The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies. Instead of passing Net Neutrality, which only attempts to address one of the symptoms of these monopolies, why not just solve the problem altogether? Pass legislation prohibiting local governments from granting monopolies. Require at least two cable and two phone companies in every local jurisdiction. Then if one of them tries something stupid like throttle Netflix as a ploy to extort Netflix into paying them, their customers will simply cancel and switch service to the competitor ISP.
When Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, one of the survivors had been camping near the mountain, saw the eruption, and got into his car. He reported he was flooring it at 100 mph down the road ahead of the pyroclastic flow, and passed another car doing 75 mph. He survived. The couple in the 75 mph car died.
So if your standard is saving a single life, then artificially limiting the top speed can cost lives too.
That may work for promoting diversity at a single company. But it does nothing to promote diversity in the industry. If 25% of the people working in software are women, and Google hires 50% women, it doesn't change the fact that 25% of the people working in software are women. All it does is force the ratio to be skewed more towards men in the non-Google companies. The overall percentage for the industry remains 25% women.
If you believe in diversity, it has to be promoted on the supply side. That means encouraging more women to pick the software industry as a career. Forcing companies to hire some arbitrary diversity percentage (demand side) accomplishes nothing, other than generating a lot of animosity and possibly skewing pay to favor the employee group over-represented in your diversity mandate relative to the industry.
Because Netflix is a home-viewing platform, critics like Spielberg say that it's better-suited for the Emmys, which celebrate TV, a medium inherent to home-viewing.
2017 sales of the same movies on disc and digital format were $20.5 billion for the U.S., $47.8 billion worldwide. Compounding this is the fact that disc and digital movies are cheaper per viewer. So each dollar spent on disc and digital formats represents more viewers than a dollar spent at the theater.
People view theatrical release movies predominantly in the home, not in theaters. It's been this way since the 1980s when movie rentals on videotape became a thing. If you honestly make "viewed in theaters" vs "viewed at home" the distinguishing factor, then no film (except those intentionally withheld from disc and digital distribution) qualifies for the Oscars.
Encrypted = paid. One of the attractions of Google Photos is that they give you free unlimited storage for photos up to 2048x2048 (and videos up to 1080p and 15 minutes IIRC). But in order to qualify, their servers have to be able to confirm that it's actually a photo, which means it has to be unencrypted.
Also, unlike things like your SSN or drivers license, your photos cannot be used for indirect financial gain (identity theft). The most a stranger can do is look at them (you're still protected by copyright if someone uses them for commercial purposes without your permission). So unless you're a celebrity or in the habit of taking nude photos of yourself, you probably don't really care if other people see your photos. And so won't pay extra to store them in encrypted form to keep them secure. If you're that paranoid about people seeing you, you should be wearing a burka whenever you go outside.
It's not that simple. I've had to help a dozen or so people try to recover "irreplaceable" photos from a dead phone or hard drive. I've never had someone complain that their online photos were seen by unauthorized persons. And in fact, I suspect the people who lost their photos would've gladly accepted strangers viewing their photos if it meant they had them back. So on balance, it's a risk worth taking for most people, and I recommend people backup their important photos to the cloud. Google Photos is a good choice because they give you free unlimited storage of photos up to 2048x2048 resolution (it has an option to automatically downsize larger photos). (The other services I recommend are Amazon Prime - unlimited storage of photos of any size, and Office 365 - inclues 1 TB of cloud storage.)
Totally agree with you that unless encrypted, private documents like will or your master password list, or private porn you made with your SO do not belong on the cloud. But for regular photos documenting important moments in your and your children's lives, the risk of losing everything in a fire or robbery is greater than the risk of an unauthorized person viewing them online. So back them up to the cloud. It's the lesser of two evils.
Cities really should be required to approve construction of a certain number of new housing units each year, before their residents are allowed to qualify for HUD low income housing assistance. Otherwise you're just making the problem worse - decreasing supply by awarding housing to someone who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford a home in the city. Thereby squeezing everyone else into bidding on fewer housing units, driving their prices even higher. At a minimum, you need to construct as many new homes as you're awarding to low income people, just to maintain prices.
You're assuming the goal of a business is to maintain their pre-tax revenue and sales. It's not. It's to maximize their profit (profit = revenue - costs). So yes passing the tax on to customers will decrease demand (fewer unit sales). But from a profit perspective, it is usually preferable for the company to pass the tax on rather than simply eating it. The obvious example is if the seller currently only has a 2% profit margin, and you impose a 3% revenue tax on them. Obviously they're not going to eat the tax since that would mean they'll be losing money with each sale. The only way they can continue to sell and stay in business is by passing part or all of that tax on to consumers.
