The goal is to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, some 4.3 light years away. NASA is working on technology to allow a spacecraft to reach 10% of the speed of light, which might allow them to reach Alpha Centauri in as soon as 44 years.
First, warp drives do not exist (yet). You cannot instantly jump to 10% the speed of light and spend 44 years coasting to Alpha Centauri. To travel 4.3 light years with a constantly accelerating technology would require you to hit 20% the speed of light, not 10%. If you constantly accelerate up to 10% the speed of light by the time you reach the destination, then it'll take you 87 years to traverse 4.367 light years, not 44 years.
Second, you don't want to be accelerating the entire trip. Otherwise once you reach the destination, you're traveling way too fast for the trip to be of any use. Assuming the Alpha Centauri system is about the same size as our solar system, a probe reaching it at 20% the speed of light would pass through the entire system in a little over a day. It's stupid to travel 44 years just to have one day of science gathering. To be useful, you need to accelerate to the halfway point, the decelerate to the destination.
This means the trip of 44 years would require hitting 20% the speed of light by the halfway point - it would need twice the acceleration of a mission which hit 20% at the destination. So combined with the 10% vs 20% speed of light error, you actually need to develop a technology with 4x the acceleration of a mission which would arrive at Alpha Centuari at 10% the speed of light.
The product of this intensive farming doesn't taste good compared with grass fed animals
Have you actually tasted these different kinds of meat? The organic and especially free-range beef I've tried has been tough and stringy with less fat (not as tasty) compared to the mass-produced beef. It turns out lazy cows result in more tender meat, and fat cows results in tastier meat. That's why they prevent calves from moving their entire lives and overfeed them to produce veal - if the muscles don't do work, the meat ends up more tender and fattier/tastier.
I wouldn't go so far as saying people can't eat meat, but I have to say that the amount of abuse I get from people who do eat it because I won't shows that they clearly know they're the ones on the wrong side of the fence.
Well if you don't eat meat, then clearly you're unqualified to state which method of production produces better-tasting meat. If you then make judgmental statements about eating meat to meat eaters from that unqualified position (as you just did above), I'm not at all surprised that they heap abuse upon you. Quite clearly you're the one in the wrong.
I have yet to meet a single meat-eater who insists on the meat coming from animals. If scientists can develop a way to grow meat in a lab or convert plants into something that tastes and feels like meat but is cheaper and less damaging to the environment, they're all for it. The only people holding an absolute opinion on this topic are the people who refuse to eat meat, and want to impose that behavior onto everyone else.
1) There's typically a 10:1 ratio in biomass at each step of the food chain. That is, to produce 1 pound of beef, the cow needs to eat roughly 10 pounds of grass. So 90% of the nutrients the cow gets from the grass end up recycled in cow manure. Only 10% goes into the beef (where 9% becomes human feces and 1% becomes human biomass). The vast majority of what the cow consumes ends up going into its manure, not "some."
2) "Nutrients" do not necessarily survive cellular processes. The catalyst-type nutrients do (although they usually break down into smaller chunks over time, else you would never need to eat more of those nutrients). But the building block-type get transformed into different molecules. So it's improper to think of the system as having some sort of "nutrient balance" where the amount of nutrients consumed equals the amount of nutrients expelled. What usually happens when there are insufficient nutrients is that the plant or animal uses energy to convert raw elements or simple molecules into the required nutrients.
[The Congress shall have power] "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
In other words, authors and inventors are granted a monopoly over their works for a limited time, after which these works pass into the public domain so they can add to the sum total knowledge of mankind.
If copyright is causing works to be lost before they can enter the public domain, then it's defeating the purpose upon which copyright is based in the Constitution. And the rationale for giving these works copyright protection in the first place vanishes.
Since the purpose of the clause is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," and the mechanism is by "securing exclusive rights for a limited time," when a situation arises where the two contradict each other, the purpose must prevail. Otherwise you're using the letter of the law to defeat the intent of the law.
In other words, copyright law must err on the side of making sure these works make it into the public domain, not on the side of protecting the author's or inventor's monopoly. To be protected by copyright, the work must eventually make it into the public domain. So either the work has to make it into the public domain, or it cannot be protected by copyright. There is never a case where protecting the temporary monopoly is more important.
Most people now do their computing on mobile devices (laptops, phones, tablets). Outside of gaming and corporate use, desktops are becoming rare. And thus the phrase "Linux on the desktop" doesn't mean what it used to.
If you take it to mean Linux as the OS used most by the general public, that's pretty much already happened, though not in the way most Linux advocates wanted. Android is based on the Linux kernel (and you can add get most of the familiar Unix tools with BusyBox) If some of the open source compilers were ported over so you could compile traditional Linux apps, that would pretty much be it (my phone is more powerful and has more memory and storage than my PC from the 1990s when I began using Linux). But the idea of porting to a platform controlled by Google seems to stick in the craw of open source advocates.
Historically, contributions by the communications industry has favored Democrats (every year since 1990, except '98 when they were equal). 3/4 of the top recipients are Democrats. That's even more incredible when you consider that the party in power usually gets more lobbying contributions. The Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and the Democrats are still receiving more lobbying money from the communications industry. (You can drill down to the cable or telecom subsets if you want. The general trend is still the same - Democrats receive more lobbying dollars from these industries. Telephone utilities are one of the few subsets whose lobbying contributions consistently favor Republicans.)
