Given recent news reports about altercations between airliner personnel and passengers, I wouldn't at all be surprised if airlines began video surveillance of ticketing booths gates, and the interior of airplanes. The problem with cell phone video is that it almost always misses the beginning of the incident. So if the industry feels they are being wrongly criticized by the news media replaying and relying exclusively on cell phone video to characterize a story, they are going to respond by installing 24/7 surveillance video.
The main actor I can see working against this isn't the EFF. It's the NTSB. They won't want video of people in a plane cabin dying in a plane crash to become public. Because planes are much safer than cars, but any such video would cause irrational people to drive rather than fly, leading to more net deaths. For ticketing booths and gates, I suspect DHS already requires 24/7 video surveillance. Especially after the terrorist attack at Amsterdam airport.
Essentially you can either use the same improvements to make the cars more efficient in terms of gas usage or you can make them have more total horsepower.
That's not true. it's a false dichotomy fabricated by people trying to justify their purchase of an econobox by criticizing people who refuse to.
The vast majority of your driving occurs in the 20-25 hp band (highway cruise). Peak hp (or close to it) is only used during acceleration so has minimal effect on overall mileage (unless you're doing a lot of stop/starting at high acceleration). All you have to do is tune an engine with high peak power to be efficient in the 20-25 hp range.
In the 20th century, increasing peak power usually required increasing engine displacement (more and bigger cylinders). This added a lot of weight, as well as made it difficult to improve efficiency in the 20-25 hp range, so the criticism of high-hp engines had some basis back then. But 21st century engines are relying more on advanced technologies like fuel injection and turbochargers to substitute for displacement. Volvo puts a 4-cylinder 2.0 liter engine in their 4400 lb XC90 (their biggest SUV). It generates 316 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque, and is able to pull the SUV from 0-60 in 6.5 seconds. Yet gets 20 MPG city, 25 MPG highway.
(And before you scoff at a "mere" 25 MPG, MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. So the bigger the MPG number, the smaller the fuel savings. Improving your car's mileage from 16 MPG to 25 MPG saves more fuel than increasing it from 25 MPG to 50 MPG.)
Unless you spend 100% of your driving time stuck in 7 mph traffic. In which case I would suggest the problem isn't the car or the commute, but the government where you live in encouraging growth but failing to keep its transportation infrastructure up to date.
Even at low or normal highway speeds, these high-hp cars get good (or at least decent) gas mileage. Cruising at highway speeds only requires about 20-25 horsepower. So if you tune an engine with high peak power to be efficient at the 20-25 hp power band, it can get decent MPG, yet still have gobs of power on tap if you decide to floor it.
Agreed that pairing the fingerprint scanner to the device adds security (though the total level of security is still rather low because, as you point out, you leave your fingerprints everywhere).
But security is not Apple's primary goal. Self-enrichment is. When Apple bought Authentec (who made the fingerpring scanners), they dropped support for all scanners Authentec had sold in the past. Not only that, they removed existing drivers and software from the Authentec website. I only discovered this when I had to reinstall Windows. I had updated my Authentec software several times, and the backup website database I'd made couldn't be read by the version that shipped with the laptop. I went to the Authentec website only to find a message saying that support had been dropped. The Wayback Machine ended up saving my butt because for some reason they'd archived the zip file containing the software.
Apple screwed over tens if not hundreds of millions of owners of existing devices and compromised their security just so they could retroactively make Authentec's scanners exclusive to Apple products.
Way to compare to a nonexistent zero state. 100 ambulance calls in 3.4 years for 10,000 employees is an incident rate of 2.9 per 1000 people per year.
The hospitalization rate for people aged 18-44 is 78.9 per 1000. The rate for people aged 45-65 is 108.8 per 1000. So the rate for ages 18-65 is 2 / (1/78.9 + 1/108.8) = 91.5 per 1000.
Basically you're advocating that Tesla employees should unionize because Tesla is mistreating them by keeping them 30x healthier at work than they are at home.
A decade ago I would've agreed with you. But modern computers have become so fast you can be OS-agnostic and just run stuff in virtual machines.
I run Windows on my laptop, but only because the 3D games I play are the only things that don't run well in a VM.
My other Windows programs run inside a virtual machine (I got tired of having to reinstall all my Windows programs every time I upgraded laptops).
I run FreeBSD in a VM for my file server and backups.
I run Linux Mint in a VM for when I do stuff with Linux.
