I've done it all three ways - hanging outdoors, hanging indoors, and a dryer. The dryer by far produces the best results. Most clothes come out not needing ironing. And in Winter, the energy used by the dryer to produce heat also heats your home so its energy use is not entirely wasteful. (In Summer you just close the laundry room door so the extra heat doesn't add to your air conditioning bill).
Hanging outdoors is second best, but results in crinkled clothes which need ironing (eliminating a good chunk of the energy savings of not using a dryer since you dry everything at once, but iron one at a time). If you've got a family of 4, it takes a lot of space. That forces you to wash/dry in multiple small loads instead of a few big ones, which wastes more energy and requires more labor. And of course weather and particulate matter (pollen, smog) can dirty your "clean" clothes before you've even worn them.
Hanging indoors is worst. All the problems of hanging outdoors, but less space so more loads, more crinkling since you typically don't use clothespins to stretch the clothes out, longer drying time, and picks up household odors. It also increases the humidity of the air indoors, which cools the air so increases your heating bill in the Winter. In Summer, if you're in a low-humidity environment (desert) this cooling can be helpful; but in high-humidity climates it just increases your air conditioning bill because humid air feels hotter (sweating is less effective) forcing you to run the air conditioner more.
But overall, I'd say the biggest factor is reduction of labor. Instead of taking 15-30 minutes clipping everything to the line or rack, you just shove all the clothes into the dryer in 1 minute, turn it on, and go do something else. (Unloading time is about the same for both since you have to fold the clothes.)
This is the problem I have with most arguments against autonomous cars. People always want to compare them against a completely attentive and alert human driver who completely understands every hypothetical situation. Not against the statistical average human driver who has 0.5 seconds to grok the situation and react before an accident occurs.
In a way I can understand it. If you can do better than humans in the human's best case, then you can do better than humans in all cases. But it just perpetuates the flawed reasoning most people use of making decisions based only on the best or worst case (e.g. winning the lottery, plane crashes, nuclear accidents). The real fix is to educate people to do these broad-band comparisons based on statistical average, not based on outliers.
Also of note is that 1/4 of the portion of the budget that isn't in that 3/4 is interest on debt (about 6% of the budget). And that will rise as interest rates rise unless we start reducing the debt.
Believing that cutting taxes will magically increase government revenues through growth makes the people saying either idiots or charlatans or both.
At 100% taxation (Communism) we get a certain amount of tax revenue.
At an arbitrary % of taxation between those two points, we get an amount of tax revenue higher than at 100% taxation.
If tax revenue is a continuous function of tax rate, then according to the mean value theorem there is a certain percentage between 0% and 100% at which tax revenue is maximized. Call it m%.
If the current tax rate is below m%, then decreasing tax rate will decrease tax revenue.
If the current tax rate is above m%, then decreasing tax rate will increase tax revenue.
You can argue that we're below m% so cutting taxes won't work. But automatically classifying people as idiots or charlatans for believing decreasing tax rate can increase tax revenue just shows your lack of understanding of mathematics.
If this celebrity net worth data is a common fact, then Google can do whatever it wants. Databases of common facts (e.g. info from a phone book) cannot be copyrighted. Just because you created a database of common facts doesn't mean you suddenly own those facts and that nobody else can use them without your permission.
OTOH, if their celebrity net worth figure is calculated based on their research combined with some proprietary algorithm, Google is in violation of their copyright. They can simply send Google a cease and desist letter and Google will have to pull it off their snippets (or license it from them).
OTOH, if Google has basically done what they did except using a new algorithm Google developed on its own, then they're SOL. They can't even argue that Google stole the idea from them because even if they didn't exist, Google would've created the algorithm based on the large number of search queries they got for a celebrity's net worth. Based on the sequence of events described in the summary, it sounds like this is what happened.
Moral of the story: If you want to make a successful website, make it based on something deeper than a simple factoid which can easily be recreated and expressed in a single sentence. Google is an excellent way of driving traffic to you, unless what you offer is so small that people won't bother clicking a link for "the full picture"..
Kinda like what Netflix does internally. Looks at your viewing history and ratings, finds other people who've rated movies similar to you, and suggests movies that they liked but you haven't seen.
The downside (for the movie maker) is that this means a movie doesn't have a single "rating". The benefit (for the movie viewer) is that you'll see ratings more relevant to your interests. If you're an honest reviewer who gives a wide range of ratings across an eclectic range of films, then you'll see ratings based on other honest eclectic reviewers. If you're a fanboi who only gives a 10-rating for movies or series you like, the ratings will be based on the aggregate votes of other fanbois. If you're a troll who only gives one-star ratings, the ratings you see will be based on the aggregate votes of other trolls who only give one-star ratings.
The downside (for the movie viewer) is that this requires you to register an account with the review site, and they can build a profile on you. Potential privacy issues.
The last millenium of technological and economic progress has been driven by specialization. Instead of everyone having to learn how to grow crops, hunt for food, dig a well, weave clothes, build a home, etc. we've all specialized. One person learns how to grow crops. He sells it to someone who hunts (or grows) livestock. Who hires someone to dig a well. Who buys clothes pre-made by someone else. Who hires people to build their home. Because each individual can concentrate on a small field of human knowledge, we've been able to increase the depth of knowledge in those specific fields by leaps and bounds - much faster than when everyone was a generalist who had to know how to do everything.
