower, faster, bounced more, bounced less, bounced differently. Unfortunately, the courts have been way too generous in allowing patent infringement lawsuits against the same idea implemented in different ways.
A schoolmate pointed this out back in the 1980s when noise cancellation technology was first being developed. If a sound wave field has energy, and its inverse sound wave field has energy, and when you overlay the two on top of each other the sound disappears, where does the energy go?
I didn't learn the answer until grad school. The energy gets shifted from the areas experiencing destructive interference (no sound), to the areas experiencing constructive interference. It's actually the same principle that directional antennas use - sensitivity in some directions is given up in order to enhance sensitivity in other directions. It turns out the energy isn't necessarily tightly coupled to the physical waves. In fact sometimes the energy and the waves don't even move in sync - one can travel faster than the other. So you're not just limited to direction in which you can project the energy, you can also concentrate it at specific distances . With enough control, you can concentrate the transmitted energy at specific points.
Sound doesn't just travel through air. It also travels through solids, free of the constraints of the inverse square law. Things like table legs and the frame of a storage rack become an acoustic waveguide, conveying the sound with much less loss (attenuation depends on the frequency and the material). Similar natural 2D waveguides allow scientists to hear whales hundreds of km away.
That's the way I have my business security camera system set up. The SSD (250 GB - fairly large at the time I bought it) can store about 1.5 days worth of footage, which is transferred to long-term storage either overnight or whenever the SSD gets close to full. I set it up this way not to avoid sonic attacks, but because I was planning to add more cameras in the future and wasn't sure how many concurrent video streams a HDD could keep up with.
I was originally concerned about the longevity of the SSD, but it turned out not to be an issue. The cameras generate a little shy of 200 GB of video each day. Based on a conservative estimate of the NAND lasting 1000 write cycles, I estimated I'd have to replace the SSD after 2.5 years. It worked without problems for nearly 5 years before I had to replace it due to an unrelated hardware issue. The new system has a 1 TB SSD so I expect it to last 10+ years.
Either ISPs are a common carrier, or they aren't. If they're a common carrier, they're agnostic to the traffic they carry. In exchange, they're indemnified from liability for that traffic.
If ISPs argue they can throttle or assign certain traffic to fast lanes (anti-net neutrality), then they're arguing they're not common carriers. If they're not common carriers, then they're liable for the traffic they carry. They will have to track down pirates on their network and enforce copyright lest the copyright holders sue them instead of the actual pirates. They will have to monitor traffic for people plotting crimes, lest they be held liable for aiding and abetting. And if a member of a drug cartel conducts illegal banking transactions, the ISP will be on the hook for money laundering. Someone looks up ways to get away with murder, the ISP will be found complicit. If you can monitor your traffic to detect piracy, what's your excuse for not monitoring it to detect these other things?
That's the Pandora's box the ISPs will open if they decide they don't want to be agnostic to the traffic they carry. But like most people, they're tempted by only the positives of a course of action and blindly ignore the negatives.
The potassium chloride you find in most supermarkets (in water softener tablets and as salt substitutes) will expose you to about as much radiation as nuclear waste. And heaven forbid you have a granite countertop in your home. The radiation detectors CBP has installed at border checkpoints are regularly triggered by mundane shipments like cat litter, granite, porcelain, bananas, nuts.
Optical illusions work because our visual system takes certain shortcuts to reduce the amount of processing needed to identify what it is we're looking at. e.g. We assume diagonal lines are 3-dimensional, leading to errors when we view a 2D object with diagonal lines. The only information actually provided was the horizontal line + 2 diagonal lines. Our brains extrapolated the nonexistent 3D nature of the object to create the error. (The top line looks like the the edge of a box viewed from the inside, so our brain concludes the line is further away and thus bigger than it appears; the bottom line looks like the edge of a box viewed from the outside, so our brain concludes the line is closer and thus smaller than it appears.) Likewise, the computer vision AI makes the turtle/rifle error because it's extrapolating from its very limited information subset to determine if the object is a turtle or a rifle.
These sorts of errors disappear as you add more information, thus reducing the amount of extrapolation needed. I was driving on a rural highway at night when suddenly it seemed like the road was twisting and warping. This went on for about 10 seconds until I moved into an area with fewer trees, and I realized what I thought were billboards in the distance were actually boxcars on a moving train. My brain had been assuming they were fixed points in space, when in fact they were moving. So initially it erroneously concluded the billboards were static and the road was warping, but the moment I recognized them as boxcars my brain correctly realized the "billboards" were moving and the road was static.
So in these early stages of visual AI, we're going to encounter a lot of these errors. But as the AI becomes more sophisticated and able to take into account more contextual information, these errors will begin to disappear. They probably won't disappear entirely, because you can only glean so much information from a static photo. But for real-life applications like security, the turtle/rifle error is highly unlikely to happen once the AI starts comparing the questionable object in multiple frames in a video instead of a single frame, or starts comparing it from multiple viewpoints provided by multiple cameras.
There's a company running commercials here called DealDash which advertises HDTVs for $10, laptops and tablets for $20. I was curious how they got prices that low so I investigated. It functions as an auction, kinda like eBay. Except you pay a transaction cost for every bid you make - roughly 75 cents per bid. So if a $300 TV comes up for auction and sells for $10 after 10 bid cycles, the winner will have paid $10 + 10*$0.75 = $17.50 for it. Sounds great, right?
But if you look at the total cost to society, if 50 people made a grand total of 10 bids each on it trying to win that TV, the total cost to all of them to purchase that TV is actually $10 + 50*10*$0.75 = $385. And the company makes a tidy $85 profit even though the winner only paid $17.50 for a $300 TV.
That's what you have to remember when you socialize costs. The price the individual user pays is only a fraction of the actual cost. The rest is distributed over society, paid for with your taxes. So the cost of your ambulance ride is actually $150 + whatever general tax revenue is needed to fund the system. (The price the uninsured foreigner pays is probably the marginal cost - most of the fixed costs like purchasing the ambulance has already been paid for by your citizens, and the foreigner is only paying for a few minutes of the EMT's time and equipment depreciation, and the gas.)
This is why the cost to operate an ICE vehicle isn't just the gas you buy put into it. It's the cost of the gas + the cost of the pollution caused by the emissions. Likewise, it's why EVs aren't zero emissions. All they do is displace the emissions to the power plant which generates the electricity they use. Which means if your electricity is mostly generated by coal, the overall EV efficiency (after factoring in generation, transmission, and charging losses) is about the same as for a gasoline vehicle.
You have to look at the total cost of something to all of society, not just to the individual user or in an individual instance. You can criticize the U.S. for having 2x the health care costs of the OECD average. But criticizing it on the basis of a single ambulance ride cost to the end-user is naive.