The proper way to implement these devices is to allow them to only communicate on the LAN. No attempts to connect to the Internet, no receiving instructions from the Internet. To access them away from your home, you set up a VPN sever on your home router. Your phone, tablet, or laptop then connects to that VPN, making it appear as if it's connected to your home LAN, and thus giving you access to all these devices on your LAN.
Unfortunately, the VPN server part of that is rather challenging to set up. People are lazy / technically challenged. These device manufacturers have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which means they need a way for these devices to work even for the laziest and most clueless buyer. So they make these devices connect to their server over the Internet. (Not that they mind, since it allows them to collect usage data.) Your phone, tablet, or laptop then connects to their servers, when then hands off the connection to your home device. But because you're now trusting a third party, that exposes you to all sorts of attacks by the Internet at large.
Part of the nostalgia is that cassette tapes were the first mass-consumer media format which consumers could record on by themselves. So it wasn't just mix tapes or new songs copied from radio broadcasts. You could record audio messages and mail them (the early version of podcasts). My grandmother's last words to her kids was recorded on cassette tape, because she had grown too frail to write.
However...
The revival of the cassette tape isn't just to do with hipsters making old technology cool again. It's about cherishing memories of a time when the cassette tape was such an integral part of how we expressed ourselves.
The other memories I have are that the sound quality was terrible, and grew worse with repeated playback or if you left the tape in the glove compartment of a hot car. It was a PITA trying to fast-forward or rewind to the beginning of the exact song you wanted. Distortion (from a chewed or misaligned tape) was common. Occasionally the player would jam and eat the tape. Tape breakage was rarer, but still happened. And if wasn't a commercial album tape, there were several minutes of silence at the end of each side because you couldn't get the duration of all the songs to exactly match the tape length. (The length of commercial album tapes was customized to match the songs' playback duration.)
Anyone who actually used cassette tapes gladly embraced CDs (enough so that we willingly forked over $17 for a CD album instead of $12 for the tape version), and later burned our own mixes to CD-R. Then switched to MP3 players and never looked back.
That's mainly because most people listened to their tapes on walkmen, whose pitch would change as you walked around with them. A decent home deck could sound great.
The Walkman's drive mechanism was counterbalanced so it wouldn't do that. That was the whole point of the name - you could listen to it while walking (or jogging) and the pitch wouldn't change, so it would sound as good as your home cassette player. Most people don't know this because the Walkman was priced at about $150 (around $500 today), so they bought cheaper knockoff units instead. You could still warp playback by spinning the unit, but you don't normally do that while walking/jogging.
If the USB people were in charge of naming these, this discovery would've resulted in changing the name of FarOut to FarFarOut mk 1, and this one would've been named FarFarOut mk 2. The next one found further away would be named FarFarOut 2x2 because... I have no idea. Maybe the guy naming these was dropped on his head as a baby and never really recovered?
You can always set up your own website to manage subscriptions and accept payments/donations, and get service from a credit card processor to handle the payments for about 1.8% to 2.5%. The 5% you pay Patreon is for taking care of all the subscription and payment details for you (3% for Patreon if you figure 2% goes to the payment processor). The 30% Facebook wants is their cut for taking care of this plus web hosting. Though IMHO their licensing terms (unrestricted perpetual license) should be illegal. They're basically demanding rights equal to the content creator, which if you believe in copyright defeats the purpose of copyright (content creator controls distribution of their content).
USB 3.0 using the USB-A connector was renamed to USB 3.1.Gen 1
The higher 10 Gbps speed on USB-A was named USB 3.1 Gen 2
USB 3.1 using the USB-C connector is USB 3.1 Type C..
Microsoft keeps rearranging settings and stuff. It's gotten to where about a quarter of the online tutorials and guides don't work anymore because Microsoft has rearranged things since the guide was written. The one that stands out in my mind is the setting to disable driver updates. There used to be a setting in the updates page of the control panel which allowed you to disable driver updates. Then it got removed from the control panel and moved to the Metro UI settings. Then it got split into a separate setting for each driver. Then they completely removed the setting for several months (which screwed over my gaming laptop since the video drivers Win 10 kept installing didn't work). And now they seem to have finalized on using the "Roll back driver" button in the driver's properties. If you click that, it rolls back the driver and disables automatic updates for that driver.
The problem with that is some of the updates dismantle some essential services (like the network), to prepare them to be updated upon reboot. Then you end up with mysterious "the network doesn't work" call from a client, who lies when you ask them "Have you tried rebooting?" (Dunno why, maybe they don't want to do anything that requires more work on their part.) So I drive over, spend a half hour tinkering with network settings and stuff under the assumption that the computer was rebooted. Then when I happen to reboot for a different reason, I see the update progress bar, and everything works correctly after.
Microsoft has designed the entire update process under the assumption that it can reboot the computer at will, so strange things can happen when you intentionally delay that reboot. It's gotten to where I just start the troubleshooting process with a reboot.
