They don't see the irony in demoting posts which ask for likes, while they simultaneously cover up the page with an unremovable popup asking you to join or login if you try to browse Facebook anonymously in incognito mode?
The U.S. has one of the lowest home price to income ratios in the developed world. If it's dumb to own a home in the U.S., it's super-dumb to own one elsewhere in the world.
It sounds more like you bought more home than you could afford. I spent almost a year shopping for a home, and the one I finally bought was in a nice area I liked, in decent shape, but the price was depressed because the owners had been trying to move for years so the house had been "on the market" for a really long time in MLS. After I bought it, even after mortgage and expenses, I was still able to sock away 20%-25% of my income in savings/investments. I like living here, there's no HOA, I pay someone half the HOA fees I normally saw when shopping to rake the leaves and maintain the lawn (though I'm considering doing it myself because I could use the exercise - why pay for a gym membership when there's work to do around the house), and I'm handy enough to do most of my own repairs.
The problem with picking a name like this is that a large fraction of your potential customers will spell it the way it's normally spelled in English - Othello. When they're unable to find the website to download the browser, a large number of them will just give up.
A similar thing happened to a friend. He opened a high-end mail order chocolate shop (one of the places he advertised was in-flight magazines) but used some name whose spelling looked nothing like its pronunciation. I warned him that would make it impossible for people who vaguely remembered the name to find his store via a web search, but he was so enamored with the name he stuck with it. He was bankrupt within a few years. (The chocolates were good though.)
Likewise, company and product names which are common words (Opera, Otello/Othello) can be impossible to find in search engines or have a lot of noise in their search results. Whereas made-up unique names and acronyms or obscure words from dead languages (VAIO, ATIV, Camry, Prius, Pepsi, Verizon, etc.) yield easy and exact search results, provided people can remember your made-up word. I know this is marketing, but in this case it's true. You want your customers to be able to find you as easily as possible.
A stolen and unrecovered car is easy. The insurance company totals it and pays out.
A stolen car recovered but damaged is easy. Insurance company figures out how much it would cost to repair the damage, and pays that.
A stolen car recovered which has only been depreciated by logging 11,000 miles? How do you calculate that? Depreciation is not fixed per mile. Depreciation from 2,000 to 13,000 miles is a lot more than depreciation from 42,000 to 53,000 miles, even though both are 11,000 miles worth of depreciation.. The actual value the owner loses depends on when he sells the car. If he sells it immediately, the sale value will reflect depreciation from 2,000 to 13,000 miles If he continues to use it for a few years before selling it, the depreciation will be for 42,000 to 53,00 miles. Which one does the insurance company pay out?
people confuse creation of money with creation of value.. Value is food, materials, information, useful work.
The purpose of money is to facilitate trade. Say you raise chickens, and you go to the market with eggs to sell. You want to buy some milk, so you visit the dairy farmer. He has milk, but he doesn't want eggs. He wants carrots. So you visit the vegetable farmer. Yes he has carrots, but he doesn't want eggs either. He wants apples. So you visit the orchard farmer who sells apples. He doesn't want eggs either, but he does need his horse shoed. So you visit the blacksmith, who does want eggs. So:you give the blacksmith some eggs so he'll shoe the orchard owner's horse, so the orchard owner will give some apples to the vegetable farmer, so the vegetable farmer will give some carrots to the dairy farmer, who will give you some milk.
Having a universal currency that everyone can trade in eliminates the need to chain together multiple trades like this just to accomplish a single transaction. Everyone can just do their trades immediately against the currency. This is what a lot of people who are anti-money miss. Value is not always tangible. There is value in making trade easier with currency. (Likewise there is value in more efficient distribution of goods. In the above example, the number of eggs, milk, carrots, apples, and horseshoes is exactly the same before and after the trade, but their value has increased after the trade because they've been distributed to the people who want them - i.e. who value them more than the original owners. That is how trading creates wealth/money/value seemingly out of nothing.)
But as noted in other comments, bitcoin's wild fluctuations in value make it a terrible currency. So aside from its anonymous nature facilitating illicit transactions, I'm not really sure what value bitcoin adds to the economy. Hence why economists conclude it's a bubble.
If you can't explain the convenience or purpose provided for the end-user of your software in layman's terms, maybe you shouldn't be writing the software.
Mostly agreed, but branched undo/redo is one of those esoteric things which not every user uses or knows how to use, but for the user who does it can be a godsend. Sometimes you do aim a feature at a subset of the userbase.
Unlike Apple's approach of dumbing everything down so every user can use it, I prefer keeping the basic application easy to use. But the user should be able to drill down into the more complex, esoteric features should they happen to need them. (Maybe have a "revert to default" option in case a basic user accidentally changes an advanced setting.)
The good news is that it seemed like NASA would be one of the last groups to use reused rockets because of their deep-seated bureaucracy.
You do realize NASA used reusable rockets for manned spaceflight for 30 years? The Space Shuttle's main engines were reusable, as well as the solid rocket boosters (they would parachute down into the sea, where they were collected, disassembled, cleaned, repacked with fuel, and reassembled).
NASA's problem with reusable spacecraft has always been cost, not engineering. And since SpaceX tells them the cost in a fixed dollar amount with no extra work needed on NASA's part, there's no reason for them not to jump on this.
The grade-school version of science which is taught (come up with a hypothesis, conduct an experiment which tests it, evaluate the results) is a bit oversimplified. For science to function, the null hypothesis must be disprovable.
You can have "reindeer can't fly" as a null hypothesis, because producing a single example of a flying reindeer disproves the hypothesis.
You can't have "reindeer can fly" as a null hypothesis. Even if you produce a thousand reindeer and demonstrate that they don't fly, all you've shown is that those reindeer couldn't fly, or chose not to fly at the time of your experiment.
Likewise, the null hypothesis in the case for cell phone radiation has to be that it's safe. If you can document one example showing how the radiation affects cellular activity leading to the formation of cancer, then you've disproven the null hypothesis, and can put warning labels on all cell phones.
Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the desire of health officials. They want to keep society safe - they want to err on the side of caution. They would prefer to assume that anything new is dangerous until proven safe. The problem is, there is no experiment or series of experiments you can conduct which proves something is safe (always causes no change to the system). The only way you can pull that off is by testing every possible scenario in the universe and in all time, which is a practical impossibility.
