During Obama's 8 years in office, The Democrats controlled the House for 2 years, and the Senate for 6 years. During Obama's first two years in office, the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, and for 6 months had a supermajority in the Senate (could not be stopped by fillibusters). They had a good chance of passing anything during those 2 years (just needed to convince 2 Republican Senators not to fillibuster), and could've passed anything they wanted with impunity during those six months.
That they didn't pass any net neutrality legislation during those years tells you it's not really that important to them. And that their current protestations about it are merely to force the Trump administration to "fight and circumvent to get anything done."
The things they did choose to pass during those two years were unpopular enough with the voters that the following election they lost control of the House by the largest swing since 1938, and almost lost control of the Senate (where only 1/3 of the senators were up for re-election). Compare this to net neutrality which seems to have pretty universal support outside of monopoly ISPs, and might even have helped them in the election if they'd bothered to pass it.
It's actually closer to 10 cents a pop. So it adds $1000 to a 10k unit order.
If the poor IT guy has to wait 10 seconds for the USB-to-ethernet dongle to be recognized (we'll assume "it just works" and no time is needed for driver installation), for 10k units that's 27.8 hours of extra billable time. If he makes $50k/yr, that's $25/hour. So the extra cost to use a USB-to-ethernet dongle per 10k units is $695 per incident. Just two incidents and the built-in ethernet port is cheaper.
RS-232 and parallel ports aren't added because they're rarely used. Ethernet is. Every year in my computer consulting business, I probably spend a cumulative 3-5 hours at client's offices (billed at $100/hr) twiddling my thumbs because they asked me to set up a device without an ethernet port, and to do that I need the WiFi password. They don't know the password, and have to run around digging through papers or making phone calls to figure out the password. That right there is several hundred dollars my clients could save if they'd bought devices with built-in 10 cent ethernet ports.
It's self-inception. The first all-electric cargo ship uses electricity generated predominantly from coal to carry coal.
I'm actually more curious what route it takes. If you figure the route is 65 km (25% safety factor in range to account for currents and wind), at 12.8 kph that works out to 5 hours travel time. If it takes 2 hours to load and unload, that's 4 hours lay time for a 5 hour trip. That's gotta be some gnarly route to make such a high percentage of lay time preferable to something like a roundabout rail route which eliminates the extra loading/unloading steps. Even if one end of the route is on an island, building a new power plant and/or laying down underwater power cables may be preferable long-term.
Just make sure all your literature calls it a comic conference, not a convention. And if attendees shorten it to comic con, you have a ready-made argument that the trademark has become genericized and should be invalidated.
"Many creators are saying it's unfair for patrons to have to pay transaction fees. In addition to that, most people support multiple creators and not just one, and they'll have to pay the extra fee for each pledge they make."
On the contrary, the patrons were already paying the transaction fees before. They'd send donations to the creator, and the creator would use some of those donations to pay the transaction fees.
The only thing that's changed is that the patrons now know how much of their donation is going to transaction fees. This knowledge can be used to eliminate inefficient donations in favor of more efficient donations which incur smaller fees. e.g. the other commenter who paid $1/mo to a bunch of creators.
At 2.9% and 35 cents per transaction, that meant each creator was only getting 62.1 cents per dollar donated.
If he instead switches to $10/mo rotated between 10 different creators each month, then that results in a transaction fee of 29 cents + 35 cents, or each creator receiving $9.36 of the $10, or 93.6 cents per dollar donated.
I suppose some creators might be upset at donations becoming less uniform, coming in large bursts instead of small steady amounts. But at the end of the year they'll have gotten to keep more money. Unless this change somehow alters donors behavior and they end up donating less overall.
That would be fine for a one-time transaction (e.g. purchasing a car).
With recurring transactions, there's also a period during which the contract is in effect (e.g. renting an apartment for a year). Once you're beyond that term, what happens next is either defined elsewhere in the contract, or is totally up in the air. Usually it switches to month to month. The two parties continue each month as they were under the original contract. But either party is free to change the terms if they wish (and the other party is free to quit since the contract is no longer in effect).
Biogas is usually generated from landfills. When a landfill is closed, it's capped off with layers impermeable to water (to prevent rain from leaching the contents of the landfill into the soil) and to air (to prevent the smell from disturbing people occupying whatever you build on top of it). A system of pipes and ducts is constructed around the outside which collects the gases produced by the decomposing trash (mostly methane) for use in power generation applications. (Also because methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - you're better off burning it to convert it into CO2, rather than releasing it straight to the atmosphere.)
Plants which convert organic matter like manure directly to biogas are relatively rare. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has to do with economy of scale. With a landfill, you're collecting gas from a huge volume of material with relatively few pipes. The capping to trap the gases would've been done anyway whether or not you were collecting the gases, so doesn't add to the cost.
If you are too stupid to know when you are getting in the gray zone where harassment could be considered then you really should stay out of society. Just because that woman is friendly doesnâ(TM)t mean there is anything more from it.
Just because that woman is friendly doesn't mean there isn't anything more to it either. Unfortunately, I'm seeing a lot of cases where it's considered OK if a woman wants the attention, harassment if she doesn't. You cannot define what is/isn't OK based on how someone's reaction after the event has been precipitated.
