People in general mis-estimate their actions. Al Capone believed he was a public benefactor, providing a great service to the American people. Many people don't understand why what they're doing is wrong, no matter how much you as an observer figure they're the type of person who knows better.
I'm *very* good with risk, and have done a lot of work in computer security. I got called on leaving my computer unlocked all the time at work, and didn't see this as a problem because the only people messing with it were *other* infosec people who were trying to prove a point. We have a locked room in a locked building, surrounded by people who can see wtf is going on; who is really going to mess with it? That's operational risk management: I'm working from threats, outcomes, probability, severity, and responses, not blind application of best practices.
So some manager at one firm was collecting everyone's password so he could log in as them in case they were on vacation and had the required access to do something. This is bad: those people in particular were financial executors for 6-figure transactions. They had access to customer accounts, invoices, and company funds. Collecting everyone's password means you lose non-repudiation: illegal activity could be a rogue account manager, another account manager who memorized that guy's password when the password sheet came around, or the manager who was collecting passwords. Everything had to be audited because anyone could be impersonated or impersonate someone else.
That's what my risk model missed: leaving my computer unlocked means, in some distant and theoretical sense, someone *could* (but is *extremely* unlikely to) impersonate me. It's not that I have access to anything important, or that someone could do it without getting caught; it's that there's the physical possibility I could be impersonated. As an infosec professional, I should have considered locking my computer as something important for some odd reason; but as someone familiar with operational risk, I evaluated any risks in a similar manner to accidentally stumbling into an errant cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas that somehow floated into the building.
Someone mentioned that many other cars, which don't cheat and have legal emissions programs, *also* have an enormous deviation between their emissions in testing conditions and their emissions in road conditions--this is why emissions are tested in standard conditions: the environment can push emissions outside testing conditions, and that's okay so long as the engine operates in a particular manner regarding emissions. If it emits high emissions in testing, it will emit *even* *higher* emissions in those real-world cases.
What if the engineer figured the car performs comparably to other, legal engines, but doesn't scale in the same manner, and so doesn't hit emissions targets during testing? The gap between a VW TDi and a compliant vehicle in real-world driving is *much* smaller (and occasionally inverted--the TDi sometimes has lower emissions) than the gap between a VW TDi on corrected software and a compliant vehicle in test conditions. It's no big deal and it doesn't matter in the real world.
An engineer with no work ethic would see no value in that; he'd just change the behavioral characteristics of the engine and be done with it. An engineer who wants to produce the best product would have it correct as it approaches test conditions--which is approximately what this engineer did. A malicious engineer could have obfuscated it by changing some math around so that it would look legit, but seem to dip around the testing conditions.
I'm not sure $200 billion is a lot of money in context; it could be.
America has 113,000 miles of fiber optic cable, with costs ranging from $30,000 to $80,000 to install, while a 6-fiber cable itself only costs $2,000 per mile. That's $0.226 billion for the cable and $3.39 to $9.04 billion to lay it. That's been incrementally installed over time. Caveat: that's 2016; in 1996, the unadjusted prices were much higher, because making a fiber optic cable involves engineering a composite material (flexible glass fiber reinforced by epoxy resin) with high-durability and precise optical properties, and the manufacture process today produces a higher percentage of usable, long cables (more yield, whereas past processes produced a lot of useless trash as part of the cost of a good cable).
You also have to consider specialized cables and other equipment. Even today, a trans-atlantic cable costs $300 million, and a trans-pacific is even bigger; placing the cable is expensive as hell; and there's a ton of other equipment and engineering involved in running the network using all these cables.
$200 billion seems like a lot for an infrastructure lay; it might be more reasonable for an upgrade (a lot of changing stuff around in-place, which adds costs). $200 billion as a seed for both initial deployment and long-term stable maintenance seems *very* reasonable. It's interesting, nonetheless, that this came from taxpayer money.
Still, net profits coming off these companies is only in the 5%-10% range. There's a gap somewhere between the ideal that they make a 97% margin and the reality that they only make a fraction of that.