In other words, it's not the responsibility of those claiming cell phones are safe to show that each of those possible biological interactions you've listed doesn't happen. That's impossible to do because even if they test it a thousand times and it doesn't happen, you can simply claim "well it didn't happen this time, but sometimes it does."
In fact, it is your responsibility to show that one (or more) of those biological interactions you've listed actually does happens. Health officials don't like this because it puts the burden of proof (and thus the hard work) onto them. But it's the only scientifically valid way to proceed.
(There's actually a third category - unknown or unable to be determined. When you haven't done any studies, then the hypothesis is pretty clearly in this third category. Then you're justified in "playing it safe" and assuming the thing could be harmful even though you have no evidence of it. But as the number of studies finding no link to harm builds up, it becomes statistically more and more likely that the null hypothesis is true, and at some point you can stop assuming the thing could be harmful. Also note that you can never prove the null hypothesis is correct. That's why it's a null hypothesis - because it's disprovable, but not provable. That's why the laws of thermodynamics, conservation of momentum, conservation of mass/energy, etc. are still considered theories and not actual laws. Things always behave in accordance with them, and we haven't found any exceptions, but neither are we sure that there are no exceptions)
Real economic activity generates productivity - added value. The mining company digs rocks out of the ground, and sells the ore for more than it cost them to dig. The refinery smelts the ore, and sells the resulting steel for more than it cost them to buy and smelt the ore. The tool company buys the steel and forms tools out of it, and sells the tools for more than it cost to buy the steel and form it. The tool store buys the tools and transports and arranges them in a retail display, and sells them for more than what all that cost it. The carpenter buys the tool, and uses it to create furniture whose sale value more than makes back the price of the tool. The homeowner buys the furniture, because the value it provides in organizational efficiency outweighs its purchase price. In each step, the value of the item increases because productivity was added, making it worth more than the acquisition cost and the cost of the improvements the temporary owner made.
I'm having a difficult time seeing where the productivity gain in bitcoin is. All that happened is someone mined/bought some bitcoin, then sold it at a higher price to someone else, who sold it at a higher price to someone else, etc. just because people keep expecting its value to rise. With stocks, at least the first person to buy the stock was contributing capital to the expansion of the company (which must have used it well if their stock is still worth something). With bitcoin, the only thing the first person to acquire it did was turn a bunch of electricity into heat to calculate some numbers with special mathematical properties.
If there's no productivity gain, then the process is zero sum or negative sum, and there is no net productivity gain for society (e.g. someone got some furniture which didn't exist before). In that case this is basically like a lottery, and one of the winners is donating some of his winnings back to society. Well, considering the money for those winnings came from society in the first place, there's no net good being done here. You're just moving money around.
People here complain about finding a great job, but being required to sign a non-compete to get it. The principled thing to do is to walk away and find another job, maybe not as cushy, but one that doesn't require you to compromise your principles. It's not always the easiest choice to make, but that's what makes it a principled decision. If upholding your principles always coincided with making the easy choice, we'd all be eating chocolate for dinner, being encouraged to waste time on slashdot at work, and having life handed to us on a silver platter. The real world doesn't work that way. Things are better because people made and are making the harder, but principled choices.
If there were real journalists who did real journalism at Gawker, then they compromised their principles when they took a job at smutty rag like that. I have very little sympathy for them. Things like non-competes and sex tape tabloids exist because people are willing to compromise their principles and sign and purvey those things. If people took the high road and refused to sign nor work for such places, they wouldn't exist. The journalists who agreed to work for Gawker, regardless of what other good they might have done, were part of the problem. If they'd chosen to find work at a respected news organization and carried out their muckraking there, and your conspiracy is true, then Thiel wouldn't have been able to silence them with a trivial lawsuit over a sex tape.
Funny though that a site that popular and profitable was that well hated.
That makes perfect sense to me. There's a lot of money to be made by appealing to people's baser instincts. Sex, drugs, gambling, alcohol, smoking, etc. We know such things (in excess) don't contribute to the improvement of society, but we're physically wired to desire such things and so if given the opportunity will waste money on them. Principled people recognize this and try to steer those with less self-control away from such things. Unprincipled people use them as a money-making opportunity. If you're using such things to "pay the bills" for real muckraking, then you're effectively cancelling out any good that you're doing for society. You need to quit that job and find one where the good you do outweighs the harm.
Netflix offers media hosting servers so that Netflix traffic doesn't have to travel over the ISP's upstream link - Netflix's library can be hosted and served locally within the ISP's network. Netflix offers this for free to larger ISPs. Verizon and Comcast refused Netflix's free offer just to manufacture a false argument for fast lanes.
Netflix is a content provider, not a service provider and therefore is not a peer and should be paying for bandwidth.
Netflix is already paying for bandwidth. They are paying their ISP for the bandwidth they consume.
Verizon, Comcast, et al are already being paid for they bandwidth the use. Their customers pay them $x/mo for y Mbps and increasingly z GB/mo. Them charging Netflix is nothing more than double-dipping - charging Netflix for something that the ISP's customers have already paid them for. This is like you going to a restaurant, ordering and paying for steak, and the restaurant claiming that this somehow entitles them to charge the cattle rancher a steak processing and butchering fee. Even though the rancher has already paid those costs via the slaughterhouse which he took his cattle to.
The only reason the ISPs able to get away with it is because local governments have granted them a local Internet service monopoly. If there were actually competition among cable and DSL Internet services, any ISP which threatened to throttle Netflix if Netflix didn't pay them would be shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers would complain to their neighbor that Netflix has been really flaky lately, and their neighbor would say Netflix streams just fine at his house. And the customers would simply cancel service and switch to the neighbor's ISP.
10 years ago I lived in Washington (state) and got a job commuting to Vancouver for work. I looked into getting a Canadian cell phone, and it turned out that adding the Canada roaming option to my U.S. plan was cheaper per minute than any Canadian plan.
There are lots of scams involving implicit authorization. Some of the ones I've encountered include
Letters made up to look like an official government notice for you to do some required annual government filing. The ones I got were $150 to file a statement of information for your business with the secretary of state. When I took over my dad's business, I dumped these in the trash (you can file it online for $20). My dad had gotten one at his home address, and came yelling at me demanding to know why I hadn't paid these guys. I explained the scam to him. He sheepishly admitted he'd been paying them every year for over 20 years he'd been in business.
