In rural or suburban areas, porch pirates usually drive their own vehicles. I've seen dozens of videos of porch pirates stealing packages and then hopping into a car. But without the license plate, it's not enough for the police to find them.
Set up a license plate reader (LPR) camera, and you can give the cops something to work with. That assumes, of course, that the police will bother to take action even with the license plate.
After sitting through the abomination of "The Last Jedi", I think I'll see Episode IX after I get around to watching "Solo", "Star Trek: Discovery", and "Star Trek Beyond". Oh, wait...
Both franchises are done, and Star Wars most of all. It's nothing but a Disney merchandising vehicle. Having Lucas "consult" on the script means nothing. The script will be ultimately be written by a Disney executive committee.
This incident (among many others) should be kept in mind when the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies insist on backdoor keys for smartphone and computer encryption.
Federal agencies that can't their own data secure certainly won't be able to keep yours secure.
Intel doesn't want to compete in low-margin product areas where it can only make a few dollars off each sale. Intel wants to sell expensive desktop and laptop processors where it is the only supplier, and rake in the profits. That is the market that made Intel what it is today, and is also very clearly the type of business that its current management wants to pursue. Managing a low-margin product line must be career suicide at Intel.
This is why Intel abandoned the IoT and the Arduino-style computer markets (e.g. the Galileo). There's no money to be made in them (by their standards). I accepted some donated Galileo boards from Intel, and tried in vain for months to get them to provide some additional parts. Every few months when I emailed an engineer, he had moved on to another department within Intel. The Galileo product line had the stench of death on it from the very beginning.
Contrary to the way most people here seem to be interpreting it, the third pilot's anecdote actually absolves Boeing and places blame for the crashes primarily upon the four pilots. This is looking like a pilot training problem.
A friend of mine from college is a senior Delta pilot and has served as a flight instructor for many years, including the training of pilots from other countries. He has also flown the 737 MAX. His conclusion is the same as yours, and is an unfortunate reflection of the state of pilot training and aircraft maintenance in developing countries.
That Lion Air plane should have been grounded the day before, after the first incident. And as many new stories have reported, that particular aircraft had a backlog of maintenance issues that Lion Air failed to address.
His observation: "Everyone thinks that flying is "safe". It's not. It's difficult and dangerous. What makes it appear "safe" in the developed world is the constant routine of aircraft maintenance and pilot training that keeps the accident rate very, very low. But in other countries, that isn't the case."
Back when I had service from Comcast (before switching to AT&T Fiber and DirecTV Now), customers were allowed to stream channels to a mobile device within your home network, but not outside of it.
I quickly solved that problem by installing a VPN server on my home network and using that to watch TV while on the road. No doubt many others did the same. This $5 / month fee is effectively a surcharge by Comcast for the computer illiterate.
Before people start getting amateur licenses to transmit blockchain information, please note that doing so almost certainly violates FCC regulations in the U.S.
The FCC is very specific with respect to ham radio: transmissions must not involve "pecuniary interests" for any of the parties involved in the message. That includes parties that may indirectly benefit from the message.
Cross said that it does not matter what type of technology -- be it SSB, digital, slow scan TV or CW -- is used to transmit that communications: "It boils down to a simple four part test that you, as the control operator of the station, must ask yourself before you cause the station to transmit a message. One, is the communications expressly prohibited in the rules? For instance, is it music, is it obscenity, something like that. Two, is the communications transmitted for compensation? Whether it's paid or compensation in some other way, such as, 'If you get this message to a friend of mine who's on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere, I'll pay your light bill.' Or, 'Get this message to someplace and I'll buy you a new radio.' That's indirect compensation. Three, does the control operator have a pecuniary interest in the communications? That is, could he or she benefit financially? Stock trades on ham radio benefit you financially. And four, does the control operator's employer have an interest in the communications? If the answer to each of these questions is 'no,' then the communications is acceptable with the caveat that it is not on a regular basis, one which could be furnished alternatively through other radio services."
There are a very few instances where transmissions of "pecuniary interest" are permitted (e.g. teachers with ham licenses can demonstrate amateur radio to students while being paid their salaries, and hams can advertise sales of personal radio equipment on local nets), but I can just about guarantee that sending blockchain information would not be one of them.
It's... okay. Not great, but an adequate filler in the MCU.
