I've owned my own domain for about 15 years, so I create a new email address for every service or vendor I sign up with. I just use the vendor's name @ my domain. To date I have over 700 email addresses, all forwarding to my main email. Except for the ones I knew from the start were shady and probably fly-by-night operations, the vast majority of them have been true to their ToS and have not shared the email address I gave them. I have not received spam nor unwanted email (other than from that vendor) at the unique email addresses I've given them.
Of the major vendors, there have been two exceptions. Soon after creating the email address, I began receiving spam from:
adobe@mydomain.com
microsoft@mydomain.com
The Adobe one received spam for a little over a year. The timing coincided with a publicized hack of Adobe's servers. So I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the address was stolen. OTOH, Microsoft... I began receiving spam at that address a few weeks after creating it. This continued for about a year, then began to die off. A few years later there was a resurgence in spam to the address, which tapered off after a year. 5 years later it happened again. So my conclusion is that they sold my email address at semi-regular intervals. I haven't received spam at that address in nearly 7 years though, so maybe they've cleaned up their act.
That would've been my vote a few years ago. But since Oracle demonstrated they're willing to sue people who use software Sun formerly released as open source, ZFS is dead. Nobody is going to touch it with a 10 ft pole, and Oracle has shown little interest in continuing to develop it.
We're just gonna have to wait for the great features in ZFS to be re-implemented in some other filesystem, free of Oracle's clutches.
I suspect it's more a problem for vector display arcade games (e.g. Asteroids, Battlezone, Star Wars). A raster display (picture is drawn with horizontal scan lines slowly moving down the screen) translates over to a LCD matrix screen fairly well. But in a vector display, the electron beam can move in arbitrary directions, resulting in perfectly sharp diagonal lines. When you try to translate that to a LCD matrix screen, you end up with jagged diagonals.
You can then mostly ignore the users who are giving false ratings
For that to work, you need to be able to identify individual users. i.e. Loss of anonymity on the Internet. Otherwise, once the search engines classify an online identity ("user") as unreliable and start disregarding it for search result ranking, people will just create a new identity and post the same false information under that identity
Also, it's not just trolls and nutty conspiracy theorists doing this. A large portion of the Internet population was more than happy to do it to link "miserable failure" with Bush 2. If you truly value the reliability of search results, you don't pull that kind of crap even if it's "just for fun."
Brutal repression happens in those places because the wealthy there are an exclusive group. They maintain their status by actively preventing others from becoming wealthy, thus others cannot join their group and dilute their economic power (as a percentage of the country's economy). They maintain their big fish in a little pond status by making sure the pond stays small. A side-effect of this repression is that it keeps the average citizen stuck in poverty. This repression results in the average GDP per capita in those countries (a measure of each person's productivity) being mired down around $10k/yr (Mexico = $10,300/yr, Brazil = $11,200/yr).. The wealthy there won't allow it to go any higher. And because they control most of the wealth, most of the economic activity in those countries is wealthy people buying and selling to each other.
It can't happen in the U.S. because the wealthy here haven't been an exclusive group for a long time. Most people in the U.S. lead fully productive lives (by modern standards - $53k/yr GDP per capita). Consequently, most of the economic activity in the U.S. is from average (and even low) income people buying stuff. If you look at the IRS income tax statistics, a full 44% of gross individual income goes to people making less than $100k/yr. 68% by people making less than $200k/yr. If you say "the wealthy" comprises anyone making over $1 million/yr, they account for less than 10% of U.S. income.
This means that in order for those U.S. millionaires (and billionaries) to stay millionaires, people with lower income must maintain their income so they can continue to buy the stuff that the millionaires are selling. If everyone but the millionaires in Mexico and Brazil lost their jobs, it wouldn't affect most of those millionaires' incomes since they're mostly selling to each other. If everyone but the millionaires in the U.S. lost their jobs, the millionaires would panic because 90% of their income comes from selling to those now-unemployed people.
If the U.S. were to fall into brutal repression like Central and South America with widescale loss of jobs, it would result in about an 80% reduction in GDP per capita, meaning those millionaires would lose about 80% of their income. They don't want that. They want to see the lower and middle classes continue to make decent incomes almost as much as the lower and middle classes do. If widescale job losses were to begin among the middle and lower classes in the U.S., the wealthy would start to panic as the loss of customers affected their bottom lines. And you'd see all income classes in the U.S. working together to figure out ways to get those people employed again.
You can see the same thing if you compare GDP (PPP) per capita - the mean - vs the median income. The mean spreads the income of the wealthy across all citizens, while the median tells you how much income the 50th percentile citizen is making. The ratio of the two gives you a sense how much the economy is skewed towards the wealthy. For the U.S., these numbers are a mean of $56,115.7 vs a median of $30,960. A 1.81 ratio. For Mexico it's $16,988.4* mean vs $5,160 median, a 3.29 ratio, indicating a much larger share of each worker's productivity is diverted into income for the wealthy. (And for comparison, since everyone seems to like comparing the U.S. with the Scandinavian countries, the ratios for Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Demark are 1.63, 1.79, 1.72, and 1.77.)
* (Yes $16,988.4 is different from $10,300. Difference between nominal and PPP GDP.)
