The problem with measuring pollution per capita is that it doesn't take into account productivity. Strictly speaking, you could reduce pollution per capita by simply stopping all production except food, shelter, and clothing. Your pollution would drop to near zero, but so would your standard of living. Ideally, you want to maintain your standard of living while reducing CO2 emissions.
Ratio of GDP to CO2 emissions measure productivity per amount of carbon dioxide emitted. The U.S. falls in the middle of the pack by this measure. China is 5x worse (i.e. they emit 5x more CO2 to produce the same amount of stuff), representing very low efficiency at converting CO2 production into useful products. You'll also note that the larger countries fare worse, since larger size = greater transportation distances.
Apple fans just "trust" Apple and buy whatever they're selling, regardless of technological inferiority. When 4G service was rolling out, the iPhone 4 was only 3G-capable. That didn't stop it from being a runaway success. Apple fans also use cognitive dissonance to ignore technological superiority in other products until it shows up in an Apple product, at which point it suddenly becomes the best thing imaginable.
LG introduced the first touchscreen-only phone, beating the iPhone by a half year. But most people mistakenly believe Apple did it first.
Gesture controls like pinch to zoom have been around since the 1980s. But most people mistakenly believe Apple invented them.
Motorola had fingerprint unlock on one of its earlier phones, but it was dismissed. Until Apple copied it about 5 years later, and suddenly it was the best thing since sliced bread.
The original iPad had 1024x768 resolution. When Android tablets came out with 1536x1024 and even 1920x1080 screens, they were dismissed because 1024x768 was "good enough." Until the Retina iPad was released, and suddenly having a high resolution screen became important.
Google had a voice assistant on Android a year before Siri (they just didn't think of anthropomorphizing it with a spiffy name), but it was ignored. Until Siri came out and suddenly it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Samsung has had OLED screens on its flagship phones since the original Galaxy S, but it's mostly become an afterthought with most people not even noticing the different display technology. How much you want to bet when the iPhone (finally) gets OLED screens it'll suddenly become the single greatest improvement in screen technology, making LCDs obsolete?
Heck, the appearance of the front face of Samsung's tablets was based on their digital picture frame which they released two years before the iPad. Apple came up with pretty much the same thing, then turned around and claimed Samsung copied them. It doesn't matter that it obviously wasn't true and Apple eventually lost in court - legions of Apple faithful still believe Samsung copied Apple when if anything it was the other way around.
TV channels in the U.S. are required to identify themselves in their broadcasts at least once an hour. Many do it more frequently, both to build up branding and so they won't get in trouble with the FCC if they miss an ID broadcast. You have to have seen these if you watch any cable or over-the-air TV broadcasts.
If you're wondering why it's a network, and "associated with", rather than just called NBC all the time, it has to do with the weird geographical set up of TV in the US, where every TV station is local, so to put out national content, TV stations associated themselves with one of five or six major networks.
It's not weird. It's because radio signal strength drops off with the square of distance. So each TV station's transmitter antenna can only cover a small geographical area. It's a non-issue for streamed content. But because TV stations still do over-the-air broadcasts, a TV station which buys a license from the major network gets exclusive broadcasting (and streaming) rights in that local area for that network's content.
Most other countries are small enough that a single "national" broadcast is sufficient (e.g. don't need a local weather report). That doesn't work in the larger countries - you need local independent TV stations to broadcast local news and events. Also, in many countries (like the UK) the government retains a tight grip on broadcast communications. The U.S. takes a laissez faire approach, allowing TV stations to choose what they want to broadcast or license to broadcast. In particular, government control of information distribution (e.g. the news) is frowned upon here. Checks and balances y'know.
You can already get an autopilot for your boat for just a few thousand dollars. So there's really nearly zero efficiency gain from using an AI to "plot the safest, shortest, most efficient route." You don't need an AI aboard the ship to do that. A supercomputer back at HQ with instant access to the most recent weather reports can do that, then relay the route to the ship via satellite.
The only cost savings for what they're trying to do is eliminating the wages and supplies for the crew. Which as you point out involves the trade-off of nobody being aboard to fix stuff if it breaks en route.
Assume on average a 85 kWh battery pack getting a 50% supercharge. 85 kWh * 0.5 = 42.5 kWh. Real-world charging efficiency is about 80%, so 53.125 kWh is needed to put 42.5 kWh into the car's battery.
