I'm skeptical that that would work. The slime layer on a fish doesn't just make them harder for predators to grip. It acts as a biological shield, helping block bacteria and parasites from reaching the skin. A long slide through a tube will strip away some or most of that layer, making the fish more likely to die.
That might not be a problem for salmon, which will die anyway after they finish their journey upstream and spawn. But eels are the opposite of salmon - they go to sea to spawn. The young live out their early lives in the ocean, then return to fresh water to live out their adult lives. Until they become old enough to spawn, return to the sea, lay their eggs, and (presumably) die. Removing part of their slime layer when they first enter fresh water will likely increase their mortality rate.
AT&T and Verizon internet have worked out regional monopolies.
AT&T and Verizon did not "work out" regional monopolies. They were granted monopolies by the local governments, and are prohibited from competing with each other by the terms of the Bell Telephone breakup which split the original AT&T into lots of smaller phone companies who provided service in different regions.
Choice is a farce in these areas, and so an arbitration agreement is forced upon any customer who "wants" internet service.
The correct recourse then is to complain to your local government for giving a monopoly to a provider with an arbitration clause. Your government chose AT&T (or Verizon). If that was not your desire, then your government is not complying to your wishes. And you need to speak up at town meetings or whatnot that arbitration clauses are unacceptable, or vote the bastards out. AT&T basically said "here are our terms", and your government gave it their stamp of approval when it chose them as the local monopoly provider.
The logic is sound. You are not required to obtain AT&T service - you can choose a different service. So anyone who chooses to accept their service and become a customer is not forced to either become a customer, nor forced to agree to arbitration. They choose to do so willingly (i.e. opposite of forced).
If there are two restaurants, one which servers only hamburgers, and one which serves only cheeseburgers, and you choose to go to the cheeseburger shop, you are not being forced to get cheese on your burger. Anyone who doesn't want cheese goes to the hamburger shop instead instead. Thus your logical syllogism that customers of the cheeseburger shop are "forced" to get cheese doesn't work. Anyone who doesn't want cheese simply chooses to go to a different shop - they aren't forced to get cheese. You chose of your own free will to go to the cheeseburger shop, so you have no grounds for complaining that they only sell cheeseburgers.
Where this runs into a brick wall is the areas where AT&T has been given a government-granted monopoly. In those cases, AT&T is the only choice, and the customer has no alternative if they don't like AT&T's terms. They are forced to agree to AT&T's terms if they want any service. But even then I'm not sure there's grounds for complaint. The monopoly is granted by the government - usually a city or county government. If the people don't like AT&T's terms, it isn't AT&T[s fault. It was/is their government's job to obey the will of the people and avoid giving monopolies to companies that have an arbitration clause. i.e. the fault lies with the government, not with AT&T. The state or federal government could pass laws requiring local governments to only grant monopolies to providers without an arbitration clause. But that's a local versus state or federal government issue, nothing to do with AT&T (or ISPs for that matter).
I have the technical skill and equipment and resources (domain, web hosting) to run my own email server. I actually did it for 3 years. Eventually I gave up and switched to a hosted service (first yahoo, then gmail).
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server. So I switched my email service to one run by a company who monitors it 24/7, notices outages within minutes instead of hours or days, and has expert staff who are more skilled at fixing it than I ever could be unless I quit my day job.
Unless you're an expert at diagnosing and fixing home solar installations and batteries, and can drop whatever you're doing at any time of the day (or night) to run home and fix it when the wife calls to say the house has no electricity, you don't want to be off the grid. Sometimes the first indication you'll have of a problem with your array will be when your battery dies because it hasn't been getting any power from the panels all day. Then you'll be stuck trying to fix it without the benefit of having electricity (to, say, search the net to try to help diagnose what the problem might be). Even if you've got a backup generator, it requires at least annual maintenance and the fuel has to be refreshed (gas goes bad after about 6-12 months, quicker if it's an ethanol blend and your storage container isn't completely airtight).
Things that you use intermittently like a car or a washing machine, it's OK to own because you can survive a short downtime without it if it should break. Things that need close to 100% uptime like electricity or email or phone service, you want it provided by a company with staff on hand 24/7 dedicated to providing it and fixing it when it breaks. Solar panels on your home supplement this reliable power source, not the other way around.
For service employers who interact with customers (e.g. fast food register operators), this basically means customers have to wait in longer lines. Having more employees working the registers means customers get faster service, but it also means you have more employees sitting idle when there aren't enough customers. Having fewer employees working the registers means customers have to wait longer, pushing some of those customers into time the employees would otherwise be sitting idle. Thus efficiency (in terms of reduced time employees spend idle) is increased.
