2000 election
48.38% Gore (Dem)
47.87% Bush (Rep)
2.74% Nader (Green)
0.96% Other (all conservative parties) 51.12% total liberal parties
48.83% total conservative parties
2016 election
48.18% Clinton (Dem)
46.09% Trump (Rep)
3.28% Johnson (Libertarian)
1.07% Stein (Green)
0.69% Other (all conservative parties)
0.05% Other (all liberal parties) 49.3% total liberal parties
50.06% total conservative parties
Since the U.S. only allows a single vote for President, if nobody wins an outright majority (50%), you have to take into account votes for other candidates to really judge the will of the people in that election. This accounts for third parties siphoning votes away from the top candidates.
In 2000, Gore won a plurality (but not a majority) of the popular vote, and the liberal parties won a majority of the popular vote. Gore was the "best" winner of the 2000 election.
In 2016, Clinton won a plurality (but not a majority) of the popular vote, but the conservative parties won a majority of the popular vote. Trump was the "best" winner of the 2016 election.
Clinton lost because she wasn't popular enough to get enough liberal voters to go to the polling stations, plain and simple. She (and many liberal pundits) refuse to recognize this, and keep trying to blame external factors for her loss. Russian meddling (never mind that if emails saying Trump had been given debate questions in advance were leaked, that would've been the scandal instead of the source being Russia), "fake news" (which has been present forever, just not with a catchy name), Comey's announcements (Clinton's polls went down when Comey announced she wasn't being charged with anything, not even a reprimand - she likely lost a large number of voters with security clearances), and now poor DNC operations (Trump's campaign was even more disorganized). Winners adapt so they can win. Losers refuse to change even when they're told they're wrong, then blame others for their loss.
Yours is also a hugely immoral stance as you basically advocate that children are their parents property. I find that idea quite repulsive.
That (limited) viewpoint is usually the attitude adopted by legal minors.
The reality is that this isn't just a rights issue. It's a rights and responsibility issue. I don't know what the situation is in Germany, but in the U.S. the parents are fiscally responsible for their children's misdeeds until they become a legal adult. If a 17-yo drives a car into a store and destroys it in a fit of rage and can't pay for the damages himself, it falls upon the parents to pay for it.
So it isn't treating children as if they're property, as it is keeping rights and responsibility linked. If a 14-yo wants to be declared legally independent of his or her parents, I don't think most people would have a problem with it as long as he also became financially and criminally responsible for all his deeds as if he were an adult. Unfortunately, the way most teens want it is that they get all the rights of an adult, but their parents still have to bear all the responsibility (including paying for food, clothing, and shelter).
Without the linking of responsibility to rights, the parents effectively become wage slaves to children who are free to live as they wish. That too is immoral and repulsive. It's why Monsanto's stance with Round-Up Ready seed is immoral. They want all the rights that come with ownership of the patented seed (farmers who use it are forced to pay for it), but none of the responsibility that comes with it (organic farmers who don't want it can't sue them for damages if the seed blows onto their farms).
So on average you'd expect 1 - 0.75^2.21 = 47% of tech companies to have a founder who is first or second generation (for various definitions of "founder").
TFA says the "most highly valued" tech companies have 1.5 million employees, and an even 60% of them fit the statistic. Based on some googling of number of employees, they are probably looking at just 10 companies. With a sample size of 10, the margin of error for percentages is +/- 32%.
So the 60% figure is actually well within the margin of error of what you'd expect by random chance (47% +/- 32%). Even if you go with the low point in the graph of first and second gen Americans (about 17%), the expectation is 1 - 0.83^2.21 = 34%. Add in the +/- 32% margin of error and 60% is still within the expected range.
Funny how people seem to ignore things like population and GDP when it comes to ridiculing the U.S. for having the most military spending.
The best way to gauge how much a country pollutes is probably carbon emissions per GDP. That is, how much CO2 is emitted per amount of productivity generated. By that measure, the U.S. is only 1.6x worse than the EU. China is 8.5x worse.
1970s and 1980s - people went to arcades to play video games. The "best" games earned their reputation at the arcade, and were ported to home console systems and PCs.