Assume 160 W/m^2 commercial panels. PV solar capacity factor in the desert Southwest is about 0.185. That is, over a year, a 100 Watt panel will produce the equivalent of a constant 18.5 Watts. So the 160 W/m^2 panels will produce 160 Watts * 0.185 = 29.6 Watts average over 24 hours, or 0.7104 kWh / m^2 in 24 hours.
This means to supercharge a single Telsa S requires 53.125 kWh / 0.7104 kWh/m^2 = 74.78 m^2 of solar panels.
Oh wait, you're gonna store that solar energy in a battery first? That's going to introduce more charging and discharge losses. If you figure 90% for both, that's 74.78 m^2 / (0.9*0.9) = 92.32 m^2 of solar panels needed for every car you want to supercharge that day.
How busy is a Supercharger station? Summary says 6-20 stalls per station, so say 13 average. Figure they're half occupied during day hours, empty at night. At 30 minutes to charge, that's 2 per hour per bay, or (6.5 bays occupied)*(2 vehicles per bay per hour)*(12 hours) = 156 vehicles charged per day.
So to generate enough electricity to supercharge those 156 vehicles requires (156 vehicles)*(92.32 m^2/vehicle) = 14,401 m^2 of solar panels per Supercharger station. Or approx 120m x 120m of solar panels. Or put another way, the average home solar installation is about 30 m^2. So each Supercharger station would need as many panels as 480 homes.
It's not at all clear that RISC wins in the mobile space. Intel's offerings win in performance per Watt benchmarks by a factor of 2-5, they just haven't hit the minimum Watts that ARM processors have.
The problem for Intel is price. Current ARM processors have about 2-3 billion transistors and sell for about $10-$20. Kaby Lake has about the same number of transistors, but sells for $100-$300. Intel has enjoyed that huge price per transistor for so long that they simply don't know how to compete at a lower price anymore. Intel could destroy ARM tomorrow by simply slashing the price of their processors to be roughly the same as ARM. But they would have to completely restructure the company and its finances in order to do it.
If the Apple pattern holds, ARM is going to take over 95% of the computing market, with Intel holding on to a minuscule but lucrative 5% of high-end users (scientific, industrial, gaming).
It's not a Republican concept. It's a freedom concept. People are free to make their own decisions.
Every purchase is a sale. Every sale is a purchase. Economic transactions are symmetric that way. You are exchanging money for satellite TV service. DirecTV is exchanging satellite TV service for money. They are free to set the terms under which they'll agree to pay you (with service). You are free to set the terms under which you'll agree to pay them (with money). If both of you can come to equitable terms, then the trade happens. If you can't agree, then no trade happens.
If you don't like the arbitration clause, it's real simple - don't agree to it. Tell them you won't be buying their service because they insist on arbitration, and walk away. Find someone selling a similar product who doesn't require arbitration. If every seller requires arbitration, then perhaps you should investigate why they're all requiring arbitration, instead of immediately making the knee-jerk reaction of prohibiting it because you don't like it. If "half of the population in the business ownership 'club'" is requiring arbitration, there's probably a good reason for it.
Only Democrats were fighting this because taking away people's freedom under the guise of "the government knows better" is an anathema to Republican principles. Republicans believe in letting people make their own decisions, so the bad ideas die (because fewer people agree to them) while the better ideas flourish. They don't even claim to know which are the bad or good ideas - they just believe in your right to discover them for yourself.
Remember, this isn't a court which concluded that AT&T used arbitration to overcharge customers. This is a group of Senators claiming it. (I'd actually agree with them when it comes to cable and Internet service. Those are frequently government-granted monopolies in this country so you don't have the ability to walk away from deals you don't like - there are no other sellers because the government has prohibited them. But satellite TV and mobile phone services have competitors you can go to if you don't like the terms offered.) The one area I'd agree with them is that DirecTV's advertising is deceptive. Those $50/mo offers are introductory prices, and after the first year the price jumps up to the regular price which is buried in the fine print and difficult to find. My cable company OTOH advertised the regular price directly underneath the introductory price - in a smaller non-bold font, but very easy to see so I knew quickly and exactly what I was getting into. But that falls under the jurisdiction of the FTC, not class action lawsuits.