Copies of the same invoice (without an invoice number) sent to both the accounting dept and to the project lead. They're gambling that the project lead will assume s/he got the only copy and hands it over to accounting, and accounting will assume they are separate bills and will pay both. I try to make sure any contracts with installment payments have different amounts for each scheduled payment to avoid this. (e.g. Break up a $6000 bill into $3500 and $2500 payments, instead of $3000 and $3000.)
Letter doctored to appear as a magazine/membership subscription renewal, when in fact nobody at the company subscribes to the magazine or membership. Scammers are gambling that the accountant paying the bills will automatically pay renewal notices without checking to make sure they're actual renewals.
Phone call from someone claiming to be from a government regulatory organization, who then pumps you for information on your company like # of employees, pay, which banks you have accounts with, etc. Probably a prelude to some future scam where they can use that information to make themselves sound more legit since the "know" inside information about your company.
(Limited to businesses which rent out space.) Tenant uses your name and address on a shipping waybill, then skips out on paying. When the shipping company tries to collect, they have your info as the company that requested the shipment, and the package was in fact shipped to your address, with the tenant as the "employee contact" at "your company." By the time it's gotten to this stage, the tenant has already left for greener pastures.
And there's the straight-out fraud where employee who is quitting buys a bunch of personal stuff on their corporate account, before vanishing.
The secretary did good by trying to confirm it first instead of blindly carrying it out. Hope she got a bonus and a raise.
Wire transfers can and are reversed all the time. That's where the second victim in the scam (David Aldridge) comes in.
The fraudster convinces David to accept a wire transfer on her behalf. When he receives the money, he withdraws it and hands over the cash to her. She then disappears. When the bank tries to reverse the wire transfer and finds the money is gone, the person liable for it is the second mark in the fraud, not the fraudster.
If you've ever gotten a scammy-looking email asking if you'd help transfer some money by receiving a payment (Western Union is more common, though I've seem bank wire ones), and they'll let you keep some excess funds as payment, you are the second mark. The money transfer is fraudulent. And when the transferring bank/company tries to reverse it, you will be on the hook for the full amount. (This differs from the Nigeria 419 scam, where they try to make you pre-pay some fees to initiate a transaction which never occurs. In these scams, the transaction actually occurs, and the scammer is relying on the time it takes between the transfer and reversal to dupe you into parting with the ill-gotten money.)
"Prescription" in this context means the optical characteristics of the lenses needed to correct your vision. Not a doctor's authorization to purchase, like a drug prescription.
If you don't have your latest prescription from your eye doctor, most eyeglass shops will be happy to measure your current glasses to determine your old prescription, then grind duplicate lenses.
The bigger issue IMHO is Luxottica. Ever wonder why a few pieces of plastic and metal you place on your face cost $200+ before you even buy lenses for them? And why those Taiwanese mail-order glasses places can sell you frames for only $15? It's because one company owns or has controlling interest in most of the popular eyeglass brands and a large fraction of stores worldwide, and they rig the prices.
You actually bring up an interesting point people aren't mentioning. Disney owns ABC, so this will in effect be a reduction of the national TV studios from 4 (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) to 3 (CBS, NBC, Disney).
I'm actually old enough to remember when there were just three big TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). Fox managed to claw its way up into becoming the 4th national TV network in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I suspect that'll be the rationale to approve this merger - we've had only 3 national networks before and it didn't prevent a 4th from joining their ranks.
At this point, the only mechanism we have for "correcting" the mistake is to elect an opposition party to power in Congress in 2018.
Good luck with that. The Democrats might win the House, but they're highly unlikely to win the Senate. There are 24 Democratic Senate seats (and 2 independents who vote with the Dems) up for re-election in 2018, vs just 8 Republican seats. And 5 of those Democrats are in states which voted for Trump by huge margins. Senators are re-elected every 6 years, so those Democrats rode Obama's re-election coattails to win in these deep-red states. The more likely outcome is a Republican gain in the Senate.
(2016 was the reverse, with Republicans defending 24 Senate seats, vs. just 10 for the Democrats. That was the year the Democrats had to pick up seats to win the Senate. The Republicans escaped it losing only 2 seats and maintaining control. 2020 is more favorable to the Democrats, with 22 Republicans and 11 Democratic Senate seats up for re-election.)
Yes the House is skewed by gerrymandering. What bugs me is that the press is just now reporting on gerrymandering being a problem, when they completely ignored it during the 40 years (1955-1994) the Democrats controlled the House. All this stuff about the gerrymandering problem is old hat to me because I tried to explain it all to people in the 1980s. Culminating in a ballot initiative to try to fix the problem.
Environmental groups and NOW ran ads against it and defeated it because they knew the the districts were gerrymandered to favor Democrats, so fixing the problem then would've meant more Republicans in office. I'll vote for any sensible reform, but I won't cry any tears if it fails. Those groups made their bed - they can lie in it. (Republicans overcame gerrymandering by coming up with a strategy to defeat it that didn't involve winning legislative seats - win the governorship in states where Democrats controlled both state legislatures, and simply veto the gerrymandered districts the Democrats came up with.)
Don't want your information to be scraped? Have it behind a login - free or otherwise - then ban accounts that are slurping down 10,000 pages a day.
Ohhhhh then it wouldn't be easily indexed by search engines and thus findable by the general public and your site would fade into obscurity. What to do!?
Seems to me it would be trivial to code in exceptions to the slurp limit for the IP address of known search engines. And leave a link on your site for search engines you don't know about to request an exception.
Course the next step in this arms race is to use a botnet to do distributed slurping. Each compromised machine accesses a handful of pages, then sends them to a master server for aggregation. I'm not sure what you could do to prevent that, technically or legally. If you hang your laundry out in some place accessible to the public, just accept that people will be able to take snapshots of it.
Maybe they listened to their own net neutrality arguments, and realized that (1) it was hypocritical to be arguing for net neutrality against the ISPs while simultaneously blocking competitors from their store. And (2) while a direct opportunity to help their own product sales existed by blocking competitors, there were indirect consequences in that the competitors could block theirs as well. Since it was a zero sum game, there was nothing to be gained by going down that route, and a lot of money to be lost inconveniencing customers just to arrive at the same final destination. (That is to say, progress comes from making your stuff better than others'. Throwing roadblocks in front of others to drag their products down may temporarily help your product get ahead, but it results in a long-term loss for all of society once everyone starts throwing up roadblocks.)