Because they're tired of paying $80/mo for cable because it's the only way to get a couple dozen channels they want, but the cheapest bundle that includes those channels comes with hundreds of other channels they're not interested in. Whereas the streaming services offer more granular selection which lets you pick and choose those channels you want for $30/mo, because they're not bundled with a bunch of expensive sports channels you never watch.
So revenue is a bad metric to use too. The best metric would be Nielsen ratings based on viewing source - number of individual eyeballs watching a particular show via OTA, broadcast cable, vs. streaming. And even then cable has an unfair advantage because most cable ISPs offer a discount if you bundle Internet + TV service.
A good portion of the H1B worker's money goes back to their home country.
That's a temporary effect. The whole point of the H1-B program, at least from the employee's and government's point of view, is to grant citizenship to a skilled and productive foreigner. Once the worker gets U.S. citizenship, their next step will immediately to be apply for citizenship for their immediate family and have them immigrate to the U.S. At which point they stop sending money back to their home country, and start spending it here in the U.S.
If you're upset about money leaving the country, you should be directing your ire at illegal immigrants. A portion of their money really does get sent back to their home country in perpetuity. That's what's been sad/amusing about the media's attempt to conflate the plight of legal immigrants with that of illegal immigrants by using confusing terms such as "undocumented" immigrants. Deporting illegal immigrants means more opportunity for legal immigrants. If our social system doesn't have to support millions of illegal immigrants, that would allow us to absorb more legal immigrants, and we can increase the quota of visas we give for legal immigration into the country. Illegal immigrants are basically people who illegally cut in line ahead of the other immigrants waiting so they can get a visa legally.
Google has no control over existing Android code. The only thing they control is new versions of Android, right up until it's released. Android is open source under the Apache 2.0 license (free, as in beer - you don't have to release your modifications). If you don't like what Google is doing with it, just grab a copy of the Android source and fork it. Like Amazon did for Fire OS.
The only reasons for not starting with Android (where 99% of the work has already been done) is if you don't like Android's core design, or if you want to add all sorts of other "features" that you don't want users to know about (like back doors), or if you deliberately want to make it incompatible with existing Android apps.
Because dividing it by state doesn't tell you who is consuming those social services. You're falling for a classic statistical fallacy called Simpson's paradox. When you divide a sample into groups, the trend within each of those groups can contradict the overall trend. The best recent example was the 2016 Presidential election. Clinton won more popular votes than Trump. But because the votes are grouped by state, Trump ended up winning the election.
Dividing it by "red state" and "blue state" unfairly transfers the tax contributions of red voters in blue states into the "blue state" category, and the social service consumption of blue voters in red states into the "red state" category. Red voters on average have higher incomes than blue voters. And since we use a progressive tax system, higher income people pay more taxes. Hence for the country overall red voters are net tax contributors, blue voters are net social service recipients.
If you don't believe this is possible, here's a simple example. Imagine a country with two states. Blue State has 2 blue voters and 1 red voter. The red voter pays $100 in taxes, the 2 blue voters receive $40 in services each. Red State as 2 red voters and 1 blue voter. The red voters each pay $10 in taxes, the 1 blue voter receives $40 in services. So in this simplified example, every red voter is a tax contributor, every blue voter is a social services recipient. Yet the blue state is the net tax contributor and the red state is the net social services recipient. That is how little tax contributions by state are correlated to tax contributions by political affiliation.
Grouping it by states just takes advantage of an unrelated factor to create Simpson's Paradox, Rural states tend to vote red, urban states tend to vote blue. But rural states tend to consume more government money simply because it costs more to deliver the same government services to the same number of people, if those people are spread out over a wider area.
This is just another aspect of the question about the fundamental nature of freedom. If you are free, can you choose not to be free? And by corollary, if you cannot choose not to be free, are you truly free?
It crops up all over the place. Can citizens in a democracy vote to cease being a democracy? Does freedom of speech protect the speech of people who want to withdraw or limit the freedom of speech? And more relevant to this case, the BSD license vs the GNU license. Generalizing, the BSD license lets you do whatever you want with open source. OTOH if you use GNU-licensed open source to create something, you are required to release what you do as GNU-licensed open source itself.
Honestly I don't know for certain which is actually better, or if one is better in some situations, the other better in other situations. But I tend towards the more-freedom side for one reason: If you prohibit certain activities, you're deliberately prohibiting the exploration of certain portions of the solution space. I've yet to see a mathematical or logical argument demonstrating that the optimal solution can never reside within these prohibited solution spaces. So prohibiting them is based on ideology, not on reason. So I'm with Tim Berners-Lee on this one - as much as I dislike DRM, people who disagree with me should be free to experiment with it, including forming DRM standards if they wish.
The studios approve two types of devices if you wish to stream their coopyrighted content. One approval is for a hardware device - a phone, tablet, dedicated player (e.g. Roku), Blu-ray player, etc. You submit a sample of this hardware, they go over it and OK it, and authorize you to stream to it. This is why the iPhones got Netflix before Android phones. Netflix had to submit just a few iPhone models for approval, so that happened pretty quickly. They had to submit hundreds of Android phone models for approval, so that took some time.