A side effect of this specialization is that everyone is pretty ignorant of fields they did not specialize into. To poke fun of people for not knowing as much as you in your chosen specialization is very immature, small-minded, and hypocritical. This app is basically the equivalent of jocks beating up nerds for being bad at sports. Or your friend who is hip with fashion telling you that the bowtie is back in style and you should totally wear it to the frat party. It's a mean-spirited prank which tries to cast as stupidity the ignorance via specialization that is essential to a modern functional society. Shame on the tech guys who thought this would be funny.
We've known for about 3 decades now that light-based computing doesn't have thermal problems caused by current leakage, and thus compared to electron-based computing has higher theoretical capacity as we approach quantum limits. The problem is we didn't figure this out until we were a few decades down the road of electron-based computing. So optical computing has always been several orders of magnitude behind electronic computing in terms of density (capacity), speed, and cost.
Basically we went down the wrong path for making computers. And switching to the right path will make most of the R&D we've done on electronic transistors obsolete, while new R&D will need to be done to bring optical computing up to the same level as electronic computing. So mere breakthroughs in optical computing aren't enough. We need multiple breakthroughs and multiple decades worth of sustained R&D just to bring its performance up to the level of current electronic computing, before it can finally exceed the capability of electronic computing. So even if this is a huge breakthrough, outside of a few very specialized fields (e.g. ones sensitive to EMF interference) it's not going to result in a superior end-product for several decades.
It already is a humanitariannightmare. It's just that by doing nothing, you can blame the North Korean government for it. If you manage to overthrow the NK government, suddenly you become responsible for the nightmare and critics blame you for things that would've happened anyway even if you had done nothing.
I have a couple virtual phone numbers from when I used to work in Canada (a Canadian number and a Washington number). Both are hosted by Anveo for a couple bucks a month. Actually, based on the volume of calls (near zero) I could probably drop it to the $0.50/mo per-minute plan and save a few bucks.
Both forward to my cell phone. But I can also set them up to work with a SIP device (a VoIP phone). In that configuration, I can take the VoIP phone anywhere in the world and use those numbers as long as I have an Internet connection. To remain legal, I have to give an address for the Washington number for 911 purposes. But it's just a field I can fill in with anything, and there is no similar requirement for the Canadian number even though I can use it to easily make calls to the U.S.
All the standard obfuscation methods like VPNs, multiple proxies, and and anonymizing services work (provided you can get enough bandwidth with consistent latency).
AI researchers first ran across it when developing neural nets. The longer you allowed a neural net to learn, the more rigid its definition of boundary conditions became. Sometimes so rigid that the net became useless for its intended task. e.g. You could develop a neural net which would stop a train in the correct position at the platform 80% of the time. Further training would increase this to 90%, then 95%, then 99% of the time, but resulted in the net completely flipping out the remaining 1% of the time when it calculated it was going to overshoot by 1 mm outside the trained parameters. The first solution was to stop the learning process and freeze the neural net before it reached this stage, then simply use it in production with the learning capability (ability to modify itself) disabled. The next solution was to use simulated annealing to occasionally reset the specific things the neural net had learned, while retaining the general things it had learned.
You also see this in biological neural nets. As people get older, they tend to get set in their ways, less likely to change their opinions even in the face of contradictory evidence. (As opposed to younger people who are too eager to form an opinion despite weak or the lack of evidence.) I suspect this is also where the aphorism "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" comes from. IMHO this is why trying to lengthen the human lifespan in the pursuit of immortality is a bad idea. Death is nature's way of clearing out neural nets which have become too rigid to respond properly to common variability in situations they encounter. My grandmother hated the Japanese to her dying day (they raped and killed her sister and niece during WWII). If people were immortal, we'd be completely dysfunctional as a society because everyone would be holding grudges and experience-based prejudice for hundreds of years, to the detriment of immediate benefit.
While a legal solution would work, I think this case actually calls for a technical solution. If your TV, radio, and stereo system's audio were hardwired to listening devices like the Echo and Home, those devices could automatically filter out audio from those sound sources before running voice recognition. It would stop advertisers from (ab)using the devices in this manner. But more importantly it would improve the devices' functionality. You could speak commands in the middle of a loud movie and the device could understand you as if the room were silent
Also, the device could detect when the audio matched the beginning of a known commercial, and automatically mute the TV/radio. And automatically un-mute it when the commercial break was over (audio not matching a known commercial detected). The advertisers wanna play games with Google's new toy, Google can play games with the advertisers' livelihood.
A split view is only necessary if you're dragging and dropping. For a tabbed view, all you have to do is copy (or cut for move) and paste. Click, ctrl-c (or ctrl-x), then ctrl-v in the other tab.
I had been using QTTabBar to add tabs to file explorer windows (Clover 3 and TabExplorer are other options). Unfortunately it interferes with context menus, and I had to go back to a half dozen file explorer windows scattered all over the desktop. Native tab support would be most welcome.
A split view should be easy to add though. I'm thinking of emacs where you could have multiple files open simultaneously and cycle through them, and also split the edit box into multiple windows and (optionally) show different files in each window. Considering this functionality dates back to the 1980s, you have to wonder WTH Microsoft has been doing all this time.
Toshiba is the #2 flash memory manufacturer. Samsung is #1. If Toshiba goes under, Samsung dominates the NAND industry with close to 50% market share (even more for high-speed NAND), and can start to dictate pricing to companies which need to buy large quantities of NAND - like Apple. So it's in Apple's best interest to make sure Toshiba stays around and kicking and manufacturing NAND.