The notion that Republicans are in the pockets of corporations in these industries while Democrats are not doesn't correlate to the lobbying money trail, suggesting that it's a narrative that's been manufactured by the media (i.e. fake news). The same thing happened with science funding during Bush 2's term. The media so badly misportrayed his science policies (excessively focusing on killing the Superconducting Super Collider and his ban on fetal stem cell research) that most of the public still think his administration was anti-science. Ask yourself - based on what you heard on the news, do you think Bush was pro- or anti-science funding? In fact his administration enacted the biggest increase in Federal science R&D funding since Bush 1 and the 1960s space race.
You can even see when this started to happen. Up until 2000, contributions by the print, publishing, and newspaper industries only slightly favored Democrats. But from 2000 onwards, it's skewed to wildly favor Democrats, by about a 5:1 margin today. Around 2000, the media stopped trying to remain unbiased, and skewed unabashedly towards the left. (My guess would be the appearance of Fox News favoring the Right meant the rest of the media felt they no longer had to try to restrain their bias favoring the Left.)
Health care is more of a mixed bag.
Don't believe everything the media spoon-feeds you just because it confirms your pre-existing biases. Do your own research to see where the money is flowing (to and from). The Open Secrets website is a great tool that's organized to be very easy to use.
You're trying to buy a home in the same desirable area your grandparents bought. Real estate prices in desirable areas has increased more than the rate of inflation simply because the population has increased. More people want to live in the desirable areas, but you can't squeeze in many more houses there. Demand outpaces supply, therefore the home price skyrockets.
If you look for a home outside of these desirable-but-already-saturated areas, the prices are more in line with what your grandparents paid (after adjusting for inflation).
Median income is up for all quintiles since 1967 after adjusting for inflation, even the bottom two. Meaning the home price to income ratio has fallen since 1967 (you need to use a smaller percentage of your income to afford a home).
I'm sorry for your situation, but you are an outlier. Not representative of the norm. Home ownership is easier today than in 1967.
If you want to know why you Millenials are having a hard time buying a home, the answer is really simple. The savings rate has fallen from 12% in 1967 to about 6% today. Basically, you spent all your money instead of saving it. Contrast this to, say, the UK - where the savings rate has actually gone up since the 1970s. It's not all bad news though. Young people began saving more beginning about a decade ago. Unfortunately, you actually had a negative savings rate from about 1995-2007 (you were spending more than you made). So combine your higher savings rate with paying off your accumulated debt, and you can't afford to rent an apartment so you end up living in your parents' basement.
So you think what happened when the public tried to identify the Boston Bombers from surveillance footage is a good thing? It basically became a modern-day Salem Witch Hunt. While police corruption is certainly possible and needs to be rooted out, we've given police the task of criminal investigations precisely because we can then train a handful of investigators of these fallacies and how to avoid them, instead of having to train the entire public. It's a protective mechanism we've developed to prevent witch hunts. Opening up all cameras to the public short-circuits that protection.
Unfortunately, our basic psychology makes us easily fall for things which sound right but are wrong. Investigators reviewing surveillance video footage have at least some training to avoid falling for the most common of those fallacies when identifying a suspect. If you throw a bunch of random untrained people from the public into that role, they'll usually end up falling for groupthink and confirmation bias leading them to the wrong conclusion. (Releasing the footage after the investigation is done via a court order or FOIA can still be done.)
Due to bends in the fibers and roughnesses on the cut surfaces of the fibers, light transmission is generally a bit less than half the incident light on the fibers, so given five percent fibers, about two percent.
OMG. They're taking a nominal 750 Watts/m^2 of solar energy hitting the Earth, sending it through concrete which is 2% transmissive, collecting it with solar panels which are 16% efficient, embedded in a flat surface which will yield only a 14% capacity factor? That knocks the energy generation down to (750 W/m^2)*(0.02)*(0.16)*(0.14) = 0.336 Watts/m^2.
If you assume a 2-lane highway 30 feet wide (China modeled their highways after the U.S. IHS), that's 60 feet * 1.2 miles = 35,318 square meters. The average power generation of this 1.2 mile stretch of highway will be only 11.87 kW. It would take you on average 5 to 8.5 hours to charge a single Tesla S' battery with this 1.2 mile stretch of highway.
Who the hell came up with this idiotic idea? Obviously not an engineer.
Iridium failed to generate a return on investment and filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
However, as the constellation of satellites was already in orbit and functional, they had considerable value. A group of investors bought them from Motorola for $25 million (vs. $5 billion to build and launch), assumption of debt, and indemnity for Motorola. They drastically reduced the scope of the project, slashing costs to the point where fewer customers could keep it profitable, and repurposed the satellites for things other than telephone communications.
You can get the same effect from a pre-dawn launch from Canaveral. The contrail, being so high up in the atmosphere, is lit by the sun while the ground and most of the sky above the observer is still in darkness. On the west coast the conditions for this to happen occur after sunset. On the east coast the conditions occur before sunrise.
I read somewhere that they were going to use more aerodynamic braking in the future (Block 5's only?), to use less fuel for landing
So they're heading back towards the solution we used for the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters - attach parachutes and let them drift down into the ocean, where a ship tracks them down and picks them up.
