Any attempt at changing MAC address of the wireless card causes bluescreen.
Most WiFi card vendors started to prohibit this about 10 years ago due to the increased use of MAC address spoofing to try to break into networks. The laptop I bought in 2007 was the last one I owned which could do it. IIRC, one of the methods of cracking WPA used it to imitate a connected client and cause the access point to quickly generate a lot of (encrypted) response data which could be analyzed to guess the password.
Of course on my newer laptops any attempt to change the MAC address just fails. It doesn't bluescreen.
It's even worse when you learn who actually makes the laptops. The dirty little secret of the laptop industry is that almost no name brand actually makes their laptops. They're almost all made by ODMs - original design manufacturers. They're like OEMs except they also design the product. All the brand name does is give the ODM the specs of what they want, approve the final design, and slap their label on it. The Macbooks for example are made by Quanta. Quanta also happens to make most of HP's and Dell's laptops.
I ordered from Rainbow Symphony on Amazon precisely for this reason. I knew they sold legit eclipse glasses, and I noticed that their Amazon listing said "sold by Rainbow Symphony." It was not Prime and did not say "fulfilled by Amazon.". So I placed the order on Amazon, and a couple weeks later I got a package shipped direct from Rainbow Symphony with the eclipse glasses, completely bypassing Amazon's inventory.
Baader has several different films. Their silver/gold film is certified safe for visual observation under the ISO standard; their photo film is not. It lets through a little more UV than the ISO limit. It's designed for use on cameras, where the glass in the lens will block enough of the UV to make it ISO-compliant. But if you use it to view the sun directly, you're going to be slightly over the ISO limit.
While I'm sure AgenaAstro is fine, I wouldn't put it past some fly-by-night shop making glasses out of the photo filter film (because he was unable to purchase the visual filter film). So Amazon is justified in their caution. Where they're screwing up is in bringing up this issue so close to the eclipse, and not reviewing the documentation AgenaAstro sent them in a timely manner.
The laptops are a way to bypass the long testing and approval process which keeps ancient computers in aerospace. Airplanes have the same problem, often using technology a decade or older because that's the computer which the plane was certified with. Upgrading the computers involves re-certifying the plane, which is horribly expensive unless you're re-certifying it anyway (e.g. new model of the plane).
With a laptop, you can grab one off the shelf and just launch it to see if it works in space - that currently costs about $4000 per pound ($9k per kg) which is cheaper than radiation hardening and testing it. In the early days of the Space Shuttle, the most powerful computer aboard was a HP 41CX calculator.
cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia.
Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).
CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.
If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.
The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.
SCO was a version of AT&T System V Unix. So it really had nothing to do with Linux. Linux (and Minix) was a Unix-like OS written from the ground up. The entire SCO lawsuit was a fishing expedition to try to extract money from the open source project which was eroding their market share.
System V goes back to the 1980s. Other versions of Unix go back to the 1970s. I'm sure there's still install media and binaries for it floating around out there. The hard part would be finding hardware it can run on.
I think we're going about this the wrong way. These are scientist (or scientist types) trying to convince regular people with science. That's a huge hurdle to jump because not only do you have to do a data dump on them of the scientific research on vaccines, you have to convince them (or teach them) about the scientific method and statistics so they can grok that data dump.
Instead of trying to teach these people a new way to think, reach these people via the way they already think. They're into the anti-vaxx stuff because:
Anecdotal evidence. They hear a story about how McCarthy's kid was diagnosed with autism after getting a vaccine, and jump to the conclusion that one caused the other. Their primary motivation is fear. So rather than trying to fight fear with reason, use fear to sway them to the statistically correct decision. Deluge them with anecdotes of kids who didn't get vaccines and died or went blind because of measles. etc.
The allure of a conspiracy theory. These folks are the "government is trying to mind control the people" type. Their primary motivation is mistrust of authority. So simply cast the anti-vaxx movement as an alternate authority figure. Start a new conspiracy theory about how McCarthy is using this whole anti-vaxx thing to make money.
Back before GPS navigation became ubiquitous, I read that men tend to navigate using road names, women tend to navigate using landmarks. So I started giving directions with both road names and landmarks. I got a lot of comments from people that they really liked my directions. There's no reason to limit ourselves to just one method of teaching people.
As someone who grew up in the 1970s, I can assure you the climatology talk which filtered out to the general public back then was about whether or not we'd enter another ice age.