For service employers who don't interact with customers (e.g. maids), it just means their hours were reduced. The office decides to have cleaning services come in every other day instead of every day. The floors are a bit dirtier, but it's considered preferable to the higher price of cleaning service. Thus efficiency is increased.
For production employees, they simply moved production out to someplace with a lower minimum wage. Thus efficiency is increased.
The Canadian Supreme Court, however, downplayed this objection and called Google's fears "theoretical." "This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods," wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.
So Canada agrees with the U.S. that Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription drugs to Americans should be de-indexed from Google worldwide.
Whether this is a free speech or an illegal trade is irrelevant and a straw man. The key issue is whether another country can apply their laws in your country. Maybe considering a case with Canada on the benefiting end of the "illegal" trade might give the judges some perspective.
Oil drilling started off on land, then it moved to shallow waters, then it moved to deep waters. The technology developed on the easiest sites then moved to the harder sites when there were not enough easy sites.
That's actually what has me wondering why this costs so damn much. Isn't the "technology" exactly the same as a floating oil rig, except instead of doing the considerably harder task of sending a pipe down to a fixed spot on the sea floor, they're just sticking a wind turbine on top of it? The R&D for this has already been done and paid for by the oil industry. Why is it costing so much to mount a wind turbine onto decades-old technology? Even the problem of sending power from the turbine to shore via a cable is analogous to the pipe for pumping oil back to shore.
Some of the first wind farms in the UK were on Scottish islands. Not only did they have plenty of wind
Just to address the other comment on your post, the seas off Scotland are one of if not the best place on earth for wind power. Globally, onshore wind power has a capacity factor (ratio of actual power produced to peak production capacity) of about 0.20 to 0.25. Offshore wind is usually around 0.30-0.35. Offshore wind in Scotland is way up around 0.60-0.75. The winds are both strong and consistent there.
It's not just about having offline maps. The GPS on a lot of older and lower-end phones is A-GPS (assisted GPS). The processor on the phone would take too long to do the initial position fix calculations. So it transmits the GPS satellite data to the cell tower, a hefty computer on the cell tower quickly does the calculations, and transmits the position back to the phone. Once the phone has the initial position, subsequent position updates are calculated on the phone. Because the calculations for updating the position are a lot simpler than calculating the initial position.
If the cell network goes down or is inaccessible, these devices lose their ability to use GPS unless they were already using it at the time the outage began.
You say you're a linux fan, but I don't buy it. You refer to this guy like he's a nutter, and then associate him with Linux. How is that something a Linux fan would do?
I'm a Linux fan (I learned on Unix systems at school, before I ever touched a DOS/Windows PC). And I'd agree Linux has a lot more nutters that Windows. Windows has a lot more dumb users - the type who will go along with something because everyone else is. But Linux has a greater share of what we call conspiracy theorists in other circles.
Personally, I think both GP and OP are both right. GP is right that companies who chose Windows did so without giving enough weight to its security issues (Unix was designed from the ground up for multiple users; Windows was designed assuming a single root user, with multi-user capability added off as an afterthought). Same with backups - not thinking that they're important because "we never need them", and thus not committing enough money and manpower into a decent backup regimen. OP is right that you can't place the blame entirely on the companies and individuals who chose Windows. These decisions aren't made in a vacuum - the choice of the rest of society matters because that influences compatibility, amount of available software (and its price), and the pool of programmers and admins you can hire from. Unfortunately a lot of the people who made the decision to go with Windows instead of Linux either didn't know enough about tech to be qualified to be making that decision, or are retired (or dead) now and complaining about their past choices doesn't help the present situation.
So we're saddled with an inferior OS which self-perpetuates via inertia and sunk costs, and nobody wants to take the lead on abandoning it because the people/companies who'll spearhead that effort will pay the highest cost. They're the ones who'll have to trudge through fresh deep snow, while those who follow after get the easier job of following in the trail they've made. Everyone wants to be a follower, not a leader.
I agree Trump says a lot of stupid things. But it's pretty obvious here that he means he thinks Amazon is using the Washington Post for its own purposes (i.e. feeding it stories), not that it owns the Washington Post. Here's the tweet in question from TFA:
The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!
I'm not quite sure how you get from that to Amazon owning the Washington Post. If there are multiple possible interpretations of a statement, the one that makes the most sense is likely the correct one, not the one which best reinforces your political biases by making the speaker appear the dumbest.