Unless perhaps you live in a country with very low cost of living,
United States, baltimore city. The house was $50k and is 1.7 miles from the light rail system. Public transit is slow, so I drive; I may amend that again some time soon.
are single,
SPD, so aromantic and asexual (these are complex topics; sex isn't a non-thing for me, but doesn't provide a disproportionate rewards mechanism or impulsive excitement, so fairly less-interesting than pizza which necessarily has fewer complications and strings). If I were otherwise, the additional cost of living for a mate would be, optimized, around $350. Note that cooking for two is more efficient than cooking for one, and I'd have to convert to more eating at home in that scenario (which would save an additional couple hundred on my end, but let's ignore that). All further expenses are discretionary, although women tend to demand some kind of allowance because they're not house pets (this is reasonable, although it makes a hilarious parallel to whores-on-retainer who attach to one client and make him pay a few hundred a month).
Children are also cheap and less-demanding. People overestimate the cost of childcare; I saw a billboard claiming $750/month once, and did the math and figured on a lot less. Canned baby food is expensive; a food mill costs $50, and running bananas, peas, carrots, and green beans through that costs a lot less than buying tiny glass jars of same. There's a modern figure of over $1M to raise a child to age 18, which is patently ridiculous.
and have your home paid off.
Next year.
This month: $421 - Mortgage; $560 - Food (too many $20 meals; need to lay off the Peking Duck and seafood platters); $128 - Electricity/Gas (need to insulate my house...); $83 - Internet (170Mbit/s); $62 - Phone; $44 - Gasoline; about $80/month for car insurance (6mo $480) and $12/mo for AAA; $10/mo for Spotify; $6/mo for Web hosting; $250/mo for a loan. Total: $1,656.
Fix the food budget by cooking meals at home and I can eat well around $96/month; I can eat like a friggin' regent at $130/mo. Takes the till down to $1,226.
Insulating my house and replacing window AC with central air/heat pump (operating as a dehumidifier, while I run an evaporative cooler as major cooling) would drop around 40% off my electricity bill, rendering it to under $80/month year-round. $1,178.
Paying off the loan and mortgage would cut $671 out, taking the till to $507/month. I am 10 months away from that.
Right now, I don't have a dishwasher or a stove; I'm looking at a double-oven stove, a high-end dishwasher, and a massive refrigerator. It's about $6,000 of kitchen appliances, which is why I don't cook yet. Yes, I know 10 months of $480 excess spending is close to that; it's bad financial hygiene.
I really have done extreme budget estimates down to $25/month on food, part of an attempt to validate the $100/month budget ($106/month now, and now represented as a $180/month combined Food/Clothing/Personal Care budget) used as a baseline in my Citizen's Dividend plan (which had an original goal of ending all homelessness and hunger in the U.S., but turned out to be much better than that). Thing is I like to eat a lot more meat than all that.
If you're on the U.S. West Coast, there is still housing at the normalized values I computed. Bread flour costs exactly the same; 10lb of pinto beans in Seattle, WA costs 54 cents more. Seattle prices are ass-tier; if I lived in the area, I'd have to make around $145-$180k to have an equivalent income, in general. For example: $23 gets me two large 2-topping pizzas here; in Seattle, $30 will get you ONE PIZZA. Buying cheap import goods (e.g. GROCERIES, clothes) from wholesale clubs and big discount stores leaves an immense amount of additional spending money in your hands
But the question was "how many more", in response to "marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths", in the context of an increase in air pollution from VW TDi vehicles. Your response didn't state a new context, so it would only include those new deaths from VW TDi emission increases over the baseline emission control standards.
People are forgetting the early fall-out of the VW scandal was every other car manufacturer *also* appearing to perform a lot worse on emissions in the real-world than in testing conditions. VW pulled off theirs better than the rest of 'em.