In other news, tit for tat leads the prisoner's dilemma to the optimal solution again.
That's the misguided grade-school reasoning used to get support for the ACA. Yes the U.S. healthcare system is screwed up. But it wasn't the private insurance system which screwed it up. A salient point the media ignored in the buildup to the ACA was that (1) U.S. government spending on healthcare was almost as much as private spending, and (2) the government alone was already spending more per capita on health care than Canada. i.e. Government healthcare spending was just as much to blame for the high prices as the private healthcare system. If a single-payer system like Canada's was truly the answer, it could've been duplicated with the complete elimination of the private health insurance system and a slight reduction in taxes.
Middlemen can help or hurt a system. The value they add is in adding fluidity, reducing risk (they take on some of the risk themselves), and consolidating work (eliminating duplicated effort). The retail merchandise market is rife with middlemen. They're the ones doing the market analysis and guessing how much of a product needs to be shipped to each geographic area. They place the orders with the manufacturer, and arrange for transportation. They add value by doing their best to minimize the delta between supply and demand for each region. If you eliminated these middlemen, it would result in more undersupply (shortages for a product, resulting in buyers having to waste time and money going to other stores in search of the product) and more oversupply (excess inventory, resulting in having to hire more transportation to ship the products to areas with shortages, increasing overall costs), and increased costs due to the duplicated effort of every manufacturer selling competing products having to do these regional market analyses.
But a system only requires a certain number of middlemen layers to achieve maximum efficiency. Beyond that, middlemen needlessly increase prices (the value they add is less than the cost they charge). But for something as widescale and varied as healthcare, I'm extremely dubious of the contention that the optimal number of middlemen for that system is zero. I can see a social argument for single payer (I actually agree with the notion that basic healthcare should be a human right), but the economic arguments for it never made sense.
I suspect that like the piracy argument, your argument is based on the false assumption that if news aggregators didn't exist, these people would got their news from "better" services and be better informed. It's more likely that if these people weren't getting their news from Google News or Facebook, they wouldn't be getting any news at all. i.e. The problem isn't the aggregator, the problem is some people just don't actively seek out news.
I hit several news sites daily (including ones I dislike but feel I should browse just so I'm getting a complete picture). I also go through Google News in case there's something these "major" news sites are omitting, on the theory that a computerized algorithm will have less bias than a human editor at selecting which stories are important.
That's how I learned about 2 people dying and 57 people being hospitalized due to drug overdoses at a Florida music concert on June 1, 2016. That was the same day there was a murder-suicide at UCLA which was all over the national news and even preempted regular broadcasts in Southern California for live news coverage. The drug story barely made it out of local news even though it had just as many deaths and far more injuries. Because most of the news organizations are biased against guns, to them a negative story about guns was more important than a bigger negative story about drugs. In this case, Google News was superior to the regular national news outlets.
UFO is just a catchall term for unidentified flying object. It doesn't automatically mean alien spacecraft.
The prevalence of smartphones means more UFOs are captured on video, not less as you're implying. But getting it on video allows the person to review and show the object to others. This increases the chances of identifying the object, at which point it ceases to be a UFO and stops the story of the incident from spreading. So it's not that people aren't getting video of UFOs on their smartphones. It's that the video helps determine what they are so they're no longer UFOs. (The online services which show plane routes and times also help, as you can conclusively prove that the time and location of the unidentified lights corresponds exactly with a certain airliner flight.)
In the old days all you had was eyewitness testimony, so it was more difficult to turn a UFO into an IFO. People weren't deliberately reporting alien spacecraft more frequently. It was just harder to identify the UFO, so they'd keep telling their story.
This is not a problem with the free market. There is no free market at play here. These cable and phone companies have government-granted monopolies for last mile service. There is no free market competition for these services because the government has prohibited it.
You are correct that it's inefficient to have multiple physical networks covering the same area. But in the beginning, nobody knew what was the best way to wire up all these homes. So the government stepped in to prevent every Joe cable company from stringing up cables on the telephone poles to service houses. They authorized one cable company to do it, in exchange for certain price and coverage guarantees. This too wasn't a problem as long as different governments picked different cable companies. Each cable company tried something a little different. The implementations which worked better got their contract renewed. The ones which didn't had the contract awarded to a different cable company after a few years. In this way, the cable industry homed in on the best method to connect houses and distribute TV and Internet service. This was the free market solving the problem in the most efficient way.
That was then. Today, pretty much every cable company has arrived at the same optimal solution. Even the cable modems and set-top tuners have become standardized to use this solution (DOCSIS and ATSC). The only potential future improvement is optical fiber to the home (which might not even be optimal since copper's bandwidth is fine over the short distance from the street to the house). Now that the free market has determined the most efficient way to distribute cable Internet, it's time to standardize it. Turn it into a utility with one company given a monopoly over building and maintaining it, but prohibited from providing services over it. Other companies (which don't control the cable) provide service over that cable. Just like how electricity and natural gas are sold.
Or to use your road analogy, in the beginning nobody knew the best way to build a road. Some thought concrete was better, others thought asphalt was better. Some thought you should build it on solid bedrock, others thought a software base of gravel and sand would be better. Cities hired different companies to build their roads, and lots of different roads were built in lots of different ways. By comparing notes on rates of degradation, maintenance costs, and driving over many different roads, we got a sense of which methods of building roads worked better. Gradually all roads began to adopt these methods, while the inferior methods were discarded. Once the free market had found what seemed to be the best way to build roads, that's when we standardized their construction and arrived at the FedEx/DHL/UPS situation you describe. (A better analogy would be Edison and Tesla/Westinghouse fighting over DC vs AC for power transmission over long distances. Nobody knew which was better so both had to be allowed, but in different geographical areas since they were incompatible with each other. Once AC as found to be superior, we standardized on it.)
The problem with Internet service is the government still has the monopoly rules in place from that previous "discovery" phase, which no longer serve any purpose because the optimal method of distribution has already been found. But it's dragging its feet moving on to the "standardization" phase of converting it into a utility.
Picture yourself spending all day typing COBOL programs into a keypunch machine. Back in the 60s and 70s that's pretty much tantamount to picturing yourself as a woman.
Honest question, since I genuinely don't know the answer. Were the women punching the code into the machines the ones writing the programs?