What they should have done is still allow user reviews before the movie is released. But just silently weight all those reviews by zero since clearly there's no way for those users to have actually seen the movie. Since an account can't submit more than one review for a movie, that at least clears the effect of all the dumb troll reviews from their rankings (the smart trolls would wait until after the movie's release). The text of the early reviews can stay too, just flag it with a big red banner on top saying the review was submitted without having seen the movie. If the same user's reviews have a tendency to be flagged this way, flag all their reviews with a big red banner on top saying the user has submitted multiple fake reviews before the movie's release.
Instead, all their new policy does is push all the troll reviews from pre-release to just-after release. Meaning all of the trolls' ratings will still be included in the movie's overall rating.
As Elon pointed out, he gave that figure in the last earnings report way before that tweet....
The fact that the figure he tweeted had previously been disclosed is irrelevant. The SEC's argument isn't that he published new undisclosed information outside of the regular financial statements. They're saying that he broke the terms of his settlement, where he agreed not to publish anything written (including tweets) without first getting them approved (though I'm unclear on who exactly is supposed to do the approving). He could've tweeted something as benign as "Tesla went public in 2010" and if he didn't first get it approved, it still would've been a violation.
In other words, they're saying that if he had been in compliance, whoever at Tesla was supposed to be doing the approving would've noticed the error in the "500,000" figure, and corrected it to "350k to 500k" to match the earnings report before it was tweeted to the public. And thus his followup tweet (clarifying that 500k was the expected end-of-year rate not the end of year total) shouldn't have been necessary. They're saying the fact that a correction tweet was necessary is evidence that he's shooting tweets from the hip again, instead of first getting them approved like he's supposed to be doing.
The SEC is actually trying to do him a favor by trying to get him to stop his drunken midnight tweets.
then the taxpayers would have received an even better bang-for-buck.
Better bang-for-the-buck almost always comes at the cost of a slower timeframe. I can save a lot of money buying a better bang-for-the-buck CPU, but someone still has to overpay for the shiny, new high-end CPUs to fund Intel and AMD's R&D to sustain their current rate of technological progress. So yeah we might have saved some money having the civilian sector develop these things instead of the military. But if we had, we would probably be at the equivalent of 1970s or 1980s technology today. And that's ignoring the possibility that we might've been part of the German or Japanese empire today. Remember, Great Britain just barely managed to hang on against Germany in WWII while waiting for the U.S. to rev up arms production and train its armed forces. And prior the battle of Midway (which the U.S. won primarily because it had radar and advanced carriers, and dumb luck), the Japanese had won every naval engagement against the allies (Australia was in danger of being invaded). If the U.S. had held back military spending prior to WWII in order to get better bang-for-the-buck, history might have turned out quite differently.
There's also the type of research which requires extensive searching of a solution space. NASA started off as NACA - the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their primary job was to wind tunnel test every possible wing profile to see how each one performed, because the military wanted to be sure it was using the best possible wing design. No single company or research lab is going to undertake that kind of endeavor. There has to be a single large customer who wants it badly enough and who'll fund it to make it happen. And even if a civilian research lab had done it, it would've cost the same. (If a company had done it, it would've cost several times more - the information would've been proprietary, so each company would've had to duplicate it.)
According to the linked site, it's an archive of history and culture. Not technology. It'd be kinda like going (back) to the moon, and finding the dinosaurs had already been there and left a record of their culture and history.
Is that TFA is complaining that the audience is bombing the rating for a movie, on a site whose name is a reference to audience members throwing tomatoes at actors in a poor performance.
The only explanation I can think of (since TFA doesn't explain it) is that they're trying to stem the theft of phones bought on contract with a stolen identity. The carrier lock is typically only used on phones which you buy via an installment plan. If you pay for the entire phone up-front, you're entitled to having it unlocked right there at the store when you buy it. But on an installment plan, you usually only pay x% down, with a promise to pay $y each month for the next z months. If the phone is unlocked, a legit customer could in theory pay the x%, then fail to make any of the monthly payments. Switch the phone over to a different carrier, and they've got a shiny new phone for only the x% down they paid. The thing which discourages legit customers from doing this is the hit to their credit report for failing to make the monthly payments.
But if the phone is bought using a stolen identity, then the buyer doesn't care about the hit to the credit report - it's not their credit report. So they'll sign up for the phone and plan using the stolen identity, pay the x% down, and skip out on the payments. They can then sell the phone for close to full price and make nearly (100-x)% profit.
The carrier locking phones bought on installment plans would help prevent this. The thief has to wait the 60 days before he can unlock the phone and sell it, during which time he's in possession of a "hot" item and could be nabbed if the person whose identity he stole catches the unauthorized credit activity and notifies everyone (Verizon and the police).
But the real beneficiary here is Verizon - they're no longer losing $800 phones for a $200 down payment. The person whose identity was stolen ultimately isn't responsible for paying Verizon for the remainder of the contract payments. And they probably had a lot of other fake accounts opened up in their name. It'll cost them about the same to clean up the mess regardless of whether or not there's also a fake Verizon account in the mix. So it's rather disingenuous for Verizon to try to spin this as helping prevent identity theft, when the primary beneficiary is themselves.
Closed, it's nearly double that, at 11 mm. Not thin, exactly, but still a heck of a lot easier to slip into your pants pockets than the 17mm Galaxy Fold.