I've pretty much eliminated the Washington Post from the news sources I'll click through on Google News for this exact reason - they spin nearly every story in the most anti-Trump way they can think of, rather than giving an evenhanded presentation of the facts. (And no, I didn't vote for Trump.) I wouldn't call it fake news, more like news with a double serving of editorializing on the side. I don't need my news source telling me how I should think, thank you. I guess I'll have to add Tony Romm at Recode to the list.
The problem is that they abuse their dominant search engine to try take over other markets (in this particular case, shopping), which is arguably not the best shopping product, but still got ranked higher in the search results.
I was writing up a comment about how I've never seen a Google shopping link in my search results. Ad yes, but not a search result, and I've always had to access a separate page to use Froogle / Google Shopping. But when I checked to confirm when Google started the service (way back when it was Froogle), I ran across this gem:
Google prominently featured the service result in Google Search starting in January 2008 in Germany and the United Kingdom. It subsequently extended the practice to France in October 2010, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain in May 2011, the Czech Republic in February 2013 and Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Poland and Sweden in November 2013.
Objection withdrawn. Though now I'm curious why they didn't do it in the U.S.
I also learned that they switched to a pay-to-play model in 2012 (merchants have to pay Google if they want to show up in Google Shopping), which was right around the time I started noticing the "service" was sometimes missing the lowest priced merchant. So it's no longer a bona fide price comparison service. Unfortunately Pricegrabber is a shade of its former self (only lists what it thinks is the lowest price instead of letting you see all merchants' prices in a list). Anyone have a suggestion for a true price comparison site?
Honestly, I do not know understand why it is an issue to dislike someone because they are Muslim. It's not like disliking a person because they are brown, or black or whatever color.
Islam is a religion and an ideology. It is reasonable to not like a person based on what they choose to believe?
The distinction between what people are, and what they choose to believe is not the basis of Constitutional protections. The protections specifically listed in the Bill of Rights were made not based of whether the traits were objective or subjective, but based on which traits had historically been the target of unfair discrimination. Religious persecution has a rather ugly history behind it (and in fact was the reason a lot of the early colonists moved from Europe to the Americas), so religious freedom was enshrined in the Constitution. If there had been a long, sordid history of comic book geeks being beat up and killed, then liking comic books would've been specifically protected by the Constitution as well.
Islam is just one specific case. The general principle here is whether a society based on tolerance and coexistence is self-sustainable. Society is either inclusive or exclusive. Either we allow anyone and everyone to participate, or we exclude certain groups. The presumption here is that a society based on coexistence is in fact self-sustainable, we just have to figure out how to make it work. I'm not actually sure if it is self-sustainable, but I think it's a worthy enough goal that we should attempt it. If we start banning certain groups, then we become an exclusive society - just like the Nazis except we choose different groups to exclude. That may have worked centuries ago when most of the world was still unknown and unexplored so excluded groups could just pick up and move elsewhere, but we're running out of space now. It's inevitable that groups with incompatible subject philosophies are going to bump up against each other, so we're going to have to find some way to get along. As long as the vast majority of Muslims are willing to treat me with a live-and-let-live philosophy, I'm willing to reciprocate and treat them the same. And classify the occasional terrorist as outliers and criminals, rather than representative of their group overall.
Constitutional protections only apply to people on U.S. soil. That was the whole point of putting a prison in Guantanamo - it was Cuban soil, not U.S., and thus the prisoners wouldn't have U.S. Constitutional protection. (Though the SCotUS eventually decided the terms of the U.S. lease with Cuba gave it control as if it were U.S. soil).
Visa applicants, or people entering at U.S. border checkpoints for that matter, are not considered to be on U.S. soil yet, and thus do not enjoy Constitutional protection.
An increase in workload in one area cannot be made without a decrease in workload in another. Without the freeze, the government staff are tied up doing their regular job of interviewing, reviewing, and granting/denying visa applications (if they weren't busy with this stuff, then their job is unnecessary and they should be let go). Presumably the freeze was needed to pause the workload and free up the personnel, so the procedures and processes could be audited, revised, and new systems implemented.
What you say could be possible if new workers were hired to do the auditing, revising, and implementing. But since they'd be new, they'd have to interview current INS staff first to get a clear picture of how the current procedures are (or aren't) working and find potential gaps in security. So you'd still need to lessen the workload of the current staff - either by freezing immigration for a period of time, or delaying visa application reviews thus stretching out wait times. It's likely better to just skip the interviews and let the people who've been working with the system all this time work on revising it.
