Everyone's fantasy is to play the hero. But if everyone is running around in a shared game playing a hero, then suddenly heroes are normal, meaning they aren't really heroes anymore. To maintain the illusion of a heroic player character, you have to populate the world with lower-ability bots. That works in a RPG-type MMO, but not in a PVP-type MMO. SW Battlefront tried to get around it by time-limiting how long until and how often you could play the heroes. But that resulted in having to play grunts lots of times before you were allowed to play the hero (for one life after you've unlocked it). The PVP-equivalent of grinding in a RPG.
I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
Egalitarian PVP MMOs or deathmatch-type games, where everyone plays "characters" with the same abilities or picks from a subset of fixed choices with quasi-balanced abilities, don't have this problem.
Power companies are reluctant to allow you to sell power back to the grid because then you aren't paying the distribution costs (construction and maintenance of the wires, transformers, infrastructure like switching and monitoring equipment, etc. which lets you sell back power to the grid). In the areas where these costs are taken into account, the sell-back price is usually around half the retail price, which dramatically lowers the economic viability of solar. Ignorant solar proponents cry foul at this, demanding they be paid full retail price as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.
If you can use all the power generated by your PV solar installation, or store the excess in batteries for use during night or bad weather, and you can get the economics of solar to work, then good for you. But if you're trying to use the power grid as your battery, then you can't run your cost/benefit analysis using retail electricity prices. Also note that the maintenance costs per house are fixed. Whether you need to draw power from the grid just one day out of the year, or every day out of the year, you still need the same wiring to your house. So we're not talking about a discount per kWh here. We're talking about a fixed cost per household. (Actually the electrical utilities should just separate out their bill into generation and transportation costs like water and gas companies do.) We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.
All that said, FWIW, in the cost analyses I've done, the local price of electricity is a much bigger factor than utilization. In places with high electricity prices (e.g. Hawaii) and good weather, the payback time for a PV solar installation can be as low as 5-7 years with subsidies, about 10-12 years without. (I should mention that the most cost-efficient energy system I found was geothermal heating and cooling. Where you run your heating and air conditioning with a heat pump using the ground as a heat sink instead of the air. For the desert region of Southern California, the payback time I calculated for that was as short as 3 years, and that's without subsidies.)
Exchange offers a lot of organizational-level management tools (e.g. revoking email privileges for a fired employee while retaining their emails for reference by their replacement) which are sorely lacking in open source mail servers. I despise Outlook and haven't touched it since my first contact with it in the 1990s. But I used to run a Unix-based mail server, and I totally understand why Exchange is so popular with companies.
What's going on here is a failure of open source to provide the tools the customer wants. Companies and organizations (charities, government) want these sorts of email management tools. But open source coders are very individualist and generally aghast at the idea of a manager having that sort of power over "your" email. So they don't put any work into adding those sorts of capabilities even if that's what the customers want.
Meanwhile, the customers are so desperate for said tools that they're willing to pay good money for them. Microsoft steps up and says they'll gladly take your money in exchange for creating these tools. And the open source community sneers at the entire thing even though they've basically driven the organization to Microsoft by refusing to provide the tools the organization needed to operate.
Smallpox was eradicated because (1) it only infects humans, (2) the symptoms are highly visible, and (3) people who've had the disease are immune but no longer carriers. Once enough humans were vaccinated and infected persons were isolated, the disease was unable to find new hosts and was eradicated.
Unfortunately this is not the case for other diseases. We attempted to eradicate Yellow Fever in the early 1900s, but it failed because the disease can infect other species. Polio has been difficult because an infected person is often asymptomatic, and can unwittingly spread the disease. Likewise, measles has a long period between when an infected person can spread the disease, and when the symptoms first appear. Malaria is probably the disease we'd most like to eradicate, but you can get malaria multiple times. So vaccination only confers a low level of immunity.
The only other disease we're getting close to eradicating is Guinea worm. This is a parasitic disease, not a virus, but by educating people about drinking clean water or boiling or filtering before drinking, it was nearly eradicated. Unfortunately it ran into (1) above - it was thought that the worms could only infect people, and thus a global halt to infection for a short period of time would be enough to drive the worm into extinction. Then we discovered that dogs can also carry the form of worm which infects humans.
When faced with a myriad of different problem conditions like this, the best approach is usually a shotgun approach. You throw all sorts of different things against the wall in hopes of randomly finding something that sticks. That is the libertarian philosophy. Your insinuation that libertarians require personal profit as motivation is incorrect. Libertarians are free to donate their money to whatever causes they feel are worthy, and do so all the time. What libertarians are against is being forced to donate their money to causes they personally don't feel are worthy, or being prevented from donating their money to causes they feel are worthy.
What the GP is advocating is a market-based approach to combating diseases. A libertarian, being in favor of the shotgun approach, would approve of both for-profit and charitable means of fighting diseases. The anti-market folks (mostly liberal) would try to prevent for-profit approaches without even seeing if they would work. And likewise the pro-market folks (mostly conservative) would try to phase out charitable approaches in favor of for-profit approaches. To the libertarian, the anti-market folks can donate to the charities fighting diseases, the pro-market folks can donate to for-profit organizations fighting diseases, and everyone is happy (well, everyone except those who think they are "right" and feel they should be able to control how the "wrong" people spend their money).