I ask because I took a "computer math" course in jr. high in the early 1980s (a year before the school got networked Apple IIs). We used ancient programmable HPs (which I later found to my delight used almost the same programming language as the HP-15C) which were fed instructions on punch cards. The procedure to "program" the machines was:
Scribble out a flowchart for your program on paper.
Convert that flowchart into step-by-step computer instructions (again on paper).
Convert the instructions into punch codes (again on paper).
Punch the cards.
Feed the cards into the machines.
The last three steps didn't require any technical knowledge, and in fact were pretty boring but easy to screw up if you didn't pay attention (e.g. hanging chads, or punching the wrong chad). The "programming" was in the first two steps, and didn't require you be anywhere near the machines. I usually did the programming at home - class time was for running the program on the machines and debugging. I would've punched out the cards at home too (in fact did so a couple times) but the chad punching devices were much nicer to use and the teacher wouldn't let us take them home with us.
So the fact that period photos show women directly interacting with the machines doesn't necessarily tell you who was writing the programs. It's not like today where you input your code directly into the computer, and get immediate feedback via the computer. I honestly don't know if those women were programming. But considering how boring and tedious the punching step was, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they farmed that job out to unskilled workers so the programmers didn't have to waste their valuable time on it.
Almost. Repealing net neutrality falls in line with the Free Market dogma of less government regulation.
Unfortunately, the Internet Service industry is not a free market. In most areas, the local government has granted a single ISP a monopoly. This is what's causing the problem - government interference in the market, not oligopolies (small group of companies which rise to the top on their own merit). By granting a monopoly, customers cannot switch to a different ISP, meaning the ISP can do whatever they want without taking their customers' interests into account.
If Trump/Pai stick to the free market dogma and also outlaw local governments from granting service monopolies, then net neutrality isn't needed. Competition and choice among ISPs would mean that if one ISP tries to throttle Netflix to force Netflix to pay them, all that will happen is their customers will cancel service and switch to a different ISP (one which doesn't throttle Netflix).
Net neutrality is government regulation trying to fix a problem caused by government regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't see the irony in demoting posts which ask for likes, while they simultaneously cover up the page with an unremovable popup asking you to join or login if you try to browse Facebook anonymously in incognito mode?
The U.S. has one of the lowest home price to income ratios in the developed world. If it's dumb to own a home in the U.S., it's super-dumb to own one elsewhere in the world.
It sounds more like you bought more home than you could afford. I spent almost a year shopping for a home, and the one I finally bought was in a nice area I liked, in decent shape, but the price was depressed because the owners had been trying to move for years so the house had been "on the market" for a really long time in MLS. After I bought it, even after mortgage and expenses, I was still able to sock away 20%-25% of my income in savings/investments. I like living here, there's no HOA, I pay someone half the HOA fees I normally saw when shopping to rake the leaves and maintain the lawn (though I'm considering doing it myself because I could use the exercise - why pay for a gym membership when there's work to do around the house), and I'm handy enough to do most of my own repairs.
The problem with picking a name like this is that a large fraction of your potential customers will spell it the way it's normally spelled in English - Othello. When they're unable to find the website to download the browser, a large number of them will just give up.
A similar thing happened to a friend. He opened a high-end mail order chocolate shop (one of the places he advertised was in-flight magazines) but used some name whose spelling looked nothing like its pronunciation. I warned him that would make it impossible for people who vaguely remembered the name to find his store via a web search, but he was so enamored with the name he stuck with it. He was bankrupt within a few years. (The chocolates were good though.)
Likewise, company and product names which are common words (Opera, Otello/Othello) can be impossible to find in search engines or have a lot of noise in their search results. Whereas made-up unique names and acronyms or obscure words from dead languages (VAIO, ATIV, Camry, Prius, Pepsi, Verizon, etc.) yield easy and exact search results, provided people can remember your made-up word. I know this is marketing, but in this case it's true. You want your customers to be able to find you as easily as possible.
A stolen and unrecovered car is easy. The insurance company totals it and pays out.
A stolen car recovered but damaged is easy. Insurance company figures out how much it would cost to repair the damage, and pays that.
A stolen car recovered which has only been depreciated by logging 11,000 miles? How do you calculate that? Depreciation is not fixed per mile. Depreciation from 2,000 to 13,000 miles is a lot more than depreciation from 42,000 to 53,000 miles, even though both are 11,000 miles worth of depreciation.. The actual value the owner loses depends on when he sells the car. If he sells it immediately, the sale value will reflect depreciation from 2,000 to 13,000 miles If he continues to use it for a few years before selling it, the depreciation will be for 42,000 to 53,00 miles. Which one does the insurance company pay out?
The purpose of money is to facilitate trade. Say you raise chickens, and you go to the market with eggs to sell. You want to buy some milk, so you visit the dairy farmer. He has milk, but he doesn't want eggs. He wants carrots. So you visit the vegetable farmer. Yes he has carrots, but he doesn't want eggs either. He wants apples. So you visit the orchard farmer who sells apples. He doesn't want eggs either, but he does need his horse shoed. So you visit the blacksmith, who does want eggs. So:you give the blacksmith some eggs so he'll shoe the orchard owner's horse, so the orchard owner will give some apples to the vegetable farmer, so the vegetable farmer will give some carrots to the dairy farmer, who will give you some milk.
Having a universal currency that everyone can trade in eliminates the need to chain together multiple trades like this just to accomplish a single transaction. Everyone can just do their trades immediately against the currency. This is what a lot of people who are anti-money miss. Value is not always tangible. There is value in making trade easier with currency. (Likewise there is value in more efficient distribution of goods. In the above example, the number of eggs, milk, carrots, apples, and horseshoes is exactly the same before and after the trade, but their value has increased after the trade because they've been distributed to the people who want them - i.e. who value them more than the original owners. That is how trading creates wealth/money/value seemingly out of nothing.)
But as noted in other comments, bitcoin's wild fluctuations in value make it a terrible currency. So aside from its anonymous nature facilitating illicit transactions, I'm not really sure what value bitcoin adds to the economy. Hence why economists conclude it's a bubble.
Mostly agreed, but branched undo/redo is one of those esoteric things which not every user uses or knows how to use, but for the user who does it can be a godsend. Sometimes you do aim a feature at a subset of the userbase.