This is why corporate taxes are usually a percent of profit, rather than percent of revenue. A percent of profit becomes equivalent to a higher income tax on shareholders (profit is distributed to shareholders so adds to their income). A percent of revenue is equivalent to a sales tax, so falls upon customers.
Money can't be created by taxes (at least not directly). Money is only created from productive activities, like creating/selling a product or providing a service. In that respect, taxes are never free. Taxes simply shift productivity away from the people doing the productive activity, and gives it to the government. So taxation by itself can never increase productivity (which is what's needed if you want a 3% tax increase to be "free").
Taxes can offset their hit to the economy if the tax revenue is subsequently spent on equally or more productive activities. If it's spent on things that are even more productive (e.g. taxing rich people who would've wasted the money on gold toilet seats, and using it to build highways), then the combination of tax + spend can actually increase the productivity of the economy. But if the spending is less productive, then it does net harm to the economy. (e.g. Taxing people and giving it right back to them in the form of social services is wasteful, because it adds the overhead of tax collection and redistribution, instead of just leaving the money in the people's hands in the first place. There has to be a difference between the tax collection income profile vs social services recipient income profile which increases productivity for social services to be worth it.)
Toxic behavior in competitive activities is not a new development, nor is it exclusive to video gaming, as social media users can attest. But its persistence amid a rapidly rising medium -- both in terms of users and revenue -- spotlights the question of why undesirable or, in some cases, criminal interactions have been so difficult for the video-game industry or law enforcement to eliminate.
I don't see any numerical data in TFA substantiating this. Is "toxicity" in video games more prevalent than elsewhere in life? It seems a simple enough question, and the fact that TFA doesn't answer it suggests the author simply has an axe to grind against video games, and is using the logical fallacy of a single example to promote his point. Usually people end up making this logical fallacy when they begin from a pre-determined conclusion, and work backwards to find supporting data. Rather than the opposite (look at the data first, then arrive at a conclusion.)
It's unsubstantiated journalism like this which leads to stupid things like parents pulling their kids out of school after a school shooting elsewhere in the country. Statistically, your kids are more likely to be shot outside of school than at school. So you're increasing their odds of being shot by pulling them out of school.
This process is unstoppable when the added benefit of unequal cost/benefit distribution makes it expensive for the other players in the market to oppose such political "investment"
BS. This process is trivial to stop. People just need to read the EULA and understand exactly what it is they're giving up when the agree to use a service like Facebook. Nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to use Facebook. It's completely voluntary.
So fundamentally, this isn't a problem with companies or profit or a corrupt political process. At the very root of it all, the problem is people being lazy and not really thinking about what they're agreeing to give away in exchange for participation in a social media service. Equating it to corporate behavior or corrupt politics is tantamount to admitting that people are too dumb to do the right thing for themselves, and cannot be educated to behave more sensibly. Which basically means you disagree with the entire philosophy of democracy, where you trust the people to make the right decision.
Converting CO2 into a usable or sequestered state is not a new process. It requires a very large amount of energy, but is essentially 100 year old technology
It's hundreds of millions of years old technology. Let a tree grow, chop it down, bury it (and plant a new tree to replace it). Congrats, you've just sequestered carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.
The only reason to convert it into coal first would be to prevent bio-degradation. But there are probably other less energy-intensive ways to accomplish that (e.g. what happens naturally in a peat bog).
People seem to think at the individual level, not at the group level. I first ran across this in the 1990s playing Everquest. In response to complaints about griefers harassing regular players, they came up with an anti-harassment policy. You could be banned for targeting a player and harassing them. This had the opposite effect than intended. Griefers didn't target specific players. They tended to hang out in an area and try to ruin the day of anyone who came into the area. On the other hand, people who got fed up with the griefers and tried to drive them out of an area were targeting a specific player. And so the anti-harassment policy ended up protecting griefers, while getting anti-griefers banned.
For some reason people seem to judge the harm of bad behaviors in terms of the average harm done to an individual, rather than to the overall harm done to society. A spammer sends out a hundred million spam emails, and people say "what's the big deal? It only takes you 3 seconds to realize it's spam and delete it." But 3 seconds times 100 million is 9.5 years of cumulative wasted time and productivity. Likewise, people handling private customer data don't take it seriously, since each individual's data is probably only worth a few dollars. Nobody cares if they lose a few dollars, right? But multiply it by several hundred million people and you're doing serious economic damage if you take it without permission or let it get stolen by hackers.