Certain things, mostly involving touching, are obviously crossing the line. But when it comes to non-physical behavior, the rules need to be clearly set beforehand and on both sides. That is, not only do the rules need to define what is sexual harassment, they also need to define what isn't sexual harassment. What am I allowed to do and be assured I will not be accused of sexual harassment? I don't see the latter being done; and in fact I frequently see sexual harassment literature state that anything could be considered harassment if it's unwanted attention (i.e. definition based on someone's reaction after the fact). Well, if you define harassment that way, the only option if you want to be completely safe from harassment charges is to avoid interacting with women at all. Which means excluding them from your work. Except then you're be raked across the coals for discriminating against women.
The rules as they currently exist in some places are set up so it's impossible to comply with them.
It isnâ(TM)t like in the work environment we are hugging and touching the other guys or rating their sexual assets.
Well duh. Two men having sexual relations doesn't propagate the species. It's not done because it's not necessary for the survival of the human race.
Men and women having sexual relations is necessary for the survival of the human race. Consequently, some form of sexual communication (be it innuendo, or just asking for a date) is required. You cannot retroactively define that as being sexual harassment if it turns out the woman isn't interested in a date. To do so is to orchestrate the end of the human race.
The fundamental problem here is that it's traditionally the man's role to make the first move - to be the one who makes his interest known to the woman. If all women would agree to dump that tradition, then there would be no problem. The introductory behavior between men and women would be symmetrical, and we could set down a clear set of rules of what is and isn't acceptable behavior. Unfortunately, a large fraction of women (maybe even a majority) want to keep with that tradition, and expect the man to be the one to make the first move. As long as that expectation exists, men will express their interest to women. And just by chance alone they will sometimes express their interest to women who aren't interested. You can't have one without the other. (Alternatively, you could just define verbally expressing one's interest the first time as not-sexual harassment. Then there's a clear avenue for men to express their interest without running afoul of harassment guidelines. And if the woman rejects him, then no more advances are to be made by the man.*)
And yes I know you're not supposed to enter a relationship with someone at work. While that's a nice guideline for avoiding lots of potential problems, the unfortunate reality is that it happens, and pretty often too based on the number of married couples I know who somehow met through their work.
* Likewise, a large number of the married couples I know are together because the man persisted even after the woman rejected his initial advances. i.e. He harassed her until she eventually grew to like him and ended up marrying him. There'
The Bronze Age isn't so named because we knew how to cast bronze. We already knew how to cast metal during the Copper Age. The Copper Age was when we learned to refine ore (de-oxidize it) to create metal. The Bronze Age was when we learned that mixing two different metals together in certain combinations and ratios could create an alloy (bronze is a combination of copper and tin) which was stronger or had more desirable properties than either of its constituent metals on their own.
And as has been pointed out in another followup comment, iron isn't necessarily better than bronze for making a sword. It's just cheaper. Even today iron and steel (alloy of iron and carbon, and often other metals) don't sit at the top of the engineering strength chart. They sit at the top of the strength per unit cost chart.
By creating a currency ostensibly free from the corrupting influence of government control of fiat currencies, bitcoin has managed to become a currency which is 150x even more corrupt.
Ajit has made clear he doesn't believe in government regulation (net neutrality), and instead argues that a pro-market approach (competition) is best. Appeal to that. Don't stop at repealing net neutrality. Repeal the government-granted service monopolies which take away people's choice of cable company and phone company.
There are two ways to lick this problem. Either complete government regulation, or complete free market (any ISP which tries to throttle Netflix unless Netflix paid them would be shooting themselves in the foot - their customers would cancel and sign up with an ISP which didn't throttle Netflix). Either is preferable to the current situation where the existing government regulations (cable and phone monopolies) have the sole effect of stifling the market and empowering the ISPs to do stupid things like set up paid Internet fast lanes because they know their customers are captive and can't leave.
Unless you're talking about a one-way trip. The moon landings required about 8 days of total travel and loiter time. It's fairly trivial to package enough food, water, oxygen, fuel, and waste storage (the astronauts left bags of poop and urine on the moon) for a trip of that duration.
Mars requires (assuming a least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit) about 9 months to travel there, 16 months to wait for another Hohmann transfer orbit window for the return trip, then another 9 months for the return trip. That's over 1000 days in total. Two orders of magnitude longer than the moon landings.
Don't be fooled by the apparent ease with which we're sending robots to Mars. Robots don't need food, water, oxygen, and waste storage. And if they're solar or nuclear powered (as all of them have been thus far) they don't need fuel either. While it may technically be possible to launch people on a trip to Mars within the next decade or two, they either wouldn't be returning or would as corpses. We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem, maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space, and shielding space travelers from solar radiation, before a manned Mars mission will be feasible. Developing the rockets for the trip is the easy part.
Fear of an American preemptive strike is exactly what motivated NK to develop their nukes in the first place.
Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
You grossly misunderstand North Korea. The U.S. has had the capability to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea unchallenged for over 65 years and hasn't done so. There isn't much else it can/could have done to assuage North Korea's fears and convince it that it wasn't going to attack (at least not without opening up South Korea to another North Korean attack - North Korea's two top goals are to drive the U.S. out of the peninsula, and to reunify it, by violent means if necessary).
Even the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea (about 37,000) aren't sufficient in number to represent any meaningful offensive fighting force if the U.S. did decide to launch a preemptive strike(North Korea has just shy of 1 million active military personnel). The U.S. troops there know it too. They call themselves "speed bumps." Their sole purpose is, in the event of a North Korean invasion, to be overrun and killed, so that the U.S. has an excuse to immediately get involved in a second Korean War without having to go through the UN like the first time (which only succeeded because the USSR was boycotting the UN that week)..