1980s to 1990s - transition period, with the first blockbuster console games without a corresponding arcade release (Super Mario Bros).
2000s and 2010s - all games are now released directly to console or PC. Ask a kid if they want to go to the arcade, and they'll reply "What's an arcade?"
Times change. Except for live events like concerts or sports, where being part of the crowd is part of the experience, people prefer viewing their entertainment at home. Movie theaters are not a necessity, they were just a way to amortize the high cost of the projection and sound system across all viewers. As the cost of big screen TVs, projectors, and home theater sound systems continues to go down, movie theaters are going to become a relic of the past, just like arcades. The benefits I've seen from watching movies on my projector and HTS are:
No jerk behind me making rude noises/comments or spoiling the movie. Likewise others don't hate you if your kid starts having a meltdown.
Adjust the volume to our comfort level.
Can pause if someone needs a bathroom break, or rewind if we missed something or want to see a scene again.
Consume our own choice of snacks and drinks - no need to sneak bottled water in to avoid paying $4 for it.
Can stop the movie if it turns out to be bad, and immediately pick a different movie to watch (from the beginning).
Fukushima was precipitated because although there were multiple backup generators, they were all located in the same place (basement) and all relied on a single fuel supply. When the tsunami flooded the basement and contaminated the fuel, all that redundancy was useless. Likewise, BA had multiple backup servers, but they all relied on a single power supply which fried the backup servers when it went bad.
Reliability does not come from redundancy per se. It comes from keeping all possible modes of equipment failure independent of each other. Adding redundant equipment can help achieve this, but redundancy is undone if that equipment is all vulnerable to a single mode of failure. When the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters showed signs of burning through the two O-rings sealing each mated section, NASA tried to fix it by increasing redundancy by adding a third O-ring. But they completely failed to account for an outside factor (cold weather) affecting all three O-rings simultaneously. And the Challenger blew up.
The real issues involve transgender people being perceived as duplicitous and being treated as if they're perverted.
No, that's the reasoning among those who only consider the scenario which supports their ideological beliefs.
If you consider all possible scenarios, you realize it's possible for a perverted heterosexual (presumably male, though it'd be sexist to assume so) to go into the bathroom of the opposite gender by pretending to be transgender.
The resolution for the whole thing points to unisex bathrooms, with a separate partitioned area for urinals, and the stall walls extended to go from floor to ceiling so you can't peek over/under them. That would also settle the arguments about there needing to be more toilets allocated to women because they take more time so the lines are longer at womens' bathrooms. Though I suspect there will be pushback by businesses since walls extending to the floors will increase the amount of janitorial labor needed to clean multi-stall restrooms, and extending walls to the ceiling will require each stall to have its own vent.
I was shocked to realize the same thing a few years ago. We were looking for live music performers for a festival. A cellist friend brought in a CD of his friend playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. While we listened to it, he raved about how good his friend was. I pointed out he was missing a lot of notes, and everyone looked at me like I had just said spaghetti grows on trees. So I started pointing out every time he missed a note, and all I got were dumb stares. It gradually dawned on me that the vast majority of people, even trained musicians like my cellist friend, can't hear individual missed notes.
In the years since, I've thought about why this might be. I think it's because the "individual" notes in music are not acoustically distinct. When you have 4 instruments each playing different notes, it's not like putting 4 distinct marbles in a bowl. Each "note" is actually a hodgepodge of a fundamental frequency with dozens of overtones. The ratio of the amplitude of these overtones to the fundamental determine the sound of the note characteristic to each instrument (e.g. violin vs. guitar). When you play multiple notes together, these overtones combine into a morass of sound instead of remaining distinct. It's not like putting 4 separate marbles into a bowl. It's like mixing 4 different color paints in the bowl. So being able to separate out the individual notes is something your brain has to learn how to do. "What combination of notes and overtones would produce the sum total amplitude that I'm hearing?"