One side doesn't decide it. One side insists on it, and the other side has to agree to it if they want what the first side is selling (satellite TV service in this case).
Your bank robber analogy doesn't work because the robber is forcing the bank to hand over its money. In the case of satellite TV service, you are willingly giving AT&T money in exchange for a service you want. Just like you have the right not to buy from them if you don't like their terms, they have the right to refuse to sell to you if they don't like your terms.*
Arbitration clauses are a result of (ironically) jury trials in civil courts awarding huge damages for trivial or stupid reasons. Since jurors are selected at random from the entire population, you cannot be sure if you're going to get competent or incompetent jurors. Lawyers exploit this by dismissing potential jurors who might actually understand the technical minutia of a civil case (I've been dismissed every time after I say I have an engineering degree from MIT). Companies responded to this uncertainty by requiring arbitration - where they know cases will be decided by competent arbitrators. (Arbiters work for an independent company - they're not employees of the company selling you the product/service as you seem to think.)
* The Supreme Court cases allowing arbitration were based on satellite TV and cellular phone service - both of which are national and thus have competition. I suspect the arbitration clauses in cable TV and landline phone service would be found illegal, because those are government-granted monopolies. The buyer doesn't have a choice in those cases - if you want cable TV, the government forces you to buy it from that one cable TV company. If the cable company insists on arbitration, that becomes more like your bank robber analogy.
Having to slice the adhesive securing the screen to the housing, remove the power supply, hard drive, and fan, and tilt out the logic board to swap memory modules isn't exactly user-friendly. It still gets only a 3/10 for repair-ability.
The issue isn't duration of data retention. It's who controls the data retention. Yes Google can potentially keep your voice search data for longer, but they let you review and delete it if you want. Amazon also lets you erase Alexa's recordings if you want.
Apple lets you erase your search history, but it's unclear if that also deletes the audio recordings they have of you.
Google and Amazon = YOU decide
Apple = They decide for you what's best
Another way to think of it is that if you open up a 9V battery, you'll find all it is is six batteries 1.5V batteries slightly smaller than a AAA, arranged in series to generate 9V. The chemistry and energy content of a 1.5V and 9V battery is the same by mass.
The Channel tunnel works better than ferries because it allows continuous traffic flow. Ferries have to transport vehicles in discrete chunks, with time taken to onload and offload them. With a tunnel, the vehicles can go straight through (as traffic allows) without having to stop. Same reason turbine engines (continuous fuel reaction) eventually replaced piston engines (fuel combusted in discrete chunks) for any applications needing high power generation.
Hyperloop requires loading vehicles into a train sitting in an evacuated loop. That means there needs to be some sort of airlock. As of yet, nobody has invented a graduated airlock which allows contents to pass through at speed. Transport must come to a halt, the edges sealed to be airtight, then the compartments opened for offloading and onloading. So Hyperloop needs to transport vehicles in discrete chunks, meaning it will function much like the ferry does. Not like the Channel tunnel does; despite the fact that it travels through a tunnel. Hyperloop will only become rail-like when it's extensive enough to allow point-to-point transport from origin to destination. That maximizes the speed increase you gain for suffering through the zero speed of the onload/offload cycle.
I took the train from London to Avignon last year (a through service). Very much more civilised way of travelling than by air. Yes it took a bit longer but was far less stressful.
Like Concorde, I suspect that will be Hyperloop's undoing. Everyone wants to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or London to Paris more quickly. But how much more are they willing to pay for it? I suspect the vast majority of people will simply choose to ride a regular train for an hour or two more rather than pay extra to ride Hyperloop for slightly less time. Hyperloop makes more sense in the U.S. because we lack a high speed rail system. There's a nearly factor of 10 travel time gap between air and rail/highway. But Europe already has fast trains that will get you there in roughly 1/3 to 1/4 the time of a plane.
Apple would've done it eventually anyway, without any threat of government regulation, just to reduce the wait times for repairing broken screens. The market would've been sufficient to solve this problem without any government interference.
Where government regulation would help is in preventing Apple from bricking your phone if you have it repaired by a non-authorized repair center. But even then it's only necessary because of government copyright and patent laws which prevent said third parties from hacking the product and/or software to bypass Apple's bricking. i.e. It's government regulation designed to fix problems created by other government regulation.