The second type of approval is for software players. If you want to stream to a software player running on a general purpose computing device, Hollywood has much more stringent requirements. Their fear is that you'll run another program along-side the streaming video that peeks into the memory containing the decrypted stream, and save stream to disk thus giving you a DRM-free digital copy of the movie. Their "solution" is that the DRM and video decode process has to happen inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends each frame directly to the display device. They don't want a native Windows or OS X or Liinux binary which does this because someone could theoretically modify the binary before running to weaken or pierce the encrypted VM. That's why the players are coded in Flash or Silverlight (theoretically you could modify those as well, but it's a lot harder since a new copy of the player is sent when you begin streaming the movie).
This insanity is also why playing streamed movies on PC requires much heftier hardware than mobile devices. Because the entire decode process has to happen inside the encrypted VM, you can't take advantage of dedicated video decode hardware built into every GPU since the late 1990s. The entire thing has to be done in software (moreover, software running in a VM). It's extremely CPU-intensive. That's why until recently you needed an i3 or better (Pentium or Atom wasn't enough) to stream 1080p movies from Netflix, Hulu, etc, while your phone with a low-end ARM processor could stream the same 1080p movie with no problems. Because the phone was approved as a hardware device, it's allowed to use dedicated video decoding hardware.
One problem with your theory. The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from. Free market economics views reduced productivity as an inefficiency, and tries to get rid of it (actually it simply offers greater rewards for higher-productivity activity, which has the side-effect of strangling low-productivity activity). Either the robot-produced products need to be lowered in price to just as or more affordable to the masses than before they were produced by robots (meaning poor people's standard of living stays the same or increases - i.e. they become richer), or the wages of the masses have to increase so they can afford to buy as many or more toys as before (meaning poor people become richer).
That's why historically in developed nations, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have also gotten richer. That the rich have gotten richer than the poor have gotten richer is certainly a valid complaint. And you can also complain that the changes are happening too quickly for the masses to retrain for new jobs. But casting it as a doom and gloom scenario where 1% control all the wealth and the rest of the population is jobless and lives on a starvation diet is simply unrealistic. Long before that happens, a free poor people would create a black market doing jobs for and trading with each other using an alternate currency, essentially invalidating the non-material wealth of the 1%. So any way to keep the masses employed, productive, and being paid results in a better outcome for both poor people and rich people. There is no us vs them here.
The only thing that can ruin an entire economy is a government on a misguided quest for economic equality - because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions. That freedom is what allows people to increase their standard of living - by individually choosing more productive activities over less.
Netflix does use AI in developing the video compression algorithm. The problem with encoding videos with lossy algorithms is that video quality is a subjective thing. You need a person to watch it and tell you how good the video quality looks. This makes it rather slow and difficult to do A/B testing, not to mention how boring it is watching the same clips over and over with different encoding.
Netflix got around the problem by using machine learning to teach a computer when video quality looked good. They had a bunch of people watch videos with different compression and rate the quality, then told the AI that their ratings were gospel. It then analyzed the different videos and decided for itself which features were associated with good quality. Once the computer was generating the video ratings as people, they had a rapid way to do A/B testing. That allowed them to optimize their compression algorithm in much less time than with using humans to rate video quality.
I'm not sure why Summary links to some popular news article which talks in general about Netflix using AI, instead of linking to the actual Netflix page describing exactly what they did. This used to be the sort of technical detail you'd expect from slashdot submissions.
PS/2 ports needed to be killed because weren't hot pluggable. If you unplugged a PS/2 keyboard or mouse and plugged in a new one while the computer was on, it could hang or crash or even damage the computer. Not many users knew that because it worked as if it were hot pluggable about 9 times out of 10. But most techies knew it could hang the computer, and the developers of USB certainly knew it - USB was designed specifically to be hot pluggable.
And USB supplanted Firewire on the Apple side. Firewire was good tech for its time, but it flopped because Apple wanted $1 per port (not per device). USB was free to implement.
Apple lost their suit against Samsung for "copying" the iPad. Samsung showed sufficient prior art (e.g. Star Trek) that they won the iPad portion of the trial.
Apple won their suit against Samsung for "copying" the iPhone. Samsung compiled a series of internal memos and photos showing they were developing iPhone-like phones (flat, touchscreen, no integrated keyboard, and yes - rounded corners) before the iPhone was announced. But their attorneys failed to submit it before a filing deadline, and the judge refused to grant them an extension. Probably the stupidest thing about the whole trial - the judge was more worried about sticking to the schedule and enforcing deadlines than getting to the truth. The jury essentially decided the case never knowing what Samsung had been working on before the iPhone was announced.
From Samsung perspective even with the verdict it was worth it since it made them the #2 smartphone seller at the time.
We don't need a right to repair law. All we need is a law that says if a manufacturer adds something to a product to make it harder for the end-user to fix, then they must fix the product for free forever.
The rationale being that if the end-user is not free to fix the product, then the end-user is not the owner. The end-user has merely rented the product. The manufacturer is still the owner, and thus is responsible for the cost of repairs.
I posted a brief analysis in a previous article (using the RIAA and MPAA's own numbers) showing how Hollywood tries to hamstring industries with a much larger economic contribution than theirs. And provided accounting evidence (using Sony's own annual reports) how their music division almost single-handedly killed their audio electronics division by forcing them to use DRM.
I'm sure someone could do the same for global sales.
I would reckon your odds of surviving being run over by a truck are much lower than surviving being shot.
