If it is valuable to allocate resources to activities in space, then individuals can choose to invest their own damn resources in those activities; it is not the purpose of government to make such investments for people, especially against individuals' will.
Do you feel the same way about the interstate highway system? How about waiting for individuals to create their own justice system? Oh wait, that IS what libertarians want.
There are a whole lot of things that are too big for individuals to do. It's why we need government.
You've got it backwards. Individuals first chose to travel paths, eventually wearing footpaths along common routes. Individuals first sought justice when perceived crimes were committed.
Only after lots of individuals had done and were doing these things, and proven that these things worked and were worthwhile, did they collectively agree that these things needed to be formalized, standardized, and centralized. Only then did they task their government to build highways and implement a criminal justice system. Government's role should mostly be focused on eliminating redundancies, inefficiencies, and inconsistencies which arise from lots of individuals trying to do the same thing in different ways. Those different ways are initially needed to quickly determine which way is the best way. But after a while all that individual trial and error makes clear which way is the best way, and people can collectively agree on how best to build something together.
Implementing something that no individual has done, like a space program, is a whole different matter. I won't say government shouldn't be investing in these things. But you have to be extremely careful that the government doesn't wind up pouring billions into a boondoggle. Having individuals travel the path first is a great way to weed out the bad paths, the things that sound good on paper but just don't work in real life, and the things whose costs simply don't justify doing them.
e.g. Rockets are ridiculously expensive. Prior to Sputnik, the U.S. correctly recognized that they weren't cost-effective, and was working on gradually working up to space by flying there. But because the U.S. and Soviet Union were in a cold war, after Sputnik was launched, it became a matter of pride to equal or better that feat before the other side. And the U.S. poured billions of dollars into rockets because it determined that that was the fastest way to obtain space launch capability..
Now that the cold war is over and countries are collaborating on space exploration and nobody cares about firsts anymore, the latest research is focusing on... flying into space because it's more cost-effective. Exactly what the U.S. was doing before it got sidetracked by hubris and bragging rights. If we hadn't shifted our spending into rockets, who knows, maybe we might have already had hypersonic transports today. That's the kind of misstep you want to avoid but is very easy to make when government strikes out on its own direction, without individuals first having tried the different possible solutions so we have empirical evidence of what works best.
Or a more modern example: GSM was developed by the EU government and mandated as a cellular standard. The U.S. refused to require it, and allowed individuals and companies in the U.S. to try different cellular standards. One of these was CDMA, which turned out to absolutely destroy GSM's TDMA when it came to cellular data. It was so obvious which was superior that within a year the GSM standard was amended to incorporate wideband CDMA for 3G data (that's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - GSM phones had a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data; CDMA phones onl
Amazon aggressively recruited thousands of retirees
I know most age discrimination complaints are usually about tech companies trying to hire younger coders and pushing out older employees. But isn't this the same thing just with the ages reversed?
If Amazon simply lays out the conditions of employment (part time, no benefits, etc) and most of their applicants are retirees, then it's not a problem. But if they're actively seeking out retirees...
If everything is working properly, home prices should track closely with the rate of inflation. That something as fundamental and developed (i.e. not a new industry) as your home appreciated 3x in just 10 years is evidence that something is seriously wrong with the housing market where you live, not evidence that a house is a good investment.
Both the tech bubble and housing bubble was propagated by people citing stories like yours, stirring people up into a frenzy to invest so they wouldn't miss out on huge returns, which causes even more price appreciation which seems to confirm the stories. Unless there's been a fundamental change in how much people earn (so they can afford more expensive homes), 300% appreciation in 10 years is completely unsustainable and likely means there will be a sharp downturn in the near future.
You should probably be making plans to sell the home to cash out your gains before that happens. Switch to renting for a few years until the market collapses, then buy another house (for a lot less than you sold your home) when prices have returned closer to their historical norms.
If given a third choice of allowing some of my CPU time to be utilized by the site or extension for cryptocurrency mining
That's the same thing as paying for the extension, except instead of paying for it directly, you're paying for it indirectly via a higher electric bill. I (and I think anyone who really thinks this through) would rather pay a one-time fee to purchase the software/extension/access, instead of paying continuously for it every time I'm using my browser via a higher electric bill which works out to an indeterminate total sum.
Even if you're not paying for your electricity directly (your rent includes utilities), you still end up paying for it. If the landlord notices the electric bill is consistently higher, he'll just make your next rent increase a little higher. So you'll be paying a higher rent which pays a higher electric bill which pays for the software/extension/access. Burying expenses in this way under multiple layers of misdirection is how you nickle and dime people to death, and thwarts normal market forces by hiding the true cost of buying/using something.
If you don't like how much it costs to buy certain software or access, don't use it.
AFAIK, most of the world gives dates as day-month-year. So March 14 in most of the world is 14.3. Pi day, or 3.14 only happens in the U.S. (which uses month-day-year). The military and East Asia uses year-month-day, but they still have 1124 years to go until the year 3141.
The problem is that the carriers are highly vertically integrated. They own the tower networks, they provide cellular service, and they sell phones. This results in things like Verizon (with arguably the best tower network) being able to foist the highest service prices and poorest phone selection onto its customers.
If you break up that vertical integration, then most of the monopoly/oligopoly problems disappear.
Companies which own cell phone tower networks should not be allowed to sell phones or service. They would then work on standardizing their towers so any phone could connect to it. And they'd enter into contracts with service providers to cover some or all of the country with differing levels of service (voice, 3G, 4G). The tower networks would compete solely on the basis of tower network quality. Tower networks with good towers would attract more or higher-paying service providers. Tower networks with poor towers would either be bought out or shut down. Anyone wishing to start a tower network could start with a few towers in a poorly serviced (rural) area and build from there.