The explanation given in your link (that the mass media was hyping global cooling, but climate scientists were publishing papers about global warming) doesn't really help. It just confirms the belief that the mass media will hype whatever they want rather than report accurately.
The problem is the phishers only have to succeed once. I've been using email since 1987. In that time I've identified and deleted hundreds if not thousands of phishing emails. But I fell for one - it was a phishing email claiming to be from eBay about a problem with my recent winning bid. It just so happened that I had won a bid earlier in the day. So I clicked on it and logged into my eBay account.
I realized what I'd done within 30 seconds. Logged out, logged into eBay in another browser, and immediately changed my password. But it made me realize that even if you're 99.9% successful at avoiding phishing emails, that still means you'll slip up every now and then.
I understand now why those phishing emails claiming that there's a problem with your FedEx package aren't as stupid as I always thought ("How dumb are these guys - I'm not even expecting a package via FedEx"). They're just spamming it to tens of millions of people. A few hundred thousand of them are expecting a FedEx package, and the phishers are gambling that a few hundred or a few thousand of them will click-through on the phishing email. It's a one-shot variant of the perfect prediction scam, leveraging the huge scalability of spamming to eliminate the multiple iterations normally needed to run the con. If it's "obvious" the email is a phishing email, it just means you fell into the 99% or so of people who by random chance didn't fall within the parameters to successfully pull off the con.
The problem with spatially planning a city is that the plan for a small city is different from the plan for a big city, but it's impossible to predict if a small city will become a big city. So short of reclaiming areas via eminent domain and re-purposing them (wasteful since you're demolishing established structures), you're left with an either/or choice. Either spatially plan for the size city you have today and get burned if the city becomes significantly larger in the future. Or spatially plan for future city growth, and get burned if the city doesn't increase in size or even shrinks.
Public transportation systems can also have the same problem of city not growing as expected (subways), although they can be slightly more flexible (buses). Taxis are even more flexible, since the number of taxis in service can be scaled up or down more quickly than buses. And Uber/Lyft vehicles are even more flexible yet since they're otherwise used as personal vehicles.
In other words, this isn't a problem with just One Correct Solution. It's a problem with multiple solutions - the more efficient solutions quickly drift out of their optimal range if city growth doesn't follow projections, the less efficient solutions are more flexible and can adapt more quickly to deviations in city growth from expectations.
Honestly, I think rich people just throw their money at it to keep it tied up in court for as long as they can. Malibu has the exact same problem - the beach is public, but the houses in front of it block access. The few public access gates are frequently locked (illegally) or vandalized by property owners to prevent the public from accessing the beach.
The basic idea is that you can't own the beach. You can own the land adjacent to it, but the beach (in California, up to the point where it's submerged during high tide) belongs to the public. Rich people have tried to get around this by buying up all the land in front of a beach to make it difficult or annoyingly distant for the public to access it. But the CCC responds by requiring a public accessway be installed if that happens.
There isn't really a need need. My city just went through something similar (private developer locking gate to stairway through their development to a public beach). If the California Coastal Commission tells you to allow access and you refuse, they can fine you up to $11,250 per day (about $4.1 million per year). Granted a billionaire could stave off bankruptcy while paying the fine for hundreds of years. But if it came to that, I imagine legislation would swiftly be passed increasing the maximum daily fine or raising it geometrically the longer you don't comply.
You've actually got it backwards. The null hypothesis in this case is "there is no gender-based discrimination." Since you cannot prove a negative (e.g. "reindeer can't fly"), it becomes the null hypothesis, and the burden of proof falls upon those trying to disprove it.
That is, the base assumption is that differences in job preference are caused by biology or other non-discriminatory factors, leading to gender disparity in the workplace. The burden of proof is upon those advocating that gender disparity is caused by discrimination to prove a causal link between discrimination and gender disparity. The burden of proof isn't on those advocating the null hypothesis because you can't prove it (short of disproving all possible alternative hypotheses).
Those advocating the null hypothesis can critique studies advocating the discrimination hypothesis, e.g. suggesting that biology could account for the difference we see, without actually having to prove it. The burden of proof then falls again those advocating the discrimination hypothesis to come up with experiments or studies which separate out the effects of biology from the effects of discrimination (this is what they're talking about when you read that a study "controlled for" factors like age or income).