After 2016, I would've thought it would've been obvious to everyone that guns weren't the problem. If you take away guns, the crazies will just resort to other methods to kill people (like trucks - the fantasy that they'd use knives is only true for crimes of passion, but not for deliberate killings like this one). Heck, the driver of the truck in Nice had a gun, and opted to use the truck instead. Likewise, in the Brussels attack, the terrorists realized they'd probably be shot and killed quickly by armed security had they charged in guns blazing, so they resorted to using bombs which would inflict casualties before security could respond.
This is like those checklists criticizing anti-spam solutions. Outlawing the tools doesn't work. You have to recognize and admit that violence is a social problem and concentrate on solutions which address why people might resort to violence.
There's a (IMHO) simple reason for the divide on gun control in the U.S. The issue mostly breaks down into urban (pro gun-control) vs rural (anti gun-control). And if you analyze it that way, I think the reason is obvious: Urban areas have faster police response times. If you live in a city, it makes sense to just call someone else with a gun (the police) and wait for them to arrive if a crime is in progress.
Which brings us to what I think is the real problem with the gun control debate - too much emphasis on a uniform national law. When you have a strong geographically correlated trend like this, the solution is simple - allow different regions to enact different laws. The rural areas can have lax gun laws, the urban areas can have strict gun laws, and everyone is happy (well, happier than they are now). But no, we've got pro-gun people wanting easy access to guns for the entire country because anything less would diminish the 2nd Amenedment, and anti-gun people wanting to ban guns in the entire country because you can transport guns from rural areas to urban. Both arguments have merit, but I think we need to ask ourselves if our attempt to create one national law on this issue isn't doing more harm than geographically different laws would even with all the flaws.
Others have already posted a link to the full list (22 MB text file - whee). Someone else has set up a website to let you search that list from your browser (only one site at a time) which may be a bit more manageable if you don't visit many sites which require logins.
It's for manufacturing tolerances and component rigidity. A curved surface is more rigid, especially if it has a double-curve. Back when HDTVs had CCFL backlights and were 2-3 inches thick, the extra thickness helped to stiffen them. Just like an I-beam. The sole purpose of the middle section of an I-beam is to separate the two ends by as much distance as possible. The more you can separate them, the more the beam can resist bending moments and the more rigid it is.
But as we moved to LED backlights and HDTVs became thinner, the separation between the front and back halves became smaller and they started to lose this rigidity. When you take something very big and flat and make it thin, it loses its rigidity. It wants to flop over - just like a sheet of paper. Manufacturers wanted to make the TVs thinner, but didn't want the top half flopping over. One answer is to add thick metal stiffeners, but that adds weight. Another answer is add a slight curve. When you do that, part of the bending moment trying to flop the top over gets converted into compressive stresses in the curved parts, and the panel is easily able to resist flopping over.
If you have a large family, it makes sense. For most people, this is gonna be a miss for them.
There's no rule saying you have to be related to watch the movie together. It makes sense for most people if 4+ of them (at $13/ea ticket prices) are willing to get together and watch as a group. I have a 5.1 home theater system with a projector that throws a 12' x 7' image, and that's exactly what my friends and I occasionally do.
The fly in the ointment isn't the price. It's the entire concept of watching movies at home. When movies only came out in theaters, you had to watch it while it was still in theaters. Home video, subscription cable, and and now streaming has changed that - you can now watch a movie which hasn't been in theaters for months or years any time you want. My queue over all streaming services is about 100 movies long (never mind the episodic TV shows). I'm more than content to watch other stuff while I wait for hit movies to show up on the streaming subscription services. The only exception I can think of is the reason my sister gave for taking her son to watch The Force Awakens on opening night - so he wouldn't be left out of conversations when the other kids in school talked about it.
The key point is that they are successful because their services help people make (or save) staggering amounts of money - more than Google makes. That is how the economy becomes more efficient and standard of living improves. Someone comes up with an idea which helps people make more money (increase productivity) or save on costs, and sells it for a cut of the productivity increase or cost savings.
If you break this positive feedback cycle, you tank the economy. Which is Google's point - lack of fair use would prevent them from offering these services to Australia. And the only reason Australia is able to partake in the improved standard of living resulting from services like Google is because they're able to place the servers in other countries.
I called Google support when my Nexus 5's battery (2300 mAh) began failing (it would discharge normally for about 12 hours to 40%-50% charge, then would die in the next 20 minutes). As part of the diagnostic process, they asked me to put it into safe mode and do a battery run-down test. I didn't even know such a thing existed in Android. It disables all added-on apps. Only the phone functions and apps which shipped with the phone (mostly Google apps) will work - a nifty way for them to determine that a rogue app is not the culprit.
The damn thing lasted nearly 60 hours on a charge in safe mode, despite the defective battery. So it would appear modern smartphones (well, modern as of 3 years ago) are more than capable of lasting a weekend on a single charge. They die early because of all those damn apps which insist on waking up every 5 minutes so they can report your position, calls, texts, sites visited, photos taken, etc. back to their mother ship. Makes me wish there was a feature where you could "jail" certain apps to prevent them from running entirely, unless you specifically launch it.
That's probably why Google is publicizing this. To point out that the DMCA badly needs a disincentive for filing false takedown claims. If only 0.05% of claims are even factually correct (not even considering if they're legally valid), that's a huge problem with the law.