Except for a few exceptional people and musically inclined individuals (who near lots of notes over and over in different combinations), most people's brains never learn this. So rather than hearing individual notes, most people only hear an overall sound. They're unable to pick out a missed note in a piano concerto, or a misplaced opening riff. Listen to Ravel's Bolero (same melody repeated over and over with different instrument combinations) and try to name the instruments. Easy when it starts with individual instruments, but gets harder when multiple instruments start playing together.
The earliest instance of computer generated composition is that of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois in 1955-56. Using the Illiac high-speed digital computer, they succeeded in programming basic material and stylistic parameters which resulted in the Illiac Suite (1957). The score of the piece was composed by the computer and then transposed into traditional musical notation for performance by a string quartet.
IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest -- one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece -- a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention -- was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ''Emmy'') was genuine Bach.
While I agree with the point TFA is making, its car analogy is totally baseless. You cannot use a car without wheels. You can use a convertible laptop/tablet without a physical keyboard.
A more fitting car analogy would've been advertising a vehicle as an off-road vehicle, when 4WD is an add-on option and not standard on the base model. This is in fact how many SUVs are advertised, and their manufacturers have not been laughed out of the market.
You kid, but I helped collect signatures to get a ballot initiative qualified for a State election. The general rule of thumb is that you need to collect at least 2x as many signatures as is required to qualify because when the State verifies the signatures, half of them are going to be fake, duplicate, or unverifiable. 3x if you want to be assured of qualifying.
And these are signatures collected via face-to-face interactions. Is anyone really surprised that comments submitted essentially anonymously over the Internet are full of fakes?
It took so long because you can't sue lawyers for malpractice. The rate at which lawyers are disbarred is about 0.08% per year. Compared to about 0.3% of doctors losing their license for malpractice. So either lawyers are 4x more honest than doctors, or self-policing by the American Bar Association is inadequate.
Since lawyers insist being able to sue doctors for malpractice is vital for keeping the medical profession honest, why not let us sue lawyers for malpractice? After all, what's good for the goose...
Wouldn't a balloon/blimp with a solar powered heating element to heat up the air inside (to maintain lower density than the surrounding air) and rudimentary thrusters for some maneuverability be cheaper still? You're not relying on a (relatively) complex set of electric motors for lift, just a simple resistor (heating element).
Universities were able to extract more money from students because of loans, and used that money to hire more administrators who did not help improve student performance in any way. That's why cost has gone up - because they had more money to throw around, they hired more paper pushers who don't actually help with anything. Not the other way around as you seem to think. If that one link isn't enough to convince you, take your pick.
That is ostensibly the reason the H-1B program exists. Research found a net movement of skilled workers out of the U.S. So a visa program was created to stem the tide, by encouraging skilled foreign workers to apply for jobs in the U.S. via a route which led to eventual citizenship. (Same thing for student visas - research found most of the foreigners attending U.S. colleges simply went back to their home country after graduation. They displaced an American student from college, got an education, and took that education out of the U.S. So the student visas were modified to give graduates a chance to find employment in the U.S. as a prelude to U.S. citizenship.)
But then the program was hijacked by HR personnel exploiting the "unable to find a suitable American for the job" requirement by crafting needlessly specific job requirements, so they could hire foreign workers at below-market wages. Eventually this led to entire personnel companies set up for this purpose. (Schools don't have an incentive to exploit student visas since their tuition is the same.)
There are lots of other discretionary expenses people can reduce or cut.
cable TV subscriptions
Internet plans at a higher speed than you really need
easing an expensive car you can show off instead of buying one more practical
buying a new car instead of a used car
replacing a car after using it just 3 years
getting a new computer and GPU every 3 years instead of 5
getting a new TV every 5 years so you can upgrade to something 5 inches bigger
upgrading your iPad device every 2 years
driving alone in your car instead of carpooling
owning a car instead of taking public transportation
buying a caffe mocha grande at Starbucks every morning
going out for lunch every day at work instead of packing your own lunch (made with groceries) in a brown paper sack
eating out for dinner every other evening
buying concert tickets instead of watching it on TV
consolidating your debt
price-shop big expenses like insurance
and dozens more
Phones and phone plans are just frequently given as an example because pretty much everyone has one and they're very consistent in pricing between budget and high-end models. It's an example demonstrating how things many people consider "necessities" are not really necessary, they're just spending a lot more money than they need to satisfy their desires. Not an indictment of phones per se.