Part of its problem was a middling script that basically put Brie Larson in the position of smirking and making snarky remarks to everyone, posing heroically, and not much else. There wasn't much in the way of character development. Larson was very much overqualified for the role, given what she was asked to do.
There's no way that this man, and his family, were not aware that his condition was critical. The doctor (who might have been hundreds of miles away) made the correct decision to inform the patient immediately of his prognosis.
Being there in person wouldn't have changed a thing. Quite the contrary - the patient very probably would have died waiting for the doctor to show up in person to tell him exactly what he and his family almost certainly already knew - that his life was about to end.
This is a story designed to make an insurance company look evil. There may be plenty of valid reasons to hate Kaiser Permanente, but this incident was not one of them. Note from the article: ""The evening video tele-visit was a follow-up to earlier physician visits." The family in fact did have previous personal consultations, where I'm sure they were told what to expect if the test results came out badly. The tele-visit was the doctor following up with them in as timely a manner as possible.
If you think she should have automatically hired a lawyer, that tells me you've never lived on limited finances. I admit this is a bit of a projection on my part, but I can't imagine a student who hasn't grown up in a rather wealthy family thinking that the first thing to do is hire a lawyer.
You are very definitely projecting. My family was about as far from wealthy as you can imagine. Fortunately, an engineering degree lets you pay off student loans pretty quickly.
But put it this way - if I had been accused of academic misconduct while earning my Ph.D, with my entire future hanging in the balance, you can bet I would have reached out to friends, family, charity legal aid, or whoever else I knew to get advice on how to defend myself.
You are assuming that "hiring an attorney" would involve tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps it would in the long run, if the case went to court, but paying for an initial consultation would be money well spent when compared to having my life destroyed.
You're trusting her version of events without getting the scoop from the university, due to privacy concerns. She can say whatever she wants. If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
Exactly this. The university is constrained by FERPA in terms of the information it can release, even in cases of academic misconduct. If the evidence that Ms. Filler claims to have never seen includes other students' grades or academic records, then it will require a subpoena for the university to produce it.
One thing in particular strike me as questionable. From the article:
Filler was called into a meeting on the main campus on August 22 where the university told her of an investigation. She had "no idea" about the specifics of the hacking allegations, she told me on a phone call, until October 18 when she was pulled out of her shift, still in her bloodied medical scrubs, to face the accusations from the ethics and grievance committee.
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test. Having been personally involved in cases of academic misconduct at a private university, I assume that Tufts has a specific internal procedure that must be followed in cases like this. A student accused of cheating is first presented with the charges, and a hearing date is set at which the student answers those charges with evidence and testimony of their own. I would bet that Tufts can easily provide documentation that she was indeed notified well in advance of the hearing.
Contrary to what the Techcrunch article implies, faculty and staff are not going to accuse a student of such egregious academic misconduct without being very sure of their evidence, and being very careful to document that they followed their own internal procedures. Universities constantly deal with accusations of student cheating, and with students' parents who hire attorneys who threaten to sue the school. Holding a "surprise" hearing would be an invitation to a lawsuit, which Tuft's own internal attorneys would never allow.
Ms. Filler has the right to file suit against Tufts. What puzzles me is that she did not retain an attorney in this matter long ago. The initial accusations were made months before her expulsion. Or... what if she did hire a lawyer, got nowhere given the evidence against her, and didn't tell Techcrunch?
She is now presenting her case to the court of public opinion, which may get her some offers of pro bono legal assistance. The question is whether such assistance will lead to any relief for her, once other people learn more from Tufts' side of the story.
Do people know if you stop being friends on facebook? I added an old school mate and it's non stop politics now, but I don't want to offend him. Similarly for a person who keeps proselytizing.
You don't have to stop being friends. Just unfollow them. I assure you that they'll never know.
What you'll quickly realize is that the people who constantly push politics or religion on Facebook have no desire to actually engage with other people. Facebook is just a convenient soapbox to preach from while they feel superior for their enlightened attitudes.
I've seen very few people actually leaving Facebook...
There's no need to shut down your account if you simply stop using the platform, which is very much what I am observing. I have unfollowed so many people (because they couldn't resist screeching about politics or religion, or sharing clickbait memes), and blocked so many clickbait sites (e.g. "only 0.1% can answer this correctly", "what dog do you look like", etc.) that my feed is a pale shadow of what it used to be. My real friends (as opposed to FB friends) report the same thing. I simply don't feel a need to check Facebook much anymore. There's nothing interesting going on. If I need to reach out to friends quickly, I message them instead.