I have a separate Win 10 VM for if I need to do anything risky (e.g. investigating a suspicious email attachment). If it gets malware and blows up, I just revert it to a snapshot.
I have Win 8, Win 7, and Win XP VMs that I fire up when a client wants my help with one of those legacy OSes.
I also had an OS X VM (Apple prohibits it in their license, but it's trivial to remove the software block) when I had a couple Mac clients.
You're forgetting - those ISP monopolies exist because of government regulation. The local governments award exclusive cable or phone contracts to a single company (often for kickbacks or coverage agreements), and in exchange they prohibit competition.
Basically, net neutrality is government regulation trying to fix flaws in other government regulation. The entire problem began with the premise that government oversight was necessary for "proper" and "fair" phone and cable service.
But it isn't a natural monopoly or duopoly. The entity choosing which one or two companies provide Internet service is the local government. They're the ones creating the monopoly (or duopoly). If there's no net neutrality and an ISP is found to be throttling websites based on their political affiliation, the local government could potentially revoke their charter and award the service contract to a different ISP.
You see, there are two ways around the problem of neutral access. The government regulation approach (government-granted ISP monopolies, net neutrality), or the free market approach (competition between multiple ISPs, no net neutrality). With the free market approach, if an ISP tries to throttle your access to Netflix or Breitbart or the ACLU, and customers don't like it, the customer simply switches service to a different ISP who doesn't throttle. With the government approach, if that happens the customer has to wait for the government to do something about it, whether it be net neutrality or revoking the ISP's charter. Net neutrality is just one of many possible government band-aids to cover up a government-created problem.
The study used the records of hospitalists because generally speaking, the patient does not get a chance to choose their hospitalist
But does the hospitalist get to choose the patient? I'm not familiar with hospital procedures so can't say. The original paper addresses it with:
Hospitalists typically work in scheduled shifts or blocks (such as one week on and one week off) and do not treat patients in the outpatient setting. Therefore, within the same hospital, patients treated by hospitalists are plausibly quasi-randomized to a particular hospitalist based only on the time of the patient's admission and the hospitalist's work schedule."
So they're relying on the fact that hospitalists work in scheduled shifts to randomize the patient to hospitalist allocation. But that goes out the window if there are 2 hospitalists working the same shift, and the younger one reviews the initial symptoms for an incoming patient and says "This looks like a tough one. I'd better give it to Bob since he's older and more experienced."
Because an alarming ecological story comes up, and without evidence or even a rational hypothetical cause, it's immediately blamed on climate change.
Most insects are herbivorous, so rely on plants for food. Global warming (increasing global temperatures, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, shorter winters) are conducive to plant growth. So you'd actually expect temperatures increasing by a few degrees to lead to more insects, not fewer.
Loss of continuous habitat is possible, but I'd consider it unlikely. Larger species are more susceptible to that than smaller ones like insects. We would've noticed the loss of biomass there first.
My bet is on pesticides. You state later that Canada and the EU are eco-friendly, therefore speculating that they use less pesticides. But this map (pages 17, 47-49) shows the EU uses more pesticides per hectare than the U.S./Canada, and are only exceeded by China and some South and Central American countries. (The EU uses more pesticides than the U.S. and Canada because it has less arable land but more population. So to feed itself the EU needs to grow more food per hectare.) Pesticide use in kg/ha is down slightly since 1989, but I suspect this is more than offset by development of more effective pesticides.
No, the people who stole the code from the NSA and released it without giving Microsoft a couple months to come up with patches bear the largest share of the blame. They're the ones who turned this into a 0-day exploit.
Releasing the code to the public wasn't necessary to shame and cripple the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. All they needed to do was give Microsoft a copy and publicly tell them to patch it or they'd make it public in 60 days. Once Microsoft confirmed the vulnerabilities were real, the NSA would've been shamed. And once the exploits were patched, the NSA tools would've become useless, and the objective of crippling the NSA and stopping their illegal wiretapping would've been achieved.
But they didn't do that. They immediately released it to the public. The people who stole and released the NSA software aren't freedom fighters or conscientious activists for democracy. They're anarchists and criminals. Those of you assuming some noble intent in their actions are mistakenly projecting your desires.