My last two phones were 8.5mm and 6mm. They were actually too thin - I kept dropping them when I tried to hold them by the edges. I ended up buying cases for them not to protect them, but to make them thicker so I wouldn't drop them so often. I really wish they'd just put a bigger, multi-day battery into these and make them closer to 10-15mm thick. That would also alleviate most of the complaints about the battery being non-replaceable. You could limit the charge/discharge cycle to between 10%-90% or 20%-80% (like they do on EVs), increasing lifespan from around 600 cycles to closer to 2000 cycles before the battery wears to half its capacity when new.
It's up to the patent examiner to decide of proof that the invention works is needed before granting the patent. If this application goes to a competent examiner, he'll be required to prove it works. If it goes to a flaky examiner, well, I guess the USPTO will collect some filing fees, and this guy will get to mount his patent in a shiny frame which he can show off to prospective investors he's looking to con money out of.
A ding from a slow-speed impact can usually be pulled out with a suction cup that costs a few dollars (a shop will usually charge you $20-$50 in labor for it). Any residual scuffs and scratches can be covered up with touch-up paint you can get from your dealer for about $10 (you can get generics for cheaper, but matching paint colors is a pain).
A replacement airbag typically costs $1000+. And since these are exterior airbags, they're going to be bigger and thicker to deal with the higher impact loads, so will likely cost more.
A better solution for beginners learning to drive would be some sort of additional bumper you could attach around the car, like a case for your phone. It would bear the brunt of any impacts instead of the car's body. Or (a lot easier and less nerve-wracking), just teach the beginner in an old beat-up car.
TFA author suffers from an issue which I've seen afflict a lot of the Millennial generation - blaming everyone and everything for their problems except themselves. He blames social media, the phone, the engineers who built it, etc.
The problem is you. Lots of us manage balanced lives using our electronic gadgets without being obsessively dependent on them. I forgot to bring my phone with me to work and shopping yesterday, and didn't have access to it until about 8pm. It was a little inconvenient, but no big deal. If you're unable to do that and are going into what are basically withdrawal symptoms when you disconnect, *you* have a problem. And the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Only after you've identified the true source of your problem, is recovery possible. As long as you keep blaming other people and other things instead of yourself, you won't be addressing the true cause of the problem, so you'll never be able to resolve it.
Flights in the other direction can usually be re-routed to a different altitude or route where the jet stream is not as strong. Likewise flights in the same direction as the jet stream can be preferentially routed to take advantage of it it's strong.
I was on a flight from Asia to the U.S. which benefited from a particularly strong jet stream and arrived 3 hours early (11 hours instead of 14 hours). For that, we were punished by having to stay in the plane at the gate for nearly 2 hours, since the Customs and Immigration employees hadn't yet arrived for work that morning to process arrivals. I would imagine it's the same for domestic flights if there's insufficient room at the gates. The plane would probably have to stay somewhere on the tarmac until a gate opened up. I suppose that objectively it's slightly better for the passengers (same amount of time aboard the plane, but it's quieter). But subjectively, it's rather frustrating knowing that you're already at the destination, but are prohibited from deplaning by logistics.
Copyright trades off the right of the public to use/reproduce/distribute creative works, in exchange for the copyright holder to be incentivized to create more works. This is done under the presumption that the value the work adds to society, is greater than the cost to society of granting the copyright holder a temporary monopoly.
The value the work adds to society can be tabulated via how much money the copyright holder can make from selling the work during the monopoly period.
The cost of granting the temporary monopoly includes the cost of enforcing copyright.
If the cost of enforcing copyright exceeds the benefit of copyright to society, then the tradeoff is no longer worth it. That is, copyright has outlived its usefulness, and should be abolished. But the simplest way to make this determination is to make sure that the copyright holder bears the full cost of enforcing that copyright. Then they can simply look at how much money they're making from copyright, compare it to how much they're spending to enforce copyright, and decide whether or not copyright is worth it.
If you shift copyright enforcement costs onto someone other than the copyright holder, then you make possible a solution where copyright becomes a net drain on society, yet we retain it because we have no easy way to determine that it has become a net drain on society. So it is imperative that the copyright holder be liable for all enforcement costs. The only two choices here that make sense are the copyright holder bears the enforcement costs, or we abolish copyright.
So shifting enforcement costs onto others is stupid, because it destroys your only direct means of determining if copyright is still worth it. If the copyright holder believes enforcement by ISPs is beneficial to copyright, then they should be paying ISPs to enforce copyright. That will make it obvious if the enforcement costs has exceeded the value of copyright to society, meaning copyright is no longer worth it and should be abolished.
The AT&T breakup dealt with the long distance phone monopoly (MCI was using microwave transmitters to send voice over the long distance leg, turning a long distance call into two local calls plus their microwave hop; hence their name - Microwave Communications Inc). It didn't touch the government-granted local phone monopolies. Each region still had just one phone company which owned the lines and provided service. The AT&T breakup just made it so most long-distance calls went between two different phone companies, instead of within a single company.