It's not just the elements you combine which matters. The amount of each element you add can change the final alloy's characteristics. For example, steel (alloy of iron and carbon) becomes stronger as you add carbon. The carbon atoms wedge themselves in between the crystalline iron grains, making it harder for them to slide around (sliding is what gives metals their malleability), thus making the steel stronger (less bendy) than iron. But if you add too much carbon, you reduce the malleability so much that it becomes brittle. The microscopic structure continues to become stronger (the iron atoms don't slide against each other making it almost diamond-like in toughness), but the macroscopic structure now fractures - the crystalline metal grains which used to absorb energy by sliding around now absorb it by separating. And the combined result is weaker than iron in practical applications. Where the steel falls along this spectrum depends on the amount of carbon you add.
If it were just a simple combination of elements, then there would be a limited number of alloys, and an "unidentifiable" alloy would imply an unknown/undiscovered element. But because the amount of each element matters, there are literally an infinite number of possible alloys. And some of them may have a "sweet spot" in their desirable characteristics (like carbon does with iron to create strong steel). Not enough or too much of the alloying material and you've completely missed the sweet spot. (And there may even be multiple sweet spots - it all depends on how the half dozen elements you're alloying together interact with each other.)
So of course the DoD is going to be running experiments combining all sorts of different materials in different combinations and concentrations in search of possible alloys we've overlooked or haven't stumbled upon yet. And if they're smart they'd be cataloging their findings and storing the resulting alloys in a warehouse in case it's ever needed for future testing (so they don't have to create it again). And if they've got a particular combination and concentration of elements nobody has tried before, that would make it an "unkonwn" or "unidentified" alloy. Unknown until they make it and test it, that is.
Samsung operates as large multi-national conglomerate should. Their different branches do not favor each over over the competition. Samsung Device Solutions (who manufactures their semiconductor products) will happily prioritize DRAM sales to Apple over Samsung Mobile if Apple will pay more. That's why Samsung sells lots of things to Apple (RAM, SSDs, manufactures their SOCs) despite Apple suing them. That said, Samsung Mobile may have some sway with Samsung Consumer Electronics (which contains their display division), because Mobile has basically been subsidizing CE's OLED development for the last 7 years.
If Microsoft had acted this way (OS division had not given preferential treatment to their software division making Internet Explorer; software division making Office had released iOS and Android versions immediately instead of acting as an incentive for Windows Phone sales), they wouldn't be as universally reviled.
There is no punishment too severe for Apple for deliberately degrading the performance of devices after they have been sold. (This is argualbly far worse than the hardware/software tying & lying that got IBM put under antitrust consent decree back in the 1960's!)
(Note: I have no love for Apple.) The performance degradation is actually a service to the customers. Lithium-ion batteries can't deliver as many amps as they get older. Not only does their capacity drop, but their voltage under load drops as well. Try to draw as many Amps as you could when the battery was new, and the voltage drops more than it used to - sometimes so low that the device stops working. You may have experienced this with a laptop with an old battery. It'll work fine until it hits around 30%, and suddenly it'll power off. There actually was 30% battery life left, it's just that the laptop was trying to draw more Amps than the aged battery could deliver, resulting in the system acting like the plug was pulled.
By limiting the max performance of the phone, Apple is limiting the maximum amperage the phone tries to draw from the battery. This prevents the instant shutdown scenario, allowing you to use that remaining 30% of battery power. The you pay is that you lose the top end of the phone's performance,
The more elegant solution of course is a user-replaceable battery, and the customer simply buying a new battery. But that went the way of the dodo thanks to Apple and hundreds of drooling fanboy reviewers criticizing phones with "flimsy" backs which hid user-replaceable batteries. The masses wanted their phone to have a solid metal shell. They got it, and all the drawbacks that come with it. It always confused me why people would want their phones to be metal like it was a durable good, but they were ok with giving up a replaceable battery like it was disposable.
The cable companies got the local governments to grant them monopolies. So customers literally can't slip through their fingers, unless they eschew cable service entirely.
It's not that people don't learn anything. It's that those who do learn eventually die of old age. And the new younger people who replace them have to learn it all over again, except many of them refuse to believe the wisdom their elders try to pass on to them, and end up having to learn the same old lesson by direct experience again..
Technically, this only affects Uber because they were trying to run their business as if they were a taxi company (with their drivers owning their "taxis" instead of Uber providing them).
I think the court case would've been much more interesting if Uber had tried to operate like Craigslist or a stock exchange. People seeking rides would request them on Uber's site, drivers giving rides would bid on the requests. The people seeking rides could select one of the bids, or wait to see if any cheaper bids came in (aware this could cause them to lose older bids as drivers left to give rides to others). And Uber collected a transaction fee for each successful pairing.
But the way Uber operates, dictating just about everything about their drivers except when they work and making them get buy their own car and insurance, the EU Court's ruling is not at all surprising.
BUT - the most important work is still on the developer to ensure that their app runs great on iPhone, iPad and Mac and has a cohesive UI that scales and takes advantages of the different technologies
Scaling is a big problem for iOS. When Apple made the Mac, they Did It Right. Both MacOS and OS X are DPI-aware (dots per inch). When you plug a monitor into the Mac, it queries the monitor for the model, looks it up in a database to determine the screen size Then it takes the display resolution, divides it by the screen size to calculate a PPI (pixels per inch). Then scales the UI elements appropriately. Apple originally had to develop this for their Postscript laser printer way back in the 1980s. They integrated it into the Mac so when page layout artists were working on a Mac, an 11 point font on the screen was exactly the same physical size as when it was printed out.