Service providers would negotiate with tower networks to provide service (kinda like Netflix negotiates with their ISP) to provide the best coverage for the lowest price to customers. Service providers would compete solely on the basis of coverage, features (minutes, GB of data, speed), and price. Anyone wishing to start a service provider company could start by offering service in a small region and grow from there.
Phone manufacturers would compete against each other directly, since anyone could buy a phone anywhere and use it with any service provider (what GSM tries to do). The phones would compete only on the merits of the phone
Crucially, any improvement in one of these three areas would immediately be available to all competitors in the other two areas. A better phone would be usable on any service provider and any tower network. A better discount service provider could contract with any tower network and use any phone. A better tower network would be available to all service providers and could connect to any phone.
GSM initially used TDMA - time division multiple access. Basically each phone took turns talking to the tower. This was terrible for data because each phone took a timeslice of the bandwidth regardless of how much data they had to transmit, or even if they had no data to transmit. If a tower had 50 Mbps of data bandwidth and had 50 phones connected to it, each phone only got about 0.5 Mbps (there is padding at the ends of the timeslices to account for latency due to the phone's distance from the tower and the speed of light).
CDMA (code division multiple access) phones don't use timeslices. They all transmit simultaneously and the tower tells them apart because they're using orthogonal codes. Kinda like writing horizontally and vertically on the same sheet of paper. Your letters overlap, but they're distinct (orthogonal) enough that you can still figure out what the letters are in the direction you're reading. CDMA has no problem with data because each phone sees the other phones as an increase in the noise floor. Since the data bandwidth is the signal to noise ratio, the more phones are transmitting, the higher the noise and the lower the data bandwidth for a single phone. If fewer phones are transmitting, the noise floor drops, and each phone gets more data bandwidth. So in CDMA the data bandwidth available to each phone scales automatically. If there's just one phone using data, it can use all of the tower's 50 Mbps. If there are 50 phones transmitting, each gets 1 Mbps.
CDMA completely destroyed GSM in cellular data performance. Within a year GSM threw in the towel and amended the GSM spec to add UMTS which used wideband CDMA for data. That's why GSM carriers took about a year longer than CDMA carriers to move to 3G data. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had two different radios, a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio so couldn't do both at once.
If you'd gotten your wish and the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and mandated GSM, CDMA wouldn't have happened and cellular data speeds today would probably be 1-2 Mbps. We would not have LTE because most LTE implementations use OFDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes). CDMA was the proof of concept that this crazy "everyone transmits at the same time and we tell them apart by orthogonality" idea actually worked when scaled up to a nationwide cellular network. Without that proof, there would've been little incentive to develop the higher-power consumption OFDMA.
GSM vs CDMA is actually a perfect example of why market competition produces better results than government-mandated standards. (The SIM card is very cool though and I'm glad it got incorporated into LTE.) Government should not be mandating technological standards. It should stick to mandating standardized requirements, and leave it up to the market to come up with the best technologies to meet or exceed those requirements.
And yet recreational boaters show screenshots of their GPS nav system indicating that their anchored boat is 200 feet from shore on dry land. And it's common in some areas. Ones without large structures to reflect signals.
The calculations for a position fix with GPS is fairly complex and requires some time. Older commercial GPS units from the 1990s and early 2000s would take up to a minute to do this calculation. And the processors on phones back then were completely incapable of doing this so Assisted GPS was developed - the phone transmits the satellite signal times to the cell tower, a hefty computer on the tower does the position fix calculations, and transmits the GPS coordinates back to the phone.
Obviously, real-time position updates aren't very useful if you're only updating the position once a minute. So what GPS units do instead for subsequent position fixes is assume the initial position fix is correct and only calculate the change in position. This calculation is a lot easier and the early units could do it every few seconds.
That made GPS units usable for real-time navigation, but if your initial position fix was wrong then subsequent position fixes would be offset by the error in the initial position fixes. That's why your GPS sometimes thinks you're taking side-streets instead of the freeway, or boats can appear to be on dry land. It's usually caused by moving during the initial position fix calculation because people are impatient. You gotta stand still during the initial position fix, or the subsequent position deltas will be offset by the distance and direction you moved between the initial position fix and first changed position fix.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, you need to stop moving and force the GPS unit to do a new initial position fix. Usually turning it off and back on would do it. But some units retained the last known position through a power cycle, and needed to be forced to do a new initial position fix.
You can already get sub-meter accuracy in some areas with differential GPS. It uses a reference signal from a fixed ground station to adjust or toss out obviously inaccurate satellite signals.
And Selective Availability was first turned off in the buildup to the first Gulf War in 1990. GPS was still relatively new and the U.S. military hadn't expected a massive deployment that soon, so didn't have sufficient military grade GPS receivers (IIRC they only had enough to provide one per company or battalion (few hundred soldiers), when ideally they wanted one per squad (few soliders) or vehicle. So they turned off SA and bought and distributed civilian GPS receivers (which still cost about $1500 apiece then).
It was turned back on after the war, but GPS users, especially maritime users, had gotten a taste of what its true accuracy was like and didn't want to go back. 100 meter accuracy is only enough to get you in the vicinity of the harbor entrance. 20 meter accuracy is enough to avoid specific rocks and shoals. They lobbied hard to get it turned off, and developed methods to augment GPS with other signals like dGPS. These became commonplace enough by the late 1990s that there was really no point keeping SA on, since dGPS is actually more accurate than GPS without SA.
There are FAR more people employed in the sale and instillation of solar panel than there are in manufacturing.