Let me repeat what I said in the last article about safe harbor provisions. The entire premise behind copyright is that by granting an artificial temporary monopoly, it fosters the creation of more value in creative works than the market left alone would foster. In other words, the economy as a whole has more productive activity (makes more money) with copyright than without. The moment the cost of enforcing copyright exceeds the economic benefit of copyright, that premise is no longer true, and the rationale for copyright existing vanishes.
Safe harbor provisions exist to insure that this condition of copyright's existence is not violated. Safe harbors make sure the cost of enforcing copyright is borne by the entities benefiting from copyright. The IP holder is making money off copyright. If they're also responsible for paying for enforcement of copyright, then it becomes a simple subtraction problem. If the amount of money they make from copyright exceeds the cost of enforcing copyright, then it's worth having copyright. If the cost of enforcing it exceeds the money they're making, then the entire rationale upon which copyright is based is no longer true, and the economy would be better off simply eliminating copyright.
If the IP companies are allowed to eliminate safe harbor provisions and shift the cost of enforcing copyright onto other companies, then this subtraction is no longer so simple. The profit shows up in one entity, the costs show up in another. We could wind up in a situation where copyright is a drag on the economy (enforcement costs exceed economic benefit), but we'll never know it because the profit goes to the IP companies while the enforcement cost is borne by the ISPs and data services companies.
If the IP companies want ISPs and data services companies to enforce copyright, the proper way to do it is for them to pay for enforcement. This will result in the market determining the cost of enforcement. Couple this with the market determining the value of selling copyrighted material, and the annual account balance of the IP companies automatically tells us whether copyright is still worth it, or whether technology has made copyright economically unfeasible.
The attraction of electric motors for trucks is the same reason steam and diesel locomotives were replaced by diesel-electric. The heavy loading means there's a huge range of torque vs. speed requirements. So a direct mechanical linkage from an ICE engine to the wheels requires a massive number of gears in the transmission. For a train this would mean 20-50 gears. Most trucks use 10-18 gears (plus 2 reverse gears).
An electric motor can cover that huge torque vs speed range without any gears. At some point the extra weight of the transmission with all those gears is more of a burden than the losses you get from converting the ICE's mechanical energy into electrical to drive the electric motor. In that respect, even if the truck isn't 100% electric, it could offer some serious advantages. e.g. No low gears - the ICE engine only drives the truck at higher speeds. At lower speeds it's powered by an electric motor, whose battery is recharged by the ICE.
They're called trains. We don't run them without a driver out of an overabundance of caution, but the conductor mostly just sits there ready to yank on the brake if something catastrophic happens.
A driverless truck/lorry won't happen (at least not for several decades if not centuries) because the existing infrastructure won't support it. A good percentage of the places where trucks have to unload their goods aren't actually built for trucks to park and unload. I regularly see tractor trailer drivers make 5, 7, even 9 point turns to position their trailer correctly. Newer businesses in remote areas (lots of cheap land) can be built for easier truck unloading. But existing businesses in cities and areas with high land prices are usually limited in the amount of space they can devote to truck turning/parking. (Loading generally isn't a problem because the distribution warehouses are designed around the trucks, unlike retail stores.)
Heck, one of the businesses near where I live gets a produce delivery truck every other day who parks in the middle of the street with hazard lights blinking while they unload. That turns the two-lane road (one lane in each direction) into a one lane road where traffic in both directions has to take turns going around the truck. Hardly ideal but it's the only way for a truck to unload cargo at this location. I've wondered how an autonomous car would even deal with a situation like that, much less a driverless truck.
I don't think a driverless truck will ever happen until the "truck" is redesigned with all-wheel steering and no cabin (engine and drivetrain completely underneath the truck bed). Basically they'd be mobile shipping containers which can pivot and rotate in place or move sideways if need be.
Legal consequences will discourage deliberate abuse. But I suspect the technical solution here is to add a direct feed of known non-human audio sources (TV, radio, stereo system) to devices like Google Home or Alexa. That way these devices can selectively ignore from your TV, radio, and stereo system, kinda like how voice chat programs eliminate echo by subtracting the audio they send to the speakers from what they receive from the microphone. It'll prevent blatant abuse of ads to activate these devices. And as an added side benefit, you'll be able to give a voice command in the middle of a loud scene of a movie, and the device will be able to understand you just fine.
Are they counting people who actually use the service to type and receive personal messages? Or is it like Instagram where it constantly receives feeds from people you don't know in the background? I had to use TitaniumBackup to freeze Instagram because it was sucking up so much battery life, and I only used it once every few weeks to catch up with my sister's family photos.
Most routers have VPN clients, which you can use to connect to a VPN server thus sending all of your LAN's web traffic (or optionally all network traffi) over the VPN. The high-end routers also have OpenVPN clients (and servers if you want to connect to your home LAN from the Internet). And DD-WRT supports both an OpenVPN client and server, so any router which can be upgraded to DD-WRT will also work.
So I just subscribed to a VPN service which supports OpenVPN (actually they just give me sole access to my own virtual machine where I can install Linux and an OpenVPN server). Then configured the router to send all web traffic to the OpenVPN server.