If those advocating the discrimination explanation are unable to come up with a way to separate out biological effects, then that's an obstacle to proving the discrimination hypothesis. Until they are able to overcome that obstacle, the assumption is that the null hypothesis is correct.
Your post actually supports Damore by demonstrating the flawed reasoning of those criticizing him. You have made a non-falsifiable hypothesis the null hypothesis. Even if a company kept video recordings of everything that happened every minute of every workday, demonstrating that no gender-based discrimination happened, you can still argue "but they plotted it after work hours when they met at a bar." It's a non-falsifiable hypothesis. This means it cannot be the null hypothesis. The base assumption has to be that there is no gender-base discrimination, and you have to gather evidence showing this hypothesis is false.
Last year, more than 30,000 students rode 650 buses to 230 schools at a cost of $120 million
That doesn't sound right. $120 million over 30,000 students is $4000 per student-year. If there are 200 school days in a year, that's $20 per student per day, or $10 per student per trip. A savings of $5 million only reduces this to $9.58 per student per trip.
A monthly MBTA bus pass is $55/mo, which at 21 school days per month would work out to $1.31 per student per trip. So the school buses are 7.6x more expensive.
A little of the price difference I can understand due to school buses running fewer trips (a school bus usually services 2-4 schools on staggered schedules, with a few hours lull around lunch). So the purchase cost of the bus is amortized over fewer trips. Utilization of public buses is also higher. 392,413 riders on a weekday over 7200 round trips = 54.5 riders per circuit, which is close to or over 100% capacity per circuit (obviously not everyone is on the bus at the same time, but we're looking at fares per circuit). School buses OTOH run at about 51% capacity per circuit.
But if you figure these are both 2:1 factors, then that would bring up the MBTA bus cost to just $5.24 per student per trip. Still about half that of operating the school buses. Maybe that's the solution. In other countries I've visited, schoolkids ride the public bus and subway.
FWIW, in grad school I worked with sonars which emitted in the 12-35 kHz frequency range. I wasn't exposed to them regularly, but I did get blasted a few dozen times (very annoying when it's in the audible range). Because they're designed to operate underwater, the transducers pack a lot more energy than speakers designed for the air (water being 800x denser than air).
By the time I was 35 my hearing above 11 kHz was pretty much gone. On those hearing tests, I rated among 60- and 70-year olds. And no I didn't listen to loud music as a kid. I actually hated rock concerts because of how loud they were, and only went to one in my life (part of a school rally). The loss seems to have stabilized. I'm 48 now and I'm still able to hear 11 kHz, but not above.
I didn't notice it happening, and it happened pretty rapidly (within a few years). Because of the relatively few incidents of exposure and short durations (single pings - this was in the days before CHIRP sonars), I've wondered if the cause wasn't the sonars, but rather some electronic device. Say, a component in a computer I used all the time, constantly exposing me to high frequency noise just outside my hearing range for hours every day. I do suffer tinnitus, though oddly it doesn't bother me as it's in the frequencies I've lost so doesn't interfere with hearing "real" sounds.
The interesting this about this is that you can earn A LOT more than than the usual 20% tax bracket and still pay 20%
Everyone focuses on this side of capital gains taxes, never the flip side. I think the flip side is the more important one.
If you're in a lower tax bracket, you still pay 20% capital gains tax. This has the effect of discouraging middle- and low-income people from investing in stocks. And since stocks on average have a much higher rate of return than interest in a bank savings account, you steer low- and middle-income people away from the best way to accumulate wealth short of starting a company.
In the U.S., the long-term capital gains tax is 15%. After accounting for deductions and credits, the $100k-$200k income bracket pays a net 12.7% in income taxes (column T). The $200k-$500k income bracket pays a net 19.5%. So 15% is somewhere around $200k. The flat 15% capital gains tax rate discourages people making less than $200k from investing in stocks.
We need to get rid of the flat capital gains tax rate. If you still want to encourage investment in stocks (the reason it exists), change the capital gains tax rate to your income tax bracket minus 10%. That way all income classes receive that encouragement, not just higher incomes.
Ego drives it. About 95% of people believe they're smarter than the average of their peers. So they tend to be dismissive of the collective wisdom built up from the company's past experiences. When they implement a new change which is the same as an old change, they think "this time it'll be different because I'm in charge."