Trump's contention that the current system is full of holes and is letting dangerous people into the country would mean he would favor the freeze over the slowdown as the more security-conscientious choice. I disagree with his contention. But I agree the President has the legal authority to make temporary changes to immigration like this. Obama implemented a similar freeze (or ban, to use your terminology) on Iraqi refugee immigration for 6 months, although that ban was based on specific intel.
Mars' atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and has less than 1% the pressure of Earth's. Even if we were somehow able to add enough nitrogen and oxygen to Mars' atmosphere to give it Earth-like pressure, the CO2 already there would give it 15x more CO2 than the Earth.
Mars is going to be more inhospitable than Earth until we're technologically capable of terraforming on a planetary scale. And if we can do that, we can just fix Earth's atmosphere.
The $115 million settlement averages out to $1.43 for every person who was affected.
Class action lawyers get about 15% of the total settlement amount. So the actual breakdown is $17.25 million to the lawyers, $1.22 for each person affected.
but if one guy made a million buying on the dip that means somebody lost it
They didn't lose it. They willingly sold it for 10 cents.
If you buy something for $300+, then program a computer to sell it for 10 cents, and it does it, the problem isn't the computer. It's the fact that you programmed it to do something stupid. While it's nice that the exchange is reimbursing people for their losses, that's a bad thing in the long run. If stupid decisions don't come around to bite people in the butt, they fail to learn the lesson and will continue making stupid decisions.
On a related note, this is why a country's currency is better (more stable) than a cryptocurrency that isn't backed by anything. With the country's currency, because the country is basing its economy on it, you can estimate a semi-accurate range of values for the currency. You avoid programming sell orders outside that range because "that's obviously stupid." With a cryptocurrency whose value is entirely based on what other people think it's worth, you can't set a range. Because everyone could simultaneously up and decide it's another tulip bubble and suddenly it's worth nothing. Unlike a currency which is based on the productivity of a country, or even gold, the value of a cryptocurrency is based entirely on how much faith its users have in its value. That's why those people thought they were doing a smart thing programming a sell order at 10 cents on a $300 investment - so they could recoup something if it crashed.
Which gets us to the real reason why they're reimbursing customers for their losses. Because if those customers become discouraged, lose faith, and quit trading in that cryptocurrency, then its price will crash - for real this time.
There's not gonna be a trade war. Any foreign company trying to do business in the U.S. will just set up a U.S.-only subsidiary. The U.S. government can subpoena anything at the subsidiary, but won't be able to touch anything at the parent company.
U.S. companies OTOH will be at a competitive disadvantage due to this stupid policy. Because everyone will know that anything they own could potentially be raided by the U.S. government no matter where in the world it's stored. Consequently, U.S. companies will simply move overseas, setting themselves up in another country with sane laws, and turning their U.S. shell into a subsidiary which only does business in the U.S.
Your "trade war" is going to be over before it even begins because the only people wanting to fight for the U.S. government's side is going to be the U.S. government. All the "soldiers" for the U.S. are going to defect to other countries first chance they get.
There is a national security issue here, but not the one you're probably thinking of.
If the SCotUS decides this in favor of the U.S. government, this isn't going to end the way they think it will. The U.S. companies aren't going to roll over and hand over the information the U.S. government wants. They're going to expatriate and reincorporate in another country which doesn't have such overreaching search and seizure laws.
The stupid IRS policy of taxing all income earned abroad simply because you're a U.S. citizen already causes wealthy Americans to move abroad (with their money) and give up their U.S. citizenship. A bad decision here will start the same exodus among U.S.-based multinational corporations. That's the national security issue here - the nation's economic security is being put at risk due to the U.S. government trying to make its laws and authority apply outside of the U.S.
Agreed, but a lot of the choices in Puss in Boots ended up with game over - Puss being stuck in the book (the objective is to get him out of the book). The kids then had to go back to a previous decision tree and select a "different" choice (i.e. the other choice). I didn't watch them play it enough to see if there were multiple ways to win, but I did see several ways to lose.
Most modern trailers come with electronic brake controllers. When you hit the brakes, the trailer brakes also engage thus assuring that the car is always pulling the trailer, instead of the trailer pushing the car. The only trailers using the old surge brakes are boat trailers - the hydraulic actuator can withstand getting wet, unlike electronic controllers. Surge brakes only engage when the trailer begins pushing the car. So the trailer's braking cannot exceed the car's braking (the surge brake disengage the moment that happens), which is what's needed to dampen out the swaying.
Accelerating is preferable to hitting the brakes on a trailer with no brakes. But with a trailer with properly adjusted brakes, speeding up just feeds more energy into the trailer, making the swaying worse.