If there are currently 1 million homes with rooftop solar panels, and the end-state is 125 million homes (100%) with rooftop solar panels, then wouldn't the amount of labor needed for sales and installation be exactly the same regardless of the time it takes to install panels on 124 million rooftops? Rapid installation of solar panels creates more jobs now, but results in fewer jobs in the future relative to a slower pace of installation.
I dunno if this is a good or bad decision from a manufacturing standpoint. I'm pretty pro-free trade so my immediate uninformed reaction is that it's bad. But the jobs argument seems specious.
That's exactly what customers can do whenever a carrier changes their terms of service - you can quit their 2-year or 3-year contract without paying an early termination fee.
Of course the carriers don't exactly advertise this, but that's the way it's always been. Legally, if either side violates or voids contract terms, and the other side is not obligated to continue to honor the contract.
The primary cost isn't the water as TFA is making it out to be. It's the filtration. Nestle, Coca Cola (Dasani), and Pepsi (Aquafina), Budweiser, etc. use reverse osmosis fiiltration to purify city tap water for use in their beverages as well as for bottled water. So do most restaurants for that matter.
The typical reverse osmosis filter in your home operates at a low enough volume that it can run off of pressure from the city water supply. In that case you're basically stealing electricity from the city water company's pumps to power your RO filter. But to produce the quantities these companies require, they have to power their own pumps to increase the pressure on the RO filters to generate sufficient volume.
This whole thing is kinda like complaining that Intel makes billiions of dollars each year selling silicon microchips from sand which they get practically for free.
collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He's capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing -- a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps -- so that no frames are missed.
Why?
VHS only has about 333x480 (NTSC) or 335x576 (PAL) resolution in luminosity, much lower color resolution. There is no point capturing it at higher resolution - you're just wasting storage space with duplicated or made-up pixels.
The framerate thing I can sorta understand - both NTSC and PAL were interlaced. So for example, the actual resolution of NTSC VHS was 333x240 @ 60 fps interlaced, which when deinterlaced (the alternate lines of video interpolated) created 333x480 frames @ 60 fps. While modern computer video formats do support interlacing, I've noticed annoying artifacts when they're converted badly (you'll see horizontal lines during quick panning or quick horizontal movement). So I can understand.capturing at 333x480 @ 60 fps when it only contains 333x240 @ 60 fps of information.
Maybe if he had access to the original Betacam tapes I could understand capturing in HD. Those had 720x480 or 720x576 resolution with 10-bit 4:2:2 chroma compression. But if your source media is plain VHS...
Aside from the SIM card (which is used for LTE anyway), CDMA and GSM are only used for voice and 3G data (in fact GSM uses wideband CDMA for 3G data).
LTE uses OFDMA, with a few channels using dynamically assigned TDMA. These are compatible with both GSM and CDMA carriers as long as the phones aren't frequency-locked to a specific carrier's bands. So the networks would in fact be compatible if you made a phone with an OFDMA LTE radio, and both CDMA and GSM voice radios. My old Nexus 5 supports all those. So does the unlocked Samsung Galaxy 8/8+. If a combined Sprint/T-Mobile requested manufacturers to make such phones, I'm sure they would (except Sony, who seems to hate CDMA voice).
Sprint service is fine in most of the East coast and midwest. Their service has been hamstrung in the West coast because the company they hired to build their tower network there (which has since gone bankrupt) spaced the towers out the furthest apart the specifications allowed. You know, the time-honored tradition of fulfilling the exact letter of the contract while spending the least amount of money possible. This resulted in a cellular network which only worked well in open, flat terrain, and had lots of dead spots in urban and hilly areas. Sprint has tried to fix this by adding intermediate towers, but this is expensive and often results in towers being too close together.
The only true fix is to tear it all down and build all the towers again with proper spacing. Or to merge with another carrier with their own tower network, and to reallocate transmitting equipment to properly spaced towers, and shut down unnecessary towers. The extra cellular bandwidth wouldn't hurt either seeing as both companies predominantly operate in the 1.8-1.9 GHz bands (Verizon and AT&T have the advantage of 900 MHz voice bands).
In the 1980s, the term was "paradigm shift" and "vertical integration." In the 1990s, the term was anything to do with the web - "information superhighway", "integrated marketing", "dot com", and "new media."
Like all marketing and fashion trends, it's just dressing up the same concept in a different way to make it seem fresh and new. You get ahead of the pack by doing stuff others are not yet doing.
Only about 3%-4% of upper management test as psychopaths (vs about 1% for the general population). How do you account for the other 96%?
The off-cited 1 in 5 Australian study was badly misreported by the press. It found 5.76% could be classified as psychopaths, 10.42% were dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics, and overall 21% showed some psychopathic traits. Crucially, they did not give a comparison for these metrics to the general population. The press added up all these numbers and misreported that 21% were psychopaths. (For comparison, 16% of prisoners are classified as psychopaths.
The vast majority of people highly successful in business are completely normal.
My extended family moved to the U.S. from Korea in the 1970s. Korea was still rebuilding back then and was paranoid about people leaving with their money, so limited emigrant families to taking about $1000 with them. So each of my father's and mother's siblings (8 in total) arrived in the country with about $1000 and the clothes on their back (and sometimes kids in tow). From worst to best off:
One unfortunately married an alcoholic, and lives in a trailer park with a poverty level income.
One made a middle class life built on running a dry cleaner 10 hours/day 6 days/week.
One made an upper-middle class life built on working overseas construction projects in crappy or dangerous locales. He gets home a couple months out of the year, but is otherwise "at work" 24 hr/day the rest of the year, and mails his paychecks home to his family..