North Korea's ire against the U.S. isn't based on paranoia. It's based on propaganda. Any repressive system generates extreme discontent within its population, which eventually leads to uprising and revolution. Unless you can present the people with an external bogeyman that they can fear and hate instead of their oppressive overload. North Korea has chosen the U.S. to be that bogeyman. They teach their grade schoolers to want to attack Americans for crying out loud. Please, educate yourself on what actually goes on in North Korea before you believe their claims of victimhood.
In a way, North Korea is a test for what the world's future will be like. You attribute the lack of a violent confrontation with North Korea for 65 years to the effectiveness of a pacifist approach to them. My hunch is that it's more because North Korea simply didn't have the capability to strike outside of its borders effectively. The nukes aren't going to end with North Korea. On the contrary, this is just the beginning. First it'll be rogue nation-states getting nukes. Then rogue organizations. Then rogue individuals. You're not going to be able to appease them all by being pacifist. At some point, one of them is going to be sufficiently offended or self-deluded to actually use those nukes.
The world needs to come up with some effective strategy for dealing with the proliferation of nukes. I honestly don't know what the best approach is (if it were simple, we would've already done it). I'm extremely troubled by Trump's aggressive attitude towards North Korea, but I can kinda see his point. We've known for decades that North Korea was a cancer in the socio-political fabric of the world. If it had been excised early on, we wouldn't be having this problem today. But instead we did nothing, taking the pacifist approach and hoping the problem would go away by itself. Well, it hasn't, and now it has nukes. And like I said, this isn't just about North Korea. This is just the beginning. Next it'll be rogue organizations with nukes, then rogue individuals with nukes. I really hope we can establish some effective way to deal with them, or we're doomed. We're going to look back at the time when terrorists brought down airliners with a bomb as the good old days.
How much environmental damage did this cause? Quantify it. If you're going to assert that he should be killed for his crime, you should be able to identify exactly what his crime was.
This seems like a silly argument. Sort of like telling the traffic court judge that you didn't kill anyone or cause any property damage, so the running the red light ticket should be dismissed.
It's not at all analogous to running a red light. Running a red light creates a probabilistic bifurcation - a chance that someone will suffer dire or fatal consequences if you run a red light. Exceeding emissions standards raises the average pollution levels (unless you're standing directly behind the vehicle and taking deep breaths of its fumes)
To address GP, the environmental damage varied by vehicle model year. Some of the older vehicles were especially egregious in exceeding the EPA and CARB standards. But the 2015 vehicles were actually within EPA limits and just barely exceeded CARB limits. In particular, the emissions were under the EPA/CARB limits in previous years, and (for the large part) within EU limits (they have much more lax diesel emissions standards than the U.S., while the U.S. uses the same limits for both gas and diesel).
But that is not the point. You can argue that the limits are arbitrary or unnecessarily low. But the venue for making that argument is in the political arena - by electing the politicians who help decide those limits and/or sending them letters/phone calls expressing your opinion, or voting out the politicians who enacted the law. Once those limits are codified into law, it is the responsibility of citizens and companies to abide by the law even if you disagree with it. The only time violating the law in protest of it (civil disobedience) is justified is when all political avenues of protesting the law have been cut off or rendered ineffective.
The NPR article is incorrect. She only looked at the sun without glasses for a few seconds. She found that uncomfortable. A woman nearby had eclipse viewing glasses but wasn't viewing the eclipse because she said she was blind as a bat anyway. So she asked to borrow the glasses.
She then viewed the sun for 15-20 seconds through those glasses, which they suspect is when the damage occurred. The glasses were probably fakes which didn't block all the rays of the sun. So this isn't a story about an idiot staring at the sun without glasses and destroying her vision as the NPR article implies. It's a story about some evil person destroying someone else's vision for life just so they could make a quick buck.
(Though I suppose it's possible she really is an idiot and made the whole thing up to hide her embarrassment.)
The problem here isn't copyright or fair use or public domain or the (lack of) right to make a copy. The problem is the copyright holders not holding up their end of the copyright bargain.
They claim we're we're not literally buying their work, we're only buying a license to view their work. So we can't make copies for our friends. That's all fine and good. But if all we're buying is a license, then buying the iPad version should also entitle you to the Kindle version; and in fact all other versions. There is absolutely no reason for someone to have to buy multiple licenses for the same thing. The copyright holders are reneging on their end of the copyright licensing bargain in order to try to sell you multiple copies of the same license.
That's what's confusing the kid about this situation. Logically it's so simple that a child gets it. The copyright holders don't. A lot of adults are also confused about this because of they've been hoodwinked by copyright holders for decades. Remember upgrading your record collection, to cassette tape, to CD? Or how about VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? Did the copyright holders offer you a free or discounted upgrade (like the software industry does)? No, they trained you to go out and pay full price for another license to stuff you already owned a license for.
Anyone about 50 or older is also part of the cable-never generation. They grew up on broadcast TV. Cable TV didn't really make a splash until the 1980s. So it's only those of us who were born between about 1970 to 2000 who have only ever gotten our TV through a cord.
we subscribe to service that uses the very same cable, except in a way for which it was not designed (unicast vs. broadcast) and is ill-suited.