But, I would be reluctant to call a ChromeOS device as a "PC" because:
- They need to have a network connection to access user data
- Local file systems (ie USB drives) are absolutely painful to access and work with (the paradigm is to use GDrive storage and anything else is work)
- There simply isn't enough memory/drive space available for anything other Extensions which are measured in the low tens of MBytes
- Applications are limited to Javascript (although I'm hoping Webassembly will be an option in the near future) with browser built in debug tools with a somewhat convoluted load/test process. A full featured IDE for application development is nothing more than a dream at this point
My first PC (an Atari 800)
Stored user data on a cassette tape drive (the floppy drive was too expensive for me to afford as a kid).
You think USB drives are painful? How about having to play a tape for 5 minutes to load a program? And if your schoolmate is fooling around with the cord and accidentally unplugs it halfway through, you have to start over again.
Had 32 kB of RAM.
Applications were limited to BASIC and assembly. No IDE, no browser. You typed BASIC code line by line, or you switched it to assembly mode and typed in raw CPU instructions. Single-threaded I should add.
It worked fine for writing reports and playing games.
A PC is a personal computer. A computer you can use for personal computing tasks. As opposed to a mainframe which was shared by multiple people. Or a workstation which was used for tasks at work. Or an embedded system which was made to control a specific object. That's it.
A Chromebook is a PC. A tablet is a PC. A phone is a PC. Heck, a smartwatch is a PC if it's got a decent way for you to input data to it. The phone in my pocket is many times faster than the fastest Cray supercomputer from around the time I owned my first PC. 160 MFLOPS for the Cray vs 718 MFLOPS for a single thread on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. The definition of "PC" you've crafted means PCs didn't exist until the late-1990s.
Project Gutenberg scans books which are out of copyright, and only famous ones.
Google Books scans contemporary works. That in itself made it worth doing. Basically if the Library of Congress burned down, there would be millions if not billions of contemporary books and magazines which existed only on the authors' computers, and in printed form on collectors shelves. There would be no central database of these works, much less a searchable one. Regardless of what you think of Google Books or how boring it is to work there (I'm having similar boredom problems scanning dozens of my family's photo albums), it's a project well worth doing.
Because a lot (most?) people mistakenly think companies and people are somehow different.
Companies are a shell, a paper construct created to allow people to work together; hopefully more efficiently than they would working alone. The laborer employee is able to concentrate on working without having to waste time on stuff outside his field of expertise, like how to calculate payroll taxes and send the payment electronically to the IRS every month. The manager employee directs the output of the workers so (ideally) their productivity is more efficient than without a manager. And investors/stockholders help kickstart the entire process by providing the initial capital to help set up the organization that became the company. When you tax a company, you're actually taxing the people who work there (who will usually just shift the tax to their customers in the form of higher prices). The company itself generates nothing - all the productivity is generated by people who work at the company.
When a company (organization of people) is profitable, that means its efficiency is high, and you want that company to grow and expand so more people can partake in that high efficiency. When a company is not profitable, that means its efficiency is low and it's doing something wrong. Either it needs to change up how it operates so it becomes more efficient, or it needs to go bankrupt, freeing its employees to go find work at other more-efficient companies (or even starting their own companies).
If a company is reporting profits, but taking away raises or bonuses, then there are two possibilities for what's going on.
The people at the company whose income is not affected (you're probably thinking of the stockholders and managers, though in the case of union shops it can sometimes be the other way around) are essentially stealing from the other people at the company. The people being robbed need to express their ire and demand a fair share of the company's success.
Or the people whose raises and bonuses are taken away were being overpaid to begin with. And this is just a way to adjust their share of the company's revenue to bring it in-line with the fair share that other people in the company are receiving.
tl;dr - Company = group of people working together. And lazy = inefficient, though inefficient does not always equal lazy.
Is that income is a rate. Savings is an amount. More precisely, your savings (or checking) account balance is simply the integral of your income minus your expenses. (Or if you prefer, (income - expenses) is the first derivative of your account balance.)
What this means is that unless you're racking up debt (loans, credit cards), you have to live within your means. The average rate of money coming in (income) has to equal the average rate of money going out (expenses). And (this is the crucial part) that requirement is the same whether you have zero savings or a million dollars saved. In other words, the person with a million dollars saved up has to live by the same constraints as someone living paycheck to paycheck. This realization struck me when I was counseling a co-worker who was having financial difficulty, and when we went over the numbers I realized she made just as much money as I did. Except instead of saving 20% of it like I was (both for retirement and as a buffer against unforeseen expenses or loss of income), she was blowing it all on toys and going out.
If you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and aren't accumulating debt, you''re already following the first rule of personal finance management - limit your spending to equal your income. All you have to do is lower your expenses slightly and you'll start accumulating savings. That savings will act as a buffer, evening out the dips and spikes TFA describes so that they don't turn into a financial emergency.
The person with a large savings account isn't necessarily better off than you because they make more money than you. They're better off because having a savings buffer frees them from having to waste time (and pulling their hair out) dealing with spot shortfalls in income or spikes in expenses. Instead of having to pay the electric bill at the last minute because you haven't gotten paid yet, you can just pay it whenever. It all adds up to exactly the same amount of income and expenses at the end of the year regardless of which way you do it. Just the paycheck-to-paycheck way is a lot more frenetic and nerve-wracking, while with a savings buffer you can just pay it, and go on doing things you enjoy instead of worrying. The savings way may even be cheaper as you won't be hit by late fees and penalties.
