The push for renewables depends on there being just the right amount of global warming. There has to be enough to warrant abandoning fossil fuels. But if there's too much, then there's not enough time for us to wait for renewables to improve in scalability and cost and for battery technology to advance enough so it can help even out renewable production inconsistencies. The best solution in that case is for us to replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants ASAP.
So it's doubtful an investment firm predicting the Earth will warm so much that it's uninhabitable by human beings has a renewables agenda. Unless they're stupid and haven't yet realized that too much global warming eliminates renewables as a viable short-term solution.
The "majority" argument is hypocritical. Discrimination happens against individuals, not groups. When you discriminate, you are taking traits which tend to be true for a group, and assuming it applies to an individual who belongs to that group. You are pre-judging them based on the stereotype (hence, a prejudice), rather than judging them based on their individual traits. Whether that group is a minority or majority is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether or not you're assuming a group stereotype is true of an individual.
e.g. Blacks on average commit more crimes per capita than other races. That's factual. But if you use that to assume an individual black you've just met is a criminal, that's discrimination.
Likewise, white males on average have historically discriminated against other races. But if you use that to assume an individual white male is a bigot, that in itself is discrimination. You're guilty of the very offense you're accusing the white male of - you are a bigot.
It's not whisteblowing (he didn't claim illegal activity really)
Yes he did:
"We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better
environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I've seen it
done)."
He might have had a better chance if he didn't outright claim that women were inherently not cut out for those jobs and instead just stuck to complaining about diversity being too highly prioritized and that the culture was suppressing any criticism of that.
That is exactly what he did. The people (including a lot of journalists, sadly) saying he claimed women weren't capable of tech work simply haven't read what he wrote. They've been writing their responses based on what others said he wrote - others who also didn't read what he wrote. You know, the echo chamber he complained about?
In general, if you write a '10 page manifesto' about anything, you are probably going to come off as a nutjob and probably won't go well for you professionally.
On the contrary, this was one of the best written commentaries on the topic that I've read, and covered a lot of the logical flaws which have bothered me about political correctness over the years. It's missing a few others I've seen (assumption of a zero base state, assumption that the null hypothesis is true by ignoring contrary evidence, ad hominem through villainization, etc), which the mass media is now shoveling out in droves.
It was amusing/sad how much butt-covering he had to do to ward off ad hominems by people who will assume if you don't support their ideology, you must oppose it. e.g.
"I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that
we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of
those in the majority."
Without having to repeat things like that, it probably would've been a 7-8 page manifesto. But it was for naught - the PC crowd accused him of it anyway.
They're actually the ones on worse footing here. He was challenging their hypothesis - that men and women are mentally equivalent in terms of interests and thus the "correct" amount of men and women in tech jobs should be 50/50. He provided empirical evidence backing up his assertion that men and women are different, thus forming the basis for his moral and intellectual certainty. I've never seen any evidence supporting their hypothesis that men and women are equivalent, yet somehow they're morally and intellectually certain they're right?
That's actually the point of the "what's your biggest weakness?" and "describe your greatest failure and how you overcame it" job interview questions. Interview guides treat it as a way to demonstrate how you overcome setbacks. But the real point is to test your honesty. A dishonest applicant will claim they don't have a weakness, or that they've never made a mistake. (I just wish more people knew this so they could apply it to politicians.)
As the old saying goes, I've never learned anything from being right.
I prefer: Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
Do they not train the machine learning algorithms with color images?
Color is extremely subjective. Remember the dress color photo that went viral? Your brain basically takes an average of all the colors it sees, guesses what the color of the light is, and does an automatic white balance. It's really good at this, so a stop sign appears consistently red to the eye.*
Totally different for a machine. The auto white balance in cameras has gotten good, but it's still easy to fool in extreme lighting conditions. Especially if there are multiple color light sources, some pointed at the camera, some away. I carry a grey card so I can prop it up near the subject location and snap a picture. That way I have a calibrated color reference for subsequent photos I can use for a manual white balance. Unfortunately, an automatic car traversing an area for the first (and only) time doesn't have that luxury.
* (There's actually an experiment which demonstrates your brain's auto white balance. You take a patchwork quilt with a bunch of different color patches. Then in a darkened room, you take a black cloth with a hole cut in it and cover all but one color patch. Say it's a green patch. You then shine a light on it, but put color filters in front of the light until the light reflecting off the patch is objectively red (predominantly 650-700 nm). When you look at the one patch, it will appear red. But if you remove the black cloth and reveal all the other colored patches under the same filtered light, your brain now has enough information to do a white balance and suddenly the patch which looked red just a moment ago will look green. Because it is green relative to all the other colors.)