I owned a 701c. No the edges didn't flex like one of the other comments purports, at least not unless you used the weight of your arms to press a key instead of just your fingers. The overhang was only about an inch on either side, so there just wasn't enough leverage for it to flex significantly. IBM did a great job designing it.
Its critical flaw (at least for me) was the complete lack of a wrist rest. I had to carry a cushioned wrist rest around with it in my bag to be able to use it comfortably. (This was back before trackpads were common nor very good. Most of us just plugged in an external mouse. So having only a trackpoint wasn't a problem.). To be fair most laptops of that era didn't have a wrist rest. The keyboards were all shoved up against the front edge like a desktop keyboard, except desktop keyboards didn't sit 1" above the desk so you could use the desk as a wrist rest. When laptops started moving keyboards closer to the screen to give you a built-in wrist rest, the butterfly keyboard was doomed. There was no way to implement its sliding motion with a forward wrist rest, without also incorporating some vertical travel as it "unfolded" - it used that empty space in front of it to unfold.
For most people looking for a great keyboard, the Macbooks are a non-starter even if they can accept the OS change, because of the half-height arrow keys and lack of spacing between every 4 function keys (or lack of physical function keys on the touch bar models). For some reason this is glossed over in all the MBP reviews. Every PC laptop which dares to commit these transgressions gets dinged for it in all the reviews, but in the Mac reviews it's never mentioned.
The Thinkpads have shrunken their arrow keys slightly compared to their old keyboards. But they remain suitably large for comfortable editing, and the function keys mimic the spaces between every 4 keys like a desktop keyboard for touch typing.
While we're at it, why don't you work on ways to eradicate the biggest source of dangerous radiation in our solar system - the sun.
Uneducated environmentalists and like-minded Hollywood script writers have got you convinced that zero radiation is the natural state of things, and any radiation is aberrant. It's actually the other way around - radiation is everywhere. Even your own body is radioactive. The only reason the sun's radiation doesn't kill everything on Earth is because of its magnetic field, which directs most of the solar radiation into the polar regions (where it collides with air molecules and ionizes them to create the aurora, instead of ionizing your DNA and causing cancer and genetic defects). It's actually one of the biggest problems that need to be overcome for a manned Mars mission. Any additional radiation due to nuclear rockets will be negligible.
Require the ticket user's name be printed on the ticket, and confirm your ID matches before you're allowed in.
That the ticket sales sites don't implement such a simple solution suggests they actually like scalpers. The scalpers help guarantee an event sells out even if not all the seats are filled. i.e. The risk of a non-sellout is shifted from the ticket sales site to the scalpers, with the scalpers losing money if the event doesn't sell out, but pocketing the cash if the event does sell out. The ticket sales sites benefit from less variability in ticket sales, and thus more predictability in their income.
For spam, don't just block it. Everyone's spam filter should reply to every spam email they get. If a spammer gets one reply per 10,000 spam emails they send, well now they have to dig through 10,000 fake replies to find each real one. If the spammers start wising up and blacklisting your email, well problem solved. They're not sending you spam anymore.
For sites that harvest your browsing data, pollute their data. Don't just block their cookies. The cookie they leave on your computer should be duplicated on a bot built into your browser which visits hundreds or thousands of random sites in the background per hour. Good luck to the harvester trying to pick out which sites you visited vs which ones the bot visited.
For malware that tries to copy your contact list, security software shouldn't just block it. It should hide your real contact list, and generate a fake one in its place populated with random names and email addresses. The malware should be allowed to copy the fake contact list.
Those companies have their own fonts because of copyright issues. By creating their own font, they avoid having to pay the font owner license fees for tens or hundreds of millions of copies of their software that they're selling.
Last time I checked, IBM doesn't sell tens of millions of copies of any software package.
The outrageous thing here isn't that they mark things up - everyone does that. It's how much Apple marks things up. The average net markup for all products and all industries is about only about 6%-10% depending on how you measure it. Apple is consistently 20%+.
The great thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
The terrible thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
Compared to the Mac, you gain a lot more flexibility and power. But for some (most?) people that's just giving them enough rope to hang themselves. (OS X is actually the same - it runs a modified version of BSD Unix under the hood. It's just that the GUI you know as OS X limits what you can do, akin to guardrails on a road which prevent you from driving anywhere where your car might get stuck or fall off a cliff.
IMHO the biggest difference between OS X and Windows from a UI standpoint is that the Windows desktop is a representation of your computer. Your programs and files sit on a drive, and if you wish you can put a shortcut (aka an alias, or a link) to them on your desktop. In fact the desktop is just a folder sitting in a special location on your drive. In OS X, your desktop is your computer. Your desktop is like the root directory, which contains your drives, which in turn contain your files and programs. (It's the same UI difference in Android vs iOS. Android apps all sit in the apps drawer, and you can arrange links to them in your home screens as you wish. iOS has no such abstraction, and the apps on your home screen(s) are the apps themselves.).
The Windows/Android method is more flexible. You can put multiple copies of the same app or file in multiple folders/home screens, or even create links to two completely different folders to each other so you can quickly navigate between the two even though their paths are completely different. OS X/iOS lacks this abstraction layer (except as an advanced topic - aliases), which makes the files and programs behave more like physical objects (can only have one copy of each). More intuitive, but less flexible.