The amusing thing is Apple doesn't make screens. They buy them pre-made from Samsung or LG, and Samsung has been making these curved screens for years. So either Apple patented (and the USPTO granted) something both companies thought was so obvious it couldn't be patented, or they pulled a Kawasaki (who basically photocopied the U.S. patent application for the jetski, changed the name of the inventor to themselves, and submitted it for a Japanese patent).
Back in the 1970s, you either paid for a movie ticket to see a movie, or waited 3-5 years for it to show up on TV at an indeterminate time, with commercials interspersed, and with unknown editing.
Today, if you don't pay for a ticket, you can catch it on pay per view in a couple months, or rent it on Blu-ray/DVD/streaming, or watch it on a pay movie channel, or stream it from a service you already pay for like Netflix, or wait a couple years for it to show up on TV, or pirate it.
In the face all that new competition, the logical thing to do is to lower movie ticket prices to make the theater experience more attractive. Instead, studios and theaters have done the opposite and raised ticket prices. I don't mind seeing the occasional bad movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime, or HBO because I'm already paying for those services. The only thing I lose is 90-120 minutes of my time (and that's only if I choose not to stop watching before the movie finishes). With a theater ticket I lose my money as well as my time. So I don't think it's at all surprising that people are holding theater movies to a higher standard than in the past. The studios need adapt to how technology has changed in the last 50 years - lower ticket prices, or improve the ratio of good to bad movies.
I use an HP48 emulator on my smartphone. But I can understand students being upset about classes requiring a TI calculator because the teachers ban smartphones during tests. I remember when the HP28C was first released, some enterprising students figured out a way to use its IR transmitter/receiver to communicate with each other during tests. In response, subsequent models had a crippled IR receiver with very limited range.
I *have* to disable the update service on my laptop. Win 10 insists on installing newer Intel graphics drivers, except they don't work with the Optimus setup on my laptop. With the newer Intel drivers, any 3D game I start crashes when it tries to use the Nvidia card. So I have to let Windows 10 update my laptop, disable the update service, then reinstall the Intel GPU drivers provided by my laptop vendor (and also the Nvidia drivers if Windows 10 has auto-updated those).
When Win 10 first came out, it gave you the option to disable updates to a specific device driver. But for some inexplicable reason, Microsoft removed this option in the Oct 2016 update. Because of Microsoft's brain-dead update policies, I literally cannot use my gaming laptop to play games if I have Windows Update enabled.
1) Who watches TV shows on their *phone*??? Honestly, I can't even imagine.
Kids, when the parents want them to shut up for 3 minutes at a restaurant so they can place their order with the waitress without constantly having to yell at Billy to stop pulling Susie's hair.
2) Why does the phone need to be non-rooted? I use Netflix just fine on my Linux system, by using Google Chrome (it's the only thing I use that browser for in fact). I don't have to have a corporate-controlled OS, only a corporate-controlled DRMed browser for that one purpose. So why can't Netflix do things that way on phones for those weirdos who want to watch Netflix on a phone?
Because of Hollywood's paranoia that you're going to capture the digital stream and save a copy to rip the movie. They require the movie remain encrypted from reading, to video decode, to display. Hollywood approves two types of playback devices for DRM media (streams, Blu-rays, DVDs, etc).
A hardware device. The manufacturer or app maker submits the device to Hollywood for approval. Hollywood looks it over, determines it's secure, and gives it their stamp of approval. This is why Netflix came out on iOS before Android. Netflix only had to submit a handful of iPhones and iPads for approval. They had to submit hundreds of Android devices for approval.
A general purpose computing device. On these, to satisfy Hollywood, the DRM decryption and video decode has to be done inside an encrypted virtual machine. The drawback of this is that the playback program cannot use dedicated video playback hardware in the GPU - that would require the unencrypted data stream be sent to the GPU, which would then produce an unencrypted video stream. That's a no-no to Hollywood, so PCs and browsers unencrypt the video completely in software inside an encrypted virtual machine (which is why the browser players always use Flash or Silverlight, instead of HTML 5 - its the only way to create a virtual machine in a browser). The extra power consumption for this inefficient method of decoding makes this approach unfeasible for a mobile device like a phone or tablet.
If you use a phone or tablet just as an app platform, then it functions like a hardware device and there's no problem. But if you root it, you can begin using it like a general purpose computing device. Someone could conceivably write a program to intercept the unencrypted data stream the Netflix app is sending to the phone's GPU for video decode, and save a copy to effectively rip the movie. Hollywood has probably been pushing Netflix and Google to plug this hole for years. Limiting Netflix to non-rooted devices is probably Netflix's concession to satisfy Hollywood.