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned my own domain for about 15 years, so I create a new email address for every service or vendor I sign up with. I just use the vendor's name @ my domain. To date I have over 700 email addresses, all forwarding to my main email. Except for the ones I knew from the start were shady and probably fly-by-night operations, the vast majority of them have been true to their ToS and have not shared the email address I gave them. I have not received spam nor unwanted email (other than from that vendor) at the unique email addresses I've given them.
Of the major vendors, there have been two exceptions. Soon after creating the email address, I began receiving spam from:
adobe@mydomain.com
microsoft@mydomain.com
The Adobe one received spam for a little over a year. The timing coincided with a publicized hack of Adobe's servers. So I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the address was stolen. OTOH, Microsoft... I began receiving spam at that address a few weeks after creating it. This continued for about a year, then began to die off. A few years later there was a resurgence in spam to the address, which tapered off after a year. 5 years later it happened again. So my conclusion is that they sold my email address at semi-regular intervals. I haven't received spam at that address in nearly 7 years though, so maybe they've cleaned up their act.
That would've been my vote a few years ago. But since Oracle demonstrated they're willing to sue people who use software Sun formerly released as open source, ZFS is dead. Nobody is going to touch it with a 10 ft pole, and Oracle has shown little interest in continuing to develop it.
We're just gonna have to wait for the great features in ZFS to be re-implemented in some other filesystem, free of Oracle's clutches.
I suspect it's more a problem for vector display arcade games (e.g. Asteroids, Battlezone, Star Wars). A raster display (picture is drawn with horizontal scan lines slowly moving down the screen) translates over to a LCD matrix screen fairly well. But in a vector display, the electron beam can move in arbitrary directions, resulting in perfectly sharp diagonal lines. When you try to translate that to a LCD matrix screen, you end up with jagged diagonals.
For that to work, you need to be able to identify individual users. i.e. Loss of anonymity on the Internet. Otherwise, once the search engines classify an online identity ("user") as unreliable and start disregarding it for search result ranking, people will just create a new identity and post the same false information under that identity
Also, it's not just trolls and nutty conspiracy theorists doing this. A large portion of the Internet population was more than happy to do it to link "miserable failure" with Bush 2. If you truly value the reliability of search results, you don't pull that kind of crap even if it's "just for fun."
Brutal repression happens in those places because the wealthy there are an exclusive group. They maintain their status by actively preventing others from becoming wealthy, thus others cannot join their group and dilute their economic power (as a percentage of the country's economy). They maintain their big fish in a little pond status by making sure the pond stays small. A side-effect of this repression is that it keeps the average citizen stuck in poverty. This repression results in the average GDP per capita in those countries (a measure of each person's productivity) being mired down around $10k/yr (Mexico = $10,300/yr, Brazil = $11,200/yr).. The wealthy there won't allow it to go any higher. And because they control most of the wealth, most of the economic activity in those countries is wealthy people buying and selling to each other.
It can't happen in the U.S. because the wealthy here haven't been an exclusive group for a long time. Most people in the U.S. lead fully productive lives (by modern standards - $53k/yr GDP per capita). Consequently, most of the economic activity in the U.S. is from average (and even low) income people buying stuff. If you look at the IRS income tax statistics, a full 44% of gross individual income goes to people making less than $100k/yr. 68% by people making less than $200k/yr. If you say "the wealthy" comprises anyone making over $1 million/yr, they account for less than 10% of U.S. income.
This means that in order for those U.S. millionaires (and billionaries) to stay millionaires, people with lower income must maintain their income so they can continue to buy the stuff that the millionaires are selling. If everyone but the millionaires in Mexico and Brazil lost their jobs, it wouldn't affect most of those millionaires' incomes since they're mostly selling to each other. If everyone but the millionaires in the U.S. lost their jobs, the millionaires would panic because 90% of their income comes from selling to those now-unemployed people.
If the U.S. were to fall into brutal repression like Central and South America with widescale loss of jobs, it would result in about an 80% reduction in GDP per capita, meaning those millionaires would lose about 80% of their income. They don't want that. They want to see the lower and middle classes continue to make decent incomes almost as much as the lower and middle classes do. If widescale job losses were to begin among the middle and lower classes in the U.S., the wealthy would start to panic as the loss of customers affected their bottom lines. And you'd see all income classes in the U.S. working together to figure out ways to get those people employed again.
You can see the same thing if you compare GDP (PPP) per capita - the mean - vs the median income. The mean spreads the income of the wealthy across all citizens, while the median tells you how much income the 50th percentile citizen is making. The ratio of the two gives you a sense how much the economy is skewed towards the wealthy. For the U.S., these numbers are a mean of $56,115.7 vs a median of $30,960. A 1.81 ratio. For Mexico it's $16,988.4* mean vs $5,160 median, a 3.29 ratio, indicating a much larger share of each worker's productivity is diverted into income for the wealthy. (And for comparison, since everyone seems to like comparing the U.S. with the Scandinavian countries, the ratios for Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Demark are 1.63, 1.79, 1.72, and 1.77.)
* (Yes $16,988.4 is different from $10,300. Difference between nominal and PPP GDP.)