Yeah they allowed local phone competition, but all the competitors had to use the monopoly phone company's phone lines. The monopoly company exploited this to drag service and repair requests for competing companies out for days, even weeks. And the customer would get mad at the competitor they were using, instead of at the monopoly phone company who owned the lines. I had to deal with this BS when setting up T1 service at a business. The service was with Speakeasy, but they leased the line from Verizon since Verizon was the monopoly phone provider in the area. The line had problems every time it rained. Speakeasy would take my service request immediately and submit a repair ticket with Verizon. Verizon would drag it out for a week, and when they tested the line a week later (when it was no longer raining), miracle of miracles! The line would test just fine and they would close the ticket. This went on for years until while upgrading service I just happened to get a call from Speakeasy and the Verizon service rep wiring the new line while it was raining. I immediately asked him to test it, and sure enough it was drowning in static. That got them to finally admit the line was faulty and send someone out to find the problem and fix it.
That's what's going on here. Frontier is the government-anointed monopoly service provider for the area. Because they own the lines, when their service quality sucks because of poor line quality, every DSL provider's service sucks equally because they're all using Frontier's lines. So Frontier has no incentive to repair or upgrade their lines. It doesn't impact the competitiveness of their business, and fixing things would just cost them more money The government agency regulating their monopoly (your state's public utilities commission) is supposed to make them behave, but they're largely ineffectual.
The way the local phone service should be done is like gas or electric service. You don't want a rat's nest of lines like India, so you do want only one company installing lines. That monopoly company installs and maintains the gas and power lines, but they're prohibited from selling gas or electricity. Instead, you can buy your gas and electricity from dozens/hundreds of companies selling those products. They all pay a transmission fee to the monopoly company, all of them paying the same fee. The fee is regulated by the PUC who looks into the monopoly company's financials each year to guarantee they're making only a certain percentage profit.
The failure of government regulators to set up phone service this way makes this squarely a failure of government regulation. If you were willing to have the rat's nest of lines and followed the Libertarian model allowing competing phone services, any company not maintaining and upgrading their lines would be committing economic suicide, and would die off. Only the companies which maintained their lines would survive.
I don't mean to defend Frontier here (they're in my work area and they completely suck). But it's not unusual for a business line+DSL to cost upwards of $100/mo. A 5-year contract would then be worth $6000+, and early cancellation could constitute damages in the $4k range.
Her experience with Frontier's service is consistent with mine. They bought out Verizon in the area where I manage an office building. Our tenants complained frequently about Verizon's spotty service, enough so that I went into negotiations with Time Warner specifically to bring cable Internet to our building. Frontier took over Verizon's service in our area about a half year before TWC was scheduled to trench lines to our building. I told the tenants to hope for the best (it would be pretty hard to suck worse than Verizon), and be sure to have some sort of backup Internet, even if that meant getting a mobile hotspot on their cell phone.
Well, Frontier managed to suck worse than Verizon. All the tenants complained of more spotty DSL Internet connections, and about half complained that even their phone service was impacted. When TWC finally came in, nearly everyone switched, including one tenant who had just signed a 3-year contract with Verizon before the Frontier switchover. Our tenants hated Frontier so much that most of them ignored my advice to maintain at least one regular phone line instead of switching entirely to TWC's VoIP service. (A decision that came back to bite them when TWC suffered an Internet outage, which of course took all the VoIP lines down as well.)
Almost nobody (except fascist dictators wishing to increase their power) is pro-war. The reason otherwise peaceful nations have and maintain a military is pretty simple. Economically, often it's cheaper to simply take resources away from someone else than it is to grow/collect/build them yourself. e.g. The Viking lifestyle of pillaging and raiding. It completely screws over the person you're taking stuff away from, but if you care only about yourself then it is the economically more cost-effective to take stuff away from others.
The goal of everyone not wanting to be screwed over this way then, is to make it more expensive for someone to take your resources away by force, than it would be for them to grow/collect/build the resources themselves. This means maintaining a military which can inflict sufficient damage upon an attacker so that even if they win, the stuff they manage to pillage from you is worth less than the damage they'll sustain from your counterattack. Nobody actually plans to use those military weapons - the threat alone is enough to cause the desired behavior.
Fail to maintain that level of military capability, and you relegate yourself to repeatedly and endlessly being screwed over by others. Your only protection then becomes the pity of others who happen to have sufficient military power to intimidate or force your attacker into stopping.
The pacifist notion that the military is full of bullies and guys with a macho complex who want to beat up and kill others, is rather disconnected from reality. The vast majority of people serving in the military believe their country has a good thing going, and wish to help defend and maintain it. If you don't believe in protecting what we have, then that is your right. But realize that you can enjoy your livelihood and pacifist lifestyle solely because of those willing to fight in your stead. Pacifism is not self-perpetuating; it can only perpetuate when someone else is willing to fight to defend it.
Of course having a military available means it can be mis-used. And a society needs to implement measures to prevent the military from being mis-used that way. But advocating the complete elimination of the military is socio-economic suicide. Nations without a military or a friendly ally with a military tend not to last too long. They get invaded and taken over, and their pacifist government is replaced by their conqueror.