It was available two days ago. Kids found Puss in Boots on Wednesday and played around with it on the Roku.
It reminded me of Dragon's Lair but with a lot fewer decisions and a lot more time to make them. For all you young'uns, yeah we had this in the 1980s, contemporaneous with the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The video of the storyline with alternate decisions and endings were stored on a laserdisc (which unlike a videotape allowed random access). And inputs you made with a joystick and buttons at certain times determined your progress through the story and which video was played. (The approx 1 sec blackout while the LD player seeked to the correct video has been edited out of that YouTube video. So it as a lot more annoying to play than the video makes it seem. RAM was way too expensive to pre-cache multiple possibilities like we can today.)
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I'm skeptical that that would work. The slime layer on a fish doesn't just make them harder for predators to grip. It acts as a biological shield, helping block bacteria and parasites from reaching the skin. A long slide through a tube will strip away some or most of that layer, making the fish more likely to die.
That might not be a problem for salmon, which will die anyway after they finish their journey upstream and spawn. But eels are the opposite of salmon - they go to sea to spawn. The young live out their early lives in the ocean, then return to fresh water to live out their adult lives. Until they become old enough to spawn, return to the sea, lay their eggs, and (presumably) die. Removing part of their slime layer when they first enter fresh water will likely increase their mortality rate.
AT&T and Verizon did not "work out" regional monopolies. They were granted monopolies by the local governments, and are prohibited from competing with each other by the terms of the Bell Telephone breakup which split the original AT&T into lots of smaller phone companies who provided service in different regions.
The correct recourse then is to complain to your local government for giving a monopoly to a provider with an arbitration clause. Your government chose AT&T (or Verizon). If that was not your desire, then your government is not complying to your wishes. And you need to speak up at town meetings or whatnot that arbitration clauses are unacceptable, or vote the bastards out. AT&T basically said "here are our terms", and your government gave it their stamp of approval when it chose them as the local monopoly provider.
The logic is sound. You are not required to obtain AT&T service - you can choose a different service. So anyone who chooses to accept their service and become a customer is not forced to either become a customer, nor forced to agree to arbitration. They choose to do so willingly (i.e. opposite of forced).
If there are two restaurants, one which servers only hamburgers, and one which serves only cheeseburgers, and you choose to go to the cheeseburger shop, you are not being forced to get cheese on your burger. Anyone who doesn't want cheese goes to the hamburger shop instead instead. Thus your logical syllogism that customers of the cheeseburger shop are "forced" to get cheese doesn't work. Anyone who doesn't want cheese simply chooses to go to a different shop - they aren't forced to get cheese. You chose of your own free will to go to the cheeseburger shop, so you have no grounds for complaining that they only sell cheeseburgers.
Where this runs into a brick wall is the areas where AT&T has been given a government-granted monopoly. In those cases, AT&T is the only choice, and the customer has no alternative if they don't like AT&T's terms. They are forced to agree to AT&T's terms if they want any service. But even then I'm not sure there's grounds for complaint. The monopoly is granted by the government - usually a city or county government. If the people don't like AT&T's terms, it isn't AT&T[s fault. It was/is their government's job to obey the will of the people and avoid giving monopolies to companies that have an arbitration clause. i.e. the fault lies with the government, not with AT&T. The state or federal government could pass laws requiring local governments to only grant monopolies to providers without an arbitration clause. But that's a local versus state or federal government issue, nothing to do with AT&T (or ISPs for that matter).
I have the technical skill and equipment and resources (domain, web hosting) to run my own email server. I actually did it for 3 years. Eventually I gave up and switched to a hosted service (first yahoo, then gmail).
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server. So I switched my email service to one run by a company who monitors it 24/7, notices outages within minutes instead of hours or days, and has expert staff who are more skilled at fixing it than I ever could be unless I quit my day job.
Unless you're an expert at diagnosing and fixing home solar installations and batteries, and can drop whatever you're doing at any time of the day (or night) to run home and fix it when the wife calls to say the house has no electricity, you don't want to be off the grid. Sometimes the first indication you'll have of a problem with your array will be when your battery dies because it hasn't been getting any power from the panels all day. Then you'll be stuck trying to fix it without the benefit of having electricity (to, say, search the net to try to help diagnose what the problem might be). Even if you've got a backup generator, it requires at least annual maintenance and the fuel has to be refreshed (gas goes bad after about 6-12 months, quicker if it's an ethanol blend and your storage container isn't completely airtight).