The best (actually only) solution I've been able to find is to compartmentalize the damage. Instead of implementing a change company-wide or product-wide, implement it in a small section first. Let them try out the change for a few months, and then having to deal with the problems it causes is usually enough to overcome their ego. Then they can objectively re-evaluate whether the change really was a good idea before you implement it company-wide or product-wide.
This works well for changes which affect events that occur with moderate frequency (happens often in the few months trial). Unfortunately it doesn't work for changes which increase the likelihood of black swan events, like cutting IT and increasing your chances of being hacked.
The proper way to test this type of thing is to give the new tool to half your employees. Then compare their productivity increase (if any) vs. the half who didn't get the tool. This eliminates other external factors, like profits being up becomes the economy is recovering.
You also have to be wary of the Hawthorne effect - where worker productivity increases simply because they think you're doing something to help them, even if you secretly haven't really changed anything. So a better way to test is to give half your employees one product, half a different product, and see which product does better. e.g. At the same time half your employees get Surface Pros, the other half get new upgraded laptops.
In the Surface team we track quality constantly, using metrics that include failure and return rates -- both our predicted 1-2-year failure and actual return rates for Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book are significantly lower than 25%
Does changing the time frame from "by the end of the second year of ownership" to "1-2 year failure rate" skew the results because more failures happen later in a product's lifetime?
The Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book were introduced in October 2015. Surface Pro 3 in June 2014.
Consumer Reports does their survey towards the beginning of their year. So "by the second year of ownership" means mostly Surface Pro 1 and 2 units. "1-2 year failure rate" means mostly Surface Pro 3 and 4 units.
But the biggest issue I have with "customer satisfaction" is that it's kind of a bullshit measurement when it comes to premium products.
Customer satisfaction surveys (usually the J.D. Power survey) tend to be skewed by:
How enamored the customer is with the product. Good looks count.
How much the customer paid. If they paid a lot, they tend to like it more to help themselves rationalize if they overpaid. This is why luxury cars always do well despite being average or worse than average in problem rate.
Lack of use. The survey is usually done immediately or a few months after purchase, So long-term failure rate usually isn't a factor.
Voluntary responses. Very few people are going to say they hate a product they just bought. Also, voluntary surveys suffer from self-selection bias, so while they can provide useful comparative data, they should never be considered the last word in product quality or reliability. (The Consumer Reports survey is also a voluntary one, though they pester you to fill it out every time you login towards the beginning of the year.)
It's also worth noting that Consumer Reports cited "start-up and freezing problems" as reasons for pulling their recommendation. Unless there's a hardware flaw (unlikely since the components are all standardized and work fine in millions of other computers), that points to problems with Microsoft's drivers. And wasn't addressed in Microsoft's reply.
This isn't limited to companies. It affects the entire country. The one poll which correctly predicted the 2016 election noticed that Trump supporters were less likely to reveal to pollsters that they were Trump supporters. And when they took steps to compensate for it in their poll weighting, lo and behold they predicted Trump would win the election.
The vitriol and violence in the media and by protesters created a culture of shaming Trump supporters, who promptly went turtle to protect themselves. Consequently they ended up undercounted in all the polls, but showed up in the election.
We need to take a lesson from science. When the theory of continental drift was first proposed, geologists initially scoffed at it and dismissed its proponents. But they never ridiculed them, never excluded them from publishing papers. And as more evidence was gathered, the community gradually came around to accept it as correct. Democracy gets it strength from the diversity of viewpoints within its population. This allows us to think up, consider, and try all sorts of different ideas which would never even be suggested in other forms of government. "Shaming" people with unpopular views is detrimental to a functional democracy.
Wouldn't it have been prudent to do your development work on a server outside the country? And use a VPN (with a password committed only to memory) to connect to the server, and do your coding work via remote desktop, rather than do the development locally? I mean it's not like the binary needs to be compiled inside the country where it's going to be used.
The people who didn't read it and assumed it said things it didn't made the toxic work environment - by spreading their assumptions and making it appear as if there was a hostile employee among them, when there wasn't. These people did the equivalent of yellowing "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there wasn't any fire, then blamed him for starting a fire when there was no fire.
I seem to recall the EU mandated that all phones had to use microUSB for their charging ports. Last I checked, iPhones still do not. That regulation seems to have worked really well. (Don't get me wrong - I like that the regulation unified charging ports on Android. I just don't see regulation as being the panacea you think it is.)