They put out a minor and insignificant amount of nitrous oxide, which we control to an obsessive degree. Our entire infrastructure would have to get about 20 times as much atmospheric NOx to cause a health concern; and NOx breaks down harmlessly in atmosphere, with a shorter half life at higher concentrations (which is really interesting), so much so that reaching those levels is going to take 80-100 times the emissions.
The way you're talking, it's like someone ate cabbage last week and you've opened a campaign against them venting toxic hydrogen sulfide into the air to kill every living thing on the entire North American continent.
The bigger issue is everyone quickly blaming someone else. We're all engineers of some form or another here, and engineers implemented this criminal enhancement, so it must have been at the behedst of the evil rich guy.
If you really cared so much about vulnerable people, you would be doing social work or something along those lines.
I'd like to be a house representative. On the subject of vulnerable people, we can discuss new taxation plans which only marginally raise taxes on the rich (0.69% less income to the top 0.1%; 2% less income to someone with $10M annual salary) and the effects on the poor in a failing welfare system, as well as the stabilizing effect on all low-income families. In the long run, I want to target a maximum tax bracket of 1/3 above marginal (a United States flat income tax would be 29.97%; the top tax bracket I specify is 41%, and I want that to be no higher than 40%), rather than attempting to use the rich as some idealized Robin Hood funding source.
As of october 1, 2012, vehicular manslaughter is a crime in my state. Previously, striking a pedestrian was possibly reckless driving, with the prosecution needing to prove negligence; this is technically impossible, so the only penalty was ever a $20 fine. After October 1, they use a reasonable person test: if you were doing something a reasonable person would consider to increase risk of injury or death (driving at excessive speeds, sexting, etc.) while driving and you killed someone, it's a $5,000 fine and 5 years in jail.
The bill in its current form hit the State legislature in 2004, and took 8 years of discussion and a small riot outside the state capitol on signing day before they were sure they wanted to pass it.
This entire thread ignores that you can invent something by observing current available techniques, well-ahead of refinement of said techniques. The artificial respirator was invented in like 1658; the first one was built in the 1800s, after multiple revisions to the steel-making process, the last one moving to a hot-blast furnace such that the same labor (wages!) required to make 400 tonnes of steel now made 80,000 tonnes of steel. For hundreds of years, building the patented device cost a *large*, and then a small fortune--think of it like your cheap, used, economy car costs as much as a high-end Ferrari (multiple millions) instead of $4,000, and the rest of the market is adjusted up accordingly (meaning almost 100% of the cars bought today would be unpurchaseable even by the super-mega-rich; there wouldn't be enough human labor to make those cars *and* food).
We don't have an activation clause in patent law, and activation has all kinds of problems (patent trolls). At the same time, the United States is a first-to-file system: if you invent something, wait for the market to be capable of providing it, and then another inventor files the same invention, your 20 years of documented proof that you invented it back when it would have been impossible to market during the patent term doesn't mean shit; and if you try to make the device you invented, you have to pay a patent license. Further, new inventions in the field may make your previously-novel idea obvious, obviating a patent.
I'm paid $75,000 annually and I put about $2,300 in the bank each month. I don't cook at home, at all, ever. I spend excessively, and still bank over 60% of my paycheck. This time next year, it will be over 85% of my paycheck.
$75k is pocket change at my level. I've been offered $135,000 plus a $13k hiring bonus.
Yeah, on the one hand, patent litigation to stunt a market is kind of bad play. On the other, patents are reasonable (14 years? Many technologies are too expensive or not ground-breaking enough to warrant licensing when invented, and *have* to sit; historically, patents on complex medical technology have frequently appeared over 150 years *before* the technology was feasible), you should negotiate reasonable licensing fees, and Arista is made up of a bunch of people who bailed on CISCO to compete with CISCO using CISCO technology they stole.
It's hard to back people who get paid to work for someone, then run off with the work they did.
Hollywood accounting is only useful when you're giving a share of the net profits to an investor, because your budgeted object (e.g. movie) shows no profit. Your vertical-monopoly suppliers (other corporations you own) still reflect a profit, which the government taxes; your partners get a reflected low profit, and don't get a share from your supply firms.