I don't think anyone denies that Qualcomm is a true innovator and contributor to technological progress. The dispute here is isn't really a patent dispute, it's an accounting dispute. Qualcomm is arguing that they should be paid twice for the use of their patents - once by the company making the chips incorporating Qualcomm technology, once by the company which buys those chips to install in their product. In essence, the question is does the first sale doctrine (which covers copyrighted and trademarked works) also extend to patents?
So I usually dislike Apple, but I'm on their side on this one. (Sort of. It's wroth pointing out that Apple tried something just as asinine, claiming companies licensing Apple's patents should pay a % of the entire value of the final product rather than just the component part that used Apple's technology. So if you put a $5 cellular GPS unit which used Apple's patent into a $100,000 truck, Apple felt they deserved 2% of $100,000 instead of 2% of $5.)
It'll sort itself out. If people find it annoying to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then they'll see a drop in overall revenue and will be forced to reintroduce their libraries to consolidated streaming services like Netflix. If people don't think it's too much hassle to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then this will become the new norm and Netflix will die out (well, probably not since they're working hard to become their own studio).
From an end viewer's perspective, this means if you would prefer Disney's library be available on Netflix, then you shouldn't subscribe to Disney's new service. That way you send them a message that you don't like the change. As for what to do in the interim, The Oatmeal had a relevant comic.
Disney is a bit of a unique case though. They're gambling that kids begging for Disney movies will be able to override the parents' rational decision not to subscribe to Disney's streaming service after they pull their library from Netflix. They're probably right.
Get these managers to reveal their blacklists. If the percentage of genders or races or ages of people in their blacklists deviates substantially from the percentage of genders, races, and ages of people working at Google, then "obviously" they must be discriminating on the basis of gender or race or age, and they need to be fired to "protect diversity in the workplace." Managers whose blacklist percentages deviate only slightly from that of the Google worker population need to be sent to diversity training and re-education courses.
The maximum speed at which your brain can process audio and convert it to information is fairly low. For myself, it's about 2x real-time. Any faster and I can't make out the words. 1.7x is a more comfortable limit. By contrast, your brain is much quicker at processing visual information. I can read about 5x faster than I can listen to someone talk. And I know lots of people can read even faster (my brain tries to insert inflection to give the text more context and slows me down, probably a result of me playing the piano so inserting "feeling" comes naturally).
You cannot "zoom out" of audio to get a big picture overview of what's being said. You can zoom out (literally) of images, and view a bunch of thumbnail images at once, quickly find the image you're looking for, and zoom in to the full size image to see more detail. Likewise you can skim text to figure out the content of each paragraph, and quickly skip ahead or behind to a paragraph with the info you're looking for. You can't do this with audio (and by extension, video whose information is conveyed via audio). The best you can do is fast-forward, then play a segment at normal (or 2x speed) so you can listen to the audio, guess if you haven't fast-forwarded enough or need to rewind, and repeat. That process is much slower than locating relevant information visually.
Related to the previous bullet, audio is one dimensional. That is fine when you want to listen to the whole thing. But it hampers searches. Text and images are two dimensional, allowing you to scan along an extra dimension if you wish to skip over a lot of stuff quickly. (Though it can become a detriment if you need to review everything.)
For these reasons audio and video are fine for entertainment, but they are vastly inferior to text and images as methods of information conveyance. The only times they become really useful for learning is when used as a third bandwidth channel to augment text and images. e.g. Professor writing text and drawing images on the chalkboard, while explaining things orally. Or when your vision is otherwise occupied. e.g. Listening to podcasts while driving.
A friend of mine with a business in the desert southwest knew about my engineering background, and asked me to review some high-efficiency air conditioning units that were manufactured locally. The city was considering installing them in the city buildings, so she figured they might be good for her business as well. She sent me scans of the brochures and specs.
The power consumption and cooling capacity didn't match up with any known air conditioner. Its power consumption was simply too low for it to be thermodynamically operating as an air conditioner (heat pump). It was a spot-on match however for a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler). Except these units cost 10x more than a swamp cooler (they were priced high for air conditioners too). Curious if there was something else I was missing, I went to the manufacturer's company website to scour it for more technical info. I didn't find anything, but the homepage had a short blurb about the company's founder.
Next I went to the city website to see if I could find anything about the selection process for these air conditioner units. That's when I learned that the city mayor had the exact same unusual last name as the company's founder. Some further researched turned up that they were brothers. Mystery solved. Company manufactures swamp coolers, prices them at 10x the normal cost of a swamp cooler and markets them as high-efficiency air conditioners. Brother who is mayor convinces the city council to buy them "to support local businesses."