Pens are probably not the best example. When I was working at a hotel, we accidentally ordered a 200-pack of the expensive high-end luxurious soft bath towels instead of the standard grade ones. The customers really liked them (we got numerous unsolicited comments about how nice they were), so we were mulling the possibility of switching to them permanently. The housekeeping staff didn't report any problems with them wearing out in the wash faster than the regular towels (industrial washing machines are not kind on textiles). Normally 200 towels would last about 1-2 years before they'd wear out and we'd have to order new ones. But the luxury ones lasted less than 6 months before we were down to a couple dozen.
There was no proof, but the obvious suspicion was that employees were simply taking them home (they were really nice) and either giving them out to friends and relatives or selling them. Overall they represented the loss of about $1500 (luxury towel cost minus 6 months of regular towel cost), and we decided not to switch because of the rampant theft. Since the hotel only had about 70 employees and the end-of-year bonus pool was a percent of the profit, basically each employee chipped in $20 of their annual bonus to buy towels for a few thieves.
The confusion is because there's two types of open source. The unrestricted kind, where the source is released and anyone can do anything they want with it (BSD, older GPL). And the kind that obligates you to comply with certain limitations or requirements if you wish to use it (mainly, contribute code you write using the open source code back to open source, e.g. newer GPL). The summary (I haven't read TFA) just lumps them all together as "open source" when the distinction actually matters here.
It is not a bug, it's a logical requirement. If you believe that information wants to be free, then you by definition support the unrestricted free kind of open source, which includes the right of users to freely pillage it in this manner. (Calling it "strip mining" is overboard though, because that implies the resources are removed - code doesn't disappear when it's copied). If you believe that free code requires some sort of restrictions on it to keep the restricted-open source ecosystem functioning, well then your rationale is not really much different from the people advocating proprietary pay software. You're just trading favors instead of money.
(And e.g. means "for example." You probably meant i.e., or "that is.")
That's all the more suspicious given that China officially banned VPNs last year. The concern: If China is allowing them to continue operating, it could be because they're sharing data on their users with the Chinese government.
Isn't that obvious? The Chinese government doesn't want its citizens using a VPN, because they'd probably pick one hosted outside China and thus pierce the Great Firewall. But it's more than happy to let people from other countries pipe their traffic through Chinese VPN servers, so they can figure out who's visiting where..
Remember, with most of the web switching from http to https, most of your traffic is already encrypted. So a VPN doesn't help in that regard. What a VPN does is obfuscate you as the source/destination of that traffic, by making it appear as if the traffic is coming from the VPN server instead of your computer (acting as a proxy). But the company running the VPN obviously knows who you are, and has to know which traffic is yours in order to function properly. If the VPN provider is logging that info or handing it over to the government, that defeats the purpose of using a VPN.
Humans have created a variety of languages, from Chinese with thousands of different characters (one for each word), to English with 26 characters which are combined to make different words, to binary with just 2 characters which are combined to make words. When researchers started playing around with compression algorithms, they got to wondering - what's the optimal number of characters in an alphabet for maximizing compression? That is, minimizing the size of the words, while also minimizing the space taken up by each character. With binary, you minimize the space needed to encode each character, but it comes at the cost of lengthening the size of each word. With Chinese you minimize the size of each word, but it comes at the cost of increasing the space needed to encode each character. How many letters in an alphabet results in the most compact language?
The answer turns out to be e. 2.718. An alphabet with e characters allows you to represent data the most efficiently and compactly. Obviously you can't have a non-integer number of characters, so the optimal number of characters for a compact language is 3.
Which is probably why DNA only codes 4 different molecules. Since a double helix with conjugate pairs can't be coded with 3 letters, 4 end up being the next step. Likely, DNA/RNA with more base pairs have developed naturally before (probably several times), but were eventually selected out after having to compete with 4-base pair DNA. So as interesting as this is, it probably isn't the first time it's happened like TFA states.
35mm film was what film SLR and point and shoot cameras used. From over a decade of scanning the stuff, I can tell you that it can hold about as much info as 4k video. You can get about 3000-4000 horizontal pixels of usable info out of a 36x24mm film frame. More if you used a low-ISO film (smaller grain), Less if you used a faster film (bigger grain, more noise).
I'm kinda surprised it wasn't shot in 70mm. That's what the bigger blockbuster movies used. But I guess Ridley Scott and Alien weren't household names back when the movie was being made. Some directors also deliberately went for a grainy look (shot with a faster film than necessary), which lowers the resolution.
Most of the night vision stuff relies on shining an IR beam to light up the scene. That is, it's basically an IR flashlight and camera. That's fine for security cameras, where you're always shooting the same area at a fixed distance. It doesn't work so well when the distance will vary or if you need to shoot at extreme distances. FLIR seems to be the only company making passive IR cameras.