Comcast has multiple divisions, but doesn't generally operate as separate firms (they have *many* subsidiaries). Both Comcast Cable and NBC Universal are divisions of Comcast. Comcast Cable is an LLC holding of Comcast; however, Comcast is responsible for its debts and obligations, as Comcast Cable is a legal division of Comcast.
Amusing: People have tried to claim a 97% profit margin on Time Warner Cable by citing the Gross Profit. Gross Profit is revenue minus cost of good sold, meaning if you buy $100 of brass and make a $250 trombone you have $150 of gross profit on the Trombone; this ignores all other operating expenses of business. The gross profits on intangible goods ignore the tangible cost of business, e.g. gross profits on iTunes will measure the cost of bandwidth (at a fraction of a cent per hundreds of songs) and register approximately a 100% profit margin, while ignoring the cost of servers and such (because additional hardware isn't needed per song sold; it's needed only when so much happens as to overload the servers, or when the servers get old and need replacement, thus the marginal cost of those servers per song depends on the number of songs sold). The gross profit analysis ignores the cost of cable infrastructure.
Joshua Foer, like any individual, proves nothing. If there was a class teaching the memory techniques he used, taking more or less random people in, and they all had incredibly good memories, I'd be impressed.
All students (n = 78) were taught insulin and DM in a didactic fashion, consisting of two traditional lectures. Each lecture spanned 60 min.
After the didactic lectures had been completed, 28 students were randomly selected and then taught insulin and DM through the MOL technique. Continued participation in the study was, in any case, entirely voluntary.
The rest of the class (n = 50) studied the same topics (insulin and DM) and completed in-class worksheets. Students were allowed open textbook reference and were allowed to take the completed worksheets home. This was a self-directed learning session under instructor supervision. The entire class was, thus, studying the same topic during the same time, albeit in different ways.
Med students, 28 using method of loci, 50 using self-directed study.
We observed a highly significant increase (P < 0.003) in the number of correct responses on the questions when attempted by students who had been taught insulin and DM through didactic lectures and the MOL technique (mean: 9.31, SD: 1.12) compared with students who had been taught through didactic lectures and the self-directed learning session (mean: 8.10, SD: 1.85). Two participants of the MOL group did not appear for the quiz.
So a random subset of medical students, having been *just* taught how to use the Method of Loci and given strict, directed mind palaces (sub-optimal: they're unfamiliar with the technique, it's a lot of cognitive load, and it's not self-directed), shifted itself up almost an entire standard deviation. That means more than 85% of the Mnemonics group *outperformed the mean* of the control group; the remaining 15% were *still* in the first deviation.
Put another way: there was not some subset of MOL subjects who moved up; the entire smooth bell curve shifted to the right. The bell curve was also tighter: the standard deviation among students using mnemonics was 60% as wide as the standard deviation among the control group. That means the students clustered closer together. In a class where students ranged across 30 points (e.g. 60%-90%), these students would have ranged across 18 points (e.g. 78%-96%).
A surprising amount of mnemonics study is done on the elderly (to combat age-related memory loss) and medical students (because the material is complex and filled with facts). The outcomes are always the same: a marked improvement in ability to remember things if those things are intentionally structured.
but it really seems to me that this would have massive real-world effects if it actually worked, and I'm not seeing them.
Why would it? You'd have to institutionalize and standardize education first, and then change that institutionalized behavior when new research came out. Each change is a risk, and requires some administrative oversight. On an individual level, all of these techniques are *skills* which require *effort*, just like any other skill, and the time spent learning is annoying and boring and exhausting. Why would these things be adopted? Why would they have an impact on the world just because some academics know about them?
We already know the Japanese methods of basic mathematics education universally produce human calculators. We instead use friendly numbers and common core.
The best bit is he's definitely guilty, and trying to get off on a technicality. The argument is the entire body of evidence collected since this whole thing started is tainted, and they have no valid reason to search him (knowing that his house is still full of child pornography because they already did an *illegal* search isn't a justifiable cause), so he gets away scot free because the authorities fucked up.