Bitcoin appears particularly attractive because it hasn't (permanently) gone down yet. Every bubble has hordes of supporters and investors who are convinced their favored investment is "special" and can't go down. And it always does. Unfortunately the losers are one last ones left holding the bag, not always the people hyping up that particular investment.
In my time, I've seen this happen with gold (1970s/1980s), the tech bubble (1990s), the housing bubble (2000s), and oil (2010s). A lot of people fleeing the housing bubble collapse seemed to dump their money into oil since it had gone up to $100/bbl and showed no signs of stopping.
If you're investing in something because it's continued to climb and you're convinced it can't go down, you're simply wrong. It can, and it will. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. Bitcoin is a bit more insulated because it's designed to become harder to acquire over time (which coincidentally enriches early adopters), so the supply constriction enhances an increase in value (e.g. imagine what would've happened to home prices if the more people bought homes, the fewer homes builders were allowed to build). So its crash won't happen until enough people realize how stupid a trait that is for "currency" or something with no intrinsic value.
This is why so many people don't take global warming seriously. Because its proponents resort to cheap tricks like deliberately choosing a word whose common definition makes the situation sound more dire than what actually happened ("destroy - put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it."), when they mean one of its lesser-used definitions.
If you practice deceptions and exaggerations like this too often, eventually people stop believing you even when the emergency is real. And that's exactly what's happened with global warming.
The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.
I think hipsters are about the stupidest trend ever. But they're not completely off base here. Pretty much all music distributed in the digital era has been degraded by the loudness war. Their dynamic range has been crushed down to almost flat. So even though that digital music file supposedly gets you 12-24 bits of dynamic range, if it's only using the upper 20%-30% of that range, you're only getting 3-7 bits of effective dynamic range. Not to mention the distortion from the high peaks (e.g. snare drums) being clipped when you raise the gain to bring quieter sounds closer to the max volume. So in terms of how the music sounds, the 5-6 bit depth of vinyl records and cassette tapes can actually be superior. You just have to deal with additional noise.
As the loudness war started in the 1990s, you have to get early CDs from the 1980s and analog records/tapes to completely avoid it.
No, this is the case where a liberal presents a view that maybe women don't want STEM careers. And those critical of him and who fired him didn't bother to actually read what he wrote, and just assumed the author was a conservative who said that women are inferior at STEM.
Really, this case has become a great litmus test at determining who actually reads the facts and decides for themselves, vs. who doesn't care about the facts as long as they can use the issue to publicly demonstrate that they're being compliant with the socially acceptable conclusion.
Even at a thousand times the cost of other methods, that would still be quite useful.
While there are a myriad of factors which go into selecting the proper material for a design, the general criteria that steel is best at is strength per unit cost. If you can pay more, more exotic materials like titanium, tungsten, chromium, or amorphous ("glass") metals are stronger per unit volume than steel. If you need lighter weight, aluminum and magnesium tend to have more strength per unit mass. If you need temperature resistance, niobium, molybdenum tend to be better. etc.
That said, a 2-3x strength increase is just huge, and could upset some of the generalities I listed above. It's been a decade since I delved into materials science, but a 2-3x stronger steel could displace both glass metals for strength per volume, and aluminum for strength per weight.
The latter would have serious implications for the aerospace industry. The big drawback of aluminum (other than relatively low melting point, which isn't an issue in subsonic flight) is that it has a fatigue limit. With a steel structure, you can design it so that repeatedly flexing it no longer causes it to weaken. Aluminum has no such point - flexing it will always cause it to weaken (which is why it was stupid to make Curiosity's wheels out of aluminum). Fatigue failure of aluminum has been the cause of numerous airliner accidents, from the original de Havilland Comet, to Aloha 243, to JAL 123 (greatest loss of life from a single aircraft accident). It's why pressurized airframes are retired and destroyed after about 75,000-100,000 flights. If 3D printed steel has a higher strength per weight than aluminum, it would revolutionize aircraft design.
Only if you define "won" as "got there first." The Japanese "won" the race to high definition TV, but all the HDTV standards today are based on the U.S. HDTV standards. Why? Because the Japanese version of HDTV was analog - that was the quickest way to transmit HDTV signals in the 1970s. The U.S. HDTV program didn't get started until the late 1980s, right around the time digital signal processors were rapidly improving in performance and dropping in price. Consequently the U.S. version of HDTV was digital, and compressed digital HDTV signals turned out to be much more practical than analog for HDTV.
Likewise, as a long-term solution to repeatedly getting things into space, rockets are not very efficient. The U.S. realized this soon after WWII and was gradually working on a series of experimental planes to fly into space. It mostly abandoned that approach after Sputnik turned space access political, turning it from a marathon into a sprint.
Now, 60 years later, after the world has invested trillions of dollars into rocketry R&D, we've seen the writing on the wall and are gradually shifting research back towards much more economically practical hypersonic flight. That is, what the U.S. was already doing in the late 1950s. Imagine where the technology might've been today if we hadn't been distracted by a political "space race." Maybe we'd already have 1 hour flights between North America and Europe/Asia. A moon base (the biggest impediment is the cost of getting materials into orbit to establish a base - rockets are damned expensive). Maybe even a Mars base (again, high cost of fuel for a Mars mission due to rockets being damned expensive). Who knows.