The problem with worms is that one infected device momentarily connected can spread the infection. So someone plugs in a USB flash drive to a computer on your restricted VLAN to copy some MP3s they want to listen to, spreads that infection to that computer, which then spreads it to the rest of the devices on the VLAN. The strength of your security is determined by your weakest link - in this case the dumbest person with physical access to your secure network.
On the surface, this could be good: writers not having to worry about eating and paying rent can concentrate on better writing.
That's not how it works.
The current bad writers who are willing to work for the current pay have to first be fired. Then new better writers who were unwilling to work for the old amount of pay, but are willing to work for the new higher pay have to be hired to replace all the bad writers you just fired.
For there to be a sale, there has to be a buyer. As Henry Ford inadvertently found when he paid his workers what was then considered an outlandishly high wage, if workers are being underpaid, then increasing their wages actually increases economic activity. His workers were paid enough to afford to buy the cars they were building. And the increased sales of his cars helped catapult Ford into one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Countries where the rich keep the masses in check (South/Central America, Middle East) have stagnated at a productivity level of around $10k-$20k per capita per year. To reach Western levels of productivity ($30k-$60k per capita per year), you have to pay workers much closer to the actual value of their productivity. If you don't pay the masses enough, they can't afford to buy stuff, economic activity suffers, and your per capita productivity drops.
So the doomsday scenario of automation taking away everyone's jobs is highly unlikely to happen in developed nations. If it did, the wealthy would actually start to lose wealth because the masses would be underemployed and no longer able to buy the products being produced in automated factories. Every sale needs a buyer. It would then become in the wealthy class' best interest to find ways to put the unemployed back to work - so they can earn money and once again start buying stuff the wealthy are producing in their automated factories. Everyone (wealthy, middle class, poor) will be on the same page, and government action to rectify the situation will pass effortlessly.
We need to educate everyone: Backup your data redundantly and check it regularly, and don't pay ransomware.
Actually, I think this is one problem which does have a (partial) technical solution. Right now files on computer storage are treated as unique discrete objects with a single state. We're unnecessarily treating a virtual object as if it were a physical object. Newer filesystems have the ability to retain the previous states of a file (snapshots). NTFS has it, but it has to be turned on manually. It's basically like making a backup every time you change or modify a file. If ransomware encrypts the files on such a system, all you have to do is remove the ransomware, delete the instances of files created after the time of infection, and use the previous version of those files instead.
If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you've got a 2 TB HDD and your files are only taking up 500 GB, then the remaining 1.5 TB is essentially wasted. Why not use some of it to store previous instances of files? It's like how unused RAM is used as an ad-hoc disk cache by all modern filesystems. You have it, you're not using it, so better to use it for something instead of nothing. It's not a true backup (you'll lose it if your HDD dies), but it's better than nothing. And on numerous occasions I've been asked to recover files which were overwritten - the owner accidentally saved a new or empty file with the same name as a needed file. With current filesystems when you do that, the old file's data is obliterated by the new data, making it unrecoverable.
All that needs to be done to protect against ransomware is to make the snapshotting an integral function of the filesystem, not something that can be controlled directly (ransomware can just turn off NTFS' shadow copies). Then ransomware would have to do something like first fill the drive's free space with files containing random numbers (to defeat disk compression) to wipe out the snapshots, before it could start encrypting files. The slowdown associated with that would give victims more time to react - 3 of the 4 people who've contacted me because they were hit by ransomware contacted me while their system was being encrypted, or were smart enough to recognize what was going on and shut off the computer immediately.
If they made 100 million nuisance calls, the company officers should be required to answer 100 million nuisance calls before they're allowed free. Because collectively that's how much of everyone's time they wasted with their calls. (And to save you the math, at 10 seconds per call, that's 32 years answering 24/7.)
Technically it wasn't done accidentally. It was done deliberately because the programmer was being lazy. The way you're supposed to do it is via
#ifdef DEBUG
insert debug code here
#endif
Then you can enable/disable all the debug code with a single #define DEBUG statement. But people being lazy, they stick the debug code straight in thinking they'll just remember to comment it out before they ship the end product. Except they forget. QA can't catch this form of laziness because short of reading all the code with a programmer's eye, there's no way to distinguish debug code from actual code. Which is why you're supposed to use #ifdef DEBUG in the first place - so automated QA can distinguish debug code from real code.