Unlike Apple's approach of dumbing everything down so every user can use it, I prefer keeping the basic application easy to use. But the user should be able to drill down into the more complex, esoteric features should they happen to need them. (Maybe have a "revert to default" option in case a basic user accidentally changes an advanced setting.)
You do realize NASA used reusable rockets for manned spaceflight for 30 years? The Space Shuttle's main engines were reusable, as well as the solid rocket boosters (they would parachute down into the sea, where they were collected, disassembled, cleaned, repacked with fuel, and reassembled).
NASA's problem with reusable spacecraft has always been cost, not engineering. And since SpaceX tells them the cost in a fixed dollar amount with no extra work needed on NASA's part, there's no reason for them not to jump on this.
Likewise, the null hypothesis in the case for cell phone radiation has to be that it's safe. If you can document one example showing how the radiation affects cellular activity leading to the formation of cancer, then you've disproven the null hypothesis, and can put warning labels on all cell phones.
Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the desire of health officials. They want to keep society safe - they want to err on the side of caution. They would prefer to assume that anything new is dangerous until proven safe. The problem is, there is no experiment or series of experiments you can conduct which proves something is safe (always causes no change to the system). The only way you can pull that off is by testing every possible scenario in the universe and in all time, which is a practical impossibility.
In other words, it's not the responsibility of those claiming cell phones are safe to show that each of those possible biological interactions you've listed doesn't happen. That's impossible to do because even if they test it a thousand times and it doesn't happen, you can simply claim "well it didn't happen this time, but sometimes it does."
In fact, it is your responsibility to show that one (or more) of those biological interactions you've listed actually does happens. Health officials don't like this because it puts the burden of proof (and thus the hard work) onto them. But it's the only scientifically valid way to proceed.
(There's actually a third category - unknown or unable to be determined. When you haven't done any studies, then the hypothesis is pretty clearly in this third category. Then you're justified in "playing it safe" and assuming the thing could be harmful even though you have no evidence of it. But as the number of studies finding no link to harm builds up, it becomes statistically more and more likely that the null hypothesis is true, and at some point you can stop assuming the thing could be harmful. Also note that you can never prove the null hypothesis is correct. That's why it's a null hypothesis - because it's disprovable, but not provable. That's why the laws of thermodynamics, conservation of momentum, conservation of mass/energy, etc. are still considered theories and not actual laws. Things always behave in accordance with them, and we haven't found any exceptions, but neither are we sure that there are no exceptions)
Real economic activity generates productivity - added value. The mining company digs rocks out of the ground, and sells the ore for more than it cost them to dig. The refinery smelts the ore, and sells the resulting steel for more than it cost them to buy and smelt the ore. The tool company buys the steel and forms tools out of it, and sells the tools for more than it cost to buy the steel and form it. The tool store buys the tools and transports and arranges them in a retail display, and sells them for more than what all that cost it. The carpenter buys the tool, and uses it to create furniture whose sale value more than makes back the price of the tool. The homeowner buys the furniture, because the value it provides in organizational efficiency outweighs its purchase price. In each step, the value of the item increases because productivity was added, making it worth more than the acquisition cost and the cost of the improvements the temporary owner made.
I'm having a difficult time seeing where the productivity gain in bitcoin is. All that happened is someone mined/bought some bitcoin, then sold it at a higher price to someone else, who sold it at a higher price to someone else, etc. just because people keep expecting its value to rise. With stocks, at least the first person to buy the stock was contributing capital to the expansion of the company (which must have used it well if their stock is still worth something). With bitcoin, the only thing the first person to acquire it did was turn a bunch of electricity into heat to calculate some numbers with special mathematical properties.
If there's no productivity gain, then the process is zero sum or negative sum, and there is no net productivity gain for society (e.g. someone got some furniture which didn't exist before). In that case this is basically like a lottery, and one of the winners is donating some of his winnings back to society. Well, considering the money for those winnings came from society in the first place, there's no net good being done here. You're just moving money around.
If there were real journalists who did real journalism at Gawker, then they compromised their principles when they took a job at smutty rag like that. I have very little sympathy for them. Things like non-competes and sex tape tabloids exist because people are willing to compromise their principles and sign and purvey those things. If people took the high road and refused to sign nor work for such places, they wouldn't exist. The journalists who agreed to work for Gawker, regardless of what other good they might have done, were part of the problem. If they'd chosen to find work at a respected news organization and carried out their muckraking there, and your conspiracy is true, then Thiel wouldn't have been able to silence them with a trivial lawsuit over a sex tape.
That makes perfect sense to me. There's a lot of money to be made by appealing to people's baser instincts. Sex, drugs, gambling, alcohol, smoking, etc. We know such things (in excess) don't contribute to the improvement of society, but we're physically wired to desire such things and so if given the opportunity will waste money on them. Principled people recognize this and try to steer those with less self-control away from such things. Unprincipled people use them as a money-making opportunity. If you're using such things to "pay the bills" for real muckraking, then you're effectively cancelling out any good that you're doing for society. You need to quit that job and find one where the good you do outweighs the harm.
Netflix is already paying for bandwidth. They are paying their ISP for the bandwidth they consume.
Verizon, Comcast, et al are already being paid for they bandwidth the use. Their customers pay them $x/mo for y Mbps and increasingly z GB/mo. Them charging Netflix is nothing more than double-dipping - charging Netflix for something that the ISP's customers have already paid them for. This is like you going to a restaurant, ordering and paying for steak, and the restaurant claiming that this somehow entitles them to charge the cattle rancher a steak processing and butchering fee. Even though the rancher has already paid those costs via the slaughterhouse which he took his cattle to.
The only reason the ISPs able to get away with it is because local governments have granted them a local Internet service monopoly. If there were actually competition among cable and DSL Internet services, any ISP which threatened to throttle Netflix if Netflix didn't pay them would be shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers would complain to their neighbor that Netflix has been really flaky lately, and their neighbor would say Netflix streams just fine at his house. And the customers would simply cancel service and switch to the neighbor's ISP.
10 years ago I lived in Washington (state) and got a job commuting to Vancouver for work. I looked into getting a Canadian cell phone, and it turned out that adding the Canada roaming option to my U.S. plan was cheaper per minute than any Canadian plan.
The secretary did good by trying to confirm it first instead of blindly carrying it out. Hope she got a bonus and a raise.
Wire transfers can and are reversed all the time. That's where the second victim in the scam (David Aldridge) comes in.