I do not doubt that Facebook engagement metrics are dropping in the U.S. Forget the bot accounts. It's the real users leaving who worry them.
This vote is every bit as meaningful as all those votes to defund Obamacare prior to 2016, when the Republicans ran the House - in other words, not meaningful at all. It's very easy to take a stand when you know the bill will never pass the Senate, or survive the President's veto. It gets much, much harder when the vote actually stands a chance of passing. Note how quickly the support to defund Obamacare evaporated the moment the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.
Now the Democrats are playing the same game. No one cares about meaningless symbolic gestures. But if the Democrats had control of the Senate, suddenly a great many of them would be getting visits from lobbyists for major telecom companies, reminding our elected representatives just who is calling the shots, and net neutrality would suddenly be taken off the table.
There you answered your own question. The assumption is that if you do not allow anyone else to use it, those other persons would have to buy another or their own stream.
Netflix could force the matter very easily by providing a single-stream HD plan, which is not the case in the U.S.
I would bet that a large number of households would happily drop to one stream to save a little money. And in that case, you won't share your account, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to rely on Netflix being available when you want it.
Selling a dual-stream plan as the minimum HD default is just begging for account sharing to take place. As I said, solving this "problem" is entirely within Netflix's power.
In the first place, the CEO of Netflix has stated that he considers account sharing to be an overall positive, not a negative.
Second, if Netflix wants to fix this "problem", it is completely within their power. Institute a single-stream HD plan (instead of the current single-stream SD plan), and many households will switch to it, instead of the double-stream HD plan. Or, Netflix could simply charge a fixed price per additional stream, in which case the owner of the account becomes moot.
Regardless, if I'm paying for a stream, why does it matter who I allow to use it? If that person hogs the stream and locks me out, that is no one's problem but mine. Either I change the password, or I buy another stream.
Yes, I agree, it's not ok to screw in a lactation room.
Interesting factoid: I have a friend who did some engineering work at the Atlanta airport, which has gender-neutral / family restrooms. During that time he worked with the people who handle security at ATL, which includes video surveillance of who goes into and out of the restrooms.
He learned that by far the most typical use of family restrooms was for people to have sex while waiting to catch a flight. It is common knowledge among airport security personnel. No doubt the same is true of similar facilities in other public buildings.
So I would argue that using a lactation room for sex is not the least bit unusual; to the contrary, having a mother actually use it for nursing is doubtedly the outlier.
Not entirely true. The patent office wont entertain perpetual motion devices without a working model that has been operating for a year.
" The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states: With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device"
So the trick is not to use the words "perpetual motion" in the description or abstract. Instead, the patent will (for example) describe a technique for extracting "energy from the vacuum". It's every bit as bogus, but it won't trigger any red flags with most patent examiners.
That's not how this works. A patent is a legal document, it has nothing to do with establishing scientific credibility. There is no requirement to prove that a device functions in order to be patented. The required steps to "reduce to practice" (make reliably reproducible) some invention are typically not patent-able. The requirement is simply that that someone like me, a PhD Physicist with a background in materials, could build the device listed in the patent.
This is absolutely correct. There have been many, many patents issued for inventions that do not and never could work. Most of them involve descriptions with technospeak gibberish that the patent examiner can't make heads or tails of. Case in point: I was hired to test Bill Fogal's "charged barrier transistor" many years ago, for which he has a patent (i.e. "High gain, low distortion, faster switching transistor": 5,196,809).
Fogal claimed that adding an emitter degeneration network to a transistor (something that circuit designers have been doing for decades) would cause a superconducting effect, resulting in a transistor that could switch infinitely fast with zero power dissipation. It was pure crank science, but Fogal did convince one company to pay to test it. He didn't care for my results that showed it did nothing special but generate a lot of 1/f noise, but that is another story entirely.
Patents are legal documents, not scientific documents. The USPTO's main concern is that your patent does not duplicate another patent. The inventor may be asked to provide additional documentation for the patent wrapper to prove that it doesn't. But there is absolutely no requirement to prove that the invention "works" in any real sense.
There are plenty of antigravity and "free energy" machines that have made it past patent examiners, and received patent protection. Of course, those patents are inherently invalid, as no one skilled in the art could ever make one work. But no one is going to bother to take the inventor to court to invalidate such a patent. What's the point? The patent has no value. It's not as if some company is worried that their antigravity machine or free energy generator is going to infringe on it.