One made an upper-middle class life built on a dual income (nurse and owning/running a printing shop).
One made an upper-middle class life built on buying a liquor store and working there 14 hours/day 7 days/week, and investing their income wisely in real estate instead of frittering it away on things like fancy cars and big screen TVs.
One made an upper-middle class life built on a dual income (engineer and pharmacist).
My dad was a doctor before moving here, so I'd leave him out of the statistics (lower-upper class). Although I do recall living in assisted housing and having to get clothes and other goods from the Salvation Army because we were poor while he was doing his recertification internship.
One married a wealthy husband.
One is upper class - they risked everything they had to start a cell phone store back when cell phones were first becoming popular, and now own a chain and warehouses worth several $million. No fancy education or pre-existing wealth. Just a lot of hard work, and an extensive list of contacts they've built up over the years with cell phone accessory manufacturers and suppliers in China.
If you've convinced yourself or somebody else has convinced you that you have no chance to make "special circumstances" for yourself, then you've already lost. Enjoy the lower or lower-middle class lifestyle that you've consigned yourself to. Yes luck plays a role. But if you don't at least try, you'll never get anywhere.
The wealth and education part was actually irrelevant to his success (aside from enabling him to stay in business until the IBM deal came up). He didn't make MS-DOS. He learned from his mom that IBM was looking for an OS, and he knew he didn't have the skill nor time to write it himself. So he bought it from a competitor. He could've known nothing about computers (like Steve Jobs) and still pulled off the deal.
So it was (1) his mom knowing the chairman at IBM in charge of the PC project, and (2) him knowing someone in the industry that had what IBM wanted. Even (1) is a string of coincidences - both she and chairman Opel were on the board for the United Way, which is how she learned of IBM's PC project and she tipped them off to talk to Microsoft for an OS. Contacts are everything. A friend of mine who transferred to Harvard said the education there was pretty much the same quality as at her previous college, but the contacts she was getting through her professors and other students were invaluable.
This is why you try as hard as you can not to burn bridges when quitting a job - something most people don't seem to care about. They'd rather get to spend a few minutes to openly express their righteous indignation at being treated badly at work, than be diplomatic and keep those contacts in their back pocket for life.
If we're trying to reduce the influence of ads bought by foreigners on U.S. elections, shouldn't Facebook be turning over all ads purchased by foreign entities during the election cycle?
Or is the goal here to arrive at a predetermined conclusion - that Russia tried to influence the election?
Ctrl-alt del generates a hardware interrupt which bypasses whatever program is running. Originally it went straight to the BIOS and triggered a reboot of the computer. But was later modified to invoke a handler attached to that interrupt. That's why it's used to initiate a login onto Windows Server. When you press ctrl-alt-del, you're guaranteed to get the real Windows login prompt (which is triggered by that interrupt). If malware has set up a fake look-alike login prompt, ctrl-alt-del will bypass it and get you to the real one. That's why you're always supposed to start a login with ctrl-alt-del, not just type in your username and password because the login screen is "already up."
So no, you don't want to attach some of these functions to another button.
New Orleans sits at the mouth of the Mississippi, which provides transport by cargo ship to/from about half the inland U.S. cities
Houston is the west-most major U.S. port in the Gulf of Mexico, providing access to the western half of the U.S. for cargo offloaded from ship to land. Ironically, that role used to be filled by Galveston (which used to be bigger than Houston). Until a hurricane in 1900 wiped out most of Galveston and people decided it was safer to move further inland to Houston.
They may be horrible places to build in terms of natural disasters, but they are very advantageous places to build in terms of economics. Economics affects our lives every day. Natural disasters affects our lives once every few decades.
Mexico City is built on an ancient lake bed. That makes the ground very flat, which again is economically advantageous when building infrastructure (you can construct it cheaper). That lake bed is also what makes earthquakes there so bad.
If you eliminated all places on Earth where natural disasters could cause lots of damage (earthquake, hurricane, tornadoes, flood, wildfire, drought, avalanche/landslide, volcanoes, tsunami, heat waves), there would be precious few places on the planet where you could build a city. So you build in whatever places are economically and socially advantageous, and deal with the natural disasters when they happen.
If you truly believe global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is occurring, and you truly believe it's going to cause mass extinction in less than 100 years, then you want to prevent it in the most effective and expeditious method we have available - nuclear power.
If you think this is just an opportunity to advance renewable energy development, then you do not truly believe one of those things. Either you think global warming is not really happening, but you can use it to scare the world into adopting your preferred energy source. Or you believe it's happening but it's not really that serious, so we have plenty of time to develop renewable energy sources and phase them in.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be our final energy source. All we need is to use it to immediately arrest climate change, buying us more time to develop cleaner energy sources. Then we can phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. Trying to jump straight to renewables is like being on a sinking ship, and insisting that nobody is allowed to use the existing life rafts. Instead you want us to research, design, and construct new life rafts to save ourselves, even if that might take more time than it takes for the ship to sink.
There's a possibility it might work. But why take that risk? Why gamble with all life on Earth? Implement the solution which is guaranteed to work (get on the existing life rafts / switch to nuclear power). Then once the immediate threat is over we can work on developing the ideal solution (develop new life rafts / develop renewables). If there's mass extinctions starting in 2100, it's going to be the fault of the environmental movement - who prevented us from immediately turning off fossil fuels and switching to nuclear, and insisted that we instead had to roll the dice and develop new unproven energy sources which still have problems with scalability and consistency.