That's why the Macs had no problem with switching to the high-PPI Retina displays, while Windows still has lots of problems with 3k and 4k screens. Windows isn't aware of your screen's size and DPI, OS X is. Microsoft fixed this with Windows 8, so the system fonts, icons, and menus scale (based on a % you set, not on the screen's physical size). But apps which don't use the system fonts and menus don't benefit from this. That's why the UI in Adobe's apps are microscopic when you run them on Windows on a 4k screen. Adobe eschewed Windows' built-in menu system to build their own (probably so they could implement tear-off menu bars). That's why when you try to run an older Windows app with any scaling other than 100%, the fonts look blurry - Windows is simply rescaling the bitmap of the font, instead of substituting a correctly-scaled font which takes advantage of subpixel rendering.
Then Apple made probably their biggest blunder with iOS. They ditched this tremendously successful DPI-aware model, and made iOS dependent on a fixed resolution and screen size. Apparently Steve drank too much of his own kool-aid and decided since 3.5" with a 4:3 aspect ratio was the "perfect" screen size and There Would Never Be any other screen size, iOS didn't need to be DPI-aware. That's why they stuck with the original 3.5" screen for so long, why when they did increase the resolution they did it by doubling the DPI, and when they increased the screen size they initially did it by stretching the screen (adding more to the top/bottom). Because that was the only way to do it without breaking the UI of older apps. This is most apparent in the iPad Mini - it uses the same resolution as the iPad, but on a smaller screen. Resulting in everything it displays being smaller than on a regular iPad. They could add scaling to iOS now, but it would be like the situation with Windows and every app in the App Store would need to be re-written to be DPI-aware.
Ironically, Android is DPI-aware. Google didn't know the sizes of the Android devices manufacturers would make, so they had to make Android DPI-aware. A lot of Android apps ignore it, but the setting is in there. When properly used, the icons and fonts on Android are the same size whether you run the app on a phone or a tablet. And unlike the Mac where it's fixed depending on your monitor size, you can override it in Android. When I got a tablet for my elderly parents, I rooted it and set the DPI as if the screen size were 33% smaller than it really was. That had the effect of automatically making all of Android's icons and fonts 1.5x bigger, which really helped my parents use the tablet.
Throttling is when you have the bandwidth, but you artificially withhold it from a particular service. If there's plenty of LTE bandwidth to stream Hulu, but AT&T degrades Hulu service to try to make their DirecTV Now service appear better, that is throttling.
Fast lanes prioritize one type of traffic over another. If AT&T prioritizes their DirecTV Now service, then Hulu will work fine over LTE, up until so many people in a cell are using LTE that more bandwidth is being demanded than the tower can provide. Then the people streaming Hulu over LTE will suffer dropouts before the people streaming DirecTV Now over LTE.
Fast lanes result in throttling only if there is insufficient bandwidth. If an ISP's full bandwidth isn't being used however, it does not result in throttling. As such, there is unlikely to be an incentive to pay for fast lanes on landline (cable, fiber, high-speed DSL) service. The low-bandwidth services (cellular, low-speed DSL) are another matter.
So no, fast lanes do not automatically result in throttling, and it's disingenuous to argue that they do.
The reason to hate fast lanes is that it creates a disincentive for the service provider to solve the problem of insufficient bandwidth by adding more bandwidth. As I stated, it's not likely to be a problem for high bandwidth services, only low bandwidth services. Hence, fast lanes create an incentive to reduce bandwidth. If having limited bandwidth and doing nothing means Internet sites will pay them for fast lanes, while spending money to add more bandwidth means nobody will want to pay them for fast lanes, the obvious choice for ISPs is to stop increasing bandwidth. This is contrary to the end-customer's best interest, and thus should be prohibited.
(The free market advocate like me would argue that some companies will choose to add bandwidth, while others will choose fast lanes. And the end-customer can decide which service to get, resulting in the market finding the optimal solution. Maybe adding bandwidth will be so much more expensive that fast lanes are a better solution. The problem with the free market argument here is that there is no free market. Most Americans only have a single choice of cable ISP or DSL provider because their local government has awarded that company a local monopoly. So they have no choice, no opportunity to switch to a different company trying to solve the bandwidth problem a different way, no free market.)
"The Internet" does not need to be regulated as a utility. Heck, "the Internet" shouldn't be regulated at all. None of the reasons you give justify making Internet service a utility. In fact, contrary to your rationale, the reason that there are so few participants is entirely the fault of local governments awarding local monopolies to a select few companies.
The cable carrying information into your house should be regulated as a utility. This covers cable TV, phone service, Internet service. It should be regulated not because of the Internet or TV channels or phone services. It should be regulated because the lines for these services have to pass through public easements, and it's in The Public's best interest to have as few physical lines as possible on telephone poles, in underground easements, and leading up to their home. The optimal solution to this problem is a single line leading to each home which carries all these services.
As such the contract to install and maintain this line should be awarded to a single company, which due to its monopolistic nature should be regulated as a utility and prohibited from providing service over the line. Companies wishing to provide service, be it Internet, TV channels, phone service, alarm monitoring, or whatever future information transmission application (holovision, smellovision, whatever), should all be allowed to transmit that information over that line for a fixed, regulated fee, but the company maintaining the line is prohibited from providing any of these services so there is no conflict of interest. This is how we do electric, gas, and long distance phone service. One company maintains all the lines and pipes in an area, but you can buy your electricity, gas, and long distance phone service from hundreds if not thousands of different suppliers.