Because they're tired of paying $80/mo for cable because it's the only way to get a couple dozen channels they want, but the cheapest bundle that includes those channels comes with hundreds of other channels they're not interested in. Whereas the streaming services offer more granular selection which lets you pick and choose those channels you want for $30/mo, because they're not bundled with a bunch of expensive sports channels you never watch.
So revenue is a bad metric to use too. The best metric would be Nielsen ratings based on viewing source - number of individual eyeballs watching a particular show via OTA, broadcast cable, vs. streaming. And even then cable has an unfair advantage because most cable ISPs offer a discount if you bundle Internet + TV service.
That's a temporary effect. The whole point of the H1-B program, at least from the employee's and government's point of view, is to grant citizenship to a skilled and productive foreigner. Once the worker gets U.S. citizenship, their next step will immediately to be apply for citizenship for their immediate family and have them immigrate to the U.S. At which point they stop sending money back to their home country, and start spending it here in the U.S.
If you're upset about money leaving the country, you should be directing your ire at illegal immigrants. A portion of their money really does get sent back to their home country in perpetuity. That's what's been sad/amusing about the media's attempt to conflate the plight of legal immigrants with that of illegal immigrants by using confusing terms such as "undocumented" immigrants. Deporting illegal immigrants means more opportunity for legal immigrants. If our social system doesn't have to support millions of illegal immigrants, that would allow us to absorb more legal immigrants, and we can increase the quota of visas we give for legal immigration into the country. Illegal immigrants are basically people who illegally cut in line ahead of the other immigrants waiting so they can get a visa legally.
Google has no control over existing Android code. The only thing they control is new versions of Android, right up until it's released. Android is open source under the Apache 2.0 license (free, as in beer - you don't have to release your modifications). If you don't like what Google is doing with it, just grab a copy of the Android source and fork it. Like Amazon did for Fire OS.
The only reasons for not starting with Android (where 99% of the work has already been done) is if you don't like Android's core design, or if you want to add all sorts of other "features" that you don't want users to know about (like back doors), or if you deliberately want to make it incompatible with existing Android apps.
Because dividing it by state doesn't tell you who is consuming those social services. You're falling for a classic statistical fallacy called Simpson's paradox. When you divide a sample into groups, the trend within each of those groups can contradict the overall trend. The best recent example was the 2016 Presidential election. Clinton won more popular votes than Trump. But because the votes are grouped by state, Trump ended up winning the election.
Dividing it by "red state" and "blue state" unfairly transfers the tax contributions of red voters in blue states into the "blue state" category, and the social service consumption of blue voters in red states into the "red state" category. Red voters on average have higher incomes than blue voters. And since we use a progressive tax system, higher income people pay more taxes. Hence for the country overall red voters are net tax contributors, blue voters are net social service recipients.
If you don't believe this is possible, here's a simple example. Imagine a country with two states. Blue State has 2 blue voters and 1 red voter. The red voter pays $100 in taxes, the 2 blue voters receive $40 in services each. Red State as 2 red voters and 1 blue voter. The red voters each pay $10 in taxes, the 1 blue voter receives $40 in services. So in this simplified example, every red voter is a tax contributor, every blue voter is a social services recipient. Yet the blue state is the net tax contributor and the red state is the net social services recipient. That is how little tax contributions by state are correlated to tax contributions by political affiliation.
Grouping it by states just takes advantage of an unrelated factor to create Simpson's Paradox, Rural states tend to vote red, urban states tend to vote blue. But rural states tend to consume more government money simply because it costs more to deliver the same government services to the same number of people, if those people are spread out over a wider area.
This is just another aspect of the question about the fundamental nature of freedom. If you are free, can you choose not to be free? And by corollary, if you cannot choose not to be free, are you truly free?
It crops up all over the place. Can citizens in a democracy vote to cease being a democracy? Does freedom of speech protect the speech of people who want to withdraw or limit the freedom of speech? And more relevant to this case, the BSD license vs the GNU license. Generalizing, the BSD license lets you do whatever you want with open source. OTOH if you use GNU-licensed open source to create something, you are required to release what you do as GNU-licensed open source itself.
Honestly I don't know for certain which is actually better, or if one is better in some situations, the other better in other situations. But I tend towards the more-freedom side for one reason: If you prohibit certain activities, you're deliberately prohibiting the exploration of certain portions of the solution space. I've yet to see a mathematical or logical argument demonstrating that the optimal solution can never reside within these prohibited solution spaces. So prohibiting them is based on ideology, not on reason. So I'm with Tim Berners-Lee on this one - as much as I dislike DRM, people who disagree with me should be free to experiment with it, including forming DRM standards if they wish.
The studios approve two types of devices if you wish to stream their coopyrighted content. One approval is for a hardware device - a phone, tablet, dedicated player (e.g. Roku), Blu-ray player, etc. You submit a sample of this hardware, they go over it and OK it, and authorize you to stream to it. This is why the iPhones got Netflix before Android phones. Netflix had to submit just a few iPhone models for approval, so that happened pretty quickly. They had to submit hundreds of Android phone models for approval, so that took some time.