If the company has more than 15 or 20 employees, then they fall under EEOC guidelines. As an independent contractor or an individual employee, you are free to blacklist people as you wish.
A manager representing a company with more than 15 or 20 employees however cannot blacklist people for qualities protected by the EEOC (sex, race, religion, age, etc).
It should be pointed out that the protected class definitions themselves are not discriminatory. Sex and race are protected classes, meaning both sexes and all races are protected, not just women and minorities. If his accusation that certain genders (presumably men) and races (presumably white/asian) were excluded from certain programs within Google, then Google would in fact be guilty of discrimination against those protected classes.
There are some who argue that only those classes with a history of being discriminated against (women, minorities, though for some reason asians don't count in their minds) should be protected classes. However, that is hypocritical - it uses the exact same reasoning used to justify prejudice and discrimination in the first place. You see, prejudice is pre-judging someone. Taking a general stereotype about a group (e.g. women can't code, blacks have lower IQ) which may in fact be statistically accurate, and assuming it applies to an individual, and thus not giving them consideration for the job. You are pre-judging that individual based on their race or gender, regardless of whether or not that stereotype may be true for that individual.
Well, when you deny protected class status to a member of a group who historically has discriminated, you are taking a general stereotype about that group (men tend to discriminate, whites tend to discriminate) which may in fact be statistically accurate, and assuming it applies to an individual, and thus not giving them consideration for protection. You are pre-judging that individual based on their maleness or whiteness, regardless of whether or not that stereotype may be true for that individual.
Gee, when a guy writes a anti-woman-programmer rant and it goes viral
This is exactly why stifling dissent and discussion is so dangerous. Obviously you never even read his "rant". Instead you've concocted a straw man based on what you think he was saying instead of what he actually said, and have judged him based on the straw man rather than what he actually said.
He is a self-identified liberal who completely supports women in programming and STEM. He was explaining why gender equality in programming may never be possible (at least not without giving women the unfair advantage of lowered standards). He never said they weren't good at programming. He said they weren't as interested in doing it as men were, and listed various biological reasons why this might be, backed up by references to scientific research supporting his assertions.
If we can silence and fire someone presenting scientific evidence just because it contradicts popular norms, then our society is in serious, serious trouble. I seem to recall something similar happening to Galileo when he claimed the Earth went around the Sun.
attempt to cajole them into a licensing deal, lest they be slapped with a lawsuit. Some of those efforts were successful: in August 2014, Adam Carolla paid about $500,000.
We really need a procedure to get these sorts of payments reversed if the patent is later found to be invalid. A large part of the reason the Blackberry died was because they settled for over $600 million with patent troll NTP right around the time when they badly needed the money to develop a new device (industry was transitioning to touchscreens). All but one of NTP's patents were later invalidated, but because RIM had entered a settlement they couldn't get the money back (even though it was effectively done under threat of a lawsuit under false pretenses).
An interesting question for discussion might be whether we agree or disagree with what the fired employee said. That is, do you think women are "neurotic" and show "a lower stress tolerance" (and that their careers suffer because women are "agreeable" rather than "assertive")
Abstract
In college and adult samples, women score higher then men on the Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits of Neuroticism and Agreeableness. The present study assessed the extent to which these gender differences held in a sample of 486 older adults, ranging in age from 65-98 (M = 75, SD = 6.5), using the NEO-Five Factor Inventory. Mean and Covariance Structure models testing gender differences at the level of latent traits revealed higher levels of Neuroticism (d =.52) and Agreeableness (d =.35) in older women than older men. The consistency of these findings with prior work in younger samples attests to the stability of gender differentiation on Neuroticism and Agreeableness across the lifespan. Gender differences on these traits should be considered in personality research among older, as well as middle age and younger adults.
I'm sorry if that shatters your worldview, but in this case reality has a distinctly anti-liberal bias.
As for agreeableness, I can't say if it helps or hurt their careers, but I don't think he ever claimed that. IIRC, he simply said one of the reasons their salaries were lower was because they were more agreeable, and more likely to accept an initial salary offer rather than negotiate for a higher salary.
Pan Am, Eastern, Midwest, Northwest, Braniff, Aloha, Frontier, and America West are examples of what happens to airlines who try to do what you suggest and keep their fares the same despite an industry-wide reduction in costs.
One of the first things you learn when you run a business is that you're almost powerless to keep prices high. If you do, a competitor with lower prices will swoop in and steal your customers. (Or in the case of Walmart, they'll do it anyway with prices so low you can't even hope to match them.)