The fact that (1) there will be a monopoly contract to maintain the line to each home, and (2) that line will pass through public easements is enough to justify regulating it as a utility.
Actually I think the appropriate aphorism here is, "Information wants to be free!" Except that won't be received as well by most of the people here (even though most of them actually believe it).
The world starts making a lot more sense when you stop viewing it in black and white, and see that absolutes are exceedingly rare, and most sayings are only partially true depending on the situation - be it capitalism or freedom of information.
"If you use these words, your budget may be cut (because we don't like these words)"
Is very different from
"If you use these words, your budget may be cut (because our constituents may vote us out of office if we are on record as approving a budget item using these words)."
The snippet you quoted seems to imply the latter, while you're assuming the former.
Slashdot Mirror
First, warp drives do not exist (yet). You cannot instantly jump to 10% the speed of light and spend 44 years coasting to Alpha Centauri. To travel 4.3 light years with a constantly accelerating technology would require you to hit 20% the speed of light, not 10%. If you constantly accelerate up to 10% the speed of light by the time you reach the destination, then it'll take you 87 years to traverse 4.367 light years, not 44 years.
Second, you don't want to be accelerating the entire trip. Otherwise once you reach the destination, you're traveling way too fast for the trip to be of any use. Assuming the Alpha Centauri system is about the same size as our solar system, a probe reaching it at 20% the speed of light would pass through the entire system in a little over a day. It's stupid to travel 44 years just to have one day of science gathering. To be useful, you need to accelerate to the halfway point, the decelerate to the destination.
This means the trip of 44 years would require hitting 20% the speed of light by the halfway point - it would need twice the acceleration of a mission which hit 20% at the destination. So combined with the 10% vs 20% speed of light error, you actually need to develop a technology with 4x the acceleration of a mission which would arrive at Alpha Centuari at 10% the speed of light.
Have you actually tasted these different kinds of meat? The organic and especially free-range beef I've tried has been tough and stringy with less fat (not as tasty) compared to the mass-produced beef. It turns out lazy cows result in more tender meat, and fat cows results in tastier meat. That's why they prevent calves from moving their entire lives and overfeed them to produce veal - if the muscles don't do work, the meat ends up more tender and fattier/tastier.
Well if you don't eat meat, then clearly you're unqualified to state which method of production produces better-tasting meat. If you then make judgmental statements about eating meat to meat eaters from that unqualified position (as you just did above), I'm not at all surprised that they heap abuse upon you. Quite clearly you're the one in the wrong.
I have yet to meet a single meat-eater who insists on the meat coming from animals. If scientists can develop a way to grow meat in a lab or convert plants into something that tastes and feels like meat but is cheaper and less damaging to the environment, they're all for it. The only people holding an absolute opinion on this topic are the people who refuse to eat meat, and want to impose that behavior onto everyone else.
1) There's typically a 10:1 ratio in biomass at each step of the food chain. That is, to produce 1 pound of beef, the cow needs to eat roughly 10 pounds of grass. So 90% of the nutrients the cow gets from the grass end up recycled in cow manure. Only 10% goes into the beef (where 9% becomes human feces and 1% becomes human biomass). The vast majority of what the cow consumes ends up going into its manure, not "some."
2) "Nutrients" do not necessarily survive cellular processes. The catalyst-type nutrients do (although they usually break down into smaller chunks over time, else you would never need to eat more of those nutrients). But the building block-type get transformed into different molecules. So it's improper to think of the system as having some sort of "nutrient balance" where the amount of nutrients consumed equals the amount of nutrients expelled. What usually happens when there are insufficient nutrients is that the plant or animal uses energy to convert raw elements or simple molecules into the required nutrients.
In other words, authors and inventors are granted a monopoly over their works for a limited time, after which these works pass into the public domain so they can add to the sum total knowledge of mankind.
If copyright is causing works to be lost before they can enter the public domain, then it's defeating the purpose upon which copyright is based in the Constitution. And the rationale for giving these works copyright protection in the first place vanishes.
Since the purpose of the clause is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," and the mechanism is by "securing exclusive rights for a limited time," when a situation arises where the two contradict each other, the purpose must prevail. Otherwise you're using the letter of the law to defeat the intent of the law.
In other words, copyright law must err on the side of making sure these works make it into the public domain, not on the side of protecting the author's or inventor's monopoly. To be protected by copyright, the work must eventually make it into the public domain. So either the work has to make it into the public domain, or it cannot be protected by copyright. There is never a case where protecting the temporary monopoly is more important.
Most people now do their computing on mobile devices (laptops, phones, tablets). Outside of gaming and corporate use, desktops are becoming rare. And thus the phrase "Linux on the desktop" doesn't mean what it used to.
If you take it to mean Linux as the OS used most by the general public, that's pretty much already happened, though not in the way most Linux advocates wanted. Android is based on the Linux kernel (and you can add get most of the familiar Unix tools with BusyBox) If some of the open source compilers were ported over so you could compile traditional Linux apps, that would pretty much be it (my phone is more powerful and has more memory and storage than my PC from the 1990s when I began using Linux). But the idea of porting to a platform controlled by Google seems to stick in the craw of open source advocates.
Historically, contributions by the communications industry has favored Democrats (every year since 1990, except '98 when they were equal). 3/4 of the top recipients are Democrats. That's even more incredible when you consider that the party in power usually gets more lobbying contributions. The Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and the Democrats are still receiving more lobbying money from the communications industry. (You can drill down to the cable or telecom subsets if you want. The general trend is still the same - Democrats receive more lobbying dollars from these industries. Telephone utilities are one of the few subsets whose lobbying contributions consistently favor Republicans.)