I took a look at some of FLIR's offerings (for operating a boat at night). A passive IR camera with an 80x60 pixel sensor costs $500. Higher resolution systems cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. I agree with your caution against tinkering with your biology. But the equivalent electro-mechanical systems are incredibly expensive, creating a huge financial opportunity if they can make this safe.
That's why every other company making a folding screen has put it on the inside. The press is currently going gaga over Huawei's folding screen, but they tend to be extremely short-sighted and overly concerned with appearance. I'm curious to see where they'll stand after using it for a year, when the screen will be all scratched up because it's made of plastic, is always on the outside, and can't be protected by a screen protector because of the fold.
Certain products like aluminum have a huge up-front energy cost associated with their production. Recycling those makes sense, as the energy cost of recycling is a lot less than the energy cost of producing new aluminum.
Other stuff, I'm not sure why people are recycling. Paper is made from carbon plants pulled out of the air. Disposing of paper in landfills sequesters that carbon underground. OTOH, recycling paper reduces the need for new paper, discouraging people from planting new trees (to chop down for more paper), thus reducing the rate at which we're pulling carbon out of the air. So why do we insist on wasting extra energy recycling paper, when it's better for the environment to bury used paper and plant more trees to create new paper?
Elsevier are fighting a losing battle for their livelihood here - the world is going OA, and once it does Elsevier (and their ScienceDirect platform which gate-keeps academic publishing metrics) is going to collapse.
Open access has nothing to do with it. Elsevier began and established its business model in an age when publishing, distribution, cataloging, and searching research papers were relatively expensive. It provided that service and charged a reasonable fee for it. I'm reminded of when the Cold Fusion paper first made the rounds when I was in college - researchers were sending each other faxes of faxes of fax copies of the paper, to the point where it was nearly illegible, because they were too anxious to wait for the paper to make it through the regular journal publishing and distribution process.
The Internet and modern computer databases have driven the cost (both in dollars and time) of those things to nearly zero (and the copies are as pristine as the original, unlike faxes). That's what's squeezing Elsevier out. It could've been OA or another service offering the same service at a lower price. Both would've squeezed it the same. The fundamental driving force behind the change is the Internet, not OA.
The better way to do this, is to create a list of household consumables. Every couple weeks when you happen to be shopping on Amazon, you go down the list and buy any items you're running short of. No need to write down a new list, or remember to add an item to your list, or get a button to push (which your kid starts pushing over and over when he finds it and thinks it's a toy). If the list is smart, it'll auto-sort itself so recently-ordered items automatically get moved to the bottom of the list.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't make it easy to do this. You can create a list with them, but when you order an item it gets removed from your list. I've had to do it with a task list on my phone (since those don't get deleted after you check an item as completed). It's a list of a bunch of stuff I buy at regular intervals. I check an item off as completed when I buy it. Every couple weeks I go through the list of "completed tasks" and uncheck stuff I need to buy again. That way the list serves not just as a reminder of what I need to buy, but also a reminder of what I might need to add to the need to buy list.
Record snow falls in the mid west are a result of global warming.
Or how do you think the snow got there? Hu? It is winter!!! But the ocean is still warm, hence it creates clouds, hence they snow down.
Can't really be so hard to grasp simple principles.
You were fine up to clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back into space, so more clouds = global cooling. So you see, it's not as simple a line of reasoning as you think it is.
This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Stick with the emphasis on mean temperatures rising. That's pretty well established. Don't try to pass off cold weather events as evidence supporting global warming, because anyone with an iota of common sense will call out your BS. The way I figure it, global warming increases the average energy state of the global weather system, resulting in greater temperature extremes (hotter and colder). But it's impossible to say if any specific hot or cold temperature event is a result of global warming, or just natural weather fluctuations. The mean temperature OTOH is a combination of millions of temperature measurements. That statistically averages out the fluctuations, giving you a reliable measure of what the system is doing over time.
Here's the thing. A certain level of civil services requires a certain level of taxation. Doesn't matter if you're a liberal and that level is high, or if you're a conservative and that level is low. What matters is that there is a certainly level of services that you've decided is optimal, and enough taxes have to be collected to sustain that level.
If you believe your city is at the correct, optimal level of taxes and services, then all residents and businesses should be contributing equally to maintain that level. If you give a break to one business or one class of people, all other businesses and all other people have to pick up the slack and pay for the shortfall.