There's a rule of thumb about voter feedback to Congresscritters. A hand-written letter is worth about 10 phone calls. A phone call is worth about 10 faxes. And a fax is worth about 10 emails.
The idea is that the more effort you had to put into the feedback, the more you must care about the issue. If your level of concern is so low that you can only be bothered to type in your name and email address on a website form letter and click "send", then the issue must not be very important to you. OTOH if you take the type to write a letter by hand and physically mail it to your representative, the issue must be very important to you, and they'll treat it as such.
Same goes here. If your complaint with the airline can only get you to expend enough effort to shoot off a text, then your level of outrage must be very low. They're not going to treat it very seriously. If it gets you to write a nasty (non-form) email, your level of outrage must be higher and they'll take you a bit more seriously. If you're outraged enough to call them and suffer the wait time on hold, then they'll take you even more seriously. And if you spent the time to write a hand-written letter and paid for a stamp to mail it to them, you must really be angry with them, and they'll take your letter very seriously.
So championing the easiest-to-use form of feedback isn't really the best way to get your complaint heard by the higher-ups.
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Most WiFi card vendors started to prohibit this about 10 years ago due to the increased use of MAC address spoofing to try to break into networks. The laptop I bought in 2007 was the last one I owned which could do it. IIRC, one of the methods of cracking WPA used it to imitate a connected client and cause the access point to quickly generate a lot of (encrypted) response data which could be analyzed to guess the password.
Of course on my newer laptops any attempt to change the MAC address just fails. It doesn't bluescreen.
It's even worse when you learn who actually makes the laptops. The dirty little secret of the laptop industry is that almost no name brand actually makes their laptops. They're almost all made by ODMs - original design manufacturers. They're like OEMs except they also design the product. All the brand name does is give the ODM the specs of what they want, approve the final design, and slap their label on it. The Macbooks for example are made by Quanta. Quanta also happens to make most of HP's and Dell's laptops.
I ordered from Rainbow Symphony on Amazon precisely for this reason. I knew they sold legit eclipse glasses, and I noticed that their Amazon listing said "sold by Rainbow Symphony." It was not Prime and did not say "fulfilled by Amazon.". So I placed the order on Amazon, and a couple weeks later I got a package shipped direct from Rainbow Symphony with the eclipse glasses, completely bypassing Amazon's inventory.
Of course I also ordered them a year ago...
Baader has several different films. Their silver/gold film is certified safe for visual observation under the ISO standard; their photo film is not. It lets through a little more UV than the ISO limit. It's designed for use on cameras, where the glass in the lens will block enough of the UV to make it ISO-compliant. But if you use it to view the sun directly, you're going to be slightly over the ISO limit.
While I'm sure AgenaAstro is fine, I wouldn't put it past some fly-by-night shop making glasses out of the photo filter film (because he was unable to purchase the visual filter film). So Amazon is justified in their caution. Where they're screwing up is in bringing up this issue so close to the eclipse, and not reviewing the documentation AgenaAstro sent them in a timely manner.
The laptops are a way to bypass the long testing and approval process which keeps ancient computers in aerospace. Airplanes have the same problem, often using technology a decade or older because that's the computer which the plane was certified with. Upgrading the computers involves re-certifying the plane, which is horribly expensive unless you're re-certifying it anyway (e.g. new model of the plane).
With a laptop, you can grab one off the shelf and just launch it to see if it works in space - that currently costs about $4000 per pound ($9k per kg) which is cheaper than radiation hardening and testing it. In the early days of the Space Shuttle, the most powerful computer aboard was a HP 41CX calculator.
Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).
CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.
If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.
The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.
SCO was a version of AT&T System V Unix. So it really had nothing to do with Linux. Linux (and Minix) was a Unix-like OS written from the ground up. The entire SCO lawsuit was a fishing expedition to try to extract money from the open source project which was eroding their market share.
System V goes back to the 1980s. Other versions of Unix go back to the 1970s. I'm sure there's still install media and binaries for it floating around out there. The hard part would be finding hardware it can run on.
Instead of trying to teach these people a new way to think, reach these people via the way they already think. They're into the anti-vaxx stuff because:
Back before GPS navigation became ubiquitous, I read that men tend to navigate using road names, women tend to navigate using landmarks. So I started giving directions with both road names and landmarks. I got a lot of comments from people that they really liked my directions. There's no reason to limit ourselves to just one method of teaching people.