Things that you use intermittently like a car or a washing machine, it's OK to own because you can survive a short downtime without it if it should break. Things that need close to 100% uptime like electricity or email or phone service, you want it provided by a company with staff on hand 24/7 dedicated to providing it and fixing it when it breaks. Solar panels on your home supplement this reliable power source, not the other way around.
For service employers who interact with customers (e.g. fast food register operators), this basically means customers have to wait in longer lines. Having more employees working the registers means customers get faster service, but it also means you have more employees sitting idle when there aren't enough customers. Having fewer employees working the registers means customers have to wait longer, pushing some of those customers into time the employees would otherwise be sitting idle. Thus efficiency (in terms of reduced time employees spend idle) is increased.
For service employers who don't interact with customers (e.g. maids), it just means their hours were reduced. The office decides to have cleaning services come in every other day instead of every day. The floors are a bit dirtier, but it's considered preferable to the higher price of cleaning service. Thus efficiency is increased.
For production employees, they simply moved production out to someplace with a lower minimum wage. Thus efficiency is increased.
So Canada agrees with the U.S. that Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription drugs to Americans should be de-indexed from Google worldwide.
Whether this is a free speech or an illegal trade is irrelevant and a straw man. The key issue is whether another country can apply their laws in your country. Maybe considering a case with Canada on the benefiting end of the "illegal" trade might give the judges some perspective.
That's actually what has me wondering why this costs so damn much. Isn't the "technology" exactly the same as a floating oil rig, except instead of doing the considerably harder task of sending a pipe down to a fixed spot on the sea floor, they're just sticking a wind turbine on top of it? The R&D for this has already been done and paid for by the oil industry. Why is it costing so much to mount a wind turbine onto decades-old technology? Even the problem of sending power from the turbine to shore via a cable is analogous to the pipe for pumping oil back to shore.
Just to address the other comment on your post, the seas off Scotland are one of if not the best place on earth for wind power. Globally, onshore wind power has a capacity factor (ratio of actual power produced to peak production capacity) of about 0.20 to 0.25. Offshore wind is usually around 0.30-0.35. Offshore wind in Scotland is way up around 0.60-0.75. The winds are both strong and consistent there.
It's not just about having offline maps. The GPS on a lot of older and lower-end phones is A-GPS (assisted GPS). The processor on the phone would take too long to do the initial position fix calculations. So it transmits the GPS satellite data to the cell tower, a hefty computer on the cell tower quickly does the calculations, and transmits the position back to the phone. Once the phone has the initial position, subsequent position updates are calculated on the phone. Because the calculations for updating the position are a lot simpler than calculating the initial position.
If the cell network goes down or is inaccessible, these devices lose their ability to use GPS unless they were already using it at the time the outage began.
If the telemetry can detect it, why can't they put out an emergency patch to stop it the moment it's detected?
I'm a Linux fan (I learned on Unix systems at school, before I ever touched a DOS/Windows PC). And I'd agree Linux has a lot more nutters that Windows. Windows has a lot more dumb users - the type who will go along with something because everyone else is. But Linux has a greater share of what we call conspiracy theorists in other circles.
Personally, I think both GP and OP are both right. GP is right that companies who chose Windows did so without giving enough weight to its security issues (Unix was designed from the ground up for multiple users; Windows was designed assuming a single root user, with multi-user capability added off as an afterthought). Same with backups - not thinking that they're important because "we never need them", and thus not committing enough money and manpower into a decent backup regimen. OP is right that you can't place the blame entirely on the companies and individuals who chose Windows. These decisions aren't made in a vacuum - the choice of the rest of society matters because that influences compatibility, amount of available software (and its price), and the pool of programmers and admins you can hire from. Unfortunately a lot of the people who made the decision to go with Windows instead of Linux either didn't know enough about tech to be qualified to be making that decision, or are retired (or dead) now and complaining about their past choices doesn't help the present situation.
So we're saddled with an inferior OS which self-perpetuates via inertia and sunk costs, and nobody wants to take the lead on abandoning it because the people/companies who'll spearhead that effort will pay the highest cost. They're the ones who'll have to trudge through fresh deep snow, while those who follow after get the easier job of following in the trail they've made. Everyone wants to be a follower, not a leader.
I'm not quite sure how you get from that to Amazon owning the Washington Post. If there are multiple possible interpretations of a statement, the one that makes the most sense is likely the correct one, not the one which best reinforces your political biases by making the speaker appear the dumbest.