This is *exactly* what we want. We want the authorities to follow the rules, and we want people who can hide in the rules to get away with it. We don't need the FBI searching you because they feel like it, finding evidence for an unpredicted crime, then charging you for it based on an illegal search. That leads to all kinds of vindictive political control, turning political opponents and other undesirables into targets to be ground away at by government overreach.
The biggest danger is the public realizing what just happened and crying out against a child porn hoarder getting off free, and then demanding the repeal of the fourth and fifth amendments immediately. The second biggest danger is the FBI succeeding with their bluff, either having no evidence to present ("we used a thing that got us information, but we won't show you that thing, so just trust us about the evidence chain") or being forced to present and being called on performing an illegal search (hacked your computer) and then *not* penalized for it ("this is all technically inadmissible, but we'll allow it anyway").
The neutral state is the FBI being forced to present and arguing (successfully and correctly) the defendant was *not* subject to an illegal search because the FBI had ample reason to believe the target site *was* doing illegal things and that its visitors were engaging in illegal activities (similar to a sting on a whore house). The outcome of being forced to present is the public can examine the code used to break Tor, then counteract it (technical arms race); Darby goes to jail; and the case sets no legal precedents weakening constitutional law.
That gets into things like entrapment and the oddities of law. In computers, a random pile of data is a random pile of data; in law, a random pile of data that has transformed from another particular pile of data is a derivative work and subject to copyright. Likewise, being invited into a house as a civilian and finding contraband is different from deciding you can't legally get a warrant, posing as a non-cop, gaining trust, and being invited into a house as an undercover officer. Both of these involve the same behaviors and the same outcomes, but one involves malicious intent to circumvent search and seizure laws.
Copyright law gives the copyright holder the right to dictate who can copy and for what use. That means license--contract--has legal force, and violation of license is violation of law.
The broken-window-blind analogy works if your computer is openly broadcasting data or accepting access: if you're running a P2P application or an HTTP server sharing all your files to the world, that's your fault. Computer services are passively providing service, same as if you put a sign out front that said "FREE WEED!"--or didn't, but the cops heard people go to your house for that sort of thing, and walked up and knocked on the door and said the rumored password, and got weed.
All adversarial accesses (trojan downloader, remote exploit, password cracking) are akin to bypassing your windows or door locks. A trojan downloader is an undeclared search, like sneaking a cop into your house by posing as a horny bar girl and following you home. These aren't the same thing as finding an open port or active service.
You pointed out that YouTube already does it, implying that the complaint is 100% valid; except YouTube appears to not do it, so what's the big deal? Is Google maliciously allowing copyrighted works?
Google can't readily assemble a list of all songs requiring a certain action, and can't readily determine what is fair use. They have been able to work with artists to compromise on the fair use angle by triggering ads via detection.
Some labels claim Google isn't 100% squashing anything that they haven't agreed is allowed. A video which contains some music is actually fair-use and not necessarily infringing; a video which is some music is infringing. The distinction can be a matter of legal debate. For example: you can argue the first video's primary entertainment value is its original content, and that it's enhanced by the music, and thus is fair use; while you might argue an AMV is derivative of music (it's a video made to express music, rather than an entertainment piece given a musical backing), and thus not fair use.
This seems strange to people because most of us like to analyze state; a lot of law relies on analyzing how state gets reached. One person tried to explain it as lawyers identifying computer bits as having color, even though we know bits can't carry any such information.
The money spent by consumers to roll into the profits which then get paid out to create those 7,000 jobs is not spent elsewhere. Consumers have limited money, and not limited desires: if you give someone twice as much salary, he's going to buy stuff with it. That means those 7,000 jobs represent their combined salary elsewhere (7,000 jobs at 3 times minimum wage could instead be 21,000 minimum-wage jobs or 3,000 Silicon Valley tech jobs).