The true cases where government regulations are needed to correct flaws in the free market are few and far between. Mostly dealing with situations involving the Tragedy of the Commons (e.g. pollution), or the emergence of a natural monopoly.
90 of the 5,067 published trials had underlying patterns that were unlikely to appear by chance in a credible dataset
The usual threshold of statistical certainty used for publishing scientific results is 95% (sometimes 98%). That is, a result becomes noteworthy enough to publish if there's a 5% or lower chance of it happening simply due to random chance.
90 studies out of 5,067 is 1.8%. Which is below the 5% you'd expect from a 95% threshold, and even the 2% you'd expect with a 98% threshold. When you're looking at five thousand studies, about 100-250 of them will report results which aren't real, but simply happened due to chance. That only 90 such studies were found seems to indicate scientists are using an even stricter standard than 98% certainty before publishing. And those 90 aren't necessarily due to fraud, but are within the number you'd expect to find purely due to chance.
ISPs are able to selectively throttle Internet traffic to/from certain websites because they enjoy a government-granted monopoly. Customers can't switch to a different ISP even when they know throttling is going on.
Why can't websites create a pseudo-monopoly of their own? What if all the websites concerned about net neutrality joined a net neutrality pact? If any member of the pact detected that an ISP was throttling traffic to their site, all pact members would throttle their traffic to that ISP. So if an ISP tried to throttle Netflix, all of their customers trying to access Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. would find those sites slow to load as well, and would flood the ISP with complaints. Unlike ISP throttling which looks to the customer like the slowdown is specific to the Netflix site and leads them to (incorrectly) conclude the problem is with Netflix, this slowdown across a wide range of sites would cause customers to (correctly) conclude the problem is with their ISP. And blame would fall upon the correct culprit.
The whole point of the economy is to increase productivity. And eliminating commute time, miles put on a commute vehicle, parking spaces for commute vehicles, renting office space for staff, etc. is a huge productivity increase that's just ripe for picking. The only thing stopping it has been paranoia that telecommuting workers were less productive than workers who came into the office. As the difficult problem of how to maintain productivity while working from home gets solved, white collar jobs will increasingly become telecommuting jobs.
used a feature of the Google Ads service that allows ad publishers to display a URL but redirect users to another link
What possible reason does this "feature" have for even existing? The whole purpose of displaying a URL when you hover over a link is to tell the user where the link will take them. There's no legitimate reason to ever override that behavior.
It's called a honeypot. Put a server on your system with valuable-looking but fake data. If a hacker goes for it, you are (1) wasting his time, (2) corrupting the trustworthiness of all the data he's collected, and (3) helping expose him via monitoring tools you've placed on the honeypot.
How is it any different than a defendant refusing to reveal where he hid the tools of his crime? The police suspect that he killed Colonel Mustard in the LIbrary with a lead pipe, but without the pipe, they are unable to prove it.
The difference comes up when the police know that evidence is contained within the suspect's property. If the police don't know where the pipe is, they can't do anything. But if they know or strongly suspect (with corroborating evidence) the pipe is in the suspect's house, they can get a warrant to bypass the 4th Amendment ad search his house.
Likewise, if they know (or strongly suspect with corroborating evidence) that the whereabouts of the pipe are contained within the suspect's phone and can convince a judge of it, the judge can compel the suspect to give the prosecution access to the phone. If the suspect refuses, he is in contempt of court, just as he would be if he refused to allow police to search his house despite being presented with a warrant.
However, if the police are merely on a fishing expedition to see what a search of the phone will turn up, the suspect cannot be compelled to give access to his phone.
found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work
That right there is the fly in the ointment. Simply working isn't enough. You have to do work producing something other people want, not necessarily what you want. Work has value because it produces something other members of society are demanding. If a UBI allows you to quit a productive job in order to start an unproductive one (e.g. artist), the net result is that the country's productivity decreases, and the standard of living drops. (Which means the UBI has to be increased to keep it at the level of "basic", starting a vicious cycle of continuing productivity declines and UBI increases.)