I think the better question is what's different about this time. They already tried buying a device maker once with Motorola Mobility
When Google acquired Motorola, they were still in their Nexus phone phase. They were working with a different manufacturer every generation to produce a "pure" low-cost Android phone as a demonstration of what the platform was capable of. The hope being that this would encourage other manufacturers to step up their game and produce better hardware. They switched manufacturers each gen so they wouldn't be accused of favoritism, since that could cause some manufacturers to stop producing Android devices entirely. They couldn't use Motorola to produce Android phones for the same reason - companies don't like being in direct competition with the company producing the software their products run. Microsoft is being extremely careful with Surface for the same reason - limiting it to a niche product (convertible tablet/laptop).
This time around, Nexus is dead. The Google Pixel line of phones is premium priced, so represents less of a threat to other Android phone manufacturers. HTC has been sued almost into bankruptcy by other companies, so could be purchased very cheaply. Samsung is hinting that it wants to abandon Android for their own OS, but also supplies many of the parts which go into producing the Pixel phones so won't be as "offended" by Google manufacturing their own phones. So I'm guessing Google/Alphabet figures if they're careful and keep their phones a (relatively) niche product, it won't upset other manufacturers into quitting the Android space, while still giving them some control in guiding the direction of Android hardware should Samsung abandon it.
It's worth pointing out that corporate espionage is not frowned upon in the East the way it is in the West. The prevailing attitude in East Asian countries (slowly changing) is that if you didn't take sufficient measures to safeguard your company's secrets and they got stolen, it's your own damn fault. In fact, employees are often expected to steal from competing companies when they can, and can be fired if they're ordered to conduct corporate espionage and they refuse.
This is why piracy is so rampant in East Asian countries. The concept of media being protected by law even though they lack any real protection, is foreign (again, slowly changing).
When Western countries were tripping over themselves to help China build high speed trains eagerly agreeing to conditions like doing the fabrication in China, I just shook my head at their naivete. And predictably, after China had gleaned enough knowledge to build the trains themselves - either by direct observation of the construction machines and plans, or by outright theft - they booted the Western companies out and began building the trains themselves. The Western reaction is "that's not fair!". The East Asian reaction is "how stupid can these guys be?"
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You've got it backwards. Individuals first chose to travel paths, eventually wearing footpaths along common routes. Individuals first sought justice when perceived crimes were committed.
Only after lots of individuals had done and were doing these things, and proven that these things worked and were worthwhile, did they collectively agree that these things needed to be formalized, standardized, and centralized. Only then did they task their government to build highways and implement a criminal justice system. Government's role should mostly be focused on eliminating redundancies, inefficiencies, and inconsistencies which arise from lots of individuals trying to do the same thing in different ways. Those different ways are initially needed to quickly determine which way is the best way. But after a while all that individual trial and error makes clear which way is the best way, and people can collectively agree on how best to build something together.
Implementing something that no individual has done, like a space program, is a whole different matter. I won't say government shouldn't be investing in these things. But you have to be extremely careful that the government doesn't wind up pouring billions into a boondoggle. Having individuals travel the path first is a great way to weed out the bad paths, the things that sound good on paper but just don't work in real life, and the things whose costs simply don't justify doing them.
e.g. Rockets are ridiculously expensive. Prior to Sputnik, the U.S. correctly recognized that they weren't cost-effective, and was working on gradually working up to space by flying there. But because the U.S. and Soviet Union were in a cold war, after Sputnik was launched, it became a matter of pride to equal or better that feat before the other side. And the U.S. poured billions of dollars into rockets because it determined that that was the fastest way to obtain space launch capability..
Now that the cold war is over and countries are collaborating on space exploration and nobody cares about firsts anymore, the latest research is focusing on... flying into space because it's more cost-effective. Exactly what the U.S. was doing before it got sidetracked by hubris and bragging rights. If we hadn't shifted our spending into rockets, who knows, maybe we might have already had hypersonic transports today. That's the kind of misstep you want to avoid but is very easy to make when government strikes out on its own direction, without individuals first having tried the different possible solutions so we have empirical evidence of what works best.
Or a more modern example: GSM was developed by the EU government and mandated as a cellular standard. The U.S. refused to require it, and allowed individuals and companies in the U.S. to try different cellular standards. One of these was CDMA, which turned out to absolutely destroy GSM's TDMA when it came to cellular data. It was so obvious which was superior that within a year the GSM standard was amended to incorporate wideband CDMA for 3G data (that's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - GSM phones had a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data; CDMA phones onl
Too often, a class action lawsuit means the lawyers gets $xx million, I get a $3 coupon.
But in this case I'd participate just to screw with Equifax.
I know most age discrimination complaints are usually about tech companies trying to hire younger coders and pushing out older employees. But isn't this the same thing just with the ages reversed?
If Amazon simply lays out the conditions of employment (part time, no benefits, etc) and most of their applicants are retirees, then it's not a problem. But if they're actively seeking out retirees...
If everything is working properly, home prices should track closely with the rate of inflation. That something as fundamental and developed (i.e. not a new industry) as your home appreciated 3x in just 10 years is evidence that something is seriously wrong with the housing market where you live, not evidence that a house is a good investment.
Both the tech bubble and housing bubble was propagated by people citing stories like yours, stirring people up into a frenzy to invest so they wouldn't miss out on huge returns, which causes even more price appreciation which seems to confirm the stories. Unless there's been a fundamental change in how much people earn (so they can afford more expensive homes), 300% appreciation in 10 years is completely unsustainable and likely means there will be a sharp downturn in the near future.
You should probably be making plans to sell the home to cash out your gains before that happens. Switch to renting for a few years until the market collapses, then buy another house (for a lot less than you sold your home) when prices have returned closer to their historical norms.