Salvatore Cezar Pais may work for the U.S. Navy, but that doesn't mean anything. Pseudoscientists are not unknown in government laboratories. In fact, several people working for the U.S. Navy kept pushing cold fusion long after it had been debunked. Mr. Pais is simply another pseudoscientific inventor who happens to have a government job.
What site are you using for laptop batteries? I need a new source.
Check out batteriesplus.com. You'll pay 2X to 3X the price compared to no-name Amazon vendors, but the batteries are branded by established manufacturers (e.g. Duracell and Rayovac), and sold by a company that's been in business for decades, with actual storefronts in the U.S.
For Mac batteries, Macsales.com is also a good source. Again, much higher prices, but sold and warrantied by a company that's been in business for decades.
You can buy the same cheap battery over and over again from Amazon every 6 months, or you can buy a good battery that will last 3+ years. To me, the choice is obvious.
Amazon has bigger problems that counterfeit goods alone. By letting in every fly-by-night manufacturer and seller from China, they've created a situation where certain items simply can't be purchased on Amazon anymore.
Case in point: try buying a good replacement battery for a laptop computer, i.e. one that won't die in a few months. You'll find the same crappy junk batteries being sold under a dozen different names, all at cut-rate prices. The quality sellers have fled Amazon. You have to go to another web site to buy a decent battery (albeit at a higher price, but at least a battery you can trust).
Or try buying an RC toy car for your kids, or a water toy, or any one of hundreds of different electronic items. The only choices you have are bad, bad, and bad.
To make it worse, the fly-by-night sellers have learned how to corrupt the Amazon review system. You'll see some item with hundreds of favorable reviews, then realize that only the last dozen of them actually apply to the item for sale. The other reviews will be talking about a completely different item. Somehow the sellers have figured out how to transfer a set of reviews to a different product.
On top of that, Amazon defends the bogus sellers. I recently got a Facebook message from a Chinese seller offering to reimburse me if I bought a super soaker toy and gave the toy a favorable review. I promptly located the item and seller on Amazon and left a scathing review, which Amazon promptly rejected. Fake paid reviews are clearly perfectly acceptable to Amazon, but reporting them is not.
Trust is Amazon's greatest asset. If people stop trusting what they buy from them, Amazon is opening the doors wide open to the competition.
Since that BTC is now lost forever, this means the remaining pool of accessible BTC is even more valuable. Oh, the joys of a deflationary currency!
Everyone holding BTC just got wealthier. So get to it, and start figuring out how to sabotage the wallets of everyone else, and you will eventually be the richest person on earth. (Cue the dramatic music.)
Obviously you don't live in a metropolitan city where people are constantly complaining about electric scooters blocking the sidewalks and littering city streets.
An autonomous scooter is the next logical step. Why look on your phone for a nearby charged scooter, and walk to it, when you can summon one to you instead? And when you're done, there's no need to think about where to park it; you step off of it, and it heads off to its next customer, or back to a charging base.
An autonomous scooter service is no different than the multitude of autonomous taxi services that are in the process of being deployed. It's just a matter of the size of the vehicle, and the range of the service.
Uber has exactly the right idea. The first company to successfully deploy an autonomous scooter will sweep away the competition, and help solve the problem of "scooter rage".
Slashdot Mirror
In rural or suburban areas, porch pirates usually drive their own vehicles. I've seen dozens of videos of porch pirates stealing packages and then hopping into a car. But without the license plate, it's not enough for the police to find them.
Set up a license plate reader (LPR) camera, and you can give the cops something to work with. That assumes, of course, that the police will bother to take action even with the license plate.
After sitting through the abomination of "The Last Jedi", I think I'll see Episode IX after I get around to watching "Solo", "Star Trek: Discovery", and "Star Trek Beyond". Oh, wait ...
Both franchises are done, and Star Wars most of all. It's nothing but a Disney merchandising vehicle. Having Lucas "consult" on the script means nothing. The script will be ultimately be written by a Disney executive committee.
This incident (among many others) should be kept in mind when the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies insist on backdoor keys for smartphone and computer encryption.
Federal agencies that can't their own data secure certainly won't be able to keep yours secure.
In the words of writer David Gerrold: "All cats have the same name. It's pronounced exactly like the sound of a can opener."