The same thing happened in computers. In the 1950s-1970s electronic transistors were a lot easier to make than optical transistors. Consequently everyone took the easy route and poured R&D into electronic transistors. That worked fine - computers were doubling in clock speed every 2-3 years - until about 2000. That's when we hit a brick wall. Current leakage in electronic transistors goes as something like the square of frequency, and it turns out about 4 GHz is the practical maximum. Beyond that, the power losses and cooling requirement make higher speeds impractical. The fastest Intel processor in 2002 was 2.8 GHz. Since then, we've only been able to push (mass-produced) clock speeds up to about 4.2 GHz. A 1.5x improvement in 15 years, compared to doubling every 2-3 years. Optical transistors would have no such limitation since it relies on quantum photons instead of lossy electrons. But because we dove headfirst into electronic transistors, our level of optical transistor technology is decades behind electronic transistors. Meaning nobody wants to spend much money on researching optical computing even though its future potential is much greater than electronic computing.
Sometimes the quickest route isn't the best route.
I suspect this is a lot like credit card debt, where the average debt is a shocking $6k. But if you drill down into the numbers, you find that 95% of people are actually responsible and keep their balance down to a thousand dollars or less (a third carry no balance). And the average is skewed high by about 5% of people who carry $50k or more in credit card debt.
Likewise, I suspect the vast majority of people are like you and me and return probably 1%-2% of what we buy. But a small minority abuse the system and return multiple items for every item that they keep.
The entire concept of the median was developed to avoid this type of skew when you use a mean for an average. With a median, you don't even look at what those 5% owe or return. You only look at what the 50th percentile owes or returns. Unfortunately, the media likes to continue to misuse the mean if it'll generate a shocking (and thus click-generating) headline.
The petroleum subsidies ($3.2 billion), even if you attributed them entirely to just motor vehicle fuel sales, amount to 2.2 cents per gallon. It's dwarfed by the 18.4 cents/gallon federal fuel tax and the average 31 cents/gallon state fuel taxes. Petroleum sales results in a net tax revenue for the U.S. government even after you factor in the subsidy. The government distortion of the petroleum market is to discourage its use, not to subsidize it.
Agricultural subsidies were implemented after the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, to guarantee the U.S. always has an oversupply of food and food production capacity. Without them, fallow farmland would be sold to be converted to other uses. And a bad cold snap or insect plague would lead to food shortages and starvation.
Contrary to what the summary implies, it's not a $7500 check from the IRS. It's a tax credit. You have to owe at least $7500 in taxes in order to take full advantage of the $7500 tax credit. If you owe less, you don't get the full credit.
Looking at the IRS tax stats for 2015, column U (average total income tax paid), the $50k-$75k bracket paid an average of $5341 in income tax, the $75k-$100k bracket paid an average of $8430 in income tax. So you had to have an income of about $75k+ to claim the full $7500 tax credit. Not exactly upper class, but definitely upper middle class. Looking at the number of returns in each income bracket, pretty much only the top 25% of incomes qualified for the full $7500.
People in the bottom 75% usually got less than $7500 even if they bought a qualifying EV. And low-income people who typically pay little to no income tax, even if they somehow managed to buy an EV (a lease would qualify you for the credit) got next to nothing. I'm actually not sure how this $7500 tax credit lasted this long. Conservatives should've hated it because it was a massive government subsidy. Liberals should've hated it because it was horribly regressive.
Delete every search result which contains "Equustek" from the entire world without prejudice. Send the ball back into Equustek's court so that they have to expend the time and effort to file a lawsuit against the proper defendant - the company infringing their trademark. Once they've successfully sued the other company and it has stopped infringing their trademark, then they can send Google notice saying that it's it's safe to remove the block on "Equustek" from their search engine. Google's algorithms can once again show search results for "Equustek" without violating the Canadian court injunction.
People need to remember that Google doesn't have to index you. If you make things difficult for them by getting all sorts of crazy court injunctions against them, an alternative that's always available to them is simply not to deal with you anymore.
I'm pretty sure a photo/screenshot of a TV show, representing 0.002% of a 25 minute show (at 30 fps), would fall under the commentary and criticism section of fair use. Publishing that single frame does not in any meaningful way detract from or degrade the value of the video to the copyright holder.
That would violate the principle of no taxation without representation. Since Verizon can't vote, the only alternative form of representation for them is lobbying and campaign contributions. If you don't like it, then you can choose between not taxing Verizon, or deciding taxation without representation is in fact OK and the U.S. colonies were unjustified in rebelling against the British Empire.
Personally I prefer the former since corporations are just organizations - dotted lines you draw around a group of people who've decided to work together. Consequently any taxes you assess against a corporation just gets passed on to people - employees, shareholders, and customers. It doesn't matter whether 100% of your tax revenue comes from corporate taxes, or personal income taxes. It's all coming out of the same pockets either way. A company doesn't generate any productivity on its own - the people who work for, run it, and buy from it do. And taxes are just shifting productivity from people to the government. So only people can pay for taxes. Creating a "corporate" tax (deciding people who work together should be taxed higher than people who work as individuals) needlessly creates an obligation to give corporations representation in government.