Patent trials are relatively rare, and held in normal courts. Consequently the typical judge who gets assigned to a patent case only has to deal with a small percentage of patent cases in his/her career, so isn't well-versed in patent law. The East Texas district court realized that since there was no requirement in patent law that the case be filed in a local court, that there would be a demand for a court where the judges were well-versed in patent law. They set out to make themselves that court, as a way to increase their workload and thus revenue.
Their rationale (patent trial judges should be specialized in patent law) was fine, even admirable. But their motivation (increase revenue) created a corrupting feedback loop. The more cases their judges decided in favor of patent trolls, the more patent trolls chose to file in their district, and the more revenue the court got.
Slashdot Mirror
The proper way to implement these devices is to allow them to only communicate on the LAN. No attempts to connect to the Internet, no receiving instructions from the Internet. To access them away from your home, you set up a VPN sever on your home router. Your phone, tablet, or laptop then connects to that VPN, making it appear as if it's connected to your home LAN, and thus giving you access to all these devices on your LAN.
Unfortunately, the VPN server part of that is rather challenging to set up. People are lazy / technically challenged. These device manufacturers have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which means they need a way for these devices to work even for the laziest and most clueless buyer. So they make these devices connect to their server over the Internet. (Not that they mind, since it allows them to collect usage data.) Your phone, tablet, or laptop then connects to their servers, when then hands off the connection to your home device. But because you're now trusting a third party, that exposes you to all sorts of attacks by the Internet at large.
However...
The other memories I have are that the sound quality was terrible, and grew worse with repeated playback or if you left the tape in the glove compartment of a hot car. It was a PITA trying to fast-forward or rewind to the beginning of the exact song you wanted. Distortion (from a chewed or misaligned tape) was common. Occasionally the player would jam and eat the tape. Tape breakage was rarer, but still happened. And if wasn't a commercial album tape, there were several minutes of silence at the end of each side because you couldn't get the duration of all the songs to exactly match the tape length. (The length of commercial album tapes was customized to match the songs' playback duration.)
Anyone who actually used cassette tapes gladly embraced CDs (enough so that we willingly forked over $17 for a CD album instead of $12 for the tape version), and later burned our own mixes to CD-R. Then switched to MP3 players and never looked back.
The Walkman's drive mechanism was counterbalanced so it wouldn't do that. That was the whole point of the name - you could listen to it while walking (or jogging) and the pitch wouldn't change, so it would sound as good as your home cassette player. Most people don't know this because the Walkman was priced at about $150 (around $500 today), so they bought cheaper knockoff units instead. You could still warp playback by spinning the unit, but you don't normally do that while walking/jogging.
If the USB people were in charge of naming these, this discovery would've resulted in changing the name of FarOut to FarFarOut mk 1, and this one would've been named FarFarOut mk 2. The next one found further away would be named FarFarOut 2x2 because... I have no idea. Maybe the guy naming these was dropped on his head as a baby and never really recovered?
You can always set up your own website to manage subscriptions and accept payments/donations, and get service from a credit card processor to handle the payments for about 1.8% to 2.5%. The 5% you pay Patreon is for taking care of all the subscription and payment details for you (3% for Patreon if you figure 2% goes to the payment processor). The 30% Facebook wants is their cut for taking care of this plus web hosting. Though IMHO their licensing terms (unrestricted perpetual license) should be illegal. They're basically demanding rights equal to the content creator, which if you believe in copyright defeats the purpose of copyright (content creator controls distribution of their content).
They repeated the inanity for USB 3.1.
USB 3.0 using the USB-A connector was renamed to USB 3.1.Gen 1
The higher 10 Gbps speed on USB-A was named USB 3.1 Gen 2
USB 3.1 using the USB-C connector is USB 3.1 Type C..
Microsoft keeps rearranging settings and stuff. It's gotten to where about a quarter of the online tutorials and guides don't work anymore because Microsoft has rearranged things since the guide was written. The one that stands out in my mind is the setting to disable driver updates. There used to be a setting in the updates page of the control panel which allowed you to disable driver updates. Then it got removed from the control panel and moved to the Metro UI settings. Then it got split into a separate setting for each driver. Then they completely removed the setting for several months (which screwed over my gaming laptop since the video drivers Win 10 kept installing didn't work). And now they seem to have finalized on using the "Roll back driver" button in the driver's properties. If you click that, it rolls back the driver and disables automatic updates for that driver.
The problem with that is some of the updates dismantle some essential services (like the network), to prepare them to be updated upon reboot. Then you end up with mysterious "the network doesn't work" call from a client, who lies when you ask them "Have you tried rebooting?" (Dunno why, maybe they don't want to do anything that requires more work on their part.) So I drive over, spend a half hour tinkering with network settings and stuff under the assumption that the computer was rebooted. Then when I happen to reboot for a different reason, I see the update progress bar, and everything works correctly after.
Microsoft has designed the entire update process under the assumption that it can reboot the computer at will, so strange things can happen when you intentionally delay that reboot. It's gotten to where I just start the troubleshooting process with a reboot.