My cats always came running when they heard it. :-)
Intel doesn't want to compete in low-margin product areas where it can only make a few dollars off each sale. Intel wants to sell expensive desktop and laptop processors where it is the only supplier, and rake in the profits. That is the market that made Intel what it is today, and is also very clearly the type of business that its current management wants to pursue. Managing a low-margin product line must be career suicide at Intel.
This is why Intel abandoned the IoT and the Arduino-style computer markets (e.g. the Galileo). There's no money to be made in them (by their standards). I accepted some donated Galileo boards from Intel, and tried in vain for months to get them to provide some additional parts. Every few months when I emailed an engineer, he had moved on to another department within Intel. The Galileo product line had the stench of death on it from the very beginning.
A friend of mine from college is a senior Delta pilot and has served as a flight instructor for many years, including the training of pilots from other countries. He has also flown the 737 MAX. His conclusion is the same as yours, and is an unfortunate reflection of the state of pilot training and aircraft maintenance in developing countries.
That Lion Air plane should have been grounded the day before, after the first incident. And as many new stories have reported, that particular aircraft had a backlog of maintenance issues that Lion Air failed to address.
His observation: "Everyone thinks that flying is "safe". It's not. It's difficult and dangerous. What makes it appear "safe" in the developed world is the constant routine of aircraft maintenance and pilot training that keeps the accident rate very, very low. But in other countries, that isn't the case."
Back when I had service from Comcast (before switching to AT&T Fiber and DirecTV Now), customers were allowed to stream channels to a mobile device within your home network, but not outside of it.
I quickly solved that problem by installing a VPN server on my home network and using that to watch TV while on the road. No doubt many others did the same. This $5 / month fee is effectively a surcharge by Comcast for the computer illiterate.
Before people start getting amateur licenses to transmit blockchain information, please note that doing so almost certainly violates FCC regulations in the U.S.
The FCC is very specific with respect to ham radio: transmissions must not involve "pecuniary interests" for any of the parties involved in the message. That includes parties that may indirectly benefit from the message.
Note the following from http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-s...:
There are a very few instances where transmissions of "pecuniary interest" are permitted (e.g. teachers with ham licenses can demonstrate amateur radio to students while being paid their salaries, and hams can advertise sales of personal radio equipment on local nets), but I can just about guarantee that sending blockchain information would not be one of them.
It's ... okay. Not great, but an adequate filler in the MCU.
Part of its problem was a middling script that basically put Brie Larson in the position of smirking and making snarky remarks to everyone, posing heroically, and not much else. There wasn't much in the way of character development. Larson was very much overqualified for the role, given what she was asked to do.
This story is pure one-sided clickbait.
There's no way that this man, and his family, were not aware that his condition was critical. The doctor (who might have been hundreds of miles away) made the correct decision to inform the patient immediately of his prognosis.
Being there in person wouldn't have changed a thing. Quite the contrary - the patient very probably would have died waiting for the doctor to show up in person to tell him exactly what he and his family almost certainly already knew - that his life was about to end.
This is a story designed to make an insurance company look evil. There may be plenty of valid reasons to hate Kaiser Permanente, but this incident was not one of them. Note from the article: ""The evening video tele-visit was a follow-up to earlier physician visits." The family in fact did have previous personal consultations, where I'm sure they were told what to expect if the test results came out badly. The tele-visit was the doctor following up with them in as timely a manner as possible.
You are very definitely projecting. My family was about as far from wealthy as you can imagine. Fortunately, an engineering degree lets you pay off student loans pretty quickly.
But put it this way - if I had been accused of academic misconduct while earning my Ph.D, with my entire future hanging in the balance, you can bet I would have reached out to friends, family, charity legal aid, or whoever else I knew to get advice on how to defend myself.
You are assuming that "hiring an attorney" would involve tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps it would in the long run, if the case went to court, but paying for an initial consultation would be money well spent when compared to having my life destroyed.
Exactly this. The university is constrained by FERPA in terms of the information it can release, even in cases of academic misconduct. If the evidence that Ms. Filler claims to have never seen includes other students' grades or academic records, then it will require a subpoena for the university to produce it.
One thing in particular strike me as questionable. From the article:
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test. Having been personally involved in cases of academic misconduct at a private university, I assume that Tufts has a specific internal procedure that must be followed in cases like this. A student accused of cheating is first presented with the charges, and a hearing date is set at which the student answers those charges with evidence and testimony of their own. I would bet that Tufts can easily provide documentation that she was indeed notified well in advance of the hearing.