That's the way business transactions work in a competitive environment. The seller has the power to lower prices but no power to raise them. The buyer has the power to raise prices but no power to lower them. Only insufficient supply or excess demand can raise prices, only over supply or insufficient demand can lower prices. The buyer and seller are just along for the ride.
Writes to flash memory perform much better when you have some empty space (about 10%-20%). Unlike a HDD, you cannot overwrite a 0 with a 1, or a 1 with a 0 in flash memory. It has to go 0 -> erased -> 1, or 1 -> erased -> 0. (If you're into electronics, it acts much like an EEPROM.) The erased -> 0/1 step is blazing fast. But the 0/1 -> erased step is really slow; about as slow as or slower than a HDD. Consequently, flash memory controllers try to erase unused cells ahead of time in the background (this was what TRIM was about in the early SSD days), so that they're ready and available for blazing-fast writes. Empty space on the drive represents a buffer of pre-erased space, protecting you from having to erase cells on the fly to write new data. The less of empty space you have, the more likely the controller will be forced to erase cells on the fly, slowing down write speed to a snail's pace.
So assuming this partition only takes 1-2 GB, having it sitting around unused and empty is a good thing. If you permanently fill that extra space with data, you'll be compromising the performance of your device. You're better off leaving it blank (either as free space, or as an unused partition). Temporarily filling it (to write a new OS) won't have much impact as long as a similar amount of space (the old OS) is deleted and erased immediately after.
Short term effectiveness has been shown. But I couldn't find any data about how effective they are over the long term, as people get used to them. Can anyone cite long term data?
Yeah, that's what I'd be worried about. That instead of teaching people to slow down on these roads, it teaches people to ignore things that look like obstacles in the road. I bet someone could wreak a lot of havoc in Philadelphia by dropping concrete colored triangular prisms all over the roads. Their drivers are now trained to ignore and drive over that shape, even if their car can't clear it.
TripTiks are now available online and downloadable to a mobile app. Which makes a lot more sense than printing it on a half-ream of paper. You can still print it at home if you really want.
A lot of the detail maps are still available if you tell them in advance where you're going. They don't stock every map in every branch anymore, and need some time to ship the appropriate maps to your branch. And their travel guide books are still an incredibly handy resource to have (lists interesting places to see, restaurants, hotels) if you know you'll mostly be hanging around one or a few areas. Kind of an offline version of Yelp or TripAdvisor. Alas the mobile version of the travel guides is a very poor port to a PDF or eBook (when I checked earlier this year). So you have to stick with the paper ones for now.
They charge for their DMV services, but it's pretty small (about $5-$15 added on to the regular DMV fees in my experience). Whether that beats having to wait 3 hours at the DMV depends on how much you make and how much you value your time (and how long the DMV waits are in your state - California sucks but it was near nonexistent in Massachusetts). In addition, I've actually found them more helpful and more knowledgeable than the average DMV staffer. When you ask a question, it seems like half the DMV staffers will tell you an outright wrong answer just to get rid of you. I have had to make multiple trips to the DMV (wasting even more hours of my time and days off) because of that. I'm beginning to wonder if one of their performance review metrics is how many customers per day they service, encouraging them to tell wrong info to make people with complex requests which will take more time go away.
The roadside assistance is actually the one thing I don't think is worth it anymore at AAA. Too many credit cards and insurance companies provide the same thing.
Then if you can't update to Android 6.0, root the phone (it's not like you have anything to lose with an older device). Titanium Backup will allow you to freeze / unfreeze an app at will. AFWall+ will let you allow/block each app's ability to use WiFi for LAN access, WiFi for Internet access, and cellular data for Internet access. There are other apps which will do the same, but I haven't used them so can't vouch for them.
Submitter is now learning how to disallow an app from doing this on Android. Some apps you *do* want to be able to turn on WiFi on its own (e.g. VoIP phone app if you don't want it burning your cellular data).
If you know you're technically incompetent and want someone to handhold you through your phone "ownership", then iOS is what you want. If you have the technical knowledge to tweak the phone and want the freedom to use your phone however you want, then Android is what you want. Just like some people like to buy a Toyota and take the car to the dealer at regular service intervals, while other people buy a Chevy and modify or tweak every single component and do all the maintenance themselves. Different strokes for different folks.
I think the stuff about replacing Li-ion in laptops and phones was fluff added by the reporter to try to make this sound more important than it really is. Rechargeable alkalines would compete against NiMH batteries which still dominate the AA and AAA rechargeable battery market.