Or put another way, if you believe your city's current level of taxation is at the correct balance between attracting businesses and providing services, then it's hypocritical to give a company a break to build a factory in your city. If you think the additional jobs the company will bring are worth more than the tax breaks you're giving them, then you've basically admitted that your current level of taxation is too high. And you should decrease your taxes for everyone so that any company will be more likely to move to your city and bring jobs, not just this one big company.
The only action that is self-consistent is to tell Amazon, "We believe we have the correct level of taxation in our city. You can either take it or leave it." Compromising your tax rate to try to attract business is equivalent to admitting that your tax rate is wrong.
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The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies. Instead of passing Net Neutrality, which only attempts to address one of the symptoms of these monopolies, why not just solve the problem altogether? Pass legislation prohibiting local governments from granting monopolies. Require at least two cable and two phone companies in every local jurisdiction. Then if one of them tries something stupid like throttle Netflix as a ploy to extort Netflix into paying them, their customers will simply cancel and switch service to the competitor ISP.
When Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, one of the survivors had been camping near the mountain, saw the eruption, and got into his car. He reported he was flooring it at 100 mph down the road ahead of the pyroclastic flow, and passed another car doing 75 mph. He survived. The couple in the 75 mph car died.
So if your standard is saving a single life, then artificially limiting the top speed can cost lives too.
That may work for promoting diversity at a single company. But it does nothing to promote diversity in the industry. If 25% of the people working in software are women, and Google hires 50% women, it doesn't change the fact that 25% of the people working in software are women. All it does is force the ratio to be skewed more towards men in the non-Google companies. The overall percentage for the industry remains 25% women.
If you believe in diversity, it has to be promoted on the supply side. That means encouraging more women to pick the software industry as a career. Forcing companies to hire some arbitrary diversity percentage (demand side) accomplishes nothing, other than generating a lot of animosity and possibly skewing pay to favor the employee group over-represented in your diversity mandate relative to the industry.
Theater ticket sales in 2017 were $11.1 billion for the U.S. + Canada, $40.6 billion worldwide.
2017 sales of the same movies on disc and digital format were $20.5 billion for the U.S., $47.8 billion worldwide. Compounding this is the fact that disc and digital movies are cheaper per viewer. So each dollar spent on disc and digital formats represents more viewers than a dollar spent at the theater.
People view theatrical release movies predominantly in the home, not in theaters. It's been this way since the 1980s when movie rentals on videotape became a thing. If you honestly make "viewed in theaters" vs "viewed at home" the distinguishing factor, then no film (except those intentionally withheld from disc and digital distribution) qualifies for the Oscars.
Encrypted = paid. One of the attractions of Google Photos is that they give you free unlimited storage for photos up to 2048x2048 (and videos up to 1080p and 15 minutes IIRC). But in order to qualify, their servers have to be able to confirm that it's actually a photo, which means it has to be unencrypted.
Also, unlike things like your SSN or drivers license, your photos cannot be used for indirect financial gain (identity theft). The most a stranger can do is look at them (you're still protected by copyright if someone uses them for commercial purposes without your permission). So unless you're a celebrity or in the habit of taking nude photos of yourself, you probably don't really care if other people see your photos. And so won't pay extra to store them in encrypted form to keep them secure. If you're that paranoid about people seeing you, you should be wearing a burka whenever you go outside.
It's not that simple. I've had to help a dozen or so people try to recover "irreplaceable" photos from a dead phone or hard drive. I've never had someone complain that their online photos were seen by unauthorized persons. And in fact, I suspect the people who lost their photos would've gladly accepted strangers viewing their photos if it meant they had them back. So on balance, it's a risk worth taking for most people, and I recommend people backup their important photos to the cloud. Google Photos is a good choice because they give you free unlimited storage of photos up to 2048x2048 resolution (it has an option to automatically downsize larger photos). (The other services I recommend are Amazon Prime - unlimited storage of photos of any size, and Office 365 - inclues 1 TB of cloud storage.)
Totally agree with you that unless encrypted, private documents like will or your master password list, or private porn you made with your SO do not belong on the cloud. But for regular photos documenting important moments in your and your children's lives, the risk of losing everything in a fire or robbery is greater than the risk of an unauthorized person viewing them online. So back them up to the cloud. It's the lesser of two evils.
Cities really should be required to approve construction of a certain number of new housing units each year, before their residents are allowed to qualify for HUD low income housing assistance. Otherwise you're just making the problem worse - decreasing supply by awarding housing to someone who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford a home in the city. Thereby squeezing everyone else into bidding on fewer housing units, driving their prices even higher. At a minimum, you need to construct as many new homes as you're awarding to low income people, just to maintain prices.