That's the same thing as paying for the extension, except instead of paying for it directly, you're paying for it indirectly via a higher electric bill. I (and I think anyone who really thinks this through) would rather pay a one-time fee to purchase the software/extension/access, instead of paying continuously for it every time I'm using my browser via a higher electric bill which works out to an indeterminate total sum.
Even if you're not paying for your electricity directly (your rent includes utilities), you still end up paying for it. If the landlord notices the electric bill is consistently higher, he'll just make your next rent increase a little higher. So you'll be paying a higher rent which pays a higher electric bill which pays for the software/extension/access. Burying expenses in this way under multiple layers of misdirection is how you nickle and dime people to death, and thwarts normal market forces by hiding the true cost of buying/using something.
If you don't like how much it costs to buy certain software or access, don't use it.
AFAIK, most of the world gives dates as day-month-year. So March 14 in most of the world is 14.3. Pi day, or 3.14 only happens in the U.S. (which uses month-day-year). The military and East Asia uses year-month-day, but they still have 1124 years to go until the year 3141.
If you break up that vertical integration, then most of the monopoly/oligopoly problems disappear.
Crucially, any improvement in one of these three areas would immediately be available to all competitors in the other two areas. A better phone would be usable on any service provider and any tower network. A better discount service provider could contract with any tower network and use any phone. A better tower network would be available to all service providers and could connect to any phone.
GSM initially used TDMA - time division multiple access. Basically each phone took turns talking to the tower. This was terrible for data because each phone took a timeslice of the bandwidth regardless of how much data they had to transmit, or even if they had no data to transmit. If a tower had 50 Mbps of data bandwidth and had 50 phones connected to it, each phone only got about 0.5 Mbps (there is padding at the ends of the timeslices to account for latency due to the phone's distance from the tower and the speed of light).
CDMA (code division multiple access) phones don't use timeslices. They all transmit simultaneously and the tower tells them apart because they're using orthogonal codes. Kinda like writing horizontally and vertically on the same sheet of paper. Your letters overlap, but they're distinct (orthogonal) enough that you can still figure out what the letters are in the direction you're reading. CDMA has no problem with data because each phone sees the other phones as an increase in the noise floor. Since the data bandwidth is the signal to noise ratio, the more phones are transmitting, the higher the noise and the lower the data bandwidth for a single phone. If fewer phones are transmitting, the noise floor drops, and each phone gets more data bandwidth. So in CDMA the data bandwidth available to each phone scales automatically. If there's just one phone using data, it can use all of the tower's 50 Mbps. If there are 50 phones transmitting, each gets 1 Mbps.
CDMA completely destroyed GSM in cellular data performance. Within a year GSM threw in the towel and amended the GSM spec to add UMTS which used wideband CDMA for data. That's why GSM carriers took about a year longer than CDMA carriers to move to 3G data. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had two different radios, a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio so couldn't do both at once.
If you'd gotten your wish and the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and mandated GSM, CDMA wouldn't have happened and cellular data speeds today would probably be 1-2 Mbps. We would not have LTE because most LTE implementations use OFDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes). CDMA was the proof of concept that this crazy "everyone transmits at the same time and we tell them apart by orthogonality" idea actually worked when scaled up to a nationwide cellular network. Without that proof, there would've been little incentive to develop the higher-power consumption OFDMA.
GSM vs CDMA is actually a perfect example of why market competition produces better results than government-mandated standards. (The SIM card is very cool though and I'm glad it got incorporated into LTE.) Government should not be mandating technological standards. It should stick to mandating standardized requirements, and leave it up to the market to come up with the best technologies to meet or exceed those requirements.
The calculations for a position fix with GPS is fairly complex and requires some time. Older commercial GPS units from the 1990s and early 2000s would take up to a minute to do this calculation. And the processors on phones back then were completely incapable of doing this so Assisted GPS was developed - the phone transmits the satellite signal times to the cell tower, a hefty computer on the tower does the position fix calculations, and transmits the GPS coordinates back to the phone.
Obviously, real-time position updates aren't very useful if you're only updating the position once a minute. So what GPS units do instead for subsequent position fixes is assume the initial position fix is correct and only calculate the change in position. This calculation is a lot easier and the early units could do it every few seconds.
That made GPS units usable for real-time navigation, but if your initial position fix was wrong then subsequent position fixes would be offset by the error in the initial position fixes. That's why your GPS sometimes thinks you're taking side-streets instead of the freeway, or boats can appear to be on dry land. It's usually caused by moving during the initial position fix calculation because people are impatient. You gotta stand still during the initial position fix, or the subsequent position deltas will be offset by the distance and direction you moved between the initial position fix and first changed position fix.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, you need to stop moving and force the GPS unit to do a new initial position fix. Usually turning it off and back on would do it. But some units retained the last known position through a power cycle, and needed to be forced to do a new initial position fix.
You can already get sub-meter accuracy in some areas with differential GPS. It uses a reference signal from a fixed ground station to adjust or toss out obviously inaccurate satellite signals.
And Selective Availability was first turned off in the buildup to the first Gulf War in 1990. GPS was still relatively new and the U.S. military hadn't expected a massive deployment that soon, so didn't have sufficient military grade GPS receivers (IIRC they only had enough to provide one per company or battalion (few hundred soldiers), when ideally they wanted one per squad (few soliders) or vehicle. So they turned off SA and bought and distributed civilian GPS receivers (which still cost about $1500 apiece then).
It was turned back on after the war, but GPS users, especially maritime users, had gotten a taste of what its true accuracy was like and didn't want to go back. 100 meter accuracy is only enough to get you in the vicinity of the harbor entrance. 20 meter accuracy is enough to avoid specific rocks and shoals. They lobbied hard to get it turned off, and developed methods to augment GPS with other signals like dGPS. These became commonplace enough by the late 1990s that there was really no point keeping SA on, since dGPS is actually more accurate than GPS without SA.