The notion that Republicans are in the pockets of corporations in these industries while Democrats are not doesn't correlate to the lobbying money trail, suggesting that it's a narrative that's been manufactured by the media (i.e. fake news). The same thing happened with science funding during Bush 2's term. The media so badly misportrayed his science policies (excessively focusing on killing the Superconducting Super Collider and his ban on fetal stem cell research) that most of the public still think his administration was anti-science. Ask yourself - based on what you heard on the news, do you think Bush was pro- or anti-science funding? In fact his administration enacted the biggest increase in Federal science R&D funding since Bush 1 and the 1960s space race.
You can even see when this started to happen. Up until 2000, contributions by the print, publishing, and newspaper industries only slightly favored Democrats. But from 2000 onwards, it's skewed to wildly favor Democrats, by about a 5:1 margin today. Around 2000, the media stopped trying to remain unbiased, and skewed unabashedly towards the left. (My guess would be the appearance of Fox News favoring the Right meant the rest of the media felt they no longer had to try to restrain their bias favoring the Left.)
Health care is more of a mixed bag.
Don't believe everything the media spoon-feeds you just because it confirms your pre-existing biases. Do your own research to see where the money is flowing (to and from). The Open Secrets website is a great tool that's organized to be very easy to use.
You're trying to buy a home in the same desirable area your grandparents bought. Real estate prices in desirable areas has increased more than the rate of inflation simply because the population has increased. More people want to live in the desirable areas, but you can't squeeze in many more houses there. Demand outpaces supply, therefore the home price skyrockets.
If you look for a home outside of these desirable-but-already-saturated areas, the prices are more in line with what your grandparents paid (after adjusting for inflation).
The home ownership rate is higher today than in 1967.
Median home prices are about the same today as they were in 1967 after you adjust for inflation.
Mortgage interest rates are lower today than in 1967.
Median income is up for all quintiles since 1967 after adjusting for inflation, even the bottom two. Meaning the home price to income ratio has fallen since 1967 (you need to use a smaller percentage of your income to afford a home).
I'm sorry for your situation, but you are an outlier. Not representative of the norm. Home ownership is easier today than in 1967.
If you want to know why you Millenials are having a hard time buying a home, the answer is really simple. The savings rate has fallen from 12% in 1967 to about 6% today. Basically, you spent all your money instead of saving it. Contrast this to, say, the UK - where the savings rate has actually gone up since the 1970s. It's not all bad news though. Young people began saving more beginning about a decade ago. Unfortunately, you actually had a negative savings rate from about 1995-2007 (you were spending more than you made). So combine your higher savings rate with paying off your accumulated debt, and you can't afford to rent an apartment so you end up living in your parents' basement.
So you think what happened when the public tried to identify the Boston Bombers from surveillance footage is a good thing? It basically became a modern-day Salem Witch Hunt. While police corruption is certainly possible and needs to be rooted out, we've given police the task of criminal investigations precisely because we can then train a handful of investigators of these fallacies and how to avoid them, instead of having to train the entire public. It's a protective mechanism we've developed to prevent witch hunts. Opening up all cameras to the public short-circuits that protection.
Unfortunately, our basic psychology makes us easily fall for things which sound right but are wrong. Investigators reviewing surveillance video footage have at least some training to avoid falling for the most common of those fallacies when identifying a suspect. If you throw a bunch of random untrained people from the public into that role, they'll usually end up falling for groupthink and confirmation bias leading them to the wrong conclusion. (Releasing the footage after the investigation is done via a court order or FOIA can still be done.)
OMG. They're taking a nominal 750 Watts/m^2 of solar energy hitting the Earth, sending it through concrete which is 2% transmissive, collecting it with solar panels which are 16% efficient, embedded in a flat surface which will yield only a 14% capacity factor? That knocks the energy generation down to (750 W/m^2)*(0.02)*(0.16)*(0.14) = 0.336 Watts/m^2.
If you assume a 2-lane highway 30 feet wide (China modeled their highways after the U.S. IHS), that's 60 feet * 1.2 miles = 35,318 square meters. The average power generation of this 1.2 mile stretch of highway will be only 11.87 kW. It would take you on average 5 to 8.5 hours to charge a single Tesla S' battery with this 1.2 mile stretch of highway.
Who the hell came up with this idiotic idea? Obviously not an engineer.
Iridium failed to generate a return on investment and filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
However, as the constellation of satellites was already in orbit and functional, they had considerable value. A group of investors bought them from Motorola for $25 million (vs. $5 billion to build and launch), assumption of debt, and indemnity for Motorola. They drastically reduced the scope of the project, slashing costs to the point where fewer customers could keep it profitable, and repurposed the satellites for things other than telephone communications.
You can get the same effect from a pre-dawn launch from Canaveral. The contrail, being so high up in the atmosphere, is lit by the sun while the ground and most of the sky above the observer is still in darkness. On the west coast the conditions for this to happen occur after sunset. On the east coast the conditions occur before sunrise.
So they're heading back towards the solution we used for the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters - attach parachutes and let them drift down into the ocean, where a ship tracks them down and picks them up.