Totally agreed grammar nazi posts don't deserve to be on the front page.
But isn't it called a "savings account" (plural) because you deposit money you've saved on multiple occasions into it? Likewise, shouldn't it be "daylight savings" because you save daylight on multiple days? i.e. If we only changed the clocks for one day, then it would be "daylight saving time." But since we change the clocks for multiple days, doesn't that make "daylight savings time" correct?
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Everyone's fantasy is to play the hero. But if everyone is running around in a shared game playing a hero, then suddenly heroes are normal, meaning they aren't really heroes anymore. To maintain the illusion of a heroic player character, you have to populate the world with lower-ability bots. That works in a RPG-type MMO, but not in a PVP-type MMO. SW Battlefront tried to get around it by time-limiting how long until and how often you could play the heroes. But that resulted in having to play grunts lots of times before you were allowed to play the hero (for one life after you've unlocked it). The PVP-equivalent of grinding in a RPG.
I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
Egalitarian PVP MMOs or deathmatch-type games, where everyone plays "characters" with the same abilities or picks from a subset of fixed choices with quasi-balanced abilities, don't have this problem.
Power companies are reluctant to allow you to sell power back to the grid because then you aren't paying the distribution costs (construction and maintenance of the wires, transformers, infrastructure like switching and monitoring equipment, etc. which lets you sell back power to the grid). In the areas where these costs are taken into account, the sell-back price is usually around half the retail price, which dramatically lowers the economic viability of solar. Ignorant solar proponents cry foul at this, demanding they be paid full retail price as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.
If you can use all the power generated by your PV solar installation, or store the excess in batteries for use during night or bad weather, and you can get the economics of solar to work, then good for you. But if you're trying to use the power grid as your battery, then you can't run your cost/benefit analysis using retail electricity prices. Also note that the maintenance costs per house are fixed. Whether you need to draw power from the grid just one day out of the year, or every day out of the year, you still need the same wiring to your house. So we're not talking about a discount per kWh here. We're talking about a fixed cost per household. (Actually the electrical utilities should just separate out their bill into generation and transportation costs like water and gas companies do.) We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.
All that said, FWIW, in the cost analyses I've done, the local price of electricity is a much bigger factor than utilization. In places with high electricity prices (e.g. Hawaii) and good weather, the payback time for a PV solar installation can be as low as 5-7 years with subsidies, about 10-12 years without. (I should mention that the most cost-efficient energy system I found was geothermal heating and cooling. Where you run your heating and air conditioning with a heat pump using the ground as a heat sink instead of the air. For the desert region of Southern California, the payback time I calculated for that was as short as 3 years, and that's without subsidies.)
Exchange offers a lot of organizational-level management tools (e.g. revoking email privileges for a fired employee while retaining their emails for reference by their replacement) which are sorely lacking in open source mail servers. I despise Outlook and haven't touched it since my first contact with it in the 1990s. But I used to run a Unix-based mail server, and I totally understand why Exchange is so popular with companies.
What's going on here is a failure of open source to provide the tools the customer wants. Companies and organizations (charities, government) want these sorts of email management tools. But open source coders are very individualist and generally aghast at the idea of a manager having that sort of power over "your" email. So they don't put any work into adding those sorts of capabilities even if that's what the customers want.
Meanwhile, the customers are so desperate for said tools that they're willing to pay good money for them. Microsoft steps up and says they'll gladly take your money in exchange for creating these tools. And the open source community sneers at the entire thing even though they've basically driven the organization to Microsoft by refusing to provide the tools the organization needed to operate.
Smallpox was eradicated because (1) it only infects humans, (2) the symptoms are highly visible, and (3) people who've had the disease are immune but no longer carriers. Once enough humans were vaccinated and infected persons were isolated, the disease was unable to find new hosts and was eradicated.
Unfortunately this is not the case for other diseases. We attempted to eradicate Yellow Fever in the early 1900s, but it failed because the disease can infect other species. Polio has been difficult because an infected person is often asymptomatic, and can unwittingly spread the disease. Likewise, measles has a long period between when an infected person can spread the disease, and when the symptoms first appear. Malaria is probably the disease we'd most like to eradicate, but you can get malaria multiple times. So vaccination only confers a low level of immunity.
The only other disease we're getting close to eradicating is Guinea worm. This is a parasitic disease, not a virus, but by educating people about drinking clean water or boiling or filtering before drinking, it was nearly eradicated. Unfortunately it ran into (1) above - it was thought that the worms could only infect people, and thus a global halt to infection for a short period of time would be enough to drive the worm into extinction. Then we discovered that dogs can also carry the form of worm which infects humans.
When faced with a myriad of different problem conditions like this, the best approach is usually a shotgun approach. You throw all sorts of different things against the wall in hopes of randomly finding something that sticks. That is the libertarian philosophy. Your insinuation that libertarians require personal profit as motivation is incorrect. Libertarians are free to donate their money to whatever causes they feel are worthy, and do so all the time. What libertarians are against is being forced to donate their money to causes they personally don't feel are worthy, or being prevented from donating their money to causes they feel are worthy.