The second type of approval is for software players. If you want to stream to a software player running on a general purpose computing device, Hollywood has much more stringent requirements. Their fear is that you'll run another program along-side the streaming video that peeks into the memory containing the decrypted stream, and save stream to disk thus giving you a DRM-free digital copy of the movie. Their "solution" is that the DRM and video decode process has to happen inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends each frame directly to the display device. They don't want a native Windows or OS X or Liinux binary which does this because someone could theoretically modify the binary before running to weaken or pierce the encrypted VM. That's why the players are coded in Flash or Silverlight (theoretically you could modify those as well, but it's a lot harder since a new copy of the player is sent when you begin streaming the movie).
This insanity is also why playing streamed movies on PC requires much heftier hardware than mobile devices. Because the entire decode process has to happen inside the encrypted VM, you can't take advantage of dedicated video decode hardware built into every GPU since the late 1990s. The entire thing has to be done in software (moreover, software running in a VM). It's extremely CPU-intensive. That's why until recently you needed an i3 or better (Pentium or Atom wasn't enough) to stream 1080p movies from Netflix, Hulu, etc, while your phone with a low-end ARM processor could stream the same 1080p movie with no problems. Because the phone was approved as a hardware device, it's allowed to use dedicated video decoding hardware.
One problem with your theory. The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from. Free market economics views reduced productivity as an inefficiency, and tries to get rid of it (actually it simply offers greater rewards for higher-productivity activity, which has the side-effect of strangling low-productivity activity). Either the robot-produced products need to be lowered in price to just as or more affordable to the masses than before they were produced by robots (meaning poor people's standard of living stays the same or increases - i.e. they become richer), or the wages of the masses have to increase so they can afford to buy as many or more toys as before (meaning poor people become richer).
That's why historically in developed nations, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have also gotten richer. That the rich have gotten richer than the poor have gotten richer is certainly a valid complaint. And you can also complain that the changes are happening too quickly for the masses to retrain for new jobs. But casting it as a doom and gloom scenario where 1% control all the wealth and the rest of the population is jobless and lives on a starvation diet is simply unrealistic. Long before that happens, a free poor people would create a black market doing jobs for and trading with each other using an alternate currency, essentially invalidating the non-material wealth of the 1%. So any way to keep the masses employed, productive, and being paid results in a better outcome for both poor people and rich people. There is no us vs them here.
The only thing that can ruin an entire economy is a government on a misguided quest for economic equality - because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions. That freedom is what allows people to increase their standard of living - by individually choosing more productive activities over less.
Netflix does use AI in developing the video compression algorithm. The problem with encoding videos with lossy algorithms is that video quality is a subjective thing. You need a person to watch it and tell you how good the video quality looks. This makes it rather slow and difficult to do A/B testing, not to mention how boring it is watching the same clips over and over with different encoding.
Netflix got around the problem by using machine learning to teach a computer when video quality looked good. They had a bunch of people watch videos with different compression and rate the quality, then told the AI that their ratings were gospel. It then analyzed the different videos and decided for itself which features were associated with good quality. Once the computer was generating the video ratings as people, they had a rapid way to do A/B testing. That allowed them to optimize their compression algorithm in much less time than with using humans to rate video quality.
I'm not sure why Summary links to some popular news article which talks in general about Netflix using AI, instead of linking to the actual Netflix page describing exactly what they did. This used to be the sort of technical detail you'd expect from slashdot submissions.
PS/2 ports needed to be killed because weren't hot pluggable. If you unplugged a PS/2 keyboard or mouse and plugged in a new one while the computer was on, it could hang or crash or even damage the computer. Not many users knew that because it worked as if it were hot pluggable about 9 times out of 10. But most techies knew it could hang the computer, and the developers of USB certainly knew it - USB was designed specifically to be hot pluggable.
And USB supplanted Firewire on the Apple side. Firewire was good tech for its time, but it flopped because Apple wanted $1 per port (not per device). USB was free to implement.
Apple won their suit against Samsung for "copying" the iPhone. Samsung compiled a series of internal memos and photos showing they were developing iPhone-like phones (flat, touchscreen, no integrated keyboard, and yes - rounded corners) before the iPhone was announced. But their attorneys failed to submit it before a filing deadline, and the judge refused to grant them an extension. Probably the stupidest thing about the whole trial - the judge was more worried about sticking to the schedule and enforcing deadlines than getting to the truth. The jury essentially decided the case never knowing what Samsung had been working on before the iPhone was announced.
Common misconception. Apple was never #1. Nokia was #1 all the way until 2011, when Samsung overtook it.
We don't need a right to repair law. All we need is a law that says if a manufacturer adds something to a product to make it harder for the end-user to fix, then they must fix the product for free forever.
The rationale being that if the end-user is not free to fix the product, then the end-user is not the owner. The end-user has merely rented the product. The manufacturer is still the owner, and thus is responsible for the cost of repairs.
I posted a brief analysis in a previous article (using the RIAA and MPAA's own numbers) showing how Hollywood tries to hamstring industries with a much larger economic contribution than theirs. And provided accounting evidence (using Sony's own annual reports) how their music division almost single-handedly killed their audio electronics division by forcing them to use DRM.
I'm sure someone could do the same for global sales.
I would reckon your odds of surviving being run over by a truck are much lower than surviving being shot.