NiMH batteries have a nominal voltage of about 1.2 V (1.35 V fully charged), versus 1.5 V for alkaline. NiMH drops to about 1.2 V when half-discharged, about the time alkalines are hitting 1.35 V. Most electronics give a low battery warning at around 1.15 to 1.2 V. I use NiMH AAs for my wireless mouse, but when I get a low battery warning and put it in the charger, the charger tells me it's at about 1.15-1.2 V and still has more than half the charge left. The NiMH lasts about 3 weeks, whereas an alkaline lasts about 2 months, even though the NiMH is rated at more Wh of capacity. My mouse is apparently designed for a 1.5 V battery.
There was a brief foray into NiZn rechargeable batteries to attempt to address this problem. NiZn's nominal voltage is 1.65 V. Not high enough to fry your toys, but high enough that your toys would use all of the battery's charge. Unfortunately it turned out to be very unstable, with a large number of cells dying after just a few charges. The discharge voltage curve is very steep towards the end, making it very easy to over-discharge them ruining them.
So unless a viable rechargable alkaline battery is developed (one that doesn't lose a huge chunk of its capacity with each charge), the only other solution is for electronics to be designed with the lower voltage of NiMH in mind. And nobody seems to be willing to do that. Well, maybe someone can build an ultra-thin voltage regulator which you can attach around your NiMH and which bumps its voltage up to 1.5 V.
But the article points out that 95% of the time music companies just chose YouTube's "monetize" option to claim the ad revenue rather than asking that a video be blocked
So just make it so that if your video is determined to have been unfairly monetized by someone else, that their monetization money for that same period of time is given to you as retribution. e.g. Warner Music monetizes Auralnauts' video for 48 hours before YouTube decides their claim is wrong, then all the money Warner Music gets from YouTube for 48 hours goes to Auralnauts instead. Yeah Warner makes a lot more money in that time than these guys would, but that means they could've afforded to hire someone to check carefully that this was an actual violation before filing the monetization claim.
Slashdot Mirror
The push for renewables depends on there being just the right amount of global warming. There has to be enough to warrant abandoning fossil fuels. But if there's too much, then there's not enough time for us to wait for renewables to improve in scalability and cost and for battery technology to advance enough so it can help even out renewable production inconsistencies. The best solution in that case is for us to replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants ASAP.
So it's doubtful an investment firm predicting the Earth will warm so much that it's uninhabitable by human beings has a renewables agenda. Unless they're stupid and haven't yet realized that too much global warming eliminates renewables as a viable short-term solution.
It's Apple. Form over function.
The "majority" argument is hypocritical. Discrimination happens against individuals, not groups. When you discriminate, you are taking traits which tend to be true for a group, and assuming it applies to an individual who belongs to that group. You are pre-judging them based on the stereotype (hence, a prejudice), rather than judging them based on their individual traits. Whether that group is a minority or majority is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether or not you're assuming a group stereotype is true of an individual.
e.g. Blacks on average commit more crimes per capita than other races. That's factual. But if you use that to assume an individual black you've just met is a criminal, that's discrimination.
Likewise, white males on average have historically discriminated against other races. But if you use that to assume an individual white male is a bigot, that in itself is discrimination. You're guilty of the very offense you're accusing the white male of - you are a bigot.
Yes he did:
"We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I've seen it done)."
That is exactly what he did. The people (including a lot of journalists, sadly) saying he claimed women weren't capable of tech work simply haven't read what he wrote. They've been writing their responses based on what others said he wrote - others who also didn't read what he wrote. You know, the echo chamber he complained about?
On the contrary, this was one of the best written commentaries on the topic that I've read, and covered a lot of the logical flaws which have bothered me about political correctness over the years. It's missing a few others I've seen (assumption of a zero base state, assumption that the null hypothesis is true by ignoring contrary evidence, ad hominem through villainization, etc), which the mass media is now shoveling out in droves.
It was amusing/sad how much butt-covering he had to do to ward off ad hominems by people who will assume if you don't support their ideology, you must oppose it. e.g.
"I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority."
Without having to repeat things like that, it probably would've been a 7-8 page manifesto. But it was for naught - the PC crowd accused him of it anyway.
They're actually the ones on worse footing here. He was challenging their hypothesis - that men and women are mentally equivalent in terms of interests and thus the "correct" amount of men and women in tech jobs should be 50/50. He provided empirical evidence backing up his assertion that men and women are different, thus forming the basis for his moral and intellectual certainty. I've never seen any evidence supporting their hypothesis that men and women are equivalent, yet somehow they're morally and intellectually certain they're right?