As an extreme example, nobody wants to collect garbage, repair toilets, clean septic tanks, etc. But because it's needed, society pays a lot for it - enough to entice some individuals to live with the stink and do it for a living. If a UBI causes some of these people to quit and take up more "satisfying" lines of work, the prices of these services will go up, resulting in less income available for people to spend on other things, resulting in the UBI not buying as much as it used to, resulting in the government increasing the UBI to compensate for its decreased purchasing power, resulting in more people switching to more "satisfying" work, resulting in more prices going up, etc.
The economy wants to price things according to how much society values it. Attempting to thwart that with a UBI or minimum wage doesn't make that tendency disappear. The economy just interprets that as damage to the system, and routes around it - by devaluing the currency to lessen the impact of the fixed value of the UBI or minimum wage on prices.
If you refuse to pay a little extra for the extra legroom, well you've just demonstrated why the airlines are prioritizing lower fares over more space.
If he claimed he was a professional engineer, or an engineer licensed to practice in Oregon and he was not, I could see the state having a case. But since he has an engineering degree, the statement "I am an engineer" is factually correct, and should not be illegal.
Otherwise, states could fine people with Ph.Ds for stating "I am a doctor" because they're not a licensed medical practitioner.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or in this case, a self-negating prophecy - the media coverage itself influenced the poll the media was relying on to predict the election. All the negative press reporting about Trump drove his supporters underground, and they began concealing the fact that they were voting for Trump. The one poll which attempted to account for this correctly predicted Trump would win.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with measuring pollution per capita is that it doesn't take into account productivity. Strictly speaking, you could reduce pollution per capita by simply stopping all production except food, shelter, and clothing. Your pollution would drop to near zero, but so would your standard of living. Ideally, you want to maintain your standard of living while reducing CO2 emissions.
Ratio of GDP to CO2 emissions measure productivity per amount of carbon dioxide emitted. The U.S. falls in the middle of the pack by this measure. China is 5x worse (i.e. they emit 5x more CO2 to produce the same amount of stuff), representing very low efficiency at converting CO2 production into useful products. You'll also note that the larger countries fare worse, since larger size = greater transportation distances.
TV channels in the U.S. are required to identify themselves in their broadcasts at least once an hour. Many do it more frequently, both to build up branding and so they won't get in trouble with the FCC if they miss an ID broadcast. You have to have seen these if you watch any cable or over-the-air TV broadcasts.
It's not weird. It's because radio signal strength drops off with the square of distance. So each TV station's transmitter antenna can only cover a small geographical area. It's a non-issue for streamed content. But because TV stations still do over-the-air broadcasts, a TV station which buys a license from the major network gets exclusive broadcasting (and streaming) rights in that local area for that network's content.
Most other countries are small enough that a single "national" broadcast is sufficient (e.g. don't need a local weather report). That doesn't work in the larger countries - you need local independent TV stations to broadcast local news and events. Also, in many countries (like the UK) the government retains a tight grip on broadcast communications. The U.S. takes a laissez faire approach, allowing TV stations to choose what they want to broadcast or license to broadcast. In particular, government control of information distribution (e.g. the news) is frowned upon here. Checks and balances y'know.
You can already get an autopilot for your boat for just a few thousand dollars. So there's really nearly zero efficiency gain from using an AI to "plot the safest, shortest, most efficient route." You don't need an AI aboard the ship to do that. A supercomputer back at HQ with instant access to the most recent weather reports can do that, then relay the route to the ship via satellite.
The only cost savings for what they're trying to do is eliminating the wages and supplies for the crew. Which as you point out involves the trade-off of nobody being aboard to fix stuff if it breaks en route.
Assume on average a 85 kWh battery pack getting a 50% supercharge. 85 kWh * 0.5 = 42.5 kWh. Real-world charging efficiency is about 80%, so 53.125 kWh is needed to put 42.5 kWh into the car's battery.
Assume 160 W/m^2 commercial panels. PV solar capacity factor in the desert Southwest is about 0.185. That is, over a year, a 100 Watt panel will produce the equivalent of a constant 18.5 Watts. So the 160 W/m^2 panels will produce 160 Watts * 0.185 = 29.6 Watts average over 24 hours, or 0.7104 kWh / m^2 in 24 hours.
This means to supercharge a single Telsa S requires 53.125 kWh / 0.7104 kWh/m^2 = 74.78 m^2 of solar panels.