Contrary to what the Techcrunch article implies, faculty and staff are not going to accuse a student of such egregious academic misconduct without being very sure of their evidence, and being very careful to document that they followed their own internal procedures. Universities constantly deal with accusations of student cheating, and with students' parents who hire attorneys who threaten to sue the school. Holding a "surprise" hearing would be an invitation to a lawsuit, which Tuft's own internal attorneys would never allow.
Ms. Filler has the right to file suit against Tufts. What puzzles me is that she did not retain an attorney in this matter long ago. The initial accusations were made months before her expulsion. Or ... what if she did hire a lawyer, got nowhere given the evidence against her, and didn't tell Techcrunch?
She is now presenting her case to the court of public opinion, which may get her some offers of pro bono legal assistance. The question is whether such assistance will lead to any relief for her, once other people learn more from Tufts' side of the story.
You don't have to stop being friends. Just unfollow them. I assure you that they'll never know.
What you'll quickly realize is that the people who constantly push politics or religion on Facebook have no desire to actually engage with other people. Facebook is just a convenient soapbox to preach from while they feel superior for their enlightened attitudes.
There's no need to shut down your account if you simply stop using the platform, which is very much what I am observing. I have unfollowed so many people (because they couldn't resist screeching about politics or religion, or sharing clickbait memes), and blocked so many clickbait sites (e.g. "only 0.1% can answer this correctly", "what dog do you look like", etc.) that my feed is a pale shadow of what it used to be. My real friends (as opposed to FB friends) report the same thing. I simply don't feel a need to check Facebook much anymore. There's nothing interesting going on. If I need to reach out to friends quickly, I message them instead.
I do not doubt that Facebook engagement metrics are dropping in the U.S. Forget the bot accounts. It's the real users leaving who worry them.
This vote is every bit as meaningful as all those votes to defund Obamacare prior to 2016, when the Republicans ran the House - in other words, not meaningful at all. It's very easy to take a stand when you know the bill will never pass the Senate, or survive the President's veto. It gets much, much harder when the vote actually stands a chance of passing. Note how quickly the support to defund Obamacare evaporated the moment the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.
Now the Democrats are playing the same game. No one cares about meaningless symbolic gestures. But if the Democrats had control of the Senate, suddenly a great many of them would be getting visits from lobbyists for major telecom companies, reminding our elected representatives just who is calling the shots, and net neutrality would suddenly be taken off the table.
So good news for my Apple stock, bad news for my desire to buy a worthwhile replacement for my 7-year-old MacBook Pro.
At this rate, I'll be calculating my Apple stock dividends on a Linux laptop a couple of years from now.
Netflix could force the matter very easily by providing a single-stream HD plan, which is not the case in the U.S.
I would bet that a large number of households would happily drop to one stream to save a little money. And in that case, you won't share your account, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to rely on Netflix being available when you want it.
Selling a dual-stream plan as the minimum HD default is just begging for account sharing to take place. As I said, solving this "problem" is entirely within Netflix's power.
In the first place, the CEO of Netflix has stated that he considers account sharing to be an overall positive, not a negative.
Second, if Netflix wants to fix this "problem", it is completely within their power. Institute a single-stream HD plan (instead of the current single-stream SD plan), and many households will switch to it, instead of the double-stream HD plan. Or, Netflix could simply charge a fixed price per additional stream, in which case the owner of the account becomes moot.
Regardless, if I'm paying for a stream, why does it matter who I allow to use it? If that person hogs the stream and locks me out, that is no one's problem but mine. Either I change the password, or I buy another stream.
Interesting factoid: I have a friend who did some engineering work at the Atlanta airport, which has gender-neutral / family restrooms. During that time he worked with the people who handle security at ATL, which includes video surveillance of who goes into and out of the restrooms.
He learned that by far the most typical use of family restrooms was for people to have sex while waiting to catch a flight. It is common knowledge among airport security personnel. No doubt the same is true of similar facilities in other public buildings.
So I would argue that using a lactation room for sex is not the least bit unusual; to the contrary, having a mother actually use it for nursing is doubtedly the outlier.
So the trick is not to use the words "perpetual motion" in the description or abstract. Instead, the patent will (for example) describe a technique for extracting "energy from the vacuum". It's every bit as bogus, but it won't trigger any red flags with most patent examiners.