That's my reason too. I used to use Chrome in a VM only for Gmail, and Firefox for everything else. Then Firefox started trying to look like Chrome. For a couple years I managed to stave it off by restoring my customized Firefox layout from previous versions. That seemed to undo all the rearranging they did to the UI elements, overriding the restrictions they put on customizing Firefox's UI. But eventually that stopped working. I was forced to learn the Chrome-like UI. After that, it was a choice between using Chrome, or using a browser trying to look and act like Chrome. So I just switched to Chrome.
Improving efficiency in energy production means generating the same amount of energy with fewer jobs. Solar provided 0.45% of the world's energy in 2015. If it needed 3 million workers to do this, then providing 100% of our energy with solar would require 667 million workers, or 8.9% of the world's population.
When India was building a dam, the chief designer toured the construction site and noticed men digging with shovels while the heavy earthmoving equipment sat unused. He asked his guide from the Indian government why they weren't using the equipment. The guide explained that this project was as much about creating jobs as it was constructing the damn. The designer replied, "Then why don't you have the workers digging with spoons? You could employ a lot more people that way."
That doesn't mean that the principles behind Net Neutrality shouldn't be upheld, however. If ISPs A, B, or C collude then it all becomes moot without regulations.
If ISPs A, B, and C collude to throttle a website that people like, once people learn that ISP D doesn't throttle it, they will cancel their subscriptions with ISPs A, B, and C to sign up with ISP D. No net neutrality or regulation needed.
Never mind that it's difficult to think up a situation where ISPs A, B, C, and D would collude to throttle a website. There is only an incentive to artificially throttle a particular site if an ISP has a monopoly and offers a service which competes with a website. That incentive vanishes when customers can flee to a different ISP in response to artificially degraded service (there is no monopoly). Because without a monopoly, artificially degrading access to a popular website just creates an equal and opposite incentive for a different ISP to swoop in and snatch up the customers wishing to visit that website.
A logo based on a stylized letter of the alphabet should not receive trademark protection, period. If you want your logo to be protected, you're going to have to be a bit more creative than taking a letter of the alphabet, tilting it, removing its hole, giving it a color, and declaring it belongs to you and nobody else is allowed to do something similar. Facebook set a really bad precedent. Despite how useless I think Twitter is, at least they came up with a creative and recognizable logo.
tl;dr - Letters of the alphabet should not be trademarkable, in any shape or form. It just creates too much risk of accidental infringement.
They wouldn't be (re)making this stuff if fans weren't throwing money at them for doing it. Ultimately, it's people willing to pay to watch these remakes which causes them to be re-made. If you want new movie ideas, you have to show you're willing to pay for them (and not willing to pay for remakes). The explosion of instant Internet reviews has actually worked against us here, as it's become harder for studios to (partially) recoup the costs of a new movie idea which flops. That makes them less likely to experiment with new movie ideas, and more likely to stick to tried and true ideas - which means a lot more remakes and reboots.
In a way, it's the same problem I'm seeing with science and R&D. Those have traditionally advanced via the shotgun approach: Lots of people try lots of different things; most miss, but some hit, and the stuff that hits is what allows technology to advance. But managers demanding success from researchers, regulations increasing the cost of trying and failing, and media increasingly and selectively mocking failures, has resulted in technology advancing more via a slower evolutionary approach rather than by leaps and bounds. The inkjet printer was invented by a bunch of guys playing with electrostatic charges to make globs of liquid move, with no thought whatsoever for practical applications.
You have to be tolerant of failure if you want lots of success. And decreased tolerance of failure leads to decreased success.
There's a fourth group you're missing. People who, because there is no evidence of it being caused by aliens or god(s), erroneously conclude that it cannot be aliens or god(s) (or aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to be indistinguishable from gods), and thus "has to be" some sort of natural phenomenon.