Oh wait, you're gonna store that solar energy in a battery first? That's going to introduce more charging and discharge losses. If you figure 90% for both, that's 74.78 m^2 / (0.9*0.9) = 92.32 m^2 of solar panels needed for every car you want to supercharge that day.
How busy is a Supercharger station? Summary says 6-20 stalls per station, so say 13 average. Figure they're half occupied during day hours, empty at night. At 30 minutes to charge, that's 2 per hour per bay, or (6.5 bays occupied)*(2 vehicles per bay per hour)*(12 hours) = 156 vehicles charged per day.
So to generate enough electricity to supercharge those 156 vehicles requires (156 vehicles)*(92.32 m^2/vehicle) = 14,401 m^2 of solar panels per Supercharger station. Or approx 120m x 120m of solar panels. Or put another way, the average home solar installation is about 30 m^2. So each Supercharger station would need as many panels as 480 homes.
It's not at all clear that RISC wins in the mobile space. Intel's offerings win in performance per Watt benchmarks by a factor of 2-5, they just haven't hit the minimum Watts that ARM processors have.
The problem for Intel is price. Current ARM processors have about 2-3 billion transistors and sell for about $10-$20. Kaby Lake has about the same number of transistors, but sells for $100-$300. Intel has enjoyed that huge price per transistor for so long that they simply don't know how to compete at a lower price anymore. Intel could destroy ARM tomorrow by simply slashing the price of their processors to be roughly the same as ARM. But they would have to completely restructure the company and its finances in order to do it.
If the Apple pattern holds, ARM is going to take over 95% of the computing market, with Intel holding on to a minuscule but lucrative 5% of high-end users (scientific, industrial, gaming).
It's not a Republican concept. It's a freedom concept. People are free to make their own decisions.
Every purchase is a sale. Every sale is a purchase. Economic transactions are symmetric that way. You are exchanging money for satellite TV service. DirecTV is exchanging satellite TV service for money. They are free to set the terms under which they'll agree to pay you (with service). You are free to set the terms under which you'll agree to pay them (with money). If both of you can come to equitable terms, then the trade happens. If you can't agree, then no trade happens.
If you don't like the arbitration clause, it's real simple - don't agree to it. Tell them you won't be buying their service because they insist on arbitration, and walk away. Find someone selling a similar product who doesn't require arbitration. If every seller requires arbitration, then perhaps you should investigate why they're all requiring arbitration, instead of immediately making the knee-jerk reaction of prohibiting it because you don't like it. If "half of the population in the business ownership 'club'" is requiring arbitration, there's probably a good reason for it.
Only Democrats were fighting this because taking away people's freedom under the guise of "the government knows better" is an anathema to Republican principles. Republicans believe in letting people make their own decisions, so the bad ideas die (because fewer people agree to them) while the better ideas flourish. They don't even claim to know which are the bad or good ideas - they just believe in your right to discover them for yourself.
Remember, this isn't a court which concluded that AT&T used arbitration to overcharge customers. This is a group of Senators claiming it. (I'd actually agree with them when it comes to cable and Internet service. Those are frequently government-granted monopolies in this country so you don't have the ability to walk away from deals you don't like - there are no other sellers because the government has prohibited them. But satellite TV and mobile phone services have competitors you can go to if you don't like the terms offered.) The one area I'd agree with them is that DirecTV's advertising is deceptive. Those $50/mo offers are introductory prices, and after the first year the price jumps up to the regular price which is buried in the fine print and difficult to find. My cable company OTOH advertised the regular price directly underneath the introductory price - in a smaller non-bold font, but very easy to see so I knew quickly and exactly what I was getting into. But that falls under the jurisdiction of the FTC, not class action lawsuits.
One side doesn't decide it. One side insists on it, and the other side has to agree to it if they want what the first side is selling (satellite TV service in this case).
Your bank robber analogy doesn't work because the robber is forcing the bank to hand over its money. In the case of satellite TV service, you are willingly giving AT&T money in exchange for a service you want. Just like you have the right not to buy from them if you don't like their terms, they have the right to refuse to sell to you if they don't like your terms.*
Arbitration clauses are a result of (ironically) jury trials in civil courts awarding huge damages for trivial or stupid reasons. Since jurors are selected at random from the entire population, you cannot be sure if you're going to get competent or incompetent jurors. Lawyers exploit this by dismissing potential jurors who might actually understand the technical minutia of a civil case (I've been dismissed every time after I say I have an engineering degree from MIT). Companies responded to this uncertainty by requiring arbitration - where they know cases will be decided by competent arbitrators. (Arbiters work for an independent company - they're not employees of the company selling you the product/service as you seem to think.)