It's not just the elements you combine which matters. The amount of each element you add can change the final alloy's characteristics. For example, steel (alloy of iron and carbon) becomes stronger as you add carbon. The carbon atoms wedge themselves in between the crystalline iron grains, making it harder for them to slide around (sliding is what gives metals their malleability), thus making the steel stronger (less bendy) than iron. But if you add too much carbon, you reduce the malleability so much that it becomes brittle. The microscopic structure continues to become stronger (the iron atoms don't slide against each other making it almost diamond-like in toughness), but the macroscopic structure now fractures - the crystalline metal grains which used to absorb energy by sliding around now absorb it by separating. And the combined result is weaker than iron in practical applications. Where the steel falls along this spectrum depends on the amount of carbon you add.
If it were just a simple combination of elements, then there would be a limited number of alloys, and an "unidentifiable" alloy would imply an unknown/undiscovered element. But because the amount of each element matters, there are literally an infinite number of possible alloys. And some of them may have a "sweet spot" in their desirable characteristics (like carbon does with iron to create strong steel). Not enough or too much of the alloying material and you've completely missed the sweet spot. (And there may even be multiple sweet spots - it all depends on how the half dozen elements you're alloying together interact with each other.)
So of course the DoD is going to be running experiments combining all sorts of different materials in different combinations and concentrations in search of possible alloys we've overlooked or haven't stumbled upon yet. And if they're smart they'd be cataloging their findings and storing the resulting alloys in a warehouse in case it's ever needed for future testing (so they don't have to create it again). And if they've got a particular combination and concentration of elements nobody has tried before, that would make it an "unkonwn" or "unidentified" alloy. Unknown until they make it and test it, that is.
Samsung operates as large multi-national conglomerate should. Their different branches do not favor each over over the competition. Samsung Device Solutions (who manufactures their semiconductor products) will happily prioritize DRAM sales to Apple over Samsung Mobile if Apple will pay more. That's why Samsung sells lots of things to Apple (RAM, SSDs, manufactures their SOCs) despite Apple suing them. That said, Samsung Mobile may have some sway with Samsung Consumer Electronics (which contains their display division), because Mobile has basically been subsidizing CE's OLED development for the last 7 years.
If Microsoft had acted this way (OS division had not given preferential treatment to their software division making Internet Explorer; software division making Office had released iOS and Android versions immediately instead of acting as an incentive for Windows Phone sales), they wouldn't be as universally reviled.
(Note: I have no love for Apple.) The performance degradation is actually a service to the customers. Lithium-ion batteries can't deliver as many amps as they get older. Not only does their capacity drop, but their voltage under load drops as well. Try to draw as many Amps as you could when the battery was new, and the voltage drops more than it used to - sometimes so low that the device stops working. You may have experienced this with a laptop with an old battery. It'll work fine until it hits around 30%, and suddenly it'll power off. There actually was 30% battery life left, it's just that the laptop was trying to draw more Amps than the aged battery could deliver, resulting in the system acting like the plug was pulled.
By limiting the max performance of the phone, Apple is limiting the maximum amperage the phone tries to draw from the battery. This prevents the instant shutdown scenario, allowing you to use that remaining 30% of battery power. The you pay is that you lose the top end of the phone's performance,
The more elegant solution of course is a user-replaceable battery, and the customer simply buying a new battery. But that went the way of the dodo thanks to Apple and hundreds of drooling fanboy reviewers criticizing phones with "flimsy" backs which hid user-replaceable batteries. The masses wanted their phone to have a solid metal shell. They got it, and all the drawbacks that come with it. It always confused me why people would want their phones to be metal like it was a durable good, but they were ok with giving up a replaceable battery like it was disposable.
The cable companies got the local governments to grant them monopolies. So customers literally can't slip through their fingers, unless they eschew cable service entirely.
It's not that people don't learn anything. It's that those who do learn eventually die of old age. And the new younger people who replace them have to learn it all over again, except many of them refuse to believe the wisdom their elders try to pass on to them, and end up having to learn the same old lesson by direct experience again..
Technically, this only affects Uber because they were trying to run their business as if they were a taxi company (with their drivers owning their "taxis" instead of Uber providing them).
I think the court case would've been much more interesting if Uber had tried to operate like Craigslist or a stock exchange. People seeking rides would request them on Uber's site, drivers giving rides would bid on the requests. The people seeking rides could select one of the bids, or wait to see if any cheaper bids came in (aware this could cause them to lose older bids as drivers left to give rides to others). And Uber collected a transaction fee for each successful pairing.
But the way Uber operates, dictating just about everything about their drivers except when they work and making them get buy their own car and insurance, the EU Court's ruling is not at all surprising.
Scaling is a big problem for iOS. When Apple made the Mac, they Did It Right. Both MacOS and OS X are DPI-aware (dots per inch). When you plug a monitor into the Mac, it queries the monitor for the model, looks it up in a database to determine the screen size Then it takes the display resolution, divides it by the screen size to calculate a PPI (pixels per inch). Then scales the UI elements appropriately. Apple originally had to develop this for their Postscript laser printer way back in the 1980s. They integrated it into the Mac so when page layout artists were working on a Mac, an 11 point font on the screen was exactly the same physical size as when it was printed out.