I prefer: Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
Color is extremely subjective. Remember the dress color photo that went viral? Your brain basically takes an average of all the colors it sees, guesses what the color of the light is, and does an automatic white balance. It's really good at this, so a stop sign appears consistently red to the eye.*
Totally different for a machine. The auto white balance in cameras has gotten good, but it's still easy to fool in extreme lighting conditions. Especially if there are multiple color light sources, some pointed at the camera, some away. I carry a grey card so I can prop it up near the subject location and snap a picture. That way I have a calibrated color reference for subsequent photos I can use for a manual white balance. Unfortunately, an automatic car traversing an area for the first (and only) time doesn't have that luxury.
* (There's actually an experiment which demonstrates your brain's auto white balance. You take a patchwork quilt with a bunch of different color patches. Then in a darkened room, you take a black cloth with a hole cut in it and cover all but one color patch. Say it's a green patch. You then shine a light on it, but put color filters in front of the light until the light reflecting off the patch is objectively red (predominantly 650-700 nm). When you look at the one patch, it will appear red. But if you remove the black cloth and reveal all the other colored patches under the same filtered light, your brain now has enough information to do a white balance and suddenly the patch which looked red just a moment ago will look green. Because it is green relative to all the other colors.)
I don't think anyone denies that Qualcomm is a true innovator and contributor to technological progress. The dispute here is isn't really a patent dispute, it's an accounting dispute. Qualcomm is arguing that they should be paid twice for the use of their patents - once by the company making the chips incorporating Qualcomm technology, once by the company which buys those chips to install in their product. In essence, the question is does the first sale doctrine (which covers copyrighted and trademarked works) also extend to patents?
So I usually dislike Apple, but I'm on their side on this one. (Sort of. It's wroth pointing out that Apple tried something just as asinine, claiming companies licensing Apple's patents should pay a % of the entire value of the final product rather than just the component part that used Apple's technology. So if you put a $5 cellular GPS unit which used Apple's patent into a $100,000 truck, Apple felt they deserved 2% of $100,000 instead of 2% of $5.)
It'll sort itself out. If people find it annoying to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then they'll see a drop in overall revenue and will be forced to reintroduce their libraries to consolidated streaming services like Netflix. If people don't think it's too much hassle to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then this will become the new norm and Netflix will die out (well, probably not since they're working hard to become their own studio).
From an end viewer's perspective, this means if you would prefer Disney's library be available on Netflix, then you shouldn't subscribe to Disney's new service. That way you send them a message that you don't like the change. As for what to do in the interim, The Oatmeal had a relevant comic.
Disney is a bit of a unique case though. They're gambling that kids begging for Disney movies will be able to override the parents' rational decision not to subscribe to Disney's streaming service after they pull their library from Netflix. They're probably right.
Get these managers to reveal their blacklists. If the percentage of genders or races or ages of people in their blacklists deviates substantially from the percentage of genders, races, and ages of people working at Google, then "obviously" they must be discriminating on the basis of gender or race or age, and they need to be fired to "protect diversity in the workplace." Managers whose blacklist percentages deviate only slightly from that of the Google worker population need to be sent to diversity training and re-education courses.
For these reasons audio and video are fine for entertainment, but they are vastly inferior to text and images as methods of information conveyance. The only times they become really useful for learning is when used as a third bandwidth channel to augment text and images. e.g. Professor writing text and drawing images on the chalkboard, while explaining things orally. Or when your vision is otherwise occupied. e.g. Listening to podcasts while driving.
A friend of mine with a business in the desert southwest knew about my engineering background, and asked me to review some high-efficiency air conditioning units that were manufactured locally. The city was considering installing them in the city buildings, so she figured they might be good for her business as well. She sent me scans of the brochures and specs.
The power consumption and cooling capacity didn't match up with any known air conditioner. Its power consumption was simply too low for it to be thermodynamically operating as an air conditioner (heat pump). It was a spot-on match however for a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler). Except these units cost 10x more than a swamp cooler (they were priced high for air conditioners too). Curious if there was something else I was missing, I went to the manufacturer's company website to scour it for more technical info. I didn't find anything, but the homepage had a short blurb about the company's founder.
Next I went to the city website to see if I could find anything about the selection process for these air conditioner units. That's when I learned that the city mayor had the exact same unusual last name as the company's founder. Some further researched turned up that they were brothers. Mystery solved. Company manufactures swamp coolers, prices them at 10x the normal cost of a swamp cooler and markets them as high-efficiency air conditioners. Brother who is mayor convinces the city council to buy them "to support local businesses."
If the company has more than 15 or 20 employees, then they fall under EEOC guidelines. As an independent contractor or an individual employee, you are free to blacklist people as you wish.
A manager representing a company with more than 15 or 20 employees however cannot blacklist people for qualities protected by the EEOC (sex, race, religion, age, etc).