* The Supreme Court cases allowing arbitration were based on satellite TV and cellular phone service - both of which are national and thus have competition. I suspect the arbitration clauses in cable TV and landline phone service would be found illegal, because those are government-granted monopolies. The buyer doesn't have a choice in those cases - if you want cable TV, the government forces you to buy it from that one cable TV company. If the cable company insists on arbitration, that becomes more like your bank robber analogy.
Having to slice the adhesive securing the screen to the housing, remove the power supply, hard drive, and fan, and tilt out the logic board to swap memory modules isn't exactly user-friendly. It still gets only a 3/10 for repair-ability.
The issue isn't duration of data retention. It's who controls the data retention. Yes Google can potentially keep your voice search data for longer, but they let you review and delete it if you want. Amazon also lets you erase Alexa's recordings if you want.
Apple lets you erase your search history, but it's unclear if that also deletes the audio recordings they have of you.
Google and Amazon = YOU decide
Apple = They decide for you what's best
Another way to think of it is that if you open up a 9V battery, you'll find all it is is six batteries 1.5V batteries slightly smaller than a AAA, arranged in series to generate 9V. The chemistry and energy content of a 1.5V and 9V battery is the same by mass.
Hyperloop requires loading vehicles into a train sitting in an evacuated loop. That means there needs to be some sort of airlock. As of yet, nobody has invented a graduated airlock which allows contents to pass through at speed. Transport must come to a halt, the edges sealed to be airtight, then the compartments opened for offloading and onloading. So Hyperloop needs to transport vehicles in discrete chunks, meaning it will function much like the ferry does. Not like the Channel tunnel does; despite the fact that it travels through a tunnel. Hyperloop will only become rail-like when it's extensive enough to allow point-to-point transport from origin to destination. That maximizes the speed increase you gain for suffering through the zero speed of the onload/offload cycle.
Like Concorde, I suspect that will be Hyperloop's undoing. Everyone wants to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or London to Paris more quickly. But how much more are they willing to pay for it? I suspect the vast majority of people will simply choose to ride a regular train for an hour or two more rather than pay extra to ride Hyperloop for slightly less time. Hyperloop makes more sense in the U.S. because we lack a high speed rail system. There's a nearly factor of 10 travel time gap between air and rail/highway. But Europe already has fast trains that will get you there in roughly 1/3 to 1/4 the time of a plane.
Apple would've done it eventually anyway, without any threat of government regulation, just to reduce the wait times for repairing broken screens. The market would've been sufficient to solve this problem without any government interference.
Where government regulation would help is in preventing Apple from bricking your phone if you have it repaired by a non-authorized repair center. But even then it's only necessary because of government copyright and patent laws which prevent said third parties from hacking the product and/or software to bypass Apple's bricking. i.e. It's government regulation designed to fix problems created by other government regulation.
The true cases where government regulations are needed to correct flaws in the free market are few and far between. Mostly dealing with situations involving the Tragedy of the Commons (e.g. pollution), or the emergence of a natural monopoly.
How dare a Millenial name herself Reality Winner! She shouldn't been more responsible like her parents, and picked a more socially acceptable name.
The usual threshold of statistical certainty used for publishing scientific results is 95% (sometimes 98%). That is, a result becomes noteworthy enough to publish if there's a 5% or lower chance of it happening simply due to random chance.
90 studies out of 5,067 is 1.8%. Which is below the 5% you'd expect from a 95% threshold, and even the 2% you'd expect with a 98% threshold. When you're looking at five thousand studies, about 100-250 of them will report results which aren't real, but simply happened due to chance. That only 90 such studies were found seems to indicate scientists are using an even stricter standard than 98% certainty before publishing. And those 90 aren't necessarily due to fraud, but are within the number you'd expect to find purely due to chance.
ISPs are able to selectively throttle Internet traffic to/from certain websites because they enjoy a government-granted monopoly. Customers can't switch to a different ISP even when they know throttling is going on.