If there are currently 1 million homes with rooftop solar panels, and the end-state is 125 million homes (100%) with rooftop solar panels, then wouldn't the amount of labor needed for sales and installation be exactly the same regardless of the time it takes to install panels on 124 million rooftops? Rapid installation of solar panels creates more jobs now, but results in fewer jobs in the future relative to a slower pace of installation.
I dunno if this is a good or bad decision from a manufacturing standpoint. I'm pretty pro-free trade so my immediate uninformed reaction is that it's bad. But the jobs argument seems specious.
That's exactly what customers can do whenever a carrier changes their terms of service - you can quit their 2-year or 3-year contract without paying an early termination fee.
Of course the carriers don't exactly advertise this, but that's the way it's always been. Legally, if either side violates or voids contract terms, and the other side is not obligated to continue to honor the contract.
The primary cost isn't the water as TFA is making it out to be. It's the filtration. Nestle, Coca Cola (Dasani), and Pepsi (Aquafina), Budweiser, etc. use reverse osmosis fiiltration to purify city tap water for use in their beverages as well as for bottled water. So do most restaurants for that matter.
The typical reverse osmosis filter in your home operates at a low enough volume that it can run off of pressure from the city water supply. In that case you're basically stealing electricity from the city water company's pumps to power your RO filter. But to produce the quantities these companies require, they have to power their own pumps to increase the pressure on the RO filters to generate sufficient volume.
This whole thing is kinda like complaining that Intel makes billiions of dollars each year selling silicon microchips from sand which they get practically for free.
Why?
VHS only has about 333x480 (NTSC) or 335x576 (PAL) resolution in luminosity, much lower color resolution. There is no point capturing it at higher resolution - you're just wasting storage space with duplicated or made-up pixels.
The framerate thing I can sorta understand - both NTSC and PAL were interlaced. So for example, the actual resolution of NTSC VHS was 333x240 @ 60 fps interlaced, which when deinterlaced (the alternate lines of video interpolated) created 333x480 frames @ 60 fps. While modern computer video formats do support interlacing, I've noticed annoying artifacts when they're converted badly (you'll see horizontal lines during quick panning or quick horizontal movement). So I can understand.capturing at 333x480 @ 60 fps when it only contains 333x240 @ 60 fps of information.
Maybe if he had access to the original Betacam tapes I could understand capturing in HD. Those had 720x480 or 720x576 resolution with 10-bit 4:2:2 chroma compression. But if your source media is plain VHS...
Aside from the SIM card (which is used for LTE anyway), CDMA and GSM are only used for voice and 3G data (in fact GSM uses wideband CDMA for 3G data).
LTE uses OFDMA, with a few channels using dynamically assigned TDMA. These are compatible with both GSM and CDMA carriers as long as the phones aren't frequency-locked to a specific carrier's bands. So the networks would in fact be compatible if you made a phone with an OFDMA LTE radio, and both CDMA and GSM voice radios. My old Nexus 5 supports all those. So does the unlocked Samsung Galaxy 8/8+. If a combined Sprint/T-Mobile requested manufacturers to make such phones, I'm sure they would (except Sony, who seems to hate CDMA voice).
Sprint service is fine in most of the East coast and midwest. Their service has been hamstrung in the West coast because the company they hired to build their tower network there (which has since gone bankrupt) spaced the towers out the furthest apart the specifications allowed. You know, the time-honored tradition of fulfilling the exact letter of the contract while spending the least amount of money possible. This resulted in a cellular network which only worked well in open, flat terrain, and had lots of dead spots in urban and hilly areas. Sprint has tried to fix this by adding intermediate towers, but this is expensive and often results in towers being too close together.
The only true fix is to tear it all down and build all the towers again with proper spacing. Or to merge with another carrier with their own tower network, and to reallocate transmitting equipment to properly spaced towers, and shut down unnecessary towers. The extra cellular bandwidth wouldn't hurt either seeing as both companies predominantly operate in the 1.8-1.9 GHz bands (Verizon and AT&T have the advantage of 900 MHz voice bands).
In the 1980s, the term was "paradigm shift" and "vertical integration." In the 1990s, the term was anything to do with the web - "information superhighway", "integrated marketing", "dot com", and "new media."
Like all marketing and fashion trends, it's just dressing up the same concept in a different way to make it seem fresh and new. You get ahead of the pack by doing stuff others are not yet doing.
Only about 3%-4% of upper management test as psychopaths (vs about 1% for the general population). How do you account for the other 96%?
The off-cited 1 in 5 Australian study was badly misreported by the press. It found 5.76% could be classified as psychopaths, 10.42% were dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics, and overall 21% showed some psychopathic traits. Crucially, they did not give a comparison for these metrics to the general population. The press added up all these numbers and misreported that 21% were psychopaths. (For comparison, 16% of prisoners are classified as psychopaths.
The vast majority of people highly successful in business are completely normal.
If you've convinced yourself or somebody else has convinced you that you have no chance to make "special circumstances" for yourself, then you've already lost. Enjoy the lower or lower-middle class lifestyle that you've consigned yourself to. Yes luck plays a role. But if you don't at least try, you'll never get anywhere.
The wealth and education part was actually irrelevant to his success (aside from enabling him to stay in business until the IBM deal came up). He didn't make MS-DOS. He learned from his mom that IBM was looking for an OS, and he knew he didn't have the skill nor time to write it himself. So he bought it from a competitor. He could've known nothing about computers (like Steve Jobs) and still pulled off the deal.