The real fix here is probably for IDEs to have a macro which automatically inserts the #ifdef DEBUG and #endif statements with a single keystroke or button-press, to discourage programmers from being lazy.
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
A public space program gets funded because people think it's a good idea.
A private space program gets funded because it actually is a good idea (return exceeds investment).
The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea. And I don't say that from a public vs private space exploration standpoint. Just ask anyone in NASA about the manned vs. unmanned exploration budget division. We get much better bang for the buck with unmanned exploration. Just look at a typical list of NASA's greatest missions. The only manned mission on the list is the moon landing.
Sanders would have lost even more easily than Clinton did. People had to hate Clinton for Clinton to lose. Sanders merely needed to say what he represented.
You're assuming a the same people who voted in Clinton vs Trump would've voted in Sanders vs Trump. That's not the case. Clinton didn't lose because people who voted for Trump hated her. Clinton lost because people who voted for Obama hated her, and didn't bother to show up to vote.
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans. The Democrats' problem has always been lower turnout. For them to win elections, they need a candidate who inspires registered Democrats to bother to vote. Obama did that. Sanders did that. Clinton did not. 2016 turnout was down in counties where Clinton won, up in counties that Trump won. Clinton's message of "If you don't vote for me Trump will win" simply wasn't good enough to inspire Democrats to go to the polls.
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Given recent news reports about altercations between airliner personnel and passengers, I wouldn't at all be surprised if airlines began video surveillance of ticketing booths gates, and the interior of airplanes. The problem with cell phone video is that it almost always misses the beginning of the incident. So if the industry feels they are being wrongly criticized by the news media replaying and relying exclusively on cell phone video to characterize a story, they are going to respond by installing 24/7 surveillance video.
The main actor I can see working against this isn't the EFF. It's the NTSB. They won't want video of people in a plane cabin dying in a plane crash to become public. Because planes are much safer than cars, but any such video would cause irrational people to drive rather than fly, leading to more net deaths. For ticketing booths and gates, I suspect DHS already requires 24/7 video surveillance. Especially after the terrorist attack at Amsterdam airport.
That's not true. it's a false dichotomy fabricated by people trying to justify their purchase of an econobox by criticizing people who refuse to.
The vast majority of your driving occurs in the 20-25 hp band (highway cruise). Peak hp (or close to it) is only used during acceleration so has minimal effect on overall mileage (unless you're doing a lot of stop/starting at high acceleration). All you have to do is tune an engine with high peak power to be efficient in the 20-25 hp range.
In the 20th century, increasing peak power usually required increasing engine displacement (more and bigger cylinders). This added a lot of weight, as well as made it difficult to improve efficiency in the 20-25 hp range, so the criticism of high-hp engines had some basis back then. But 21st century engines are relying more on advanced technologies like fuel injection and turbochargers to substitute for displacement. Volvo puts a 4-cylinder 2.0 liter engine in their 4400 lb XC90 (their biggest SUV). It generates 316 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque, and is able to pull the SUV from 0-60 in 6.5 seconds. Yet gets 20 MPG city, 25 MPG highway.
(And before you scoff at a "mere" 25 MPG, MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. So the bigger the MPG number, the smaller the fuel savings. Improving your car's mileage from 16 MPG to 25 MPG saves more fuel than increasing it from 25 MPG to 50 MPG.)
Unless you spend 100% of your driving time stuck in 7 mph traffic. In which case I would suggest the problem isn't the car or the commute, but the government where you live in encouraging growth but failing to keep its transportation infrastructure up to date.
Even at low or normal highway speeds, these high-hp cars get good (or at least decent) gas mileage. Cruising at highway speeds only requires about 20-25 horsepower. So if you tune an engine with high peak power to be efficient at the 20-25 hp power band, it can get decent MPG, yet still have gobs of power on tap if you decide to floor it.
Agreed that pairing the fingerprint scanner to the device adds security (though the total level of security is still rather low because, as you point out, you leave your fingerprints everywhere).
But security is not Apple's primary goal. Self-enrichment is. When Apple bought Authentec (who made the fingerpring scanners), they dropped support for all scanners Authentec had sold in the past. Not only that, they removed existing drivers and software from the Authentec website. I only discovered this when I had to reinstall Windows. I had updated my Authentec software several times, and the backup website database I'd made couldn't be read by the version that shipped with the laptop. I went to the Authentec website only to find a message saying that support had been dropped. The Wayback Machine ended up saving my butt because for some reason they'd archived the zip file containing the software.