Why can't websites create a pseudo-monopoly of their own? What if all the websites concerned about net neutrality joined a net neutrality pact? If any member of the pact detected that an ISP was throttling traffic to their site, all pact members would throttle their traffic to that ISP. So if an ISP tried to throttle Netflix, all of their customers trying to access Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. would find those sites slow to load as well, and would flood the ISP with complaints. Unlike ISP throttling which looks to the customer like the slowdown is specific to the Netflix site and leads them to (incorrectly) conclude the problem is with Netflix, this slowdown across a wide range of sites would cause customers to (correctly) conclude the problem is with their ISP. And blame would fall upon the correct culprit.
The whole point of the economy is to increase productivity. And eliminating commute time, miles put on a commute vehicle, parking spaces for commute vehicles, renting office space for staff, etc. is a huge productivity increase that's just ripe for picking. The only thing stopping it has been paranoia that telecommuting workers were less productive than workers who came into the office. As the difficult problem of how to maintain productivity while working from home gets solved, white collar jobs will increasingly become telecommuting jobs.
What possible reason does this "feature" have for even existing? The whole purpose of displaying a URL when you hover over a link is to tell the user where the link will take them. There's no legitimate reason to ever override that behavior.
It's called a honeypot. Put a server on your system with valuable-looking but fake data. If a hacker goes for it, you are (1) wasting his time, (2) corrupting the trustworthiness of all the data he's collected, and (3) helping expose him via monitoring tools you've placed on the honeypot.
The difference comes up when the police know that evidence is contained within the suspect's property. If the police don't know where the pipe is, they can't do anything. But if they know or strongly suspect (with corroborating evidence) the pipe is in the suspect's house, they can get a warrant to bypass the 4th Amendment ad search his house.
Likewise, if they know (or strongly suspect with corroborating evidence) that the whereabouts of the pipe are contained within the suspect's phone and can convince a judge of it, the judge can compel the suspect to give the prosecution access to the phone. If the suspect refuses, he is in contempt of court, just as he would be if he refused to allow police to search his house despite being presented with a warrant.
However, if the police are merely on a fishing expedition to see what a search of the phone will turn up, the suspect cannot be compelled to give access to his phone.
That right there is the fly in the ointment. Simply working isn't enough. You have to do work producing something other people want, not necessarily what you want. Work has value because it produces something other members of society are demanding. If a UBI allows you to quit a productive job in order to start an unproductive one (e.g. artist), the net result is that the country's productivity decreases, and the standard of living drops. (Which means the UBI has to be increased to keep it at the level of "basic", starting a vicious cycle of continuing productivity declines and UBI increases.)
As an extreme example, nobody wants to collect garbage, repair toilets, clean septic tanks, etc. But because it's needed, society pays a lot for it - enough to entice some individuals to live with the stink and do it for a living. If a UBI causes some of these people to quit and take up more "satisfying" lines of work, the prices of these services will go up, resulting in less income available for people to spend on other things, resulting in the UBI not buying as much as it used to, resulting in the government increasing the UBI to compensate for its decreased purchasing power, resulting in more people switching to more "satisfying" work, resulting in more prices going up, etc.
The economy wants to price things according to how much society values it. Attempting to thwart that with a UBI or minimum wage doesn't make that tendency disappear. The economy just interprets that as damage to the system, and routes around it - by devaluing the currency to lessen the impact of the fixed value of the UBI or minimum wage on prices.
You just have to pay a slightly higher fare for the larger seats.
If you refuse to pay a little extra for the extra legroom, well you've just demonstrated why the airlines are prioritizing lower fares over more space.
If he claimed he was a professional engineer, or an engineer licensed to practice in Oregon and he was not, I could see the state having a case. But since he has an engineering degree, the statement "I am an engineer" is factually correct, and should not be illegal.
Otherwise, states could fine people with Ph.Ds for stating "I am a doctor" because they're not a licensed medical practitioner.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or in this case, a self-negating prophecy - the media coverage itself influenced the poll the media was relying on to predict the election. All the negative press reporting about Trump drove his supporters underground, and they began concealing the fact that they were voting for Trump. The one poll which attempted to account for this correctly predicted Trump would win.