As someone who grew up in the 1970s, I can assure you the climatology talk which filtered out to the general public back then was about whether or not we'd enter another ice age.
The explanation given in your link (that the mass media was hyping global cooling, but climate scientists were publishing papers about global warming) doesn't really help. It just confirms the belief that the mass media will hype whatever they want rather than report accurately.
The problem is the phishers only have to succeed once. I've been using email since 1987. In that time I've identified and deleted hundreds if not thousands of phishing emails. But I fell for one - it was a phishing email claiming to be from eBay about a problem with my recent winning bid. It just so happened that I had won a bid earlier in the day. So I clicked on it and logged into my eBay account.
I realized what I'd done within 30 seconds. Logged out, logged into eBay in another browser, and immediately changed my password. But it made me realize that even if you're 99.9% successful at avoiding phishing emails, that still means you'll slip up every now and then.
I understand now why those phishing emails claiming that there's a problem with your FedEx package aren't as stupid as I always thought ("How dumb are these guys - I'm not even expecting a package via FedEx"). They're just spamming it to tens of millions of people. A few hundred thousand of them are expecting a FedEx package, and the phishers are gambling that a few hundred or a few thousand of them will click-through on the phishing email. It's a one-shot variant of the perfect prediction scam, leveraging the huge scalability of spamming to eliminate the multiple iterations normally needed to run the con. If it's "obvious" the email is a phishing email, it just means you fell into the 99% or so of people who by random chance didn't fall within the parameters to successfully pull off the con.
The problem with spatially planning a city is that the plan for a small city is different from the plan for a big city, but it's impossible to predict if a small city will become a big city. So short of reclaiming areas via eminent domain and re-purposing them (wasteful since you're demolishing established structures), you're left with an either/or choice. Either spatially plan for the size city you have today and get burned if the city becomes significantly larger in the future. Or spatially plan for future city growth, and get burned if the city doesn't increase in size or even shrinks.
Public transportation systems can also have the same problem of city not growing as expected (subways), although they can be slightly more flexible (buses). Taxis are even more flexible, since the number of taxis in service can be scaled up or down more quickly than buses. And Uber/Lyft vehicles are even more flexible yet since they're otherwise used as personal vehicles.
In other words, this isn't a problem with just One Correct Solution. It's a problem with multiple solutions - the more efficient solutions quickly drift out of their optimal range if city growth doesn't follow projections, the less efficient solutions are more flexible and can adapt more quickly to deviations in city growth from expectations.
Honestly, I think rich people just throw their money at it to keep it tied up in court for as long as they can. Malibu has the exact same problem - the beach is public, but the houses in front of it block access. The few public access gates are frequently locked (illegally) or vandalized by property owners to prevent the public from accessing the beach.
The basic idea is that you can't own the beach. You can own the land adjacent to it, but the beach (in California, up to the point where it's submerged during high tide) belongs to the public. Rich people have tried to get around this by buying up all the land in front of a beach to make it difficult or annoyingly distant for the public to access it. But the CCC responds by requiring a public accessway be installed if that happens.
There isn't really a need need. My city just went through something similar (private developer locking gate to stairway through their development to a public beach). If the California Coastal Commission tells you to allow access and you refuse, they can fine you up to $11,250 per day (about $4.1 million per year). Granted a billionaire could stave off bankruptcy while paying the fine for hundreds of years. But if it came to that, I imagine legislation would swiftly be passed increasing the maximum daily fine or raising it geometrically the longer you don't comply.
You've actually got it backwards. The null hypothesis in this case is "there is no gender-based discrimination." Since you cannot prove a negative (e.g. "reindeer can't fly"), it becomes the null hypothesis, and the burden of proof falls upon those trying to disprove it.
That is, the base assumption is that differences in job preference are caused by biology or other non-discriminatory factors, leading to gender disparity in the workplace. The burden of proof is upon those advocating that gender disparity is caused by discrimination to prove a causal link between discrimination and gender disparity. The burden of proof isn't on those advocating the null hypothesis because you can't prove it (short of disproving all possible alternative hypotheses).
Those advocating the null hypothesis can critique studies advocating the discrimination hypothesis, e.g. suggesting that biology could account for the difference we see, without actually having to prove it. The burden of proof then falls again those advocating the discrimination hypothesis to come up with experiments or studies which separate out the effects of biology from the effects of discrimination (this is what they're talking about when you read that a study "controlled for" factors like age or income).