What the GP is advocating is a market-based approach to combating diseases. A libertarian, being in favor of the shotgun approach, would approve of both for-profit and charitable means of fighting diseases. The anti-market folks (mostly liberal) would try to prevent for-profit approaches without even seeing if they would work. And likewise the pro-market folks (mostly conservative) would try to phase out charitable approaches in favor of for-profit approaches. To the libertarian, the anti-market folks can donate to the charities fighting diseases, the pro-market folks can donate to for-profit organizations fighting diseases, and everyone is happy (well, everyone except those who think they are "right" and feel they should be able to control how the "wrong" people spend their money).
I owned a 701c. No the edges didn't flex like one of the other comments purports, at least not unless you used the weight of your arms to press a key instead of just your fingers. The overhang was only about an inch on either side, so there just wasn't enough leverage for it to flex significantly. IBM did a great job designing it.
Its critical flaw (at least for me) was the complete lack of a wrist rest. I had to carry a cushioned wrist rest around with it in my bag to be able to use it comfortably. (This was back before trackpads were common nor very good. Most of us just plugged in an external mouse. So having only a trackpoint wasn't a problem.). To be fair most laptops of that era didn't have a wrist rest. The keyboards were all shoved up against the front edge like a desktop keyboard, except desktop keyboards didn't sit 1" above the desk so you could use the desk as a wrist rest. When laptops started moving keyboards closer to the screen to give you a built-in wrist rest, the butterfly keyboard was doomed. There was no way to implement its sliding motion with a forward wrist rest, without also incorporating some vertical travel as it "unfolded" - it used that empty space in front of it to unfold.
For most people looking for a great keyboard, the Macbooks are a non-starter even if they can accept the OS change, because of the half-height arrow keys and lack of spacing between every 4 function keys (or lack of physical function keys on the touch bar models). For some reason this is glossed over in all the MBP reviews. Every PC laptop which dares to commit these transgressions gets dinged for it in all the reviews, but in the Mac reviews it's never mentioned.
The Thinkpads have shrunken their arrow keys slightly compared to their old keyboards. But they remain suitably large for comfortable editing, and the function keys mimic the spaces between every 4 keys like a desktop keyboard for touch typing.
While we're at it, why don't you work on ways to eradicate the biggest source of dangerous radiation in our solar system - the sun.
Uneducated environmentalists and like-minded Hollywood script writers have got you convinced that zero radiation is the natural state of things, and any radiation is aberrant. It's actually the other way around - radiation is everywhere. Even your own body is radioactive. The only reason the sun's radiation doesn't kill everything on Earth is because of its magnetic field, which directs most of the solar radiation into the polar regions (where it collides with air molecules and ionizes them to create the aurora, instead of ionizing your DNA and causing cancer and genetic defects). It's actually one of the biggest problems that need to be overcome for a manned Mars mission. Any additional radiation due to nuclear rockets will be negligible.
Require the ticket user's name be printed on the ticket, and confirm your ID matches before you're allowed in.
That the ticket sales sites don't implement such a simple solution suggests they actually like scalpers. The scalpers help guarantee an event sells out even if not all the seats are filled. i.e. The risk of a non-sellout is shifted from the ticket sales site to the scalpers, with the scalpers losing money if the event doesn't sell out, but pocketing the cash if the event does sell out. The ticket sales sites benefit from less variability in ticket sales, and thus more predictability in their income.
etc.
Those companies have their own fonts because of copyright issues. By creating their own font, they avoid having to pay the font owner license fees for tens or hundreds of millions of copies of their software that they're selling.
Last time I checked, IBM doesn't sell tens of millions of copies of any software package.
The outrageous thing here isn't that they mark things up - everyone does that. It's how much Apple marks things up. The average net markup for all products and all industries is about only about 6%-10% depending on how you measure it. Apple is consistently 20%+.
The great thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
The terrible thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
Compared to the Mac, you gain a lot more flexibility and power. But for some (most?) people that's just giving them enough rope to hang themselves. (OS X is actually the same - it runs a modified version of BSD Unix under the hood. It's just that the GUI you know as OS X limits what you can do, akin to guardrails on a road which prevent you from driving anywhere where your car might get stuck or fall off a cliff.
IMHO the biggest difference between OS X and Windows from a UI standpoint is that the Windows desktop is a representation of your computer. Your programs and files sit on a drive, and if you wish you can put a shortcut (aka an alias, or a link) to them on your desktop. In fact the desktop is just a folder sitting in a special location on your drive. In OS X, your desktop is your computer. Your desktop is like the root directory, which contains your drives, which in turn contain your files and programs. (It's the same UI difference in Android vs iOS. Android apps all sit in the apps drawer, and you can arrange links to them in your home screens as you wish. iOS has no such abstraction, and the apps on your home screen(s) are the apps themselves.).
The Windows/Android method is more flexible. You can put multiple copies of the same app or file in multiple folders/home screens, or even create links to two completely different folders to each other so you can quickly navigate between the two even though their paths are completely different. OS X/iOS lacks this abstraction layer (except as an advanced topic - aliases), which makes the files and programs behave more like physical objects (can only have one copy of each). More intuitive, but less flexible.
Bitcoin appears particularly attractive because it hasn't (permanently) gone down yet. Every bubble has hordes of supporters and investors who are convinced their favored investment is "special" and can't go down. And it always does. Unfortunately the losers are one last ones left holding the bag, not always the people hyping up that particular investment.