That's why the Macs had no problem with switching to the high-PPI Retina displays, while Windows still has lots of problems with 3k and 4k screens. Windows isn't aware of your screen's size and DPI, OS X is. Microsoft fixed this with Windows 8, so the system fonts, icons, and menus scale (based on a % you set, not on the screen's physical size). But apps which don't use the system fonts and menus don't benefit from this. That's why the UI in Adobe's apps are microscopic when you run them on Windows on a 4k screen. Adobe eschewed Windows' built-in menu system to build their own (probably so they could implement tear-off menu bars). That's why when you try to run an older Windows app with any scaling other than 100%, the fonts look blurry - Windows is simply rescaling the bitmap of the font, instead of substituting a correctly-scaled font which takes advantage of subpixel rendering.
Then Apple made probably their biggest blunder with iOS. They ditched this tremendously successful DPI-aware model, and made iOS dependent on a fixed resolution and screen size. Apparently Steve drank too much of his own kool-aid and decided since 3.5" with a 4:3 aspect ratio was the "perfect" screen size and There Would Never Be any other screen size, iOS didn't need to be DPI-aware. That's why they stuck with the original 3.5" screen for so long, why when they did increase the resolution they did it by doubling the DPI, and when they increased the screen size they initially did it by stretching the screen (adding more to the top/bottom). Because that was the only way to do it without breaking the UI of older apps. This is most apparent in the iPad Mini - it uses the same resolution as the iPad, but on a smaller screen. Resulting in everything it displays being smaller than on a regular iPad. They could add scaling to iOS now, but it would be like the situation with Windows and every app in the App Store would need to be re-written to be DPI-aware.
Ironically, Android is DPI-aware. Google didn't know the sizes of the Android devices manufacturers would make, so they had to make Android DPI-aware. A lot of Android apps ignore it, but the setting is in there. When properly used, the icons and fonts on Android are the same size whether you run the app on a phone or a tablet. And unlike the Mac where it's fixed depending on your monitor size, you can override it in Android. When I got a tablet for my elderly parents, I rooted it and set the DPI as if the screen size were 33% smaller than it really was. That had the effect of automatically making all of Android's icons and fonts 1.5x bigger, which really helped my parents use the tablet.
Fast lanes result in throttling only if there is insufficient bandwidth. If an ISP's full bandwidth isn't being used however, it does not result in throttling. As such, there is unlikely to be an incentive to pay for fast lanes on landline (cable, fiber, high-speed DSL) service. The low-bandwidth services (cellular, low-speed DSL) are another matter.
So no, fast lanes do not automatically result in throttling, and it's disingenuous to argue that they do.
The reason to hate fast lanes is that it creates a disincentive for the service provider to solve the problem of insufficient bandwidth by adding more bandwidth. As I stated, it's not likely to be a problem for high bandwidth services, only low bandwidth services. Hence, fast lanes create an incentive to reduce bandwidth. If having limited bandwidth and doing nothing means Internet sites will pay them for fast lanes, while spending money to add more bandwidth means nobody will want to pay them for fast lanes, the obvious choice for ISPs is to stop increasing bandwidth. This is contrary to the end-customer's best interest, and thus should be prohibited.
(The free market advocate like me would argue that some companies will choose to add bandwidth, while others will choose fast lanes. And the end-customer can decide which service to get, resulting in the market finding the optimal solution. Maybe adding bandwidth will be so much more expensive that fast lanes are a better solution. The problem with the free market argument here is that there is no free market. Most Americans only have a single choice of cable ISP or DSL provider because their local government has awarded that company a local monopoly. So they have no choice, no opportunity to switch to a different company trying to solve the bandwidth problem a different way, no free market.)
"The Internet" does not need to be regulated as a utility. Heck, "the Internet" shouldn't be regulated at all. None of the reasons you give justify making Internet service a utility. In fact, contrary to your rationale, the reason that there are so few participants is entirely the fault of local governments awarding local monopolies to a select few companies.
The cable carrying information into your house should be regulated as a utility. This covers cable TV, phone service, Internet service. It should be regulated not because of the Internet or TV channels or phone services. It should be regulated because the lines for these services have to pass through public easements, and it's in The Public's best interest to have as few physical lines as possible on telephone poles, in underground easements, and leading up to their home. The optimal solution to this problem is a single line leading to each home which carries all these services.
As such the contract to install and maintain this line should be awarded to a single company, which due to its monopolistic nature should be regulated as a utility and prohibited from providing service over the line. Companies wishing to provide service, be it Internet, TV channels, phone service, alarm monitoring, or whatever future information transmission application (holovision, smellovision, whatever), should all be allowed to transmit that information over that line for a fixed, regulated fee, but the company maintaining the line is prohibited from providing any of these services so there is no conflict of interest. This is how we do electric, gas, and long distance phone service. One company maintains all the lines and pipes in an area, but you can buy your electricity, gas, and long distance phone service from hundreds if not thousands of different suppliers.
The fact that (1) there will be a monopoly contract to maintain the line to each home, and (2) that line will pass through public easements is enough to justify regulating it as a utility.
123 million households is pretty much everyone in the U.S..
Actually I think the appropriate aphorism here is, "Information wants to be free!" Except that won't be received as well by most of the people here (even though most of them actually believe it).
The world starts making a lot more sense when you stop viewing it in black and white, and see that absolutes are exceedingly rare, and most sayings are only partially true depending on the situation - be it capitalism or freedom of information.
"If you use these words, your budget may be cut (because we don't like these words)"
Is very different from
"If you use these words, your budget may be cut (because our constituents may vote us out of office if we are on record as approving a budget item using these words)."
The snippet you quoted seems to imply the latter, while you're assuming the former.