That problem was already solved in the late 1990s. Companies like Akamai and Cloudflare developed content delivery networks - oft-requested online content was cached closer to the destination, relieving much of the transmission bandwidth load from the Internet backbones (the data only needed to be transmitted once to each local CDN). This is what allows websites like CNN to work even when the number of page requests they get per second exceeds even what their server farm could handle (e.g. 9/11).
The problem is the last-mile ISPs are actively refusing to take advantage of CDNs. Netflix even offered their CDN caching server hardware for free to Verizon, Comcast, et al so that customers streaming Netflix content wouldn't put any additional load on the ISP's upstream bandwidth. The ISPs refused. They manufactured a nonexistent Netflix bandwidth problem just so they could have an excuse for throttling Netflix, as part of their scheme to justify Internet fast lanes.
If everyone is requesting the same data (even not at the same time), the bandwidth problem is trivially solved by local caching. The only content for which unicast is ill-suited is when everyone requests different data. And broadcast is even worse than unicast at solving that problem.
The problem is vertical integration - companies trying to use dominance at one level to leverage dominance in another level where they are weak.
In the 1980s Microsoft had no presence in the productivity suite market (word processor, spreadsheet, etc). They used their dominance of the PC operating system market to steer the dominant companies (WordPerfect, Lotus) towards creating OS/2 versions in preparation for phasing out DOS, all the while assuring them that OS/2 was the future. Meanwhile they secretly worked their own productivity apps (Word and Excel) to run on what became Windows. Then suddenly they announced they were dissolving their relationship with IBM, pulling support from OS/2, and Windows was the future. WordPerfect and Lotus were caught flat-footed, but Microsoft said not to worry - you can buy our productivity apps which will work with Windows.
Later they repeated this with Stacker (automatic file compression) and Internet Explorer, packaging those with Windows to drive the competition (Stacker and Netscape) out of business so they could dominate those markets.
Today we're suffering from it with the data transport companies (Internet and cellular data service providers) (ab)using their position to influence other markets that they don't dominate (having to buy cell phone from branded or authorized stores to be sure it'll work with your carrier, holding up Android updates so they can "customize" it to their satisfaction, cable set-top boxes before the government mandated Cable Cards, Internet fast lanes, etc).
In all cases, it's just companies trying to leverage their dominant position in one market to a dominant in another. This is more of the same. Amazon using its dominant position as online retailer to influence how you use the products you buy (whether they be FireTV or Chromecast). Google using its dominant position in user-created video content (YouTube) to as leverage to try to get Amazon to behave.
The whole thing would be a lot simpler if companies were prohibited from certain types of vertical integration. If Microsoft had been split into an OS company and software company, both Windows and Office would've had to compete on their own merits. (In fact they refused to release Office apps for Android/iOS until it was clear that Windows Phone was a failure. Likewise if ISPs weren't allowed to sell or provide media services (and likewise Cable companies weren't allowed to provide Internet service - only sell access to other companies which provided Internet service), then none of this net neutrality/Internet fast lanes BS would be happening. And if Amazon were only allowed to act as an online store, their primary goal would be to support all hardware platforms without bias or prejudice and this problem would never be happening.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906
The way I approach free speech issues is algebraic. Simply use a variable to denote the party in question, then substitute a different party for that variable. If the statement remains consistent, then it's allowable. But if it can make the statement self-contradictory with its original form, then the original premise is wrong. e.g.
Cloudflare should cut off service to neo-Nazi sites because they're preaching hatred.
Cloudflare should cut off service to X because they're preaching hatred.
Cloudflare should cut off service to people trying to ban neo-Nazi sitees because they're preaching hatred (of neo-Nazi sites).
Most of the kids I know have wanted to get into the washing machine or dryer at some point or another. I had a 5 minute argument with my niece trying to stop her from crawling in.
Also worth noting that Google lets you see and delete all audio they've recorded from your device. They like to keep your voice history around for more accurate voice recognition, but it's not essential. You can delete it all if you're paranoid, or just the snippet of your uncle making an obscene and embarrassing voice search.
That said, I'm still waiting for voice recognition to be packaged into a self-contained device. It's been almost 10 years since it began showing up in its server-assisted form (20 years as a standalone app on PC). You'd think by now technology would've improved to the point where they could start putting it on a standalone device which didn't need Internet connectivity.
If you buy things like Starbucks coffee, it's an indicator that you prioritize convenience and instant gratification over sound money management and working towards a goal. So it's $850/yr for coffee. $2500/yr on fast food instead of home-made meals. $3000/yr because you leased a nicer model car than you could afford instead of buying a more practical car. $6750/yr on higher interest payments on your home mortgage because you took whatever the bank was offering instead of researching a better loan. $3750/yr on interest payments on the credit card balance you're carrying because you just gotta buy that TV, stereo, computer, latest video game, concert tickets, whatever Right Now instead of waiting until you've actually saved up the money to afford it. etc. It all adds up.
For most people, this is the difference between making other people rich (the fast food franchise owner, car dealership, the bank, the credit card company, etc), and becoming rich themselves. It always baffled me how so many people say they're upset at the 1%, yet freely hand over their money to the 1% via their everyday purchase decisions.
It's "convenient" in that they don't have to deal with prepping the machine the night before, and cleaning it and your cup out after it's done brewing. i.e. "I don't wanna do the work" convenient, not "this is faster/more efficient" convenient. Same reason people litter, buy microwavable dinners, or pay an investment manager.