What they should have done is still allow user reviews before the movie is released. But just silently weight all those reviews by zero since clearly there's no way for those users to have actually seen the movie. Since an account can't submit more than one review for a movie, that at least clears the effect of all the dumb troll reviews from their rankings (the smart trolls would wait until after the movie's release). The text of the early reviews can stay too, just flag it with a big red banner on top saying the review was submitted without having seen the movie. If the same user's reviews have a tendency to be flagged this way, flag all their reviews with a big red banner on top saying the user has submitted multiple fake reviews before the movie's release.
Instead, all their new policy does is push all the troll reviews from pre-release to just-after release. Meaning all of the trolls' ratings will still be included in the movie's overall rating.
If it's the first link, it's actually The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Anthem of the Union during the U.S. Civil War.
The fact that the figure he tweeted had previously been disclosed is irrelevant. The SEC's argument isn't that he published new undisclosed information outside of the regular financial statements. They're saying that he broke the terms of his settlement, where he agreed not to publish anything written (including tweets) without first getting them approved (though I'm unclear on who exactly is supposed to do the approving). He could've tweeted something as benign as "Tesla went public in 2010" and if he didn't first get it approved, it still would've been a violation.
In other words, they're saying that if he had been in compliance, whoever at Tesla was supposed to be doing the approving would've noticed the error in the "500,000" figure, and corrected it to "350k to 500k" to match the earnings report before it was tweeted to the public. And thus his followup tweet (clarifying that 500k was the expected end-of-year rate not the end of year total) shouldn't have been necessary. They're saying the fact that a correction tweet was necessary is evidence that he's shooting tweets from the hip again, instead of first getting them approved like he's supposed to be doing.
The SEC is actually trying to do him a favor by trying to get him to stop his drunken midnight tweets.
Better bang-for-the-buck almost always comes at the cost of a slower timeframe. I can save a lot of money buying a better bang-for-the-buck CPU, but someone still has to overpay for the shiny, new high-end CPUs to fund Intel and AMD's R&D to sustain their current rate of technological progress. So yeah we might have saved some money having the civilian sector develop these things instead of the military. But if we had, we would probably be at the equivalent of 1970s or 1980s technology today. And that's ignoring the possibility that we might've been part of the German or Japanese empire today. Remember, Great Britain just barely managed to hang on against Germany in WWII while waiting for the U.S. to rev up arms production and train its armed forces. And prior the battle of Midway (which the U.S. won primarily because it had radar and advanced carriers, and dumb luck), the Japanese had won every naval engagement against the allies (Australia was in danger of being invaded). If the U.S. had held back military spending prior to WWII in order to get better bang-for-the-buck, history might have turned out quite differently.
There's also the type of research which requires extensive searching of a solution space. NASA started off as NACA - the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their primary job was to wind tunnel test every possible wing profile to see how each one performed, because the military wanted to be sure it was using the best possible wing design. No single company or research lab is going to undertake that kind of endeavor. There has to be a single large customer who wants it badly enough and who'll fund it to make it happen. And even if a civilian research lab had done it, it would've cost the same. (If a company had done it, it would've cost several times more - the information would've been proprietary, so each company would've had to duplicate it.)
According to the linked site, it's an archive of history and culture. Not technology. It'd be kinda like going (back) to the moon, and finding the dinosaurs had already been there and left a record of their culture and history.
Is that TFA is complaining that the audience is bombing the rating for a movie, on a site whose name is a reference to audience members throwing tomatoes at actors in a poor performance.
The only explanation I can think of (since TFA doesn't explain it) is that they're trying to stem the theft of phones bought on contract with a stolen identity. The carrier lock is typically only used on phones which you buy via an installment plan. If you pay for the entire phone up-front, you're entitled to having it unlocked right there at the store when you buy it. But on an installment plan, you usually only pay x% down, with a promise to pay $y each month for the next z months. If the phone is unlocked, a legit customer could in theory pay the x%, then fail to make any of the monthly payments. Switch the phone over to a different carrier, and they've got a shiny new phone for only the x% down they paid. The thing which discourages legit customers from doing this is the hit to their credit report for failing to make the monthly payments.
But if the phone is bought using a stolen identity, then the buyer doesn't care about the hit to the credit report - it's not their credit report. So they'll sign up for the phone and plan using the stolen identity, pay the x% down, and skip out on the payments. They can then sell the phone for close to full price and make nearly (100-x)% profit.
The carrier locking phones bought on installment plans would help prevent this. The thief has to wait the 60 days before he can unlock the phone and sell it, during which time he's in possession of a "hot" item and could be nabbed if the person whose identity he stole catches the unauthorized credit activity and notifies everyone (Verizon and the police).
But the real beneficiary here is Verizon - they're no longer losing $800 phones for a $200 down payment. The person whose identity was stolen ultimately isn't responsible for paying Verizon for the remainder of the contract payments. And they probably had a lot of other fake accounts opened up in their name. It'll cost them about the same to clean up the mess regardless of whether or not there's also a fake Verizon account in the mix. So it's rather disingenuous for Verizon to try to spin this as helping prevent identity theft, when the primary beneficiary is themselves.
This was my PDA in the late 1990s. It was 25mm thick closed. It fit in my pocket perfectly fine.