It should be pointed out that the protected class definitions themselves are not discriminatory. Sex and race are protected classes, meaning both sexes and all races are protected, not just women and minorities. If his accusation that certain genders (presumably men) and races (presumably white/asian) were excluded from certain programs within Google, then Google would in fact be guilty of discrimination against those protected classes.
There are some who argue that only those classes with a history of being discriminated against (women, minorities, though for some reason asians don't count in their minds) should be protected classes. However, that is hypocritical - it uses the exact same reasoning used to justify prejudice and discrimination in the first place. You see, prejudice is pre-judging someone. Taking a general stereotype about a group (e.g. women can't code, blacks have lower IQ) which may in fact be statistically accurate, and assuming it applies to an individual, and thus not giving them consideration for the job. You are pre-judging that individual based on their race or gender, regardless of whether or not that stereotype may be true for that individual.
Well, when you deny protected class status to a member of a group who historically has discriminated, you are taking a general stereotype about that group (men tend to discriminate, whites tend to discriminate) which may in fact be statistically accurate, and assuming it applies to an individual, and thus not giving them consideration for protection. You are pre-judging that individual based on their maleness or whiteness, regardless of whether or not that stereotype may be true for that individual.
This is exactly why stifling dissent and discussion is so dangerous. Obviously you never even read his "rant". Instead you've concocted a straw man based on what you think he was saying instead of what he actually said, and have judged him based on the straw man rather than what he actually said.
He is a self-identified liberal who completely supports women in programming and STEM. He was explaining why gender equality in programming may never be possible (at least not without giving women the unfair advantage of lowered standards). He never said they weren't good at programming. He said they weren't as interested in doing it as men were, and listed various biological reasons why this might be, backed up by references to scientific research supporting his assertions.
If we can silence and fire someone presenting scientific evidence just because it contradicts popular norms, then our society is in serious, serious trouble. I seem to recall something similar happening to Galileo when he claimed the Earth went around the Sun.
We really need a procedure to get these sorts of payments reversed if the patent is later found to be invalid. A large part of the reason the Blackberry died was because they settled for over $600 million with patent troll NTP right around the time when they badly needed the money to develop a new device (industry was transitioning to touchscreens). All but one of NTP's patents were later invalidated, but because RIM had entered a settlement they couldn't get the money back (even though it was effectively done under threat of a lawsuit under false pretenses).
There's nothing to discuss. It's scientifically accepted fact.
I'm sorry if that shatters your worldview, but in this case reality has a distinctly anti-liberal bias.
As for agreeableness, I can't say if it helps or hurt their careers, but I don't think he ever claimed that. IIRC, he simply said one of the reasons their salaries were lower was because they were more agreeable, and more likely to accept an initial salary offer rather than negotiate for a higher salary.
Pan Am, Eastern, Midwest, Northwest, Braniff, Aloha, Frontier, and America West are examples of what happens to airlines who try to do what you suggest and keep their fares the same despite an industry-wide reduction in costs.
One of the first things you learn when you run a business is that you're almost powerless to keep prices high. If you do, a competitor with lower prices will swoop in and steal your customers. (Or in the case of Walmart, they'll do it anyway with prices so low you can't even hope to match them.)
That's the way business transactions work in a competitive environment. The seller has the power to lower prices but no power to raise them. The buyer has the power to raise prices but no power to lower them. Only insufficient supply or excess demand can raise prices, only over supply or insufficient demand can lower prices. The buyer and seller are just along for the ride.
Writes to flash memory perform much better when you have some empty space (about 10%-20%). Unlike a HDD, you cannot overwrite a 0 with a 1, or a 1 with a 0 in flash memory. It has to go 0 -> erased -> 1, or 1 -> erased -> 0. (If you're into electronics, it acts much like an EEPROM.) The erased -> 0/1 step is blazing fast. But the 0/1 -> erased step is really slow; about as slow as or slower than a HDD. Consequently, flash memory controllers try to erase unused cells ahead of time in the background (this was what TRIM was about in the early SSD days), so that they're ready and available for blazing-fast writes. Empty space on the drive represents a buffer of pre-erased space, protecting you from having to erase cells on the fly to write new data. The less of empty space you have, the more likely the controller will be forced to erase cells on the fly, slowing down write speed to a snail's pace.
So assuming this partition only takes 1-2 GB, having it sitting around unused and empty is a good thing. If you permanently fill that extra space with data, you'll be compromising the performance of your device. You're better off leaving it blank (either as free space, or as an unused partition). Temporarily filling it (to write a new OS) won't have much impact as long as a similar amount of space (the old OS) is deleted and erased immediately after.