I've pretty much eliminated the Washington Post from the news sources I'll click through on Google News for this exact reason - they spin nearly every story in the most anti-Trump way they can think of, rather than giving an evenhanded presentation of the facts. (And no, I didn't vote for Trump.) I wouldn't call it fake news, more like news with a double serving of editorializing on the side. I don't need my news source telling me how I should think, thank you. I guess I'll have to add Tony Romm at Recode to the list.
I was writing up a comment about how I've never seen a Google shopping link in my search results. Ad yes, but not a search result, and I've always had to access a separate page to use Froogle / Google Shopping. But when I checked to confirm when Google started the service (way back when it was Froogle), I ran across this gem:
Objection withdrawn. Though now I'm curious why they didn't do it in the U.S.
I also learned that they switched to a pay-to-play model in 2012 (merchants have to pay Google if they want to show up in Google Shopping), which was right around the time I started noticing the "service" was sometimes missing the lowest priced merchant. So it's no longer a bona fide price comparison service. Unfortunately Pricegrabber is a shade of its former self (only lists what it thinks is the lowest price instead of letting you see all merchants' prices in a list). Anyone have a suggestion for a true price comparison site?
The distinction between what people are, and what they choose to believe is not the basis of Constitutional protections. The protections specifically listed in the Bill of Rights were made not based of whether the traits were objective or subjective, but based on which traits had historically been the target of unfair discrimination. Religious persecution has a rather ugly history behind it (and in fact was the reason a lot of the early colonists moved from Europe to the Americas), so religious freedom was enshrined in the Constitution. If there had been a long, sordid history of comic book geeks being beat up and killed, then liking comic books would've been specifically protected by the Constitution as well.
Islam is just one specific case. The general principle here is whether a society based on tolerance and coexistence is self-sustainable. Society is either inclusive or exclusive. Either we allow anyone and everyone to participate, or we exclude certain groups. The presumption here is that a society based on coexistence is in fact self-sustainable, we just have to figure out how to make it work. I'm not actually sure if it is self-sustainable, but I think it's a worthy enough goal that we should attempt it. If we start banning certain groups, then we become an exclusive society - just like the Nazis except we choose different groups to exclude. That may have worked centuries ago when most of the world was still unknown and unexplored so excluded groups could just pick up and move elsewhere, but we're running out of space now. It's inevitable that groups with incompatible subject philosophies are going to bump up against each other, so we're going to have to find some way to get along. As long as the vast majority of Muslims are willing to treat me with a live-and-let-live philosophy, I'm willing to reciprocate and treat them the same. And classify the occasional terrorist as outliers and criminals, rather than representative of their group overall.
Constitutional protections only apply to people on U.S. soil. That was the whole point of putting a prison in Guantanamo - it was Cuban soil, not U.S., and thus the prisoners wouldn't have U.S. Constitutional protection. (Though the SCotUS eventually decided the terms of the U.S. lease with Cuba gave it control as if it were U.S. soil).
Visa applicants, or people entering at U.S. border checkpoints for that matter, are not considered to be on U.S. soil yet, and thus do not enjoy Constitutional protection.
An increase in workload in one area cannot be made without a decrease in workload in another. Without the freeze, the government staff are tied up doing their regular job of interviewing, reviewing, and granting/denying visa applications (if they weren't busy with this stuff, then their job is unnecessary and they should be let go). Presumably the freeze was needed to pause the workload and free up the personnel, so the procedures and processes could be audited, revised, and new systems implemented.
What you say could be possible if new workers were hired to do the auditing, revising, and implementing. But since they'd be new, they'd have to interview current INS staff first to get a clear picture of how the current procedures are (or aren't) working and find potential gaps in security. So you'd still need to lessen the workload of the current staff - either by freezing immigration for a period of time, or delaying visa application reviews thus stretching out wait times. It's likely better to just skip the interviews and let the people who've been working with the system all this time work on revising it.
Trump's contention that the current system is full of holes and is letting dangerous people into the country would mean he would favor the freeze over the slowdown as the more security-conscientious choice. I disagree with his contention. But I agree the President has the legal authority to make temporary changes to immigration like this. Obama implemented a similar freeze (or ban, to use your terminology) on Iraqi refugee immigration for 6 months, although that ban was based on specific intel.
Mars' atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and has less than 1% the pressure of Earth's. Even if we were somehow able to add enough nitrogen and oxygen to Mars' atmosphere to give it Earth-like pressure, the CO2 already there would give it 15x more CO2 than the Earth.
Mars is going to be more inhospitable than Earth until we're technologically capable of terraforming on a planetary scale. And if we can do that, we can just fix Earth's atmosphere.