You're assuming the goal of a business is to maintain their pre-tax revenue and sales. It's not. It's to maximize their profit (profit = revenue - costs). So yes passing the tax on to customers will decrease demand (fewer unit sales). But from a profit perspective, it is usually preferable for the company to pass the tax on rather than simply eating it. The obvious example is if the seller currently only has a 2% profit margin, and you impose a 3% revenue tax on them. Obviously they're not going to eat the tax since that would mean they'll be losing money with each sale. The only way they can continue to sell and stay in business is by passing part or all of that tax on to consumers.
This is why corporate taxes are usually a percent of profit, rather than percent of revenue. A percent of profit becomes equivalent to a higher income tax on shareholders (profit is distributed to shareholders so adds to their income). A percent of revenue is equivalent to a sales tax, so falls upon customers.
Money can't be created by taxes (at least not directly). Money is only created from productive activities, like creating/selling a product or providing a service. In that respect, taxes are never free. Taxes simply shift productivity away from the people doing the productive activity, and gives it to the government. So taxation by itself can never increase productivity (which is what's needed if you want a 3% tax increase to be "free").
Taxes can offset their hit to the economy if the tax revenue is subsequently spent on equally or more productive activities. If it's spent on things that are even more productive (e.g. taxing rich people who would've wasted the money on gold toilet seats, and using it to build highways), then the combination of tax + spend can actually increase the productivity of the economy. But if the spending is less productive, then it does net harm to the economy. (e.g. Taxing people and giving it right back to them in the form of social services is wasteful, because it adds the overhead of tax collection and redistribution, instead of just leaving the money in the people's hands in the first place. There has to be a difference between the tax collection income profile vs social services recipient income profile which increases productivity for social services to be worth it.)
I don't see any numerical data in TFA substantiating this. Is "toxicity" in video games more prevalent than elsewhere in life? It seems a simple enough question, and the fact that TFA doesn't answer it suggests the author simply has an axe to grind against video games, and is using the logical fallacy of a single example to promote his point. Usually people end up making this logical fallacy when they begin from a pre-determined conclusion, and work backwards to find supporting data. Rather than the opposite (look at the data first, then arrive at a conclusion.)
It's unsubstantiated journalism like this which leads to stupid things like parents pulling their kids out of school after a school shooting elsewhere in the country. Statistically, your kids are more likely to be shot outside of school than at school. So you're increasing their odds of being shot by pulling them out of school.
BS. This process is trivial to stop. People just need to read the EULA and understand exactly what it is they're giving up when the agree to use a service like Facebook. Nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to use Facebook. It's completely voluntary.
So fundamentally, this isn't a problem with companies or profit or a corrupt political process. At the very root of it all, the problem is people being lazy and not really thinking about what they're agreeing to give away in exchange for participation in a social media service. Equating it to corporate behavior or corrupt politics is tantamount to admitting that people are too dumb to do the right thing for themselves, and cannot be educated to behave more sensibly. Which basically means you disagree with the entire philosophy of democracy, where you trust the people to make the right decision.
It's hundreds of millions of years old technology. Let a tree grow, chop it down, bury it (and plant a new tree to replace it). Congrats, you've just sequestered carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.
The only reason to convert it into coal first would be to prevent bio-degradation. But there are probably other less energy-intensive ways to accomplish that (e.g. what happens naturally in a peat bog).
People seem to think at the individual level, not at the group level. I first ran across this in the 1990s playing Everquest. In response to complaints about griefers harassing regular players, they came up with an anti-harassment policy. You could be banned for targeting a player and harassing them. This had the opposite effect than intended. Griefers didn't target specific players. They tended to hang out in an area and try to ruin the day of anyone who came into the area. On the other hand, people who got fed up with the griefers and tried to drive them out of an area were targeting a specific player. And so the anti-harassment policy ended up protecting griefers, while getting anti-griefers banned.
For some reason people seem to judge the harm of bad behaviors in terms of the average harm done to an individual, rather than to the overall harm done to society. A spammer sends out a hundred million spam emails, and people say "what's the big deal? It only takes you 3 seconds to realize it's spam and delete it." But 3 seconds times 100 million is 9.5 years of cumulative wasted time and productivity. Likewise, people handling private customer data don't take it seriously, since each individual's data is probably only worth a few dollars. Nobody cares if they lose a few dollars, right? But multiply it by several hundred million people and you're doing serious economic damage if you take it without permission or let it get stolen by hackers.