No explanation simply means no explanation. Any proffered explanations are merely conjecture, but rejecting those explanations is also conjecture. All are jumping to conclusions. For millennia, rogue waves were dismissed as drunken sailors' tales simply because nobody believed something so extraordinary was possible, and the sailors who experienced them could offer no proof other than their eyewitness testimony. It wasn't until 1995 that we finally managed to record evidence that they really do exist. Further work with the math showed that they are possible (and natural), just extraordinarily rare.
We've got evidence of a new weird, unexpected behavior. We're doing the right thing by trying to study it and collect more data on it (fortunately, this one doesn't change location, making it easy to study). At this stage, rejecting theories and implicitly insulting those suggesting them is the only premature conclusion.
US prosecution is a bit laughable. That criminal in Estonia did not steal your credit card numbers - they were given to him. As a non-US citizen, not resident in the US, all of whose actions took place outside of the US: he is clearly not subject to US jurisdiction.
I'm sure the US would love to prosecute him, but doing so would be a mockery of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
2000 election
48.38% Gore (Dem)
47.87% Bush (Rep)
2.74% Nader (Green)
0.96% Other (all conservative parties)
51.12% total liberal parties
48.83% total conservative parties
2016 election
48.18% Clinton (Dem)
46.09% Trump (Rep)
3.28% Johnson (Libertarian)
1.07% Stein (Green)
0.69% Other (all conservative parties) 0.05% Other (all liberal parties)
49.3% total liberal parties
50.06% total conservative parties
Since the U.S. only allows a single vote for President, if nobody wins an outright majority (50%), you have to take into account votes for other candidates to really judge the will of the people in that election. This accounts for third parties siphoning votes away from the top candidates.
In 2000, Gore won a plurality (but not a majority) of the popular vote, and the liberal parties won a majority of the popular vote. Gore was the "best" winner of the 2000 election.
In 2016, Clinton won a plurality (but not a majority) of the popular vote, but the conservative parties won a majority of the popular vote. Trump was the "best" winner of the 2016 election.
Clinton lost because she wasn't popular enough to get enough liberal voters to go to the polling stations, plain and simple. She (and many liberal pundits) refuse to recognize this, and keep trying to blame external factors for her loss. Russian meddling (never mind that if emails saying Trump had been given debate questions in advance were leaked, that would've been the scandal instead of the source being Russia), "fake news" (which has been present forever, just not with a catchy name), Comey's announcements (Clinton's polls went down when Comey announced she wasn't being charged with anything, not even a reprimand - she likely lost a large number of voters with security clearances), and now poor DNC operations (Trump's campaign was even more disorganized). Winners adapt so they can win. Losers refuse to change even when they're told they're wrong, then blame others for their loss.
That (limited) viewpoint is usually the attitude adopted by legal minors.
The reality is that this isn't just a rights issue. It's a rights and responsibility issue. I don't know what the situation is in Germany, but in the U.S. the parents are fiscally responsible for their children's misdeeds until they become a legal adult. If a 17-yo drives a car into a store and destroys it in a fit of rage and can't pay for the damages himself, it falls upon the parents to pay for it.
So it isn't treating children as if they're property, as it is keeping rights and responsibility linked. If a 14-yo wants to be declared legally independent of his or her parents, I don't think most people would have a problem with it as long as he also became financially and criminally responsible for all his deeds as if he were an adult. Unfortunately, the way most teens want it is that they get all the rights of an adult, but their parents still have to bear all the responsibility (including paying for food, clothing, and shelter).
Without the linking of responsibility to rights, the parents effectively become wage slaves to children who are free to live as they wish. That too is immoral and repulsive. It's why Monsanto's stance with Round-Up Ready seed is immoral. They want all the rights that come with ownership of the patented seed (farmers who use it are forced to pay for it), but none of the responsibility that comes with it (organic farmers who don't want it can't sue them for damages if the seed blows onto their farms).
Roughly 25% of Americans are first or second generation. Tech companies seem to average 2.21 founders.
So on average you'd expect 1 - 0.75^2.21 = 47% of tech companies to have a founder who is first or second generation (for various definitions of "founder").
TFA says the "most highly valued" tech companies have 1.5 million employees, and an even 60% of them fit the statistic. Based on some googling of number of employees, they are probably looking at just 10 companies. With a sample size of 10, the margin of error for percentages is +/- 32%.