My last two phones were 8.5mm and 6mm. They were actually too thin - I kept dropping them when I tried to hold them by the edges. I ended up buying cases for them not to protect them, but to make them thicker so I wouldn't drop them so often. I really wish they'd just put a bigger, multi-day battery into these and make them closer to 10-15mm thick. That would also alleviate most of the complaints about the battery being non-replaceable. You could limit the charge/discharge cycle to between 10%-90% or 20%-80% (like they do on EVs), increasing lifespan from around 600 cycles to closer to 2000 cycles before the battery wears to half its capacity when new.
It's up to the patent examiner to decide of proof that the invention works is needed before granting the patent. If this application goes to a competent examiner, he'll be required to prove it works. If it goes to a flaky examiner, well, I guess the USPTO will collect some filing fees, and this guy will get to mount his patent in a shiny frame which he can show off to prospective investors he's looking to con money out of.
A ding from a slow-speed impact can usually be pulled out with a suction cup that costs a few dollars (a shop will usually charge you $20-$50 in labor for it). Any residual scuffs and scratches can be covered up with touch-up paint you can get from your dealer for about $10 (you can get generics for cheaper, but matching paint colors is a pain).
A replacement airbag typically costs $1000+. And since these are exterior airbags, they're going to be bigger and thicker to deal with the higher impact loads, so will likely cost more.
A better solution for beginners learning to drive would be some sort of additional bumper you could attach around the car, like a case for your phone. It would bear the brunt of any impacts instead of the car's body. Or (a lot easier and less nerve-wracking), just teach the beginner in an old beat-up car.
TFA author suffers from an issue which I've seen afflict a lot of the Millennial generation - blaming everyone and everything for their problems except themselves. He blames social media, the phone, the engineers who built it, etc.
The problem is you. Lots of us manage balanced lives using our electronic gadgets without being obsessively dependent on them. I forgot to bring my phone with me to work and shopping yesterday, and didn't have access to it until about 8pm. It was a little inconvenient, but no big deal. If you're unable to do that and are going into what are basically withdrawal symptoms when you disconnect, *you* have a problem. And the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Only after you've identified the true source of your problem, is recovery possible. As long as you keep blaming other people and other things instead of yourself, you won't be addressing the true cause of the problem, so you'll never be able to resolve it.
Flights in the other direction can usually be re-routed to a different altitude or route where the jet stream is not as strong. Likewise flights in the same direction as the jet stream can be preferentially routed to take advantage of it it's strong.
I was on a flight from Asia to the U.S. which benefited from a particularly strong jet stream and arrived 3 hours early (11 hours instead of 14 hours). For that, we were punished by having to stay in the plane at the gate for nearly 2 hours, since the Customs and Immigration employees hadn't yet arrived for work that morning to process arrivals. I would imagine it's the same for domestic flights if there's insufficient room at the gates. The plane would probably have to stay somewhere on the tarmac until a gate opened up. I suppose that objectively it's slightly better for the passengers (same amount of time aboard the plane, but it's quieter). But subjectively, it's rather frustrating knowing that you're already at the destination, but are prohibited from deplaning by logistics.
If the cost of enforcing copyright exceeds the benefit of copyright to society, then the tradeoff is no longer worth it. That is, copyright has outlived its usefulness, and should be abolished. But the simplest way to make this determination is to make sure that the copyright holder bears the full cost of enforcing that copyright. Then they can simply look at how much money they're making from copyright, compare it to how much they're spending to enforce copyright, and decide whether or not copyright is worth it.
If you shift copyright enforcement costs onto someone other than the copyright holder, then you make possible a solution where copyright becomes a net drain on society, yet we retain it because we have no easy way to determine that it has become a net drain on society. So it is imperative that the copyright holder be liable for all enforcement costs. The only two choices here that make sense are the copyright holder bears the enforcement costs, or we abolish copyright.
So shifting enforcement costs onto others is stupid, because it destroys your only direct means of determining if copyright is still worth it. If the copyright holder believes enforcement by ISPs is beneficial to copyright, then they should be paying ISPs to enforce copyright. That will make it obvious if the enforcement costs has exceeded the value of copyright to society, meaning copyright is no longer worth it and should be abolished.
The AT&T breakup dealt with the long distance phone monopoly (MCI was using microwave transmitters to send voice over the long distance leg, turning a long distance call into two local calls plus their microwave hop; hence their name - Microwave Communications Inc). It didn't touch the government-granted local phone monopolies. Each region still had just one phone company which owned the lines and provided service. The AT&T breakup just made it so most long-distance calls went between two different phone companies, instead of within a single company.
Yeah they allowed local phone competition, but all the competitors had to use the monopoly phone company's phone lines. The monopoly company exploited this to drag service and repair requests for competing companies out for days, even weeks. And the customer would get mad at the competitor they were using, instead of at the monopoly phone company who owned the lines. I had to deal with this BS when setting up T1 service at a business. The service was with Speakeasy, but they leased the line from Verizon since Verizon was the monopoly phone provider in the area. The line had problems every time it rained. Speakeasy would take my service request immediately and submit a repair ticket with Verizon. Verizon would drag it out for a week, and when they tested the line a week later (when it was no longer raining), miracle of miracles! The line would test just fine and they would close the ticket. This went on for years until while upgrading service I just happened to get a call from Speakeasy and the Verizon service rep wiring the new line while it was raining. I immediately asked him to test it, and sure enough it was drowning in static. That got them to finally admit the line was faulty and send someone out to find the problem and fix it.