Pens are probably not the best example. When I was working at a hotel, we accidentally ordered a 200-pack of the expensive high-end luxurious soft bath towels instead of the standard grade ones. The customers really liked them (we got numerous unsolicited comments about how nice they were), so we were mulling the possibility of switching to them permanently. The housekeeping staff didn't report any problems with them wearing out in the wash faster than the regular towels (industrial washing machines are not kind on textiles). Normally 200 towels would last about 1-2 years before they'd wear out and we'd have to order new ones. But the luxury ones lasted less than 6 months before we were down to a couple dozen.
There was no proof, but the obvious suspicion was that employees were simply taking them home (they were really nice) and either giving them out to friends and relatives or selling them. Overall they represented the loss of about $1500 (luxury towel cost minus 6 months of regular towel cost), and we decided not to switch because of the rampant theft. Since the hotel only had about 70 employees and the end-of-year bonus pool was a percent of the profit, basically each employee chipped in $20 of their annual bonus to buy towels for a few thieves.
The confusion is because there's two types of open source. The unrestricted kind, where the source is released and anyone can do anything they want with it (BSD, older GPL). And the kind that obligates you to comply with certain limitations or requirements if you wish to use it (mainly, contribute code you write using the open source code back to open source, e.g. newer GPL). The summary (I haven't read TFA) just lumps them all together as "open source" when the distinction actually matters here.
It is not a bug, it's a logical requirement. If you believe that information wants to be free, then you by definition support the unrestricted free kind of open source, which includes the right of users to freely pillage it in this manner. (Calling it "strip mining" is overboard though, because that implies the resources are removed - code doesn't disappear when it's copied). If you believe that free code requires some sort of restrictions on it to keep the restricted-open source ecosystem functioning, well then your rationale is not really much different from the people advocating proprietary pay software. You're just trading favors instead of money.
(And e.g. means "for example." You probably meant i.e., or "that is.")
Isn't that obvious? The Chinese government doesn't want its citizens using a VPN, because they'd probably pick one hosted outside China and thus pierce the Great Firewall. But it's more than happy to let people from other countries pipe their traffic through Chinese VPN servers, so they can figure out who's visiting where..
Remember, with most of the web switching from http to https, most of your traffic is already encrypted. So a VPN doesn't help in that regard. What a VPN does is obfuscate you as the source/destination of that traffic, by making it appear as if the traffic is coming from the VPN server instead of your computer (acting as a proxy). But the company running the VPN obviously knows who you are, and has to know which traffic is yours in order to function properly. If the VPN provider is logging that info or handing it over to the government, that defeats the purpose of using a VPN.
Humans have created a variety of languages, from Chinese with thousands of different characters (one for each word), to English with 26 characters which are combined to make different words, to binary with just 2 characters which are combined to make words. When researchers started playing around with compression algorithms, they got to wondering - what's the optimal number of characters in an alphabet for maximizing compression? That is, minimizing the size of the words, while also minimizing the space taken up by each character. With binary, you minimize the space needed to encode each character, but it comes at the cost of lengthening the size of each word. With Chinese you minimize the size of each word, but it comes at the cost of increasing the space needed to encode each character. How many letters in an alphabet results in the most compact language?
The answer turns out to be e. 2.718. An alphabet with e characters allows you to represent data the most efficiently and compactly. Obviously you can't have a non-integer number of characters, so the optimal number of characters for a compact language is 3.
Which is probably why DNA only codes 4 different molecules. Since a double helix with conjugate pairs can't be coded with 3 letters, 4 end up being the next step. Likely, DNA/RNA with more base pairs have developed naturally before (probably several times), but were eventually selected out after having to compete with 4-base pair DNA. So as interesting as this is, it probably isn't the first time it's happened like TFA states.
35mm film was what film SLR and point and shoot cameras used. From over a decade of scanning the stuff, I can tell you that it can hold about as much info as 4k video. You can get about 3000-4000 horizontal pixels of usable info out of a 36x24mm film frame. More if you used a low-ISO film (smaller grain), Less if you used a faster film (bigger grain, more noise).
I'm kinda surprised it wasn't shot in 70mm. That's what the bigger blockbuster movies used. But I guess Ridley Scott and Alien weren't household names back when the movie was being made. Some directors also deliberately went for a grainy look (shot with a faster film than necessary), which lowers the resolution.
Most of the night vision stuff relies on shining an IR beam to light up the scene. That is, it's basically an IR flashlight and camera. That's fine for security cameras, where you're always shooting the same area at a fixed distance. It doesn't work so well when the distance will vary or if you need to shoot at extreme distances. FLIR seems to be the only company making passive IR cameras.