If those advocating the discrimination explanation are unable to come up with a way to separate out biological effects, then that's an obstacle to proving the discrimination hypothesis. Until they are able to overcome that obstacle, the assumption is that the null hypothesis is correct.
Your post actually supports Damore by demonstrating the flawed reasoning of those criticizing him. You have made a non-falsifiable hypothesis the null hypothesis. Even if a company kept video recordings of everything that happened every minute of every workday, demonstrating that no gender-based discrimination happened, you can still argue "but they plotted it after work hours when they met at a bar." It's a non-falsifiable hypothesis. This means it cannot be the null hypothesis. The base assumption has to be that there is no gender-base discrimination, and you have to gather evidence showing this hypothesis is false.
That doesn't sound right. $120 million over 30,000 students is $4000 per student-year. If there are 200 school days in a year, that's $20 per student per day, or $10 per student per trip. A savings of $5 million only reduces this to $9.58 per student per trip.
A monthly MBTA bus pass is $55/mo, which at 21 school days per month would work out to $1.31 per student per trip. So the school buses are 7.6x more expensive.
A little of the price difference I can understand due to school buses running fewer trips (a school bus usually services 2-4 schools on staggered schedules, with a few hours lull around lunch). So the purchase cost of the bus is amortized over fewer trips. Utilization of public buses is also higher. 392,413 riders on a weekday over 7200 round trips = 54.5 riders per circuit, which is close to or over 100% capacity per circuit (obviously not everyone is on the bus at the same time, but we're looking at fares per circuit). School buses OTOH run at about 51% capacity per circuit.
But if you figure these are both 2:1 factors, then that would bring up the MBTA bus cost to just $5.24 per student per trip. Still about half that of operating the school buses. Maybe that's the solution. In other countries I've visited, schoolkids ride the public bus and subway.
FWIW, in grad school I worked with sonars which emitted in the 12-35 kHz frequency range. I wasn't exposed to them regularly, but I did get blasted a few dozen times (very annoying when it's in the audible range). Because they're designed to operate underwater, the transducers pack a lot more energy than speakers designed for the air (water being 800x denser than air).
By the time I was 35 my hearing above 11 kHz was pretty much gone. On those hearing tests, I rated among 60- and 70-year olds. And no I didn't listen to loud music as a kid. I actually hated rock concerts because of how loud they were, and only went to one in my life (part of a school rally). The loss seems to have stabilized. I'm 48 now and I'm still able to hear 11 kHz, but not above.
I didn't notice it happening, and it happened pretty rapidly (within a few years). Because of the relatively few incidents of exposure and short durations (single pings - this was in the days before CHIRP sonars), I've wondered if the cause wasn't the sonars, but rather some electronic device. Say, a component in a computer I used all the time, constantly exposing me to high frequency noise just outside my hearing range for hours every day. I do suffer tinnitus, though oddly it doesn't bother me as it's in the frequencies I've lost so doesn't interfere with hearing "real" sounds.
Everyone focuses on this side of capital gains taxes, never the flip side. I think the flip side is the more important one.
If you're in a lower tax bracket, you still pay 20% capital gains tax. This has the effect of discouraging middle- and low-income people from investing in stocks. And since stocks on average have a much higher rate of return than interest in a bank savings account, you steer low- and middle-income people away from the best way to accumulate wealth short of starting a company.
In the U.S., the long-term capital gains tax is 15%. After accounting for deductions and credits, the $100k-$200k income bracket pays a net 12.7% in income taxes (column T). The $200k-$500k income bracket pays a net 19.5%. So 15% is somewhere around $200k. The flat 15% capital gains tax rate discourages people making less than $200k from investing in stocks.
We need to get rid of the flat capital gains tax rate. If you still want to encourage investment in stocks (the reason it exists), change the capital gains tax rate to your income tax bracket minus 10%. That way all income classes receive that encouragement, not just higher incomes.
Ego drives it. About 95% of people believe they're smarter than the average of their peers. So they tend to be dismissive of the collective wisdom built up from the company's past experiences. When they implement a new change which is the same as an old change, they think "this time it'll be different because I'm in charge."