That's what's going on here. Frontier is the government-anointed monopoly service provider for the area. Because they own the lines, when their service quality sucks because of poor line quality, every DSL provider's service sucks equally because they're all using Frontier's lines. So Frontier has no incentive to repair or upgrade their lines. It doesn't impact the competitiveness of their business, and fixing things would just cost them more money The government agency regulating their monopoly (your state's public utilities commission) is supposed to make them behave, but they're largely ineffectual.
The way the local phone service should be done is like gas or electric service. You don't want a rat's nest of lines like India, so you do want only one company installing lines. That monopoly company installs and maintains the gas and power lines, but they're prohibited from selling gas or electricity. Instead, you can buy your gas and electricity from dozens/hundreds of companies selling those products. They all pay a transmission fee to the monopoly company, all of them paying the same fee. The fee is regulated by the PUC who looks into the monopoly company's financials each year to guarantee they're making only a certain percentage profit.
The failure of government regulators to set up phone service this way makes this squarely a failure of government regulation. If you were willing to have the rat's nest of lines and followed the Libertarian model allowing competing phone services, any company not maintaining and upgrading their lines would be committing economic suicide, and would die off. Only the companies which maintained their lines would survive.
I don't mean to defend Frontier here (they're in my work area and they completely suck). But it's not unusual for a business line+DSL to cost upwards of $100/mo. A 5-year contract would then be worth $6000+, and early cancellation could constitute damages in the $4k range.
Her experience with Frontier's service is consistent with mine. They bought out Verizon in the area where I manage an office building. Our tenants complained frequently about Verizon's spotty service, enough so that I went into negotiations with Time Warner specifically to bring cable Internet to our building. Frontier took over Verizon's service in our area about a half year before TWC was scheduled to trench lines to our building. I told the tenants to hope for the best (it would be pretty hard to suck worse than Verizon), and be sure to have some sort of backup Internet, even if that meant getting a mobile hotspot on their cell phone.
Well, Frontier managed to suck worse than Verizon. All the tenants complained of more spotty DSL Internet connections, and about half complained that even their phone service was impacted. When TWC finally came in, nearly everyone switched, including one tenant who had just signed a 3-year contract with Verizon before the Frontier switchover. Our tenants hated Frontier so much that most of them ignored my advice to maintain at least one regular phone line instead of switching entirely to TWC's VoIP service. (A decision that came back to bite them when TWC suffered an Internet outage, which of course took all the VoIP lines down as well.)
Almost nobody (except fascist dictators wishing to increase their power) is pro-war. The reason otherwise peaceful nations have and maintain a military is pretty simple. Economically, often it's cheaper to simply take resources away from someone else than it is to grow/collect/build them yourself. e.g. The Viking lifestyle of pillaging and raiding. It completely screws over the person you're taking stuff away from, but if you care only about yourself then it is the economically more cost-effective to take stuff away from others.
The goal of everyone not wanting to be screwed over this way then, is to make it more expensive for someone to take your resources away by force, than it would be for them to grow/collect/build the resources themselves. This means maintaining a military which can inflict sufficient damage upon an attacker so that even if they win, the stuff they manage to pillage from you is worth less than the damage they'll sustain from your counterattack. Nobody actually plans to use those military weapons - the threat alone is enough to cause the desired behavior.
Fail to maintain that level of military capability, and you relegate yourself to repeatedly and endlessly being screwed over by others. Your only protection then becomes the pity of others who happen to have sufficient military power to intimidate or force your attacker into stopping.
The pacifist notion that the military is full of bullies and guys with a macho complex who want to beat up and kill others, is rather disconnected from reality. The vast majority of people serving in the military believe their country has a good thing going, and wish to help defend and maintain it. If you don't believe in protecting what we have, then that is your right. But realize that you can enjoy your livelihood and pacifist lifestyle solely because of those willing to fight in your stead. Pacifism is not self-perpetuating; it can only perpetuate when someone else is willing to fight to defend it.
Of course having a military available means it can be mis-used. And a society needs to implement measures to prevent the military from being mis-used that way. But advocating the complete elimination of the military is socio-economic suicide. Nations without a military or a friendly ally with a military tend not to last too long. They get invaded and taken over, and their pacifist government is replaced by their conqueror.
Patent trials are relatively rare, and held in normal courts. Consequently the typical judge who gets assigned to a patent case only has to deal with a small percentage of patent cases in his/her career, so isn't well-versed in patent law. The East Texas district court realized that since there was no requirement in patent law that the case be filed in a local court, that there would be a demand for a court where the judges were well-versed in patent law. They set out to make themselves that court, as a way to increase their workload and thus revenue.
Their rationale (patent trial judges should be specialized in patent law) was fine, even admirable. But their motivation (increase revenue) created a corrupting feedback loop. The more cases their judges decided in favor of patent trolls, the more patent trolls chose to file in their district, and the more revenue the court got.