The fraudster convinces David to accept a wire transfer on her behalf. When he receives the money, he withdraws it and hands over the cash to her. She then disappears. When the bank tries to reverse the wire transfer and finds the money is gone, the person liable for it is the second mark in the fraud, not the fraudster.
If you've ever gotten a scammy-looking email asking if you'd help transfer some money by receiving a payment (Western Union is more common, though I've seem bank wire ones), and they'll let you keep some excess funds as payment, you are the second mark. The money transfer is fraudulent. And when the transferring bank/company tries to reverse it, you will be on the hook for the full amount. (This differs from the Nigeria 419 scam, where they try to make you pre-pay some fees to initiate a transaction which never occurs. In these scams, the transaction actually occurs, and the scammer is relying on the time it takes between the transfer and reversal to dupe you into parting with the ill-gotten money.)
"Prescription" in this context means the optical characteristics of the lenses needed to correct your vision. Not a doctor's authorization to purchase, like a drug prescription.
If you don't have your latest prescription from your eye doctor, most eyeglass shops will be happy to measure your current glasses to determine your old prescription, then grind duplicate lenses.
The bigger issue IMHO is Luxottica. Ever wonder why a few pieces of plastic and metal you place on your face cost $200+ before you even buy lenses for them? And why those Taiwanese mail-order glasses places can sell you frames for only $15? It's because one company owns or has controlling interest in most of the popular eyeglass brands and a large fraction of stores worldwide, and they rig the prices.
You actually bring up an interesting point people aren't mentioning. Disney owns ABC, so this will in effect be a reduction of the national TV studios from 4 (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) to 3 (CBS, NBC, Disney).
I'm actually old enough to remember when there were just three big TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). Fox managed to claw its way up into becoming the 4th national TV network in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I suspect that'll be the rationale to approve this merger - we've had only 3 national networks before and it didn't prevent a 4th from joining their ranks.
Good luck with that. The Democrats might win the House, but they're highly unlikely to win the Senate. There are 24 Democratic Senate seats (and 2 independents who vote with the Dems) up for re-election in 2018, vs just 8 Republican seats. And 5 of those Democrats are in states which voted for Trump by huge margins. Senators are re-elected every 6 years, so those Democrats rode Obama's re-election coattails to win in these deep-red states. The more likely outcome is a Republican gain in the Senate.
(2016 was the reverse, with Republicans defending 24 Senate seats, vs. just 10 for the Democrats. That was the year the Democrats had to pick up seats to win the Senate. The Republicans escaped it losing only 2 seats and maintaining control. 2020 is more favorable to the Democrats, with 22 Republicans and 11 Democratic Senate seats up for re-election.)
Yes the House is skewed by gerrymandering. What bugs me is that the press is just now reporting on gerrymandering being a problem, when they completely ignored it during the 40 years (1955-1994) the Democrats controlled the House. All this stuff about the gerrymandering problem is old hat to me because I tried to explain it all to people in the 1980s. Culminating in a ballot initiative to try to fix the problem. Environmental groups and NOW ran ads against it and defeated it because they knew the the districts were gerrymandered to favor Democrats, so fixing the problem then would've meant more Republicans in office. I'll vote for any sensible reform, but I won't cry any tears if it fails. Those groups made their bed - they can lie in it. (Republicans overcame gerrymandering by coming up with a strategy to defeat it that didn't involve winning legislative seats - win the governorship in states where Democrats controlled both state legislatures, and simply veto the gerrymandered districts the Democrats came up with.)
Seems to me it would be trivial to code in exceptions to the slurp limit for the IP address of known search engines. And leave a link on your site for search engines you don't know about to request an exception.
Course the next step in this arms race is to use a botnet to do distributed slurping. Each compromised machine accesses a handful of pages, then sends them to a master server for aggregation. I'm not sure what you could do to prevent that, technically or legally. If you hang your laundry out in some place accessible to the public, just accept that people will be able to take snapshots of it.
Maybe they listened to their own net neutrality arguments, and realized that (1) it was hypocritical to be arguing for net neutrality against the ISPs while simultaneously blocking competitors from their store. And (2) while a direct opportunity to help their own product sales existed by blocking competitors, there were indirect consequences in that the competitors could block theirs as well. Since it was a zero sum game, there was nothing to be gained by going down that route, and a lot of money to be lost inconveniencing customers just to arrive at the same final destination. (That is to say, progress comes from making your stuff better than others'. Throwing roadblocks in front of others to drag their products down may temporarily help your product get ahead, but it results in a long-term loss for all of society once everyone starts throwing up roadblocks.)
In other news, tit for tat leads the prisoner's dilemma to the optimal solution again.
That's the misguided grade-school reasoning used to get support for the ACA. Yes the U.S. healthcare system is screwed up. But it wasn't the private insurance system which screwed it up. A salient point the media ignored in the buildup to the ACA was that (1) U.S. government spending on healthcare was almost as much as private spending, and (2) the government alone was already spending more per capita on health care than Canada. i.e. Government healthcare spending was just as much to blame for the high prices as the private healthcare system. If a single-payer system like Canada's was truly the answer, it could've been duplicated with the complete elimination of the private health insurance system and a slight reduction in taxes.
Middlemen can help or hurt a system. The value they add is in adding fluidity, reducing risk (they take on some of the risk themselves), and consolidating work (eliminating duplicated effort). The retail merchandise market is rife with middlemen. They're the ones doing the market analysis and guessing how much of a product needs to be shipped to each geographic area. They place the orders with the manufacturer, and arrange for transportation. They add value by doing their best to minimize the delta between supply and demand for each region. If you eliminated these middlemen, it would result in more undersupply (shortages for a product, resulting in buyers having to waste time and money going to other stores in search of the product) and more oversupply (excess inventory, resulting in having to hire more transportation to ship the products to areas with shortages, increasing overall costs), and increased costs due to the duplicated effort of every manufacturer selling competing products having to do these regional market analyses.
But a system only requires a certain number of middlemen layers to achieve maximum efficiency. Beyond that, middlemen needlessly increase prices (the value they add is less than the cost they charge). But for something as widescale and varied as healthcare, I'm extremely dubious of the contention that the optimal number of middlemen for that system is zero. I can see a social argument for single payer (I actually agree with the notion that basic healthcare should be a human right), but the economic arguments for it never made sense.