The best (actually only) solution I've been able to find is to compartmentalize the damage. Instead of implementing a change company-wide or product-wide, implement it in a small section first. Let them try out the change for a few months, and then having to deal with the problems it causes is usually enough to overcome their ego. Then they can objectively re-evaluate whether the change really was a good idea before you implement it company-wide or product-wide.
This works well for changes which affect events that occur with moderate frequency (happens often in the few months trial). Unfortunately it doesn't work for changes which increase the likelihood of black swan events, like cutting IT and increasing your chances of being hacked.
The proper way to test this type of thing is to give the new tool to half your employees. Then compare their productivity increase (if any) vs. the half who didn't get the tool. This eliminates other external factors, like profits being up becomes the economy is recovering.
You also have to be wary of the Hawthorne effect - where worker productivity increases simply because they think you're doing something to help them, even if you secretly haven't really changed anything. So a better way to test is to give half your employees one product, half a different product, and see which product does better. e.g. At the same time half your employees get Surface Pros, the other half get new upgraded laptops.
The Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book were introduced in October 2015. Surface Pro 3 in June 2014.
Consumer Reports does their survey towards the beginning of their year. So "by the second year of ownership" means mostly Surface Pro 1 and 2 units. "1-2 year failure rate" means mostly Surface Pro 3 and 4 units.
Customer satisfaction surveys (usually the J.D. Power survey) tend to be skewed by:
It's also worth noting that Consumer Reports cited "start-up and freezing problems" as reasons for pulling their recommendation. Unless there's a hardware flaw (unlikely since the components are all standardized and work fine in millions of other computers), that points to problems with Microsoft's drivers. And wasn't addressed in Microsoft's reply.
This isn't limited to companies. It affects the entire country. The one poll which correctly predicted the 2016 election noticed that Trump supporters were less likely to reveal to pollsters that they were Trump supporters. And when they took steps to compensate for it in their poll weighting, lo and behold they predicted Trump would win the election.
The vitriol and violence in the media and by protesters created a culture of shaming Trump supporters, who promptly went turtle to protect themselves. Consequently they ended up undercounted in all the polls, but showed up in the election.
We need to take a lesson from science. When the theory of continental drift was first proposed, geologists initially scoffed at it and dismissed its proponents. But they never ridiculed them, never excluded them from publishing papers. And as more evidence was gathered, the community gradually came around to accept it as correct. Democracy gets it strength from the diversity of viewpoints within its population. This allows us to think up, consider, and try all sorts of different ideas which would never even be suggested in other forms of government. "Shaming" people with unpopular views is detrimental to a functional democracy.
Wouldn't it have been prudent to do your development work on a server outside the country? And use a VPN (with a password committed only to memory) to connect to the server, and do your coding work via remote desktop, rather than do the development locally? I mean it's not like the binary needs to be compiled inside the country where it's going to be used.
The people who didn't read it and assumed it said things it didn't made the toxic work environment - by spreading their assumptions and making it appear as if there was a hostile employee among them, when there wasn't. These people did the equivalent of yellowing "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there wasn't any fire, then blamed him for starting a fire when there was no fire.
I seem to recall the EU mandated that all phones had to use microUSB for their charging ports. Last I checked, iPhones still do not. That regulation seems to have worked really well. (Don't get me wrong - I like that the regulation unified charging ports on Android. I just don't see regulation as being the panacea you think it is.)
There's a rule of thumb about voter feedback to Congresscritters. A hand-written letter is worth about 10 phone calls. A phone call is worth about 10 faxes. And a fax is worth about 10 emails.
The idea is that the more effort you had to put into the feedback, the more you must care about the issue. If your level of concern is so low that you can only be bothered to type in your name and email address on a website form letter and click "send", then the issue must not be very important to you. OTOH if you take the type to write a letter by hand and physically mail it to your representative, the issue must be very important to you, and they'll treat it as such.
Same goes here. If your complaint with the airline can only get you to expend enough effort to shoot off a text, then your level of outrage must be very low. They're not going to treat it very seriously. If it gets you to write a nasty (non-form) email, your level of outrage must be higher and they'll take you a bit more seriously. If you're outraged enough to call them and suffer the wait time on hold, then they'll take you even more seriously. And if you spent the time to write a hand-written letter and paid for a stamp to mail it to them, you must really be angry with them, and they'll take your letter very seriously.
So championing the easiest-to-use form of feedback isn't really the best way to get your complaint heard by the higher-ups.