If you occasionally drink coffee, like a few times a month, then Starbucks could make economic sense. You don't drink it enough to make purchasing and maintaining a home coffeemaker worthwhile (i.e. it's likely to break down before it's paid for itself in money saved not going to Starbucks). But if you drink it every day, then yeah making it yourself is cheaper, more convenient, and more efficient. It just involves a little more labor on your behalf.
Slashdot Mirror
During Obama's 8 years in office, The Democrats controlled the House for 2 years, and the Senate for 6 years. During Obama's first two years in office, the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, and for 6 months had a supermajority in the Senate (could not be stopped by fillibusters). They had a good chance of passing anything during those 2 years (just needed to convince 2 Republican Senators not to fillibuster), and could've passed anything they wanted with impunity during those six months.
That they didn't pass any net neutrality legislation during those years tells you it's not really that important to them. And that their current protestations about it are merely to force the Trump administration to "fight and circumvent to get anything done."
The things they did choose to pass during those two years were unpopular enough with the voters that the following election they lost control of the House by the largest swing since 1938, and almost lost control of the Senate (where only 1/3 of the senators were up for re-election). Compare this to net neutrality which seems to have pretty universal support outside of monopoly ISPs, and might even have helped them in the election if they'd bothered to pass it.
It's actually closer to 10 cents a pop. So it adds $1000 to a 10k unit order.
If the poor IT guy has to wait 10 seconds for the USB-to-ethernet dongle to be recognized (we'll assume "it just works" and no time is needed for driver installation), for 10k units that's 27.8 hours of extra billable time. If he makes $50k/yr, that's $25/hour. So the extra cost to use a USB-to-ethernet dongle per 10k units is $695 per incident. Just two incidents and the built-in ethernet port is cheaper.
RS-232 and parallel ports aren't added because they're rarely used. Ethernet is. Every year in my computer consulting business, I probably spend a cumulative 3-5 hours at client's offices (billed at $100/hr) twiddling my thumbs because they asked me to set up a device without an ethernet port, and to do that I need the WiFi password. They don't know the password, and have to run around digging through papers or making phone calls to figure out the password. That right there is several hundred dollars my clients could save if they'd bought devices with built-in 10 cent ethernet ports.
It's self-inception. The first all-electric cargo ship uses electricity generated predominantly from coal to carry coal.
I'm actually more curious what route it takes. If you figure the route is 65 km (25% safety factor in range to account for currents and wind), at 12.8 kph that works out to 5 hours travel time. If it takes 2 hours to load and unload, that's 4 hours lay time for a 5 hour trip. That's gotta be some gnarly route to make such a high percentage of lay time preferable to something like a roundabout rail route which eliminates the extra loading/unloading steps. Even if one end of the route is on an island, building a new power plant and/or laying down underwater power cables may be preferable long-term.
Just make sure all your literature calls it a comic conference, not a convention. And if attendees shorten it to comic con, you have a ready-made argument that the trademark has become genericized and should be invalidated.
On the contrary, the patrons were already paying the transaction fees before. They'd send donations to the creator, and the creator would use some of those donations to pay the transaction fees.
The only thing that's changed is that the patrons now know how much of their donation is going to transaction fees. This knowledge can be used to eliminate inefficient donations in favor of more efficient donations which incur smaller fees. e.g. the other commenter who paid $1/mo to a bunch of creators.
I suppose some creators might be upset at donations becoming less uniform, coming in large bursts instead of small steady amounts. But at the end of the year they'll have gotten to keep more money. Unless this change somehow alters donors behavior and they end up donating less overall.
That would be fine for a one-time transaction (e.g. purchasing a car).
With recurring transactions, there's also a period during which the contract is in effect (e.g. renting an apartment for a year). Once you're beyond that term, what happens next is either defined elsewhere in the contract, or is totally up in the air. Usually it switches to month to month. The two parties continue each month as they were under the original contract. But either party is free to change the terms if they wish (and the other party is free to quit since the contract is no longer in effect).
not as:
As a FYI, ambiguous phrases like this can be made less ambiguous simply by rearranging the text as:
Biogas is usually generated from landfills. When a landfill is closed, it's capped off with layers impermeable to water (to prevent rain from leaching the contents of the landfill into the soil) and to air (to prevent the smell from disturbing people occupying whatever you build on top of it). A system of pipes and ducts is constructed around the outside which collects the gases produced by the decomposing trash (mostly methane) for use in power generation applications. (Also because methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - you're better off burning it to convert it into CO2, rather than releasing it straight to the atmosphere.)
Plants which convert organic matter like manure directly to biogas are relatively rare. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has to do with economy of scale. With a landfill, you're collecting gas from a huge volume of material with relatively few pipes. The capping to trap the gases would've been done anyway whether or not you were collecting the gases, so doesn't add to the cost.
Just because that woman is friendly doesn't mean there isn't anything more to it either. Unfortunately, I'm seeing a lot of cases where it's considered OK if a woman wants the attention, harassment if she doesn't. You cannot define what is/isn't OK based on how someone's reaction after the event has been precipitated.