I realize many of you already know this. But in my experience talking with friends and co-workers, the majority of them live the paycheck-to-paycheck way. Many of them don't even track their spending - they deposit their paycheck, then spend money until the ATM tells them they have none left. This country really needs to make basic finance management a required course in high school. If you do use the ATM method, open up a free savings account. After depositing your paycheck, take, say, 5% of the amout you just deposited and transfer it into the savings account. Over time, gradually increase the percentage to 10%, 15%, and hopefully 20%. Make ATM withdrawls only from the checking account. If an emergency occurs, you can transfer some money from savings to checking to tide you over. No, your friends asking you to go to a concert with them does not constitute an emergency. But if an item you were saving up to buy next month goes on sale this month, then yes you can tap into your savings to get it now. Just be sure that you "pay back" any money you "borrowed" from yourself for the item on sale or for the emergency, by increasing the percentage you put into the savings account until you've caught back up to where it would've been without the "loan" to yourself.
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I've done it all three ways - hanging outdoors, hanging indoors, and a dryer. The dryer by far produces the best results. Most clothes come out not needing ironing. And in Winter, the energy used by the dryer to produce heat also heats your home so its energy use is not entirely wasteful. (In Summer you just close the laundry room door so the extra heat doesn't add to your air conditioning bill).
Hanging outdoors is second best, but results in crinkled clothes which need ironing (eliminating a good chunk of the energy savings of not using a dryer since you dry everything at once, but iron one at a time). If you've got a family of 4, it takes a lot of space. That forces you to wash/dry in multiple small loads instead of a few big ones, which wastes more energy and requires more labor. And of course weather and particulate matter (pollen, smog) can dirty your "clean" clothes before you've even worn them.
Hanging indoors is worst. All the problems of hanging outdoors, but less space so more loads, more crinkling since you typically don't use clothespins to stretch the clothes out, longer drying time, and picks up household odors. It also increases the humidity of the air indoors, which cools the air so increases your heating bill in the Winter. In Summer, if you're in a low-humidity environment (desert) this cooling can be helpful; but in high-humidity climates it just increases your air conditioning bill because humid air feels hotter (sweating is less effective) forcing you to run the air conditioner more.
But overall, I'd say the biggest factor is reduction of labor. Instead of taking 15-30 minutes clipping everything to the line or rack, you just shove all the clothes into the dryer in 1 minute, turn it on, and go do something else. (Unloading time is about the same for both since you have to fold the clothes.)
This is the problem I have with most arguments against autonomous cars. People always want to compare them against a completely attentive and alert human driver who completely understands every hypothetical situation. Not against the statistical average human driver who has 0.5 seconds to grok the situation and react before an accident occurs.
In a way I can understand it. If you can do better than humans in the human's best case, then you can do better than humans in all cases. But it just perpetuates the flawed reasoning most people use of making decisions based only on the best or worst case (e.g. winning the lottery, plane crashes, nuclear accidents). The real fix is to educate people to do these broad-band comparisons based on statistical average, not based on outliers.
No, that's based on a fundamental theorem of calculus. We know that:
If tax revenue is a continuous function of tax rate, then according to the mean value theorem there is a certain percentage between 0% and 100% at which tax revenue is maximized. Call it m%.
You can argue that we're below m% so cutting taxes won't work. But automatically classifying people as idiots or charlatans for believing decreasing tax rate can increase tax revenue just shows your lack of understanding of mathematics.
If this celebrity net worth data is a common fact, then Google can do whatever it wants. Databases of common facts (e.g. info from a phone book) cannot be copyrighted. Just because you created a database of common facts doesn't mean you suddenly own those facts and that nobody else can use them without your permission.
OTOH, if their celebrity net worth figure is calculated based on their research combined with some proprietary algorithm, Google is in violation of their copyright. They can simply send Google a cease and desist letter and Google will have to pull it off their snippets (or license it from them).
OTOH, if Google has basically done what they did except using a new algorithm Google developed on its own, then they're SOL. They can't even argue that Google stole the idea from them because even if they didn't exist, Google would've created the algorithm based on the large number of search queries they got for a celebrity's net worth. Based on the sequence of events described in the summary, it sounds like this is what happened.
Moral of the story: If you want to make a successful website, make it based on something deeper than a simple factoid which can easily be recreated and expressed in a single sentence. Google is an excellent way of driving traffic to you, unless what you offer is so small that people won't bother clicking a link for "the full picture"..
Side effects include users developing an aversion to picking up objects or touching walls in real life.
Kinda like what Netflix does internally. Looks at your viewing history and ratings, finds other people who've rated movies similar to you, and suggests movies that they liked but you haven't seen.
The downside (for the movie maker) is that this means a movie doesn't have a single "rating". The benefit (for the movie viewer) is that you'll see ratings more relevant to your interests. If you're an honest reviewer who gives a wide range of ratings across an eclectic range of films, then you'll see ratings based on other honest eclectic reviewers. If you're a fanboi who only gives a 10-rating for movies or series you like, the ratings will be based on the aggregate votes of other fanbois. If you're a troll who only gives one-star ratings, the ratings you see will be based on the aggregate votes of other trolls who only give one-star ratings.
The downside (for the movie viewer) is that this requires you to register an account with the review site, and they can build a profile on you. Potential privacy issues.