After 2016, I would've thought it would've been obvious to everyone that guns weren't the problem. If you take away guns, the crazies will just resort to other methods to kill people (like trucks - the fantasy that they'd use knives is only true for crimes of passion, but not for deliberate killings like this one). Heck, the driver of the truck in Nice had a gun, and opted to use the truck instead. Likewise, in the Brussels attack, the terrorists realized they'd probably be shot and killed quickly by armed security had they charged in guns blazing, so they resorted to using bombs which would inflict casualties before security could respond.
This is like those checklists criticizing anti-spam solutions. Outlawing the tools doesn't work. You have to recognize and admit that violence is a social problem and concentrate on solutions which address why people might resort to violence.
There's a (IMHO) simple reason for the divide on gun control in the U.S. The issue mostly breaks down into urban (pro gun-control) vs rural (anti gun-control). And if you analyze it that way, I think the reason is obvious: Urban areas have faster police response times. If you live in a city, it makes sense to just call someone else with a gun (the police) and wait for them to arrive if a crime is in progress.
But in rural areas, waiting for police can often get you killed. So people there prefer to have their own gun for protection. The stats seem to bear them out too - violent crime rates are lower in rural areas despite the rate of gun ownership being 2x higher in rural areas.
Which brings us to what I think is the real problem with the gun control debate - too much emphasis on a uniform national law. When you have a strong geographically correlated trend like this, the solution is simple - allow different regions to enact different laws. The rural areas can have lax gun laws, the urban areas can have strict gun laws, and everyone is happy (well, happier than they are now). But no, we've got pro-gun people wanting easy access to guns for the entire country because anything less would diminish the 2nd Amenedment, and anti-gun people wanting to ban guns in the entire country because you can transport guns from rural areas to urban. Both arguments have merit, but I think we need to ask ourselves if our attempt to create one national law on this issue isn't doing more harm than geographically different laws would even with all the flaws.
Others have already posted a link to the full list (22 MB text file - whee). Someone else has set up a website to let you search that list from your browser (only one site at a time) which may be a bit more manageable if you don't visit many sites which require logins.
http://www.doesitusecloudflare.com/
It's for manufacturing tolerances and component rigidity. A curved surface is more rigid, especially if it has a double-curve. Back when HDTVs had CCFL backlights and were 2-3 inches thick, the extra thickness helped to stiffen them. Just like an I-beam. The sole purpose of the middle section of an I-beam is to separate the two ends by as much distance as possible. The more you can separate them, the more the beam can resist bending moments and the more rigid it is.
But as we moved to LED backlights and HDTVs became thinner, the separation between the front and back halves became smaller and they started to lose this rigidity. When you take something very big and flat and make it thin, it loses its rigidity. It wants to flop over - just like a sheet of paper. Manufacturers wanted to make the TVs thinner, but didn't want the top half flopping over. One answer is to add thick metal stiffeners, but that adds weight. Another answer is add a slight curve. When you do that, part of the bending moment trying to flop the top over gets converted into compressive stresses in the curved parts, and the panel is easily able to resist flopping over.
There's no rule saying you have to be related to watch the movie together. It makes sense for most people if 4+ of them (at $13/ea ticket prices) are willing to get together and watch as a group. I have a 5.1 home theater system with a projector that throws a 12' x 7' image, and that's exactly what my friends and I occasionally do.
The fly in the ointment isn't the price. It's the entire concept of watching movies at home. When movies only came out in theaters, you had to watch it while it was still in theaters. Home video, subscription cable, and and now streaming has changed that - you can now watch a movie which hasn't been in theaters for months or years any time you want. My queue over all streaming services is about 100 movies long (never mind the episodic TV shows). I'm more than content to watch other stuff while I wait for hit movies to show up on the streaming subscription services. The only exception I can think of is the reason my sister gave for taking her son to watch The Force Awakens on opening night - so he wouldn't be left out of conversations when the other kids in school talked about it.
The key point is that they are successful because their services help people make (or save) staggering amounts of money - more than Google makes. That is how the economy becomes more efficient and standard of living improves. Someone comes up with an idea which helps people make more money (increase productivity) or save on costs, and sells it for a cut of the productivity increase or cost savings.
If you break this positive feedback cycle, you tank the economy. Which is Google's point - lack of fair use would prevent them from offering these services to Australia. And the only reason Australia is able to partake in the improved standard of living resulting from services like Google is because they're able to place the servers in other countries.
I called Google support when my Nexus 5's battery (2300 mAh) began failing (it would discharge normally for about 12 hours to 40%-50% charge, then would die in the next 20 minutes). As part of the diagnostic process, they asked me to put it into safe mode and do a battery run-down test. I didn't even know such a thing existed in Android. It disables all added-on apps. Only the phone functions and apps which shipped with the phone (mostly Google apps) will work - a nifty way for them to determine that a rogue app is not the culprit.
The damn thing lasted nearly 60 hours on a charge in safe mode, despite the defective battery. So it would appear modern smartphones (well, modern as of 3 years ago) are more than capable of lasting a weekend on a single charge. They die early because of all those damn apps which insist on waking up every 5 minutes so they can report your position, calls, texts, sites visited, photos taken, etc. back to their mother ship. Makes me wish there was a feature where you could "jail" certain apps to prevent them from running entirely, unless you specifically launch it.
That's probably why Google is publicizing this. To point out that the DMCA badly needs a disincentive for filing false takedown claims. If only 0.05% of claims are even factually correct (not even considering if they're legally valid), that's a huge problem with the law.