I took a look at some of FLIR's offerings (for operating a boat at night). A passive IR camera with an 80x60 pixel sensor costs $500. Higher resolution systems cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. I agree with your caution against tinkering with your biology. But the equivalent electro-mechanical systems are incredibly expensive, creating a huge financial opportunity if they can make this safe.
Adding the phrase "on a folding phone screen" does not make the concept of heating cold-sensitive parts worthy of a patent.
That's why every other company making a folding screen has put it on the inside. The press is currently going gaga over Huawei's folding screen, but they tend to be extremely short-sighted and overly concerned with appearance. I'm curious to see where they'll stand after using it for a year, when the screen will be all scratched up because it's made of plastic, is always on the outside, and can't be protected by a screen protector because of the fold.
Certain products like aluminum have a huge up-front energy cost associated with their production. Recycling those makes sense, as the energy cost of recycling is a lot less than the energy cost of producing new aluminum.
Other stuff, I'm not sure why people are recycling. Paper is made from carbon plants pulled out of the air. Disposing of paper in landfills sequesters that carbon underground. OTOH, recycling paper reduces the need for new paper, discouraging people from planting new trees (to chop down for more paper), thus reducing the rate at which we're pulling carbon out of the air. So why do we insist on wasting extra energy recycling paper, when it's better for the environment to bury used paper and plant more trees to create new paper?
Open access has nothing to do with it. Elsevier began and established its business model in an age when publishing, distribution, cataloging, and searching research papers were relatively expensive. It provided that service and charged a reasonable fee for it. I'm reminded of when the Cold Fusion paper first made the rounds when I was in college - researchers were sending each other faxes of faxes of fax copies of the paper, to the point where it was nearly illegible, because they were too anxious to wait for the paper to make it through the regular journal publishing and distribution process.
The Internet and modern computer databases have driven the cost (both in dollars and time) of those things to nearly zero (and the copies are as pristine as the original, unlike faxes). That's what's squeezing Elsevier out. It could've been OA or another service offering the same service at a lower price. Both would've squeezed it the same. The fundamental driving force behind the change is the Internet, not OA.
The better way to do this, is to create a list of household consumables. Every couple weeks when you happen to be shopping on Amazon, you go down the list and buy any items you're running short of. No need to write down a new list, or remember to add an item to your list, or get a button to push (which your kid starts pushing over and over when he finds it and thinks it's a toy). If the list is smart, it'll auto-sort itself so recently-ordered items automatically get moved to the bottom of the list.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't make it easy to do this. You can create a list with them, but when you order an item it gets removed from your list. I've had to do it with a task list on my phone (since those don't get deleted after you check an item as completed). It's a list of a bunch of stuff I buy at regular intervals. I check an item off as completed when I buy it. Every couple weeks I go through the list of "completed tasks" and uncheck stuff I need to buy again. That way the list serves not just as a reminder of what I need to buy, but also a reminder of what I might need to add to the need to buy list.
You were fine up to clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back into space, so more clouds = global cooling. So you see, it's not as simple a line of reasoning as you think it is.
This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Stick with the emphasis on mean temperatures rising. That's pretty well established. Don't try to pass off cold weather events as evidence supporting global warming, because anyone with an iota of common sense will call out your BS. The way I figure it, global warming increases the average energy state of the global weather system, resulting in greater temperature extremes (hotter and colder). But it's impossible to say if any specific hot or cold temperature event is a result of global warming, or just natural weather fluctuations. The mean temperature OTOH is a combination of millions of temperature measurements. That statistically averages out the fluctuations, giving you a reliable measure of what the system is doing over time.
Here's the thing. A certain level of civil services requires a certain level of taxation. Doesn't matter if you're a liberal and that level is high, or if you're a conservative and that level is low. What matters is that there is a certainly level of services that you've decided is optimal, and enough taxes have to be collected to sustain that level.
If you believe your city is at the correct, optimal level of taxes and services, then all residents and businesses should be contributing equally to maintain that level. If you give a break to one business or one class of people, all other businesses and all other people have to pick up the slack and pay for the shortfall.
Or put another way, if you believe your city's current level of taxation is at the correct balance between attracting businesses and providing services, then it's hypocritical to give a company a break to build a factory in your city. If you think the additional jobs the company will bring are worth more than the tax breaks you're giving them, then you've basically admitted that your current level of taxation is too high. And you should decrease your taxes for everyone so that any company will be more likely to move to your city and bring jobs, not just this one big company.
The only action that is self-consistent is to tell Amazon, "We believe we have the correct level of taxation in our city. You can either take it or leave it." Compromising your tax rate to try to attract business is equivalent to admitting that your tax rate is wrong.