All 3 points also apply to regular news services.
I suspect that like the piracy argument, your argument is based on the false assumption that if news aggregators didn't exist, these people would got their news from "better" services and be better informed. It's more likely that if these people weren't getting their news from Google News or Facebook, they wouldn't be getting any news at all. i.e. The problem isn't the aggregator, the problem is some people just don't actively seek out news.
I hit several news sites daily (including ones I dislike but feel I should browse just so I'm getting a complete picture). I also go through Google News in case there's something these "major" news sites are omitting, on the theory that a computerized algorithm will have less bias than a human editor at selecting which stories are important.
That's how I learned about 2 people dying and 57 people being hospitalized due to drug overdoses at a Florida music concert on June 1, 2016. That was the same day there was a murder-suicide at UCLA which was all over the national news and even preempted regular broadcasts in Southern California for live news coverage. The drug story barely made it out of local news even though it had just as many deaths and far more injuries. Because most of the news organizations are biased against guns, to them a negative story about guns was more important than a bigger negative story about drugs. In this case, Google News was superior to the regular national news outlets.
UFO is just a catchall term for unidentified flying object. It doesn't automatically mean alien spacecraft.
The prevalence of smartphones means more UFOs are captured on video, not less as you're implying. But getting it on video allows the person to review and show the object to others. This increases the chances of identifying the object, at which point it ceases to be a UFO and stops the story of the incident from spreading. So it's not that people aren't getting video of UFOs on their smartphones. It's that the video helps determine what they are so they're no longer UFOs. (The online services which show plane routes and times also help, as you can conclusively prove that the time and location of the unidentified lights corresponds exactly with a certain airliner flight.)
In the old days all you had was eyewitness testimony, so it was more difficult to turn a UFO into an IFO. People weren't deliberately reporting alien spacecraft more frequently. It was just harder to identify the UFO, so they'd keep telling their story.
This is not a problem with the free market. There is no free market at play here. These cable and phone companies have government-granted monopolies for last mile service. There is no free market competition for these services because the government has prohibited it.
You are correct that it's inefficient to have multiple physical networks covering the same area. But in the beginning, nobody knew what was the best way to wire up all these homes. So the government stepped in to prevent every Joe cable company from stringing up cables on the telephone poles to service houses. They authorized one cable company to do it, in exchange for certain price and coverage guarantees. This too wasn't a problem as long as different governments picked different cable companies. Each cable company tried something a little different. The implementations which worked better got their contract renewed. The ones which didn't had the contract awarded to a different cable company after a few years. In this way, the cable industry homed in on the best method to connect houses and distribute TV and Internet service. This was the free market solving the problem in the most efficient way.
That was then. Today, pretty much every cable company has arrived at the same optimal solution. Even the cable modems and set-top tuners have become standardized to use this solution (DOCSIS and ATSC). The only potential future improvement is optical fiber to the home (which might not even be optimal since copper's bandwidth is fine over the short distance from the street to the house). Now that the free market has determined the most efficient way to distribute cable Internet, it's time to standardize it. Turn it into a utility with one company given a monopoly over building and maintaining it, but prohibited from providing services over it. Other companies (which don't control the cable) provide service over that cable. Just like how electricity and natural gas are sold.
Or to use your road analogy, in the beginning nobody knew the best way to build a road. Some thought concrete was better, others thought asphalt was better. Some thought you should build it on solid bedrock, others thought a software base of gravel and sand would be better. Cities hired different companies to build their roads, and lots of different roads were built in lots of different ways. By comparing notes on rates of degradation, maintenance costs, and driving over many different roads, we got a sense of which methods of building roads worked better. Gradually all roads began to adopt these methods, while the inferior methods were discarded. Once the free market had found what seemed to be the best way to build roads, that's when we standardized their construction and arrived at the FedEx/DHL/UPS situation you describe. (A better analogy would be Edison and Tesla/Westinghouse fighting over DC vs AC for power transmission over long distances. Nobody knew which was better so both had to be allowed, but in different geographical areas since they were incompatible with each other. Once AC as found to be superior, we standardized on it.)
The problem with Internet service is the government still has the monopoly rules in place from that previous "discovery" phase, which no longer serve any purpose because the optimal method of distribution has already been found. But it's dragging its feet moving on to the "standardization" phase of converting it into a utility.
Honest question, since I genuinely don't know the answer. Were the women punching the code into the machines the ones writing the programs?
I ask because I took a "computer math" course in jr. high in the early 1980s (a year before the school got networked Apple IIs). We used ancient programmable HPs (which I later found to my delight used almost the same programming language as the HP-15C) which were fed instructions on punch cards. The procedure to "program" the machines was:
The last three steps didn't require any technical knowledge, and in fact were pretty boring but easy to screw up if you didn't pay attention (e.g. hanging chads, or punching the wrong chad). The "programming" was in the first two steps, and didn't require you be anywhere near the machines. I usually did the programming at home - class time was for running the program on the machines and debugging. I would've punched out the cards at home too (in fact did so a couple times) but the chad punching devices were much nicer to use and the teacher wouldn't let us take them home with us.
So the fact that period photos show women directly interacting with the machines doesn't necessarily tell you who was writing the programs. It's not like today where you input your code directly into the computer, and get immediate feedback via the computer. I honestly don't know if those women were programming. But considering how boring and tedious the punching step was, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they farmed that job out to unskilled workers so the programmers didn't have to waste their valuable time on it.
(This is not to denigrate women in programming. The person who invented the concept of a programming language was a woman. I'm just not sure what those photos show.)
Almost. Repealing net neutrality falls in line with the Free Market dogma of less government regulation.
Unfortunately, the Internet Service industry is not a free market. In most areas, the local government has granted a single ISP a monopoly. This is what's causing the problem - government interference in the market, not oligopolies (small group of companies which rise to the top on their own merit). By granting a monopoly, customers cannot switch to a different ISP, meaning the ISP can do whatever they want without taking their customers' interests into account.
If Trump/Pai stick to the free market dogma and also outlaw local governments from granting service monopolies, then net neutrality isn't needed. Competition and choice among ISPs would mean that if one ISP tries to throttle Netflix to force Netflix to pay them, all that will happen is their customers will cancel service and switch to a different ISP (one which doesn't throttle Netflix).
Net neutrality is government regulation trying to fix a problem caused by government regulation.