The last millenium of technological and economic progress has been driven by specialization. Instead of everyone having to learn how to grow crops, hunt for food, dig a well, weave clothes, build a home, etc. we've all specialized. One person learns how to grow crops. He sells it to someone who hunts (or grows) livestock. Who hires someone to dig a well. Who buys clothes pre-made by someone else. Who hires people to build their home. Because each individual can concentrate on a small field of human knowledge, we've been able to increase the depth of knowledge in those specific fields by leaps and bounds - much faster than when everyone was a generalist who had to know how to do everything.
A side effect of this specialization is that everyone is pretty ignorant of fields they did not specialize into. To poke fun of people for not knowing as much as you in your chosen specialization is very immature, small-minded, and hypocritical. This app is basically the equivalent of jocks beating up nerds for being bad at sports. Or your friend who is hip with fashion telling you that the bowtie is back in style and you should totally wear it to the frat party. It's a mean-spirited prank which tries to cast as stupidity the ignorance via specialization that is essential to a modern functional society. Shame on the tech guys who thought this would be funny.
We've known for about 3 decades now that light-based computing doesn't have thermal problems caused by current leakage, and thus compared to electron-based computing has higher theoretical capacity as we approach quantum limits. The problem is we didn't figure this out until we were a few decades down the road of electron-based computing. So optical computing has always been several orders of magnitude behind electronic computing in terms of density (capacity), speed, and cost.
Basically we went down the wrong path for making computers. And switching to the right path will make most of the R&D we've done on electronic transistors obsolete, while new R&D will need to be done to bring optical computing up to the same level as electronic computing. So mere breakthroughs in optical computing aren't enough. We need multiple breakthroughs and multiple decades worth of sustained R&D just to bring its performance up to the level of current electronic computing, before it can finally exceed the capability of electronic computing. So even if this is a huge breakthrough, outside of a few very specialized fields (e.g. ones sensitive to EMF interference) it's not going to result in a superior end-product for several decades.
It already is a humanitarian nightmare. It's just that by doing nothing, you can blame the North Korean government for it. If you manage to overthrow the NK government, suddenly you become responsible for the nightmare and critics blame you for things that would've happened anyway even if you had done nothing.
I have a couple virtual phone numbers from when I used to work in Canada (a Canadian number and a Washington number). Both are hosted by Anveo for a couple bucks a month. Actually, based on the volume of calls (near zero) I could probably drop it to the $0.50/mo per-minute plan and save a few bucks.
Both forward to my cell phone. But I can also set them up to work with a SIP device (a VoIP phone). In that configuration, I can take the VoIP phone anywhere in the world and use those numbers as long as I have an Internet connection. To remain legal, I have to give an address for the Washington number for 911 purposes. But it's just a field I can fill in with anything, and there is no similar requirement for the Canadian number even though I can use it to easily make calls to the U.S.
All the standard obfuscation methods like VPNs, multiple proxies, and and anonymizing services work (provided you can get enough bandwidth with consistent latency).
AI researchers first ran across it when developing neural nets. The longer you allowed a neural net to learn, the more rigid its definition of boundary conditions became. Sometimes so rigid that the net became useless for its intended task. e.g. You could develop a neural net which would stop a train in the correct position at the platform 80% of the time. Further training would increase this to 90%, then 95%, then 99% of the time, but resulted in the net completely flipping out the remaining 1% of the time when it calculated it was going to overshoot by 1 mm outside the trained parameters. The first solution was to stop the learning process and freeze the neural net before it reached this stage, then simply use it in production with the learning capability (ability to modify itself) disabled. The next solution was to use simulated annealing to occasionally reset the specific things the neural net had learned, while retaining the general things it had learned.
You also see this in biological neural nets. As people get older, they tend to get set in their ways, less likely to change their opinions even in the face of contradictory evidence. (As opposed to younger people who are too eager to form an opinion despite weak or the lack of evidence.) I suspect this is also where the aphorism "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" comes from. IMHO this is why trying to lengthen the human lifespan in the pursuit of immortality is a bad idea. Death is nature's way of clearing out neural nets which have become too rigid to respond properly to common variability in situations they encounter. My grandmother hated the Japanese to her dying day (they raped and killed her sister and niece during WWII). If people were immortal, we'd be completely dysfunctional as a society because everyone would be holding grudges and experience-based prejudice for hundreds of years, to the detriment of immediate benefit.
While a legal solution would work, I think this case actually calls for a technical solution. If your TV, radio, and stereo system's audio were hardwired to listening devices like the Echo and Home, those devices could automatically filter out audio from those sound sources before running voice recognition. It would stop advertisers from (ab)using the devices in this manner. But more importantly it would improve the devices' functionality. You could speak commands in the middle of a loud movie and the device could understand you as if the room were silent
Also, the device could detect when the audio matched the beginning of a known commercial, and automatically mute the TV/radio. And automatically un-mute it when the commercial break was over (audio not matching a known commercial detected). The advertisers wanna play games with Google's new toy, Google can play games with the advertisers' livelihood.
A split view is only necessary if you're dragging and dropping. For a tabbed view, all you have to do is copy (or cut for move) and paste. Click, ctrl-c (or ctrl-x), then ctrl-v in the other tab.
I had been using QTTabBar to add tabs to file explorer windows (Clover 3 and TabExplorer are other options). Unfortunately it interferes with context menus, and I had to go back to a half dozen file explorer windows scattered all over the desktop. Native tab support would be most welcome.