So the 60% figure is actually well within the margin of error of what you'd expect by random chance (47% +/- 32%). Even if you go with the low point in the graph of first and second gen Americans (about 17%), the expectation is 1 - 0.83^2.21 = 34%. Add in the +/- 32% margin of error and 60% is still within the expected range.
Funny how people seem to ignore things like population and GDP when it comes to ridiculing the U.S. for having the most military spending.
The best way to gauge how much a country pollutes is probably carbon emissions per GDP. That is, how much CO2 is emitted per amount of productivity generated. By that measure, the U.S. is only 1.6x worse than the EU. China is 8.5x worse.
1980s to 1990s - transition period, with the first blockbuster console games without a corresponding arcade release (Super Mario Bros).
2000s and 2010s - all games are now released directly to console or PC. Ask a kid if they want to go to the arcade, and they'll reply "What's an arcade?"
Times change. Except for live events like concerts or sports, where being part of the crowd is part of the experience, people prefer viewing their entertainment at home. Movie theaters are not a necessity, they were just a way to amortize the high cost of the projection and sound system across all viewers. As the cost of big screen TVs, projectors, and home theater sound systems continues to go down, movie theaters are going to become a relic of the past, just like arcades. The benefits I've seen from watching movies on my projector and HTS are:
Fukushima was precipitated because although there were multiple backup generators, they were all located in the same place (basement) and all relied on a single fuel supply. When the tsunami flooded the basement and contaminated the fuel, all that redundancy was useless. Likewise, BA had multiple backup servers, but they all relied on a single power supply which fried the backup servers when it went bad.
Reliability does not come from redundancy per se. It comes from keeping all possible modes of equipment failure independent of each other. Adding redundant equipment can help achieve this, but redundancy is undone if that equipment is all vulnerable to a single mode of failure. When the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters showed signs of burning through the two O-rings sealing each mated section, NASA tried to fix it by increasing redundancy by adding a third O-ring. But they completely failed to account for an outside factor (cold weather) affecting all three O-rings simultaneously. And the Challenger blew up.
No, that's the reasoning among those who only consider the scenario which supports their ideological beliefs.
If you consider all possible scenarios, you realize it's possible for a perverted heterosexual (presumably male, though it'd be sexist to assume so) to go into the bathroom of the opposite gender by pretending to be transgender.
The resolution for the whole thing points to unisex bathrooms, with a separate partitioned area for urinals, and the stall walls extended to go from floor to ceiling so you can't peek over/under them. That would also settle the arguments about there needing to be more toilets allocated to women because they take more time so the lines are longer at womens' bathrooms. Though I suspect there will be pushback by businesses since walls extending to the floors will increase the amount of janitorial labor needed to clean multi-stall restrooms, and extending walls to the ceiling will require each stall to have its own vent.
I was shocked to realize the same thing a few years ago. We were looking for live music performers for a festival. A cellist friend brought in a CD of his friend playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. While we listened to it, he raved about how good his friend was. I pointed out he was missing a lot of notes, and everyone looked at me like I had just said spaghetti grows on trees. So I started pointing out every time he missed a note, and all I got were dumb stares. It gradually dawned on me that the vast majority of people, even trained musicians like my cellist friend, can't hear individual missed notes.
In the years since, I've thought about why this might be. I think it's because the "individual" notes in music are not acoustically distinct. When you have 4 instruments each playing different notes, it's not like putting 4 distinct marbles in a bowl. Each "note" is actually a hodgepodge of a fundamental frequency with dozens of overtones. The ratio of the amplitude of these overtones to the fundamental determine the sound of the note characteristic to each instrument (e.g. violin vs. guitar). When you play multiple notes together, these overtones combine into a morass of sound instead of remaining distinct. It's not like putting 4 separate marbles into a bowl. It's like mixing 4 different color paints in the bowl. So being able to separate out the individual notes is something your brain has to learn how to do. "What combination of notes and overtones would produce the sum total amplitude that I'm hearing?"