In my time, I've seen this happen with gold (1970s/1980s), the tech bubble (1990s), the housing bubble (2000s), and oil (2010s). A lot of people fleeing the housing bubble collapse seemed to dump their money into oil since it had gone up to $100/bbl and showed no signs of stopping.
If you're investing in something because it's continued to climb and you're convinced it can't go down, you're simply wrong. It can, and it will. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. Bitcoin is a bit more insulated because it's designed to become harder to acquire over time (which coincidentally enriches early adopters), so the supply constriction enhances an increase in value (e.g. imagine what would've happened to home prices if the more people bought homes, the fewer homes builders were allowed to build). So its crash won't happen until enough people realize how stupid a trait that is for "currency" or something with no intrinsic value.
This is why so many people don't take global warming seriously. Because its proponents resort to cheap tricks like deliberately choosing a word whose common definition makes the situation sound more dire than what actually happened ("destroy - put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it."), when they mean one of its lesser-used definitions.
If you practice deceptions and exaggerations like this too often, eventually people stop believing you even when the emergency is real. And that's exactly what's happened with global warming.
I think hipsters are about the stupidest trend ever. But they're not completely off base here. Pretty much all music distributed in the digital era has been degraded by the loudness war. Their dynamic range has been crushed down to almost flat. So even though that digital music file supposedly gets you 12-24 bits of dynamic range, if it's only using the upper 20%-30% of that range, you're only getting 3-7 bits of effective dynamic range. Not to mention the distortion from the high peaks (e.g. snare drums) being clipped when you raise the gain to bring quieter sounds closer to the max volume. So in terms of how the music sounds, the 5-6 bit depth of vinyl records and cassette tapes can actually be superior. You just have to deal with additional noise.
As the loudness war started in the 1990s, you have to get early CDs from the 1980s and analog records/tapes to completely avoid it.
No, this is the case where a liberal presents a view that maybe women don't want STEM careers. And those critical of him and who fired him didn't bother to actually read what he wrote, and just assumed the author was a conservative who said that women are inferior at STEM.
Really, this case has become a great litmus test at determining who actually reads the facts and decides for themselves, vs. who doesn't care about the facts as long as they can use the issue to publicly demonstrate that they're being compliant with the socially acceptable conclusion.
While there are a myriad of factors which go into selecting the proper material for a design, the general criteria that steel is best at is strength per unit cost. If you can pay more, more exotic materials like titanium, tungsten, chromium, or amorphous ("glass") metals are stronger per unit volume than steel. If you need lighter weight, aluminum and magnesium tend to have more strength per unit mass. If you need temperature resistance, niobium, molybdenum tend to be better. etc.
That said, a 2-3x strength increase is just huge, and could upset some of the generalities I listed above. It's been a decade since I delved into materials science, but a 2-3x stronger steel could displace both glass metals for strength per volume, and aluminum for strength per weight.
The latter would have serious implications for the aerospace industry. The big drawback of aluminum (other than relatively low melting point, which isn't an issue in subsonic flight) is that it has a fatigue limit. With a steel structure, you can design it so that repeatedly flexing it no longer causes it to weaken. Aluminum has no such point - flexing it will always cause it to weaken (which is why it was stupid to make Curiosity's wheels out of aluminum). Fatigue failure of aluminum has been the cause of numerous airliner accidents, from the original de Havilland Comet, to Aloha 243, to JAL 123 (greatest loss of life from a single aircraft accident). It's why pressurized airframes are retired and destroyed after about 75,000-100,000 flights. If 3D printed steel has a higher strength per weight than aluminum, it would revolutionize aircraft design.
Only if you define "won" as "got there first." The Japanese "won" the race to high definition TV, but all the HDTV standards today are based on the U.S. HDTV standards. Why? Because the Japanese version of HDTV was analog - that was the quickest way to transmit HDTV signals in the 1970s. The U.S. HDTV program didn't get started until the late 1980s, right around the time digital signal processors were rapidly improving in performance and dropping in price. Consequently the U.S. version of HDTV was digital, and compressed digital HDTV signals turned out to be much more practical than analog for HDTV.
Likewise, as a long-term solution to repeatedly getting things into space, rockets are not very efficient. The U.S. realized this soon after WWII and was gradually working on a series of experimental planes to fly into space. It mostly abandoned that approach after Sputnik turned space access political, turning it from a marathon into a sprint.
Now, 60 years later, after the world has invested trillions of dollars into rocketry R&D, we've seen the writing on the wall and are gradually shifting research back towards much more economically practical hypersonic flight. That is, what the U.S. was already doing in the late 1950s. Imagine where the technology might've been today if we hadn't been distracted by a political "space race." Maybe we'd already have 1 hour flights between North America and Europe/Asia. A moon base (the biggest impediment is the cost of getting materials into orbit to establish a base - rockets are damned expensive). Maybe even a Mars base (again, high cost of fuel for a Mars mission due to rockets being damned expensive). Who knows.