A split view should be easy to add though. I'm thinking of emacs where you could have multiple files open simultaneously and cycle through them, and also split the edit box into multiple windows and (optionally) show different files in each window. Considering this functionality dates back to the 1980s, you have to wonder WTH Microsoft has been doing all this time.
Toshiba is the #2 flash memory manufacturer. Samsung is #1. If Toshiba goes under, Samsung dominates the NAND industry with close to 50% market share (even more for high-speed NAND), and can start to dictate pricing to companies which need to buy large quantities of NAND - like Apple. So it's in Apple's best interest to make sure Toshiba stays around and kicking and manufacturing NAND.
Let me repeat what I said in the last article about safe harbor provisions. The entire premise behind copyright is that by granting an artificial temporary monopoly, it fosters the creation of more value in creative works than the market left alone would foster. In other words, the economy as a whole has more productive activity (makes more money) with copyright than without. The moment the cost of enforcing copyright exceeds the economic benefit of copyright, that premise is no longer true, and the rationale for copyright existing vanishes.
Safe harbor provisions exist to insure that this condition of copyright's existence is not violated. Safe harbors make sure the cost of enforcing copyright is borne by the entities benefiting from copyright. The IP holder is making money off copyright. If they're also responsible for paying for enforcement of copyright, then it becomes a simple subtraction problem. If the amount of money they make from copyright exceeds the cost of enforcing copyright, then it's worth having copyright. If the cost of enforcing it exceeds the money they're making, then the entire rationale upon which copyright is based is no longer true, and the economy would be better off simply eliminating copyright.
If the IP companies are allowed to eliminate safe harbor provisions and shift the cost of enforcing copyright onto other companies, then this subtraction is no longer so simple. The profit shows up in one entity, the costs show up in another. We could wind up in a situation where copyright is a drag on the economy (enforcement costs exceed economic benefit), but we'll never know it because the profit goes to the IP companies while the enforcement cost is borne by the ISPs and data services companies.
If the IP companies want ISPs and data services companies to enforce copyright, the proper way to do it is for them to pay for enforcement. This will result in the market determining the cost of enforcement. Couple this with the market determining the value of selling copyrighted material, and the annual account balance of the IP companies automatically tells us whether copyright is still worth it, or whether technology has made copyright economically unfeasible.
The attraction of electric motors for trucks is the same reason steam and diesel locomotives were replaced by diesel-electric. The heavy loading means there's a huge range of torque vs. speed requirements. So a direct mechanical linkage from an ICE engine to the wheels requires a massive number of gears in the transmission. For a train this would mean 20-50 gears. Most trucks use 10-18 gears (plus 2 reverse gears).
An electric motor can cover that huge torque vs speed range without any gears. At some point the extra weight of the transmission with all those gears is more of a burden than the losses you get from converting the ICE's mechanical energy into electrical to drive the electric motor. In that respect, even if the truck isn't 100% electric, it could offer some serious advantages. e.g. No low gears - the ICE engine only drives the truck at higher speeds. At lower speeds it's powered by an electric motor, whose battery is recharged by the ICE.
They're called trains. We don't run them without a driver out of an overabundance of caution, but the conductor mostly just sits there ready to yank on the brake if something catastrophic happens.
A driverless truck/lorry won't happen (at least not for several decades if not centuries) because the existing infrastructure won't support it. A good percentage of the places where trucks have to unload their goods aren't actually built for trucks to park and unload. I regularly see tractor trailer drivers make 5, 7, even 9 point turns to position their trailer correctly. Newer businesses in remote areas (lots of cheap land) can be built for easier truck unloading. But existing businesses in cities and areas with high land prices are usually limited in the amount of space they can devote to truck turning/parking. (Loading generally isn't a problem because the distribution warehouses are designed around the trucks, unlike retail stores.)
Heck, one of the businesses near where I live gets a produce delivery truck every other day who parks in the middle of the street with hazard lights blinking while they unload. That turns the two-lane road (one lane in each direction) into a one lane road where traffic in both directions has to take turns going around the truck. Hardly ideal but it's the only way for a truck to unload cargo at this location. I've wondered how an autonomous car would even deal with a situation like that, much less a driverless truck.
I don't think a driverless truck will ever happen until the "truck" is redesigned with all-wheel steering and no cabin (engine and drivetrain completely underneath the truck bed). Basically they'd be mobile shipping containers which can pivot and rotate in place or move sideways if need be.
Legal consequences will discourage deliberate abuse. But I suspect the technical solution here is to add a direct feed of known non-human audio sources (TV, radio, stereo system) to devices like Google Home or Alexa. That way these devices can selectively ignore from your TV, radio, and stereo system, kinda like how voice chat programs eliminate echo by subtracting the audio they send to the speakers from what they receive from the microphone. It'll prevent blatant abuse of ads to activate these devices. And as an added side benefit, you'll be able to give a voice command in the middle of a loud scene of a movie, and the device will be able to understand you just fine.
Are they counting people who actually use the service to type and receive personal messages? Or is it like Instagram where it constantly receives feeds from people you don't know in the background? I had to use TitaniumBackup to freeze Instagram because it was sucking up so much battery life, and I only used it once every few weeks to catch up with my sister's family photos.
I wonder what the guy who came up with this idea used to do as a kid...