Certain things, mostly involving touching, are obviously crossing the line. But when it comes to non-physical behavior, the rules need to be clearly set beforehand and on both sides. That is, not only do the rules need to define what is sexual harassment, they also need to define what isn't sexual harassment. What am I allowed to do and be assured I will not be accused of sexual harassment? I don't see the latter being done; and in fact I frequently see sexual harassment literature state that anything could be considered harassment if it's unwanted attention (i.e. definition based on someone's reaction after the fact). Well, if you define harassment that way, the only option if you want to be completely safe from harassment charges is to avoid interacting with women at all. Which means excluding them from your work. Except then you're be raked across the coals for discriminating against women.
The rules as they currently exist in some places are set up so it's impossible to comply with them.
Well duh. Two men having sexual relations doesn't propagate the species. It's not done because it's not necessary for the survival of the human race.
Men and women having sexual relations is necessary for the survival of the human race. Consequently, some form of sexual communication (be it innuendo, or just asking for a date) is required. You cannot retroactively define that as being sexual harassment if it turns out the woman isn't interested in a date. To do so is to orchestrate the end of the human race.
The fundamental problem here is that it's traditionally the man's role to make the first move - to be the one who makes his interest known to the woman. If all women would agree to dump that tradition, then there would be no problem. The introductory behavior between men and women would be symmetrical, and we could set down a clear set of rules of what is and isn't acceptable behavior. Unfortunately, a large fraction of women (maybe even a majority) want to keep with that tradition, and expect the man to be the one to make the first move. As long as that expectation exists, men will express their interest to women. And just by chance alone they will sometimes express their interest to women who aren't interested. You can't have one without the other. (Alternatively, you could just define verbally expressing one's interest the first time as not-sexual harassment. Then there's a clear avenue for men to express their interest without running afoul of harassment guidelines. And if the woman rejects him, then no more advances are to be made by the man.*)
And yes I know you're not supposed to enter a relationship with someone at work. While that's a nice guideline for avoiding lots of potential problems, the unfortunate reality is that it happens, and pretty often too based on the number of married couples I know who somehow met through their work.
* Likewise, a large number of the married couples I know are together because the man persisted even after the woman rejected his initial advances. i.e. He harassed her until she eventually grew to like him and ended up marrying him. There'
The Bronze Age isn't so named because we knew how to cast bronze. We already knew how to cast metal during the Copper Age. The Copper Age was when we learned to refine ore (de-oxidize it) to create metal. The Bronze Age was when we learned that mixing two different metals together in certain combinations and ratios could create an alloy (bronze is a combination of copper and tin) which was stronger or had more desirable properties than either of its constituent metals on their own.
And as has been pointed out in another followup comment, iron isn't necessarily better than bronze for making a sword. It's just cheaper. Even today iron and steel (alloy of iron and carbon, and often other metals) don't sit at the top of the engineering strength chart. They sit at the top of the strength per unit cost chart.
Bitcoin currently has about 15 million userrs. So 1000 of them is only 0.0067%.
1% of the world's population owns about half the world's wealth.
By creating a currency ostensibly free from the corrupting influence of government control of fiat currencies, bitcoin has managed to become a currency which is 150x even more corrupt.
Ajit has made clear he doesn't believe in government regulation (net neutrality), and instead argues that a pro-market approach (competition) is best. Appeal to that. Don't stop at repealing net neutrality. Repeal the government-granted service monopolies which take away people's choice of cable company and phone company.
There are two ways to lick this problem. Either complete government regulation, or complete free market (any ISP which tries to throttle Netflix unless Netflix paid them would be shooting themselves in the foot - their customers would cancel and sign up with an ISP which didn't throttle Netflix). Either is preferable to the current situation where the existing government regulations (cable and phone monopolies) have the sole effect of stifling the market and empowering the ISPs to do stupid things like set up paid Internet fast lanes because they know their customers are captive and can't leave.
Unless you're talking about a one-way trip. The moon landings required about 8 days of total travel and loiter time. It's fairly trivial to package enough food, water, oxygen, fuel, and waste storage (the astronauts left bags of poop and urine on the moon) for a trip of that duration.
Mars requires (assuming a least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit) about 9 months to travel there, 16 months to wait for another Hohmann transfer orbit window for the return trip, then another 9 months for the return trip. That's over 1000 days in total. Two orders of magnitude longer than the moon landings.
Don't be fooled by the apparent ease with which we're sending robots to Mars. Robots don't need food, water, oxygen, and waste storage. And if they're solar or nuclear powered (as all of them have been thus far) they don't need fuel either. While it may technically be possible to launch people on a trip to Mars within the next decade or two, they either wouldn't be returning or would as corpses. We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem, maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space, and shielding space travelers from solar radiation, before a manned Mars mission will be feasible. Developing the rockets for the trip is the easy part.
You grossly misunderstand North Korea. The U.S. has had the capability to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea unchallenged for over 65 years and hasn't done so. There isn't much else it can/could have done to assuage North Korea's fears and convince it that it wasn't going to attack (at least not without opening up South Korea to another North Korean attack - North Korea's two top goals are to drive the U.S. out of the peninsula, and to reunify it, by violent means if necessary).
Even the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea (about 37,000) aren't sufficient in number to represent any meaningful offensive fighting force if the U.S. did decide to launch a preemptive strike(North Korea has just shy of 1 million active military personnel). The U.S. troops there know it too. They call themselves "speed bumps." Their sole purpose is, in the event of a North Korean invasion, to be overrun and killed, so that the U.S. has an excuse to immediately get involved in a second Korean War without having to go through the UN like the first time (which only succeeded because the USSR was boycotting the UN that week)..