The same thing happened in computers. In the 1950s-1970s electronic transistors were a lot easier to make than optical transistors. Consequently everyone took the easy route and poured R&D into electronic transistors. That worked fine - computers were doubling in clock speed every 2-3 years - until about 2000. That's when we hit a brick wall. Current leakage in electronic transistors goes as something like the square of frequency, and it turns out about 4 GHz is the practical maximum. Beyond that, the power losses and cooling requirement make higher speeds impractical. The fastest Intel processor in 2002 was 2.8 GHz. Since then, we've only been able to push (mass-produced) clock speeds up to about 4.2 GHz. A 1.5x improvement in 15 years, compared to doubling every 2-3 years. Optical transistors would have no such limitation since it relies on quantum photons instead of lossy electrons. But because we dove headfirst into electronic transistors, our level of optical transistor technology is decades behind electronic transistors. Meaning nobody wants to spend much money on researching optical computing even though its future potential is much greater than electronic computing.
Sometimes the quickest route isn't the best route.
I suspect this is a lot like credit card debt, where the average debt is a shocking $6k. But if you drill down into the numbers, you find that 95% of people are actually responsible and keep their balance down to a thousand dollars or less (a third carry no balance). And the average is skewed high by about 5% of people who carry $50k or more in credit card debt.
Likewise, I suspect the vast majority of people are like you and me and return probably 1%-2% of what we buy. But a small minority abuse the system and return multiple items for every item that they keep.
The entire concept of the median was developed to avoid this type of skew when you use a mean for an average. With a median, you don't even look at what those 5% owe or return. You only look at what the 50th percentile owes or returns. Unfortunately, the media likes to continue to misuse the mean if it'll generate a shocking (and thus click-generating) headline.
The petroleum subsidies ($3.2 billion), even if you attributed them entirely to just motor vehicle fuel sales, amount to 2.2 cents per gallon. It's dwarfed by the 18.4 cents/gallon federal fuel tax and the average 31 cents/gallon state fuel taxes. Petroleum sales results in a net tax revenue for the U.S. government even after you factor in the subsidy. The government distortion of the petroleum market is to discourage its use, not to subsidize it.
Agricultural subsidies were implemented after the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, to guarantee the U.S. always has an oversupply of food and food production capacity. Without them, fallow farmland would be sold to be converted to other uses. And a bad cold snap or insect plague would lead to food shortages and starvation.
Contrary to what the summary implies, it's not a $7500 check from the IRS. It's a tax credit. You have to owe at least $7500 in taxes in order to take full advantage of the $7500 tax credit. If you owe less, you don't get the full credit.
Looking at the IRS tax stats for 2015, column U (average total income tax paid), the $50k-$75k bracket paid an average of $5341 in income tax, the $75k-$100k bracket paid an average of $8430 in income tax. So you had to have an income of about $75k+ to claim the full $7500 tax credit. Not exactly upper class, but definitely upper middle class. Looking at the number of returns in each income bracket, pretty much only the top 25% of incomes qualified for the full $7500.
People in the bottom 75% usually got less than $7500 even if they bought a qualifying EV. And low-income people who typically pay little to no income tax, even if they somehow managed to buy an EV (a lease would qualify you for the credit) got next to nothing. I'm actually not sure how this $7500 tax credit lasted this long. Conservatives should've hated it because it was a massive government subsidy. Liberals should've hated it because it was horribly regressive.
Delete every search result which contains "Equustek" from the entire world without prejudice. Send the ball back into Equustek's court so that they have to expend the time and effort to file a lawsuit against the proper defendant - the company infringing their trademark. Once they've successfully sued the other company and it has stopped infringing their trademark, then they can send Google notice saying that it's it's safe to remove the block on "Equustek" from their search engine. Google's algorithms can once again show search results for "Equustek" without violating the Canadian court injunction.
People need to remember that Google doesn't have to index you. If you make things difficult for them by getting all sorts of crazy court injunctions against them, an alternative that's always available to them is simply not to deal with you anymore.
I'm pretty sure a photo/screenshot of a TV show, representing 0.002% of a 25 minute show (at 30 fps), would fall under the commentary and criticism section of fair use. Publishing that single frame does not in any meaningful way detract from or degrade the value of the video to the copyright holder.
That would violate the principle of no taxation without representation. Since Verizon can't vote, the only alternative form of representation for them is lobbying and campaign contributions. If you don't like it, then you can choose between not taxing Verizon, or deciding taxation without representation is in fact OK and the U.S. colonies were unjustified in rebelling against the British Empire.
Personally I prefer the former since corporations are just organizations - dotted lines you draw around a group of people who've decided to work together. Consequently any taxes you assess against a corporation just gets passed on to people - employees, shareholders, and customers. It doesn't matter whether 100% of your tax revenue comes from corporate taxes, or personal income taxes. It's all coming out of the same pockets either way. A company doesn't generate any productivity on its own - the people who work for, run it, and buy from it do. And taxes are just shifting productivity from people to the government. So only people can pay for taxes. Creating a "corporate" tax (deciding people who work together should be taxed higher than people who work as individuals) needlessly creates an obligation to give corporations representation in government.
Totally agreed grammar nazi posts don't deserve to be on the front page.
But isn't it called a "savings account" (plural) because you deposit money you've saved on multiple occasions into it? Likewise, shouldn't it be "daylight savings" because you save daylight on multiple days? i.e. If we only changed the clocks for one day, then it would be "daylight saving time." But since we change the clocks for multiple days, doesn't that make "daylight savings time" correct?