Apple screwed over tens if not hundreds of millions of owners of existing devices and compromised their security just so they could retroactively make Authentec's scanners exclusive to Apple products.
Way to compare to a nonexistent zero state. 100 ambulance calls in 3.4 years for 10,000 employees is an incident rate of 2.9 per 1000 people per year.
The hospitalization rate for people aged 18-44 is 78.9 per 1000. The rate for people aged 45-65 is 108.8 per 1000. So the rate for ages 18-65 is 2 / (1/78.9 + 1/108.8) = 91.5 per 1000.
Basically you're advocating that Tesla employees should unionize because Tesla is mistreating them by keeping them 30x healthier at work than they are at home.
You're forgetting - those ISP monopolies exist because of government regulation. The local governments award exclusive cable or phone contracts to a single company (often for kickbacks or coverage agreements), and in exchange they prohibit competition.
Basically, net neutrality is government regulation trying to fix flaws in other government regulation. The entire problem began with the premise that government oversight was necessary for "proper" and "fair" phone and cable service.
Basically, we've figured out how to make a rudimentary deflector shield.
But it isn't a natural monopoly or duopoly. The entity choosing which one or two companies provide Internet service is the local government. They're the ones creating the monopoly (or duopoly). If there's no net neutrality and an ISP is found to be throttling websites based on their political affiliation, the local government could potentially revoke their charter and award the service contract to a different ISP.
You see, there are two ways around the problem of neutral access. The government regulation approach (government-granted ISP monopolies, net neutrality), or the free market approach (competition between multiple ISPs, no net neutrality). With the free market approach, if an ISP tries to throttle your access to Netflix or Breitbart or the ACLU, and customers don't like it, the customer simply switches service to a different ISP who doesn't throttle. With the government approach, if that happens the customer has to wait for the government to do something about it, whether it be net neutrality or revoking the ISP's charter. Net neutrality is just one of many possible government band-aids to cover up a government-created problem.
But does the hospitalist get to choose the patient? I'm not familiar with hospital procedures so can't say. The original paper addresses it with:
So they're relying on the fact that hospitalists work in scheduled shifts to randomize the patient to hospitalist allocation. But that goes out the window if there are 2 hospitalists working the same shift, and the younger one reviews the initial symptoms for an incoming patient and says "This looks like a tough one. I'd better give it to Bob since he's older and more experienced."
Because an alarming ecological story comes up, and without evidence or even a rational hypothetical cause, it's immediately blamed on climate change.
Most insects are herbivorous, so rely on plants for food. Global warming (increasing global temperatures, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, shorter winters) are conducive to plant growth. So you'd actually expect temperatures increasing by a few degrees to lead to more insects, not fewer.
Loss of continuous habitat is possible, but I'd consider it unlikely. Larger species are more susceptible to that than smaller ones like insects. We would've noticed the loss of biomass there first.
My bet is on pesticides. You state later that Canada and the EU are eco-friendly, therefore speculating that they use less pesticides. But this map (pages 17, 47-49) shows the EU uses more pesticides per hectare than the U.S./Canada, and are only exceeded by China and some South and Central American countries. (The EU uses more pesticides than the U.S. and Canada because it has less arable land but more population. So to feed itself the EU needs to grow more food per hectare.) Pesticide use in kg/ha is down slightly since 1989, but I suspect this is more than offset by development of more effective pesticides.
No, the people who stole the code from the NSA and released it without giving Microsoft a couple months to come up with patches bear the largest share of the blame. They're the ones who turned this into a 0-day exploit.
Releasing the code to the public wasn't necessary to shame and cripple the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. All they needed to do was give Microsoft a copy and publicly tell them to patch it or they'd make it public in 60 days. Once Microsoft confirmed the vulnerabilities were real, the NSA would've been shamed. And once the exploits were patched, the NSA tools would've become useless, and the objective of crippling the NSA and stopping their illegal wiretapping would've been achieved.
But they didn't do that. They immediately released it to the public. The people who stole and released the NSA software aren't freedom fighters or conscientious activists for democracy. They're anarchists and criminals. Those of you assuming some noble intent in their actions are mistakenly projecting your desires.