So it was (1) his mom knowing the chairman at IBM in charge of the PC project, and (2) him knowing someone in the industry that had what IBM wanted. Even (1) is a string of coincidences - both she and chairman Opel were on the board for the United Way, which is how she learned of IBM's PC project and she tipped them off to talk to Microsoft for an OS. Contacts are everything. A friend of mine who transferred to Harvard said the education there was pretty much the same quality as at her previous college, but the contacts she was getting through her professors and other students were invaluable.
This is why you try as hard as you can not to burn bridges when quitting a job - something most people don't seem to care about. They'd rather get to spend a few minutes to openly express their righteous indignation at being treated badly at work, than be diplomatic and keep those contacts in their back pocket for life.
If we're trying to reduce the influence of ads bought by foreigners on U.S. elections, shouldn't Facebook be turning over all ads purchased by foreign entities during the election cycle?
Or is the goal here to arrive at a predetermined conclusion - that Russia tried to influence the election?
Ctrl-alt del generates a hardware interrupt which bypasses whatever program is running. Originally it went straight to the BIOS and triggered a reboot of the computer. But was later modified to invoke a handler attached to that interrupt. That's why it's used to initiate a login onto Windows Server. When you press ctrl-alt-del, you're guaranteed to get the real Windows login prompt (which is triggered by that interrupt). If malware has set up a fake look-alike login prompt, ctrl-alt-del will bypass it and get you to the real one. That's why you're always supposed to start a login with ctrl-alt-del, not just type in your username and password because the login screen is "already up."
So no, you don't want to attach some of these functions to another button.
They may be horrible places to build in terms of natural disasters, but they are very advantageous places to build in terms of economics. Economics affects our lives every day. Natural disasters affects our lives once every few decades.
Mexico City is built on an ancient lake bed. That makes the ground very flat, which again is economically advantageous when building infrastructure (you can construct it cheaper). That lake bed is also what makes earthquakes there so bad.
If you eliminated all places on Earth where natural disasters could cause lots of damage (earthquake, hurricane, tornadoes, flood, wildfire, drought, avalanche/landslide, volcanoes, tsunami, heat waves), there would be precious few places on the planet where you could build a city. So you build in whatever places are economically and socially advantageous, and deal with the natural disasters when they happen.
If you truly believe global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is occurring, and you truly believe it's going to cause mass extinction in less than 100 years, then you want to prevent it in the most effective and expeditious method we have available - nuclear power.
If you think this is just an opportunity to advance renewable energy development, then you do not truly believe one of those things. Either you think global warming is not really happening, but you can use it to scare the world into adopting your preferred energy source. Or you believe it's happening but it's not really that serious, so we have plenty of time to develop renewable energy sources and phase them in.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be our final energy source. All we need is to use it to immediately arrest climate change, buying us more time to develop cleaner energy sources. Then we can phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. Trying to jump straight to renewables is like being on a sinking ship, and insisting that nobody is allowed to use the existing life rafts. Instead you want us to research, design, and construct new life rafts to save ourselves, even if that might take more time than it takes for the ship to sink.
There's a possibility it might work. But why take that risk? Why gamble with all life on Earth? Implement the solution which is guaranteed to work (get on the existing life rafts / switch to nuclear power). Then once the immediate threat is over we can work on developing the ideal solution (develop new life rafts / develop renewables). If there's mass extinctions starting in 2100, it's going to be the fault of the environmental movement - who prevented us from immediately turning off fossil fuels and switching to nuclear, and insisted that we instead had to roll the dice and develop new unproven energy sources which still have problems with scalability and consistency.
When Google acquired Motorola, they were still in their Nexus phone phase. They were working with a different manufacturer every generation to produce a "pure" low-cost Android phone as a demonstration of what the platform was capable of. The hope being that this would encourage other manufacturers to step up their game and produce better hardware. They switched manufacturers each gen so they wouldn't be accused of favoritism, since that could cause some manufacturers to stop producing Android devices entirely. They couldn't use Motorola to produce Android phones for the same reason - companies don't like being in direct competition with the company producing the software their products run. Microsoft is being extremely careful with Surface for the same reason - limiting it to a niche product (convertible tablet/laptop).
This time around, Nexus is dead. The Google Pixel line of phones is premium priced, so represents less of a threat to other Android phone manufacturers. HTC has been sued almost into bankruptcy by other companies, so could be purchased very cheaply. Samsung is hinting that it wants to abandon Android for their own OS, but also supplies many of the parts which go into producing the Pixel phones so won't be as "offended" by Google manufacturing their own phones. So I'm guessing Google/Alphabet figures if they're careful and keep their phones a (relatively) niche product, it won't upset other manufacturers into quitting the Android space, while still giving them some control in guiding the direction of Android hardware should Samsung abandon it.
It's worth pointing out that corporate espionage is not frowned upon in the East the way it is in the West. The prevailing attitude in East Asian countries (slowly changing) is that if you didn't take sufficient measures to safeguard your company's secrets and they got stolen, it's your own damn fault. In fact, employees are often expected to steal from competing companies when they can, and can be fired if they're ordered to conduct corporate espionage and they refuse.
This is why piracy is so rampant in East Asian countries. The concept of media being protected by law even though they lack any real protection, is foreign (again, slowly changing).
When Western countries were tripping over themselves to help China build high speed trains eagerly agreeing to conditions like doing the fabrication in China, I just shook my head at their naivete. And predictably, after China had gleaned enough knowledge to build the trains themselves - either by direct observation of the construction machines and plans, or by outright theft - they booted the Western companies out and began building the trains themselves. The Western reaction is "that's not fair!". The East Asian reaction is "how stupid can these guys be?"