North Korea's ire against the U.S. isn't based on paranoia. It's based on propaganda. Any repressive system generates extreme discontent within its population, which eventually leads to uprising and revolution. Unless you can present the people with an external bogeyman that they can fear and hate instead of their oppressive overload. North Korea has chosen the U.S. to be that bogeyman. They teach their grade schoolers to want to attack Americans for crying out loud. Please, educate yourself on what actually goes on in North Korea before you believe their claims of victimhood.
In a way, North Korea is a test for what the world's future will be like. You attribute the lack of a violent confrontation with North Korea for 65 years to the effectiveness of a pacifist approach to them. My hunch is that it's more because North Korea simply didn't have the capability to strike outside of its borders effectively. The nukes aren't going to end with North Korea. On the contrary, this is just the beginning. First it'll be rogue nation-states getting nukes. Then rogue organizations. Then rogue individuals. You're not going to be able to appease them all by being pacifist. At some point, one of them is going to be sufficiently offended or self-deluded to actually use those nukes.
The world needs to come up with some effective strategy for dealing with the proliferation of nukes. I honestly don't know what the best approach is (if it were simple, we would've already done it). I'm extremely troubled by Trump's aggressive attitude towards North Korea, but I can kinda see his point. We've known for decades that North Korea was a cancer in the socio-political fabric of the world. If it had been excised early on, we wouldn't be having this problem today. But instead we did nothing, taking the pacifist approach and hoping the problem would go away by itself. Well, it hasn't, and now it has nukes. And like I said, this isn't just about North Korea. This is just the beginning. Next it'll be rogue organizations with nukes, then rogue individuals with nukes. I really hope we can establish some effective way to deal with them, or we're doomed. We're going to look back at the time when terrorists brought down airliners with a bomb as the good old days.
It's not at all analogous to running a red light. Running a red light creates a probabilistic bifurcation - a chance that someone will suffer dire or fatal consequences if you run a red light. Exceeding emissions standards raises the average pollution levels (unless you're standing directly behind the vehicle and taking deep breaths of its fumes)
To address GP, the environmental damage varied by vehicle model year. Some of the older vehicles were especially egregious in exceeding the EPA and CARB standards. But the 2015 vehicles were actually within EPA limits and just barely exceeded CARB limits. In particular, the emissions were under the EPA/CARB limits in previous years, and (for the large part) within EU limits (they have much more lax diesel emissions standards than the U.S., while the U.S. uses the same limits for both gas and diesel).
But that is not the point. You can argue that the limits are arbitrary or unnecessarily low. But the venue for making that argument is in the political arena - by electing the politicians who help decide those limits and/or sending them letters/phone calls expressing your opinion, or voting out the politicians who enacted the law. Once those limits are codified into law, it is the responsibility of citizens and companies to abide by the law even if you disagree with it. The only time violating the law in protest of it (civil disobedience) is justified is when all political avenues of protesting the law have been cut off or rendered ineffective.
The NPR article is incorrect. She only looked at the sun without glasses for a few seconds. She found that uncomfortable. A woman nearby had eclipse viewing glasses but wasn't viewing the eclipse because she said she was blind as a bat anyway. So she asked to borrow the glasses.
She then viewed the sun for 15-20 seconds through those glasses, which they suspect is when the damage occurred. The glasses were probably fakes which didn't block all the rays of the sun. So this isn't a story about an idiot staring at the sun without glasses and destroying her vision as the NPR article implies. It's a story about some evil person destroying someone else's vision for life just so they could make a quick buck.
(Though I suppose it's possible she really is an idiot and made the whole thing up to hide her embarrassment.)
The problem here isn't copyright or fair use or public domain or the (lack of) right to make a copy. The problem is the copyright holders not holding up their end of the copyright bargain.
They claim we're we're not literally buying their work, we're only buying a license to view their work. So we can't make copies for our friends. That's all fine and good. But if all we're buying is a license, then buying the iPad version should also entitle you to the Kindle version; and in fact all other versions. There is absolutely no reason for someone to have to buy multiple licenses for the same thing. The copyright holders are reneging on their end of the copyright licensing bargain in order to try to sell you multiple copies of the same license.
That's what's confusing the kid about this situation. Logically it's so simple that a child gets it. The copyright holders don't. A lot of adults are also confused about this because of they've been hoodwinked by copyright holders for decades. Remember upgrading your record collection, to cassette tape, to CD? Or how about VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? Did the copyright holders offer you a free or discounted upgrade (like the software industry does)? No, they trained you to go out and pay full price for another license to stuff you already owned a license for.
Anyone about 50 or older is also part of the cable-never generation. They grew up on broadcast TV. Cable TV didn't really make a splash until the 1980s. So it's only those of us who were born between about 1970 to 2000 who have only ever gotten our TV through a cord.
That problem was already solved in the late 1990s. Companies like Akamai and Cloudflare developed content delivery networks - oft-requested online content was cached closer to the destination, relieving much of the transmission bandwidth load from the Internet backbones (the data only needed to be transmitted once to each local CDN). This is what allows websites like CNN to work even when the number of page requests they get per second exceeds even what their server farm could handle (e.g. 9/11).