The amusing thing is Apple doesn't make screens. They buy them pre-made from Samsung or LG, and Samsung has been making these curved screens for years. So either Apple patented (and the USPTO granted) something both companies thought was so obvious it couldn't be patented, or they pulled a Kawasaki (who basically photocopied the U.S. patent application for the jetski, changed the name of the inventor to themselves, and submitted it for a Japanese patent).
Back in the 1970s, you either paid for a movie ticket to see a movie, or waited 3-5 years for it to show up on TV at an indeterminate time, with commercials interspersed, and with unknown editing.
Today, if you don't pay for a ticket, you can catch it on pay per view in a couple months, or rent it on Blu-ray/DVD/streaming, or watch it on a pay movie channel, or stream it from a service you already pay for like Netflix, or wait a couple years for it to show up on TV, or pirate it.
In the face all that new competition, the logical thing to do is to lower movie ticket prices to make the theater experience more attractive. Instead, studios and theaters have done the opposite and raised ticket prices. I don't mind seeing the occasional bad movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime, or HBO because I'm already paying for those services. The only thing I lose is 90-120 minutes of my time (and that's only if I choose not to stop watching before the movie finishes). With a theater ticket I lose my money as well as my time. So I don't think it's at all surprising that people are holding theater movies to a higher standard than in the past. The studios need adapt to how technology has changed in the last 50 years - lower ticket prices, or improve the ratio of good to bad movies.
HP quit the scientific calculator business in 2003. Til then, they were the main competitor with TI for the high-end calculator business. TI has had a free ride since then.
I use an HP48 emulator on my smartphone. But I can understand students being upset about classes requiring a TI calculator because the teachers ban smartphones during tests. I remember when the HP28C was first released, some enterprising students figured out a way to use its IR transmitter/receiver to communicate with each other during tests. In response, subsequent models had a crippled IR receiver with very limited range.
I *have* to disable the update service on my laptop. Win 10 insists on installing newer Intel graphics drivers, except they don't work with the Optimus setup on my laptop. With the newer Intel drivers, any 3D game I start crashes when it tries to use the Nvidia card. So I have to let Windows 10 update my laptop, disable the update service, then reinstall the Intel GPU drivers provided by my laptop vendor (and also the Nvidia drivers if Windows 10 has auto-updated those).
When Win 10 first came out, it gave you the option to disable updates to a specific device driver. But for some inexplicable reason, Microsoft removed this option in the Oct 2016 update. Because of Microsoft's brain-dead update policies, I literally cannot use my gaming laptop to play games if I have Windows Update enabled.
Kids, when the parents want them to shut up for 3 minutes at a restaurant so they can place their order with the waitress without constantly having to yell at Billy to stop pulling Susie's hair.
Because of Hollywood's paranoia that you're going to capture the digital stream and save a copy to rip the movie. They require the movie remain encrypted from reading, to video decode, to display. Hollywood approves two types of playback devices for DRM media (streams, Blu-rays, DVDs, etc).
If you use a phone or tablet just as an app platform, then it functions like a hardware device and there's no problem. But if you root it, you can begin using it like a general purpose computing device. Someone could conceivably write a program to intercept the unencrypted data stream the Netflix app is sending to the phone's GPU for video decode, and save a copy to effectively rip the movie. Hollywood has probably been pushing Netflix and Google to plug this hole for years. Limiting Netflix to non-rooted devices is probably Netflix's concession to satisfy Hollywood.
The problem with worms is that one infected device momentarily connected can spread the infection. So someone plugs in a USB flash drive to a computer on your restricted VLAN to copy some MP3s they want to listen to, spreads that infection to that computer, which then spreads it to the rest of the devices on the VLAN. The strength of your security is determined by your weakest link - in this case the dumbest person with physical access to your secure network.
That's not how it works.
The current bad writers who are willing to work for the current pay have to first be fired. Then new better writers who were unwilling to work for the old amount of pay, but are willing to work for the new higher pay have to be hired to replace all the bad writers you just fired.
For there to be a sale, there has to be a buyer. As Henry Ford inadvertently found when he paid his workers what was then considered an outlandishly high wage, if workers are being underpaid, then increasing their wages actually increases economic activity. His workers were paid enough to afford to buy the cars they were building. And the increased sales of his cars helped catapult Ford into one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Countries where the rich keep the masses in check (South/Central America, Middle East) have stagnated at a productivity level of around $10k-$20k per capita per year. To reach Western levels of productivity ($30k-$60k per capita per year), you have to pay workers much closer to the actual value of their productivity. If you don't pay the masses enough, they can't afford to buy stuff, economic activity suffers, and your per capita productivity drops.