Most routers have VPN clients, which you can use to connect to a VPN server thus sending all of your LAN's web traffic (or optionally all network traffi) over the VPN. The high-end routers also have OpenVPN clients (and servers if you want to connect to your home LAN from the Internet). And DD-WRT supports both an OpenVPN client and server, so any router which can be upgraded to DD-WRT will also work.
So I just subscribed to a VPN service which supports OpenVPN (actually they just give me sole access to my own virtual machine where I can install Linux and an OpenVPN server). Then configured the router to send all web traffic to the OpenVPN server.
My first PC (an Atari 800)
It worked fine for writing reports and playing games.
A PC is a personal computer. A computer you can use for personal computing tasks. As opposed to a mainframe which was shared by multiple people. Or a workstation which was used for tasks at work. Or an embedded system which was made to control a specific object. That's it.
A Chromebook is a PC. A tablet is a PC. A phone is a PC. Heck, a smartwatch is a PC if it's got a decent way for you to input data to it. The phone in my pocket is many times faster than the fastest Cray supercomputer from around the time I owned my first PC. 160 MFLOPS for the Cray vs 718 MFLOPS for a single thread on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. The definition of "PC" you've crafted means PCs didn't exist until the late-1990s.
Project Gutenberg scans books which are out of copyright, and only famous ones.
Google Books scans contemporary works. That in itself made it worth doing. Basically if the Library of Congress burned down, there would be millions if not billions of contemporary books and magazines which existed only on the authors' computers, and in printed form on collectors shelves. There would be no central database of these works, much less a searchable one. Regardless of what you think of Google Books or how boring it is to work there (I'm having similar boredom problems scanning dozens of my family's photo albums), it's a project well worth doing.
Companies are a shell, a paper construct created to allow people to work together; hopefully more efficiently than they would working alone. The laborer employee is able to concentrate on working without having to waste time on stuff outside his field of expertise, like how to calculate payroll taxes and send the payment electronically to the IRS every month. The manager employee directs the output of the workers so (ideally) their productivity is more efficient than without a manager. And investors/stockholders help kickstart the entire process by providing the initial capital to help set up the organization that became the company. When you tax a company, you're actually taxing the people who work there (who will usually just shift the tax to their customers in the form of higher prices). The company itself generates nothing - all the productivity is generated by people who work at the company.
When a company (organization of people) is profitable, that means its efficiency is high, and you want that company to grow and expand so more people can partake in that high efficiency. When a company is not profitable, that means its efficiency is low and it's doing something wrong. Either it needs to change up how it operates so it becomes more efficient, or it needs to go bankrupt, freeing its employees to go find work at other more-efficient companies (or even starting their own companies).
If a company is reporting profits, but taking away raises or bonuses, then there are two possibilities for what's going on.
tl;dr - Company = group of people working together. And lazy = inefficient, though inefficient does not always equal lazy.
Is that income is a rate. Savings is an amount. More precisely, your savings (or checking) account balance is simply the integral of your income minus your expenses. (Or if you prefer, (income - expenses) is the first derivative of your account balance.)
What this means is that unless you're racking up debt (loans, credit cards), you have to live within your means. The average rate of money coming in (income) has to equal the average rate of money going out (expenses). And (this is the crucial part) that requirement is the same whether you have zero savings or a million dollars saved. In other words, the person with a million dollars saved up has to live by the same constraints as someone living paycheck to paycheck. This realization struck me when I was counseling a co-worker who was having financial difficulty, and when we went over the numbers I realized she made just as much money as I did. Except instead of saving 20% of it like I was (both for retirement and as a buffer against unforeseen expenses or loss of income), she was blowing it all on toys and going out.
If you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and aren't accumulating debt, you''re already following the first rule of personal finance management - limit your spending to equal your income. All you have to do is lower your expenses slightly and you'll start accumulating savings. That savings will act as a buffer, evening out the dips and spikes TFA describes so that they don't turn into a financial emergency.
The person with a large savings account isn't necessarily better off than you because they make more money than you. They're better off because having a savings buffer frees them from having to waste time (and pulling their hair out) dealing with spot shortfalls in income or spikes in expenses. Instead of having to pay the electric bill at the last minute because you haven't gotten paid yet, you can just pay it whenever. It all adds up to exactly the same amount of income and expenses at the end of the year regardless of which way you do it. Just the paycheck-to-paycheck way is a lot more frenetic and nerve-wracking, while with a savings buffer you can just pay it, and go on doing things you enjoy instead of worrying. The savings way may even be cheaper as you won't be hit by late fees and penalties.
I realize many of you already know this. But in my experience talking with friends and co-workers, the majority of them live the paycheck-to-paycheck way. Many of them don't even track their spending - they deposit their paycheck, then spend money until the ATM tells them they have none left. This country really needs to make basic finance management a required course in high school. If you do use the ATM method, open up a free savings account. After depositing your paycheck, take, say, 5% of the amout you just deposited and transfer it into the savings account. Over time, gradually increase the percentage to 10%, 15%, and hopefully 20%. Make ATM withdrawls only from the checking account. If an emergency occurs, you can transfer some money from savings to checking to tide you over. No, your friends asking you to go to a concert with them does not constitute an emergency. But if an item you were saving up to buy next month goes on sale this month, then yes you can tap into your savings to get it now. Just be sure that you "pay back" any money you "borrowed" from yourself for the item on sale or for the emergency, by increasing the percentage you put into the savings account until you've caught back up to where it would've been without the "loan" to yourself.