The problem is the last-mile ISPs are actively refusing to take advantage of CDNs. Netflix even offered their CDN caching server hardware for free to Verizon, Comcast, et al so that customers streaming Netflix content wouldn't put any additional load on the ISP's upstream bandwidth. The ISPs refused. They manufactured a nonexistent Netflix bandwidth problem just so they could have an excuse for throttling Netflix, as part of their scheme to justify Internet fast lanes.
If everyone is requesting the same data (even not at the same time), the bandwidth problem is trivially solved by local caching. The only content for which unicast is ill-suited is when everyone requests different data. And broadcast is even worse than unicast at solving that problem.
The problem is vertical integration - companies trying to use dominance at one level to leverage dominance in another level where they are weak.
In the 1980s Microsoft had no presence in the productivity suite market (word processor, spreadsheet, etc). They used their dominance of the PC operating system market to steer the dominant companies (WordPerfect, Lotus) towards creating OS/2 versions in preparation for phasing out DOS, all the while assuring them that OS/2 was the future. Meanwhile they secretly worked their own productivity apps (Word and Excel) to run on what became Windows. Then suddenly they announced they were dissolving their relationship with IBM, pulling support from OS/2, and Windows was the future. WordPerfect and Lotus were caught flat-footed, but Microsoft said not to worry - you can buy our productivity apps which will work with Windows.
Later they repeated this with Stacker (automatic file compression) and Internet Explorer, packaging those with Windows to drive the competition (Stacker and Netscape) out of business so they could dominate those markets.
Today we're suffering from it with the data transport companies (Internet and cellular data service providers) (ab)using their position to influence other markets that they don't dominate (having to buy cell phone from branded or authorized stores to be sure it'll work with your carrier, holding up Android updates so they can "customize" it to their satisfaction, cable set-top boxes before the government mandated Cable Cards, Internet fast lanes, etc).
In all cases, it's just companies trying to leverage their dominant position in one market to a dominant in another. This is more of the same. Amazon using its dominant position as online retailer to influence how you use the products you buy (whether they be FireTV or Chromecast). Google using its dominant position in user-created video content (YouTube) to as leverage to try to get Amazon to behave.
The whole thing would be a lot simpler if companies were prohibited from certain types of vertical integration. If Microsoft had been split into an OS company and software company, both Windows and Office would've had to compete on their own merits. (In fact they refused to release Office apps for Android/iOS until it was clear that Windows Phone was a failure. Likewise if ISPs weren't allowed to sell or provide media services (and likewise Cable companies weren't allowed to provide Internet service - only sell access to other companies which provided Internet service), then none of this net neutrality/Internet fast lanes BS would be happening. And if Amazon were only allowed to act as an online store, their primary goal would be to support all hardware platforms without bias or prejudice and this problem would never be happening.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906
The way I approach free speech issues is algebraic. Simply use a variable to denote the party in question, then substitute a different party for that variable. If the statement remains consistent, then it's allowable. But if it can make the statement self-contradictory with its original form, then the original premise is wrong. e.g.
Cloudflare should cut off service to neo-Nazi sites because they're preaching hatred.
Cloudflare should cut off service to X because they're preaching hatred.
Cloudflare should cut off service to people trying to ban neo-Nazi sitees because they're preaching hatred (of neo-Nazi sites).
Most of the kids I know have wanted to get into the washing machine or dryer at some point or another. I had a 5 minute argument with my niece trying to stop her from crawling in.
Also worth noting that Google lets you see and delete all audio they've recorded from your device. They like to keep your voice history around for more accurate voice recognition, but it's not essential. You can delete it all if you're paranoid, or just the snippet of your uncle making an obscene and embarrassing voice search.
That said, I'm still waiting for voice recognition to be packaged into a self-contained device. It's been almost 10 years since it began showing up in its server-assisted form (20 years as a standalone app on PC). You'd think by now technology would've improved to the point where they could start putting it on a standalone device which didn't need Internet connectivity.
If you buy things like Starbucks coffee, it's an indicator that you prioritize convenience and instant gratification over sound money management and working towards a goal. So it's $850/yr for coffee. $2500/yr on fast food instead of home-made meals. $3000/yr because you leased a nicer model car than you could afford instead of buying a more practical car. $6750/yr on higher interest payments on your home mortgage because you took whatever the bank was offering instead of researching a better loan. $3750/yr on interest payments on the credit card balance you're carrying because you just gotta buy that TV, stereo, computer, latest video game, concert tickets, whatever Right Now instead of waiting until you've actually saved up the money to afford it. etc. It all adds up.
For most people, this is the difference between making other people rich (the fast food franchise owner, car dealership, the bank, the credit card company, etc), and becoming rich themselves. It always baffled me how so many people say they're upset at the 1%, yet freely hand over their money to the 1% via their everyday purchase decisions.
It's "convenient" in that they don't have to deal with prepping the machine the night before, and cleaning it and your cup out after it's done brewing. i.e. "I don't wanna do the work" convenient, not "this is faster/more efficient" convenient. Same reason people litter, buy microwavable dinners, or pay an investment manager.
If you occasionally drink coffee, like a few times a month, then Starbucks could make economic sense. You don't drink it enough to make purchasing and maintaining a home coffeemaker worthwhile (i.e. it's likely to break down before it's paid for itself in money saved not going to Starbucks). But if you drink it every day, then yeah making it yourself is cheaper, more convenient, and more efficient. It just involves a little more labor on your behalf.