Yeah, that's what I'd be worried about. That instead of teaching people to slow down on these roads, it teaches people to ignore things that look like obstacles in the road. I bet someone could wreak a lot of havoc in Philadelphia by dropping concrete colored triangular prisms all over the roads. Their drivers are now trained to ignore and drive over that shape, even if their car can't clear it.
TripTiks are now available online and downloadable to a mobile app. Which makes a lot more sense than printing it on a half-ream of paper. You can still print it at home if you really want.
A lot of the detail maps are still available if you tell them in advance where you're going. They don't stock every map in every branch anymore, and need some time to ship the appropriate maps to your branch. And their travel guide books are still an incredibly handy resource to have (lists interesting places to see, restaurants, hotels) if you know you'll mostly be hanging around one or a few areas. Kind of an offline version of Yelp or TripAdvisor. Alas the mobile version of the travel guides is a very poor port to a PDF or eBook (when I checked earlier this year). So you have to stick with the paper ones for now.
They charge for their DMV services, but it's pretty small (about $5-$15 added on to the regular DMV fees in my experience). Whether that beats having to wait 3 hours at the DMV depends on how much you make and how much you value your time (and how long the DMV waits are in your state - California sucks but it was near nonexistent in Massachusetts). In addition, I've actually found them more helpful and more knowledgeable than the average DMV staffer. When you ask a question, it seems like half the DMV staffers will tell you an outright wrong answer just to get rid of you. I have had to make multiple trips to the DMV (wasting even more hours of my time and days off) because of that. I'm beginning to wonder if one of their performance review metrics is how many customers per day they service, encouraging them to tell wrong info to make people with complex requests which will take more time go away.
The roadside assistance is actually the one thing I don't think is worth it anymore at AAA. Too many credit cards and insurance companies provide the same thing.
Then if you can't update to Android 6.0, root the phone (it's not like you have anything to lose with an older device). Titanium Backup will allow you to freeze / unfreeze an app at will. AFWall+ will let you allow/block each app's ability to use WiFi for LAN access, WiFi for Internet access, and cellular data for Internet access. There are other apps which will do the same, but I haven't used them so can't vouch for them.
Submitter is now learning how to disallow an app from doing this on Android. Some apps you *do* want to be able to turn on WiFi on its own (e.g. VoIP phone app if you don't want it burning your cellular data).
If you know you're technically incompetent and want someone to handhold you through your phone "ownership", then iOS is what you want. If you have the technical knowledge to tweak the phone and want the freedom to use your phone however you want, then Android is what you want. Just like some people like to buy a Toyota and take the car to the dealer at regular service intervals, while other people buy a Chevy and modify or tweak every single component and do all the maintenance themselves. Different strokes for different folks.
I think the stuff about replacing Li-ion in laptops and phones was fluff added by the reporter to try to make this sound more important than it really is. Rechargeable alkalines would compete against NiMH batteries which still dominate the AA and AAA rechargeable battery market.
NiMH batteries have a nominal voltage of about 1.2 V (1.35 V fully charged), versus 1.5 V for alkaline. NiMH drops to about 1.2 V when half-discharged, about the time alkalines are hitting 1.35 V. Most electronics give a low battery warning at around 1.15 to 1.2 V. I use NiMH AAs for my wireless mouse, but when I get a low battery warning and put it in the charger, the charger tells me it's at about 1.15-1.2 V and still has more than half the charge left. The NiMH lasts about 3 weeks, whereas an alkaline lasts about 2 months, even though the NiMH is rated at more Wh of capacity. My mouse is apparently designed for a 1.5 V battery.
There was a brief foray into NiZn rechargeable batteries to attempt to address this problem. NiZn's nominal voltage is 1.65 V. Not high enough to fry your toys, but high enough that your toys would use all of the battery's charge. Unfortunately it turned out to be very unstable, with a large number of cells dying after just a few charges. The discharge voltage curve is very steep towards the end, making it very easy to over-discharge them ruining them.
So unless a viable rechargable alkaline battery is developed (one that doesn't lose a huge chunk of its capacity with each charge), the only other solution is for electronics to be designed with the lower voltage of NiMH in mind. And nobody seems to be willing to do that. Well, maybe someone can build an ultra-thin voltage regulator which you can attach around your NiMH and which bumps its voltage up to 1.5 V.
So just make it so that if your video is determined to have been unfairly monetized by someone else, that their monetization money for that same period of time is given to you as retribution. e.g. Warner Music monetizes Auralnauts' video for 48 hours before YouTube decides their claim is wrong, then all the money Warner Music gets from YouTube for 48 hours goes to Auralnauts instead. Yeah Warner makes a lot more money in that time than these guys would, but that means they could've afforded to hire someone to check carefully that this was an actual violation before filing the monetization claim.