Except for a few exceptional people and musically inclined individuals (who near lots of notes over and over in different combinations), most people's brains never learn this. So rather than hearing individual notes, most people only hear an overall sound. They're unable to pick out a missed note in a piano concerto, or a misplaced opening riff. Listen to Ravel's Bolero (same melody repeated over and over with different instrument combinations) and try to name the instruments. Easy when it starts with individual instruments, but gets harder when multiple instruments start playing together.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html
While I agree with the point TFA is making, its car analogy is totally baseless. You cannot use a car without wheels. You can use a convertible laptop/tablet without a physical keyboard.
A more fitting car analogy would've been advertising a vehicle as an off-road vehicle, when 4WD is an add-on option and not standard on the base model. This is in fact how many SUVs are advertised, and their manufacturers have not been laughed out of the market.
You kid, but I helped collect signatures to get a ballot initiative qualified for a State election. The general rule of thumb is that you need to collect at least 2x as many signatures as is required to qualify because when the State verifies the signatures, half of them are going to be fake, duplicate, or unverifiable. 3x if you want to be assured of qualifying.
And these are signatures collected via face-to-face interactions. Is anyone really surprised that comments submitted essentially anonymously over the Internet are full of fakes?
It took so long because you can't sue lawyers for malpractice. The rate at which lawyers are disbarred is about 0.08% per year. Compared to about 0.3% of doctors losing their license for malpractice. So either lawyers are 4x more honest than doctors, or self-policing by the American Bar Association is inadequate.
Since lawyers insist being able to sue doctors for malpractice is vital for keeping the medical profession honest, why not let us sue lawyers for malpractice? After all, what's good for the goose...
Wouldn't a balloon/blimp with a solar powered heating element to heat up the air inside (to maintain lower density than the surrounding air) and rudimentary thrusters for some maneuverability be cheaper still? You're not relying on a (relatively) complex set of electric motors for lift, just a simple resistor (heating element).
Universities were able to extract more money from students because of loans, and used that money to hire more administrators who did not help improve student performance in any way. That's why cost has gone up - because they had more money to throw around, they hired more paper pushers who don't actually help with anything. Not the other way around as you seem to think. If that one link isn't enough to convince you, take your pick.
That is ostensibly the reason the H-1B program exists. Research found a net movement of skilled workers out of the U.S. So a visa program was created to stem the tide, by encouraging skilled foreign workers to apply for jobs in the U.S. via a route which led to eventual citizenship. (Same thing for student visas - research found most of the foreigners attending U.S. colleges simply went back to their home country after graduation. They displaced an American student from college, got an education, and took that education out of the U.S. So the student visas were modified to give graduates a chance to find employment in the U.S. as a prelude to U.S. citizenship.)
But then the program was hijacked by HR personnel exploiting the "unable to find a suitable American for the job" requirement by crafting needlessly specific job requirements, so they could hire foreign workers at below-market wages. Eventually this led to entire personnel companies set up for this purpose. (Schools don't have an incentive to exploit student visas since their tuition is the same.)
Phones and phone plans are just frequently given as an example because pretty much everyone has one and they're very consistent in pricing between budget and high-end models. It's an example demonstrating how things many people consider "necessities" are not really necessary, they're just spending a lot more money than they need to satisfy their desires. Not an indictment of phones per se.
Which is why Net Neutrality is not the answer. Competition among Internet service providers is.
That's my reason too. I used to use Chrome in a VM only for Gmail, and Firefox for everything else. Then Firefox started trying to look like Chrome. For a couple years I managed to stave it off by restoring my customized Firefox layout from previous versions. That seemed to undo all the rearranging they did to the UI elements, overriding the restrictions they put on customizing Firefox's UI. But eventually that stopped working. I was forced to learn the Chrome-like UI. After that, it was a choice between using Chrome, or using a browser trying to look and act like Chrome. So I just switched to Chrome.
Improving efficiency in energy production means generating the same amount of energy with fewer jobs. Solar provided 0.45% of the world's energy in 2015. If it needed 3 million workers to do this, then providing 100% of our energy with solar would require 667 million workers, or 8.9% of the world's population.