So the doomsday scenario of automation taking away everyone's jobs is highly unlikely to happen in developed nations. If it did, the wealthy would actually start to lose wealth because the masses would be underemployed and no longer able to buy the products being produced in automated factories. Every sale needs a buyer. It would then become in the wealthy class' best interest to find ways to put the unemployed back to work - so they can earn money and once again start buying stuff the wealthy are producing in their automated factories. Everyone (wealthy, middle class, poor) will be on the same page, and government action to rectify the situation will pass effortlessly.
Actually, I think this is one problem which does have a (partial) technical solution. Right now files on computer storage are treated as unique discrete objects with a single state. We're unnecessarily treating a virtual object as if it were a physical object. Newer filesystems have the ability to retain the previous states of a file (snapshots). NTFS has it, but it has to be turned on manually. It's basically like making a backup every time you change or modify a file. If ransomware encrypts the files on such a system, all you have to do is remove the ransomware, delete the instances of files created after the time of infection, and use the previous version of those files instead.
If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you've got a 2 TB HDD and your files are only taking up 500 GB, then the remaining 1.5 TB is essentially wasted. Why not use some of it to store previous instances of files? It's like how unused RAM is used as an ad-hoc disk cache by all modern filesystems. You have it, you're not using it, so better to use it for something instead of nothing. It's not a true backup (you'll lose it if your HDD dies), but it's better than nothing. And on numerous occasions I've been asked to recover files which were overwritten - the owner accidentally saved a new or empty file with the same name as a needed file. With current filesystems when you do that, the old file's data is obliterated by the new data, making it unrecoverable.
All that needs to be done to protect against ransomware is to make the snapshotting an integral function of the filesystem, not something that can be controlled directly (ransomware can just turn off NTFS' shadow copies). Then ransomware would have to do something like first fill the drive's free space with files containing random numbers (to defeat disk compression) to wipe out the snapshots, before it could start encrypting files. The slowdown associated with that would give victims more time to react - 3 of the 4 people who've contacted me because they were hit by ransomware contacted me while their system was being encrypted, or were smart enough to recognize what was going on and shut off the computer immediately.
If they made 100 million nuisance calls, the company officers should be required to answer 100 million nuisance calls before they're allowed free. Because collectively that's how much of everyone's time they wasted with their calls. (And to save you the math, at 10 seconds per call, that's 32 years answering 24/7.)
Technically it wasn't done accidentally. It was done deliberately because the programmer was being lazy. The way you're supposed to do it is via
#ifdef DEBUG
insert debug code here
#endif
Then you can enable/disable all the debug code with a single #define DEBUG statement. But people being lazy, they stick the debug code straight in thinking they'll just remember to comment it out before they ship the end product. Except they forget. QA can't catch this form of laziness because short of reading all the code with a programmer's eye, there's no way to distinguish debug code from actual code. Which is why you're supposed to use #ifdef DEBUG in the first place - so automated QA can distinguish debug code from real code.
The real fix here is probably for IDEs to have a macro which automatically inserts the #ifdef DEBUG and #endif statements with a single keystroke or button-press, to discourage programmers from being lazy.
A public space program gets funded because people think it's a good idea.
A private space program gets funded because it actually is a good idea (return exceeds investment).
The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea. And I don't say that from a public vs private space exploration standpoint. Just ask anyone in NASA about the manned vs. unmanned exploration budget division. We get much better bang for the buck with unmanned exploration. Just look at a typical list of NASA's greatest missions. The only manned mission on the list is the moon landing.
You're assuming a the same people who voted in Clinton vs Trump would've voted in Sanders vs Trump. That's not the case. Clinton didn't lose because people who voted for Trump hated her. Clinton lost because people who voted for Obama hated her, and didn't bother to show up to vote.
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans. The Democrats' problem has always been lower turnout. For them to win elections, they need a candidate who inspires registered Democrats to bother to vote. Obama did that. Sanders did that. Clinton did not. 2016 turnout was down in counties where Clinton won, up in counties that Trump won. Clinton's message of "If you don't vote for me Trump will win" simply wasn't good enough to inspire Democrats to go to the polls.