This is absolutely correct. There have been many, many patents issued for inventions that do not and never could work. Most of them involve descriptions with technospeak gibberish that the patent examiner can't make heads or tails of. Case in point: I was hired to test Bill Fogal's "charged barrier transistor" many years ago, for which he has a patent (i.e. "High gain, low distortion, faster switching transistor": 5,196,809).
Fogal claimed that adding an emitter degeneration network to a transistor (something that circuit designers have been doing for decades) would cause a superconducting effect, resulting in a transistor that could switch infinitely fast with zero power dissipation. It was pure crank science, but Fogal did convince one company to pay to test it. He didn't care for my results that showed it did nothing special but generate a lot of 1/f noise, but that is another story entirely.
Patents are legal documents, not scientific documents. The USPTO's main concern is that your patent does not duplicate another patent. The inventor may be asked to provide additional documentation for the patent wrapper to prove that it doesn't. But there is absolutely no requirement to prove that the invention "works" in any real sense.
There are plenty of antigravity and "free energy" machines that have made it past patent examiners, and received patent protection. Of course, those patents are inherently invalid, as no one skilled in the art could ever make one work. But no one is going to bother to take the inventor to court to invalidate such a patent. What's the point? The patent has no value. It's not as if some company is worried that their antigravity machine or free energy generator is going to infringe on it.
Salvatore Cezar Pais may work for the U.S. Navy, but that doesn't mean anything. Pseudoscientists are not unknown in government laboratories. In fact, several people working for the U.S. Navy kept pushing cold fusion long after it had been debunked. Mr. Pais is simply another pseudoscientific inventor who happens to have a government job.
Check out batteriesplus.com. You'll pay 2X to 3X the price compared to no-name Amazon vendors, but the batteries are branded by established manufacturers (e.g. Duracell and Rayovac), and sold by a company that's been in business for decades, with actual storefronts in the U.S.
For Mac batteries, Macsales.com is also a good source. Again, much higher prices, but sold and warrantied by a company that's been in business for decades.
You can buy the same cheap battery over and over again from Amazon every 6 months, or you can buy a good battery that will last 3+ years. To me, the choice is obvious.
Amazon has bigger problems that counterfeit goods alone. By letting in every fly-by-night manufacturer and seller from China, they've created a situation where certain items simply can't be purchased on Amazon anymore.
Case in point: try buying a good replacement battery for a laptop computer, i.e. one that won't die in a few months. You'll find the same crappy junk batteries being sold under a dozen different names, all at cut-rate prices. The quality sellers have fled Amazon. You have to go to another web site to buy a decent battery (albeit at a higher price, but at least a battery you can trust).
Or try buying an RC toy car for your kids, or a water toy, or any one of hundreds of different electronic items. The only choices you have are bad, bad, and bad.
To make it worse, the fly-by-night sellers have learned how to corrupt the Amazon review system. You'll see some item with hundreds of favorable reviews, then realize that only the last dozen of them actually apply to the item for sale. The other reviews will be talking about a completely different item. Somehow the sellers have figured out how to transfer a set of reviews to a different product.
On top of that, Amazon defends the bogus sellers. I recently got a Facebook message from a Chinese seller offering to reimburse me if I bought a super soaker toy and gave the toy a favorable review. I promptly located the item and seller on Amazon and left a scathing review, which Amazon promptly rejected. Fake paid reviews are clearly perfectly acceptable to Amazon, but reporting them is not.
Trust is Amazon's greatest asset. If people stop trusting what they buy from them, Amazon is opening the doors wide open to the competition.
Since that BTC is now lost forever, this means the remaining pool of accessible BTC is even more valuable. Oh, the joys of a deflationary currency!
Everyone holding BTC just got wealthier. So get to it, and start figuring out how to sabotage the wallets of everyone else, and you will eventually be the richest person on earth. (Cue the dramatic music.)
Obviously you don't live in a metropolitan city where people are constantly complaining about electric scooters blocking the sidewalks and littering city streets.
An autonomous scooter is the next logical step. Why look on your phone for a nearby charged scooter, and walk to it, when you can summon one to you instead? And when you're done, there's no need to think about where to park it; you step off of it, and it heads off to its next customer, or back to a charging base.
An autonomous scooter service is no different than the multitude of autonomous taxi services that are in the process of being deployed. It's just a matter of the size of the vehicle, and the range of the service.
Uber has exactly the right idea. The first company to successfully deploy an autonomous scooter will sweep away the competition, and help solve the problem of "scooter rage".