When India was building a dam, the chief designer toured the construction site and noticed men digging with shovels while the heavy earthmoving equipment sat unused. He asked his guide from the Indian government why they weren't using the equipment. The guide explained that this project was as much about creating jobs as it was constructing the damn. The designer replied, "Then why don't you have the workers digging with spoons? You could employ a lot more people that way."
If ISPs A, B, and C collude to throttle a website that people like, once people learn that ISP D doesn't throttle it, they will cancel their subscriptions with ISPs A, B, and C to sign up with ISP D. No net neutrality or regulation needed.
Never mind that it's difficult to think up a situation where ISPs A, B, C, and D would collude to throttle a website. There is only an incentive to artificially throttle a particular site if an ISP has a monopoly and offers a service which competes with a website. That incentive vanishes when customers can flee to a different ISP in response to artificially degraded service (there is no monopoly). Because without a monopoly, artificially degrading access to a popular website just creates an equal and opposite incentive for a different ISP to swoop in and snatch up the customers wishing to visit that website.
A logo based on a stylized letter of the alphabet should not receive trademark protection, period. If you want your logo to be protected, you're going to have to be a bit more creative than taking a letter of the alphabet, tilting it, removing its hole, giving it a color, and declaring it belongs to you and nobody else is allowed to do something similar. Facebook set a really bad precedent. Despite how useless I think Twitter is, at least they came up with a creative and recognizable logo.
tl;dr - Letters of the alphabet should not be trademarkable, in any shape or form. It just creates too much risk of accidental infringement.
Seems to be working for Star Wars / Star Trek.
They wouldn't be (re)making this stuff if fans weren't throwing money at them for doing it. Ultimately, it's people willing to pay to watch these remakes which causes them to be re-made. If you want new movie ideas, you have to show you're willing to pay for them (and not willing to pay for remakes). The explosion of instant Internet reviews has actually worked against us here, as it's become harder for studios to (partially) recoup the costs of a new movie idea which flops. That makes them less likely to experiment with new movie ideas, and more likely to stick to tried and true ideas - which means a lot more remakes and reboots.
In a way, it's the same problem I'm seeing with science and R&D. Those have traditionally advanced via the shotgun approach: Lots of people try lots of different things; most miss, but some hit, and the stuff that hits is what allows technology to advance. But managers demanding success from researchers, regulations increasing the cost of trying and failing, and media increasingly and selectively mocking failures, has resulted in technology advancing more via a slower evolutionary approach rather than by leaps and bounds. The inkjet printer was invented by a bunch of guys playing with electrostatic charges to make globs of liquid move, with no thought whatsoever for practical applications.
You have to be tolerant of failure if you want lots of success. And decreased tolerance of failure leads to decreased success.
There's a fourth group you're missing. People who, because there is no evidence of it being caused by aliens or god(s), erroneously conclude that it cannot be aliens or god(s) (or aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to be indistinguishable from gods), and thus "has to be" some sort of natural phenomenon.
No explanation simply means no explanation. Any proffered explanations are merely conjecture, but rejecting those explanations is also conjecture. All are jumping to conclusions. For millennia, rogue waves were dismissed as drunken sailors' tales simply because nobody believed something so extraordinary was possible, and the sailors who experienced them could offer no proof other than their eyewitness testimony. It wasn't until 1995 that we finally managed to record evidence that they really do exist. Further work with the math showed that they are possible (and natural), just extraordinarily rare.
We've got evidence of a new weird, unexpected behavior. We're doing the right thing by trying to study it and collect more data on it (fortunately, this one doesn't change location, making it easy to study). At this stage, rejecting theories and implicitly insulting those suggesting them is the only premature conclusion.
US prosecution is a bit laughable. That criminal in Estonia did not steal your credit card numbers - they were given to him. As a non-US citizen, not resident in the US, all of whose actions took place outside of the US: he is clearly not subject to US jurisdiction.
I'm sure the US would love to prosecute him, but doing so would be a mockery of justice.
LCD TVs using LED backlights were dubbed "LED TVs" to distinguish them from the original batch of LCD TVs which used CCFL backlights.