Class action lawyers get about 15% of the total settlement amount. So the actual breakdown is $17.25 million to the lawyers, $1.22 for each person affected.
They didn't lose it. They willingly sold it for 10 cents.
If you buy something for $300+, then program a computer to sell it for 10 cents, and it does it, the problem isn't the computer. It's the fact that you programmed it to do something stupid. While it's nice that the exchange is reimbursing people for their losses, that's a bad thing in the long run. If stupid decisions don't come around to bite people in the butt, they fail to learn the lesson and will continue making stupid decisions.
On a related note, this is why a country's currency is better (more stable) than a cryptocurrency that isn't backed by anything. With the country's currency, because the country is basing its economy on it, you can estimate a semi-accurate range of values for the currency. You avoid programming sell orders outside that range because "that's obviously stupid." With a cryptocurrency whose value is entirely based on what other people think it's worth, you can't set a range. Because everyone could simultaneously up and decide it's another tulip bubble and suddenly it's worth nothing. Unlike a currency which is based on the productivity of a country, or even gold, the value of a cryptocurrency is based entirely on how much faith its users have in its value. That's why those people thought they were doing a smart thing programming a sell order at 10 cents on a $300 investment - so they could recoup something if it crashed.
Which gets us to the real reason why they're reimbursing customers for their losses. Because if those customers become discouraged, lose faith, and quit trading in that cryptocurrency, then its price will crash - for real this time.
One of the companies I interviewed for fresh out of grad school in the 1990s was developing the same thing to help pinpoint snipers in Bosnia.
There's not gonna be a trade war. Any foreign company trying to do business in the U.S. will just set up a U.S.-only subsidiary. The U.S. government can subpoena anything at the subsidiary, but won't be able to touch anything at the parent company.
U.S. companies OTOH will be at a competitive disadvantage due to this stupid policy. Because everyone will know that anything they own could potentially be raided by the U.S. government no matter where in the world it's stored. Consequently, U.S. companies will simply move overseas, setting themselves up in another country with sane laws, and turning their U.S. shell into a subsidiary which only does business in the U.S.
Your "trade war" is going to be over before it even begins because the only people wanting to fight for the U.S. government's side is going to be the U.S. government. All the "soldiers" for the U.S. are going to defect to other countries first chance they get.
There is a national security issue here, but not the one you're probably thinking of.
If the SCotUS decides this in favor of the U.S. government, this isn't going to end the way they think it will. The U.S. companies aren't going to roll over and hand over the information the U.S. government wants. They're going to expatriate and reincorporate in another country which doesn't have such overreaching search and seizure laws.
The stupid IRS policy of taxing all income earned abroad simply because you're a U.S. citizen already causes wealthy Americans to move abroad (with their money) and give up their U.S. citizenship. A bad decision here will start the same exodus among U.S.-based multinational corporations. That's the national security issue here - the nation's economic security is being put at risk due to the U.S. government trying to make its laws and authority apply outside of the U.S.
Agreed, but a lot of the choices in Puss in Boots ended up with game over - Puss being stuck in the book (the objective is to get him out of the book). The kids then had to go back to a previous decision tree and select a "different" choice (i.e. the other choice). I didn't watch them play it enough to see if there were multiple ways to win, but I did see several ways to lose.
Most modern trailers come with electronic brake controllers. When you hit the brakes, the trailer brakes also engage thus assuring that the car is always pulling the trailer, instead of the trailer pushing the car. The only trailers using the old surge brakes are boat trailers - the hydraulic actuator can withstand getting wet, unlike electronic controllers. Surge brakes only engage when the trailer begins pushing the car. So the trailer's braking cannot exceed the car's braking (the surge brake disengage the moment that happens), which is what's needed to dampen out the swaying.
Accelerating is preferable to hitting the brakes on a trailer with no brakes. But with a trailer with properly adjusted brakes, speeding up just feeds more energy into the trailer, making the swaying worse.
It was available two days ago. Kids found Puss in Boots on Wednesday and played around with it on the Roku.
It reminded me of Dragon's Lair but with a lot fewer decisions and a lot more time to make them. For all you young'uns, yeah we had this in the 1980s, contemporaneous with the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The video of the storyline with alternate decisions and endings were stored on a laserdisc (which unlike a videotape allowed random access). And inputs you made with a joystick and buttons at certain times determined your progress through the story and which video was played. (The approx 1 sec blackout while the LD player seeked to the correct video has been edited out of that YouTube video. So it as a lot more annoying to play than the video makes it seem. RAM was way too expensive to pre-cache multiple possibilities like we can today.)
People who tow trailers have known about this for decades.