Indirectly, the build-out could reduce cost of services elsewhere, thus leading to a long-term net gain. Think of it this way: it takes 20% of your population to make food; *or* it takes 2% of your population on the farm and 8% making machines and diesel fuel, only 10% of your population, and food costs half as much. This reduction in food costs means you'd have to pay people slightly *less* (as a proportion of per-capita income) to maintain their standard of living, allowing you to sweep the remainder on the end into more jobs, lowering the unemployment rate. The corresponding reduction in scarcity means you can support a larger population, leading to population growth. (The Solow-Swan model allows you to compute how much growth came from technology and how much came from population growth as a result.)
With inflationary markets and other complex interactions, that's exactly what happens: income gaps widen, the bottom and middle standard-of-living grows anyway (slower than what would be called "completely fair" because of the income gap widening), and the wage growth lags a bit behind inflation and thus spreads wages to new jobs and reduces unemployment (it spreads because people in the middle are able to buy more from people on the bottom, who experience the slowest growth, and thus they increase bottom-end employment demand).
To put this into perspective: my Citizen's Dividend plan has a secondary goal of causing an 18% overemployment (negative unemployment), which is resolved by cutting the work week to four eight-hour days; and replacing the 30-year mortgage with a 10-year mortgage is wholly-doable, which would mean nearly everyone over 30 has 16%-20% of their income freed up, meaning four 7-hour work days or three 9-hour work days at most to stabilize the job market.
(Cutting the work week raises unemployment because, wage raise or not, those people are getting a proportional reduction in buying power, thus reducing the number of jobs they can support with their purchases. For mortgages, in a 14% mortgage prime rate market, an extra $300/month on an $1,180/month mortgage pays off the house in 10 years; and the construction industry *has* operated with construction costs matching that market condition, so you'd shave down the economic rent and convert it to a spreading of spending.)
The widening income gap has mostly prevented a labor shortage in this way; and doing all of this at once would actually reduce the amount of stuff produced, meaning yes we would be poorer (although we could just import more?). I don't know the full impact, and suspect rapid population growth is a second resolution (to create more scarcity). Honestly, if I had all the answers, economic theory would be solved, and there'd be no more human advancement in the field ever; I've only gotten as far as to say we can make a second resolution by trading material wealth for time wealth. I suspect making that decision for America will get me flamed by anyone who thinks far enough to realize I'm essentially deciding that anyone making $120,000/year or so should instead make $96,000/year and have every Friday off (that's a choice you could negotiate with your employer, or just become a contractor; reducing the work week is making that choice for you).
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People in general mis-estimate their actions. Al Capone believed he was a public benefactor, providing a great service to the American people. Many people don't understand why what they're doing is wrong, no matter how much you as an observer figure they're the type of person who knows better.
I'm *very* good with risk, and have done a lot of work in computer security. I got called on leaving my computer unlocked all the time at work, and didn't see this as a problem because the only people messing with it were *other* infosec people who were trying to prove a point. We have a locked room in a locked building, surrounded by people who can see wtf is going on; who is really going to mess with it? That's operational risk management: I'm working from threats, outcomes, probability, severity, and responses, not blind application of best practices.
So some manager at one firm was collecting everyone's password so he could log in as them in case they were on vacation and had the required access to do something. This is bad: those people in particular were financial executors for 6-figure transactions. They had access to customer accounts, invoices, and company funds. Collecting everyone's password means you lose non-repudiation: illegal activity could be a rogue account manager, another account manager who memorized that guy's password when the password sheet came around, or the manager who was collecting passwords. Everything had to be audited because anyone could be impersonated or impersonate someone else.
That's what my risk model missed: leaving my computer unlocked means, in some distant and theoretical sense, someone *could* (but is *extremely* unlikely to) impersonate me. It's not that I have access to anything important, or that someone could do it without getting caught; it's that there's the physical possibility I could be impersonated. As an infosec professional, I should have considered locking my computer as something important for some odd reason; but as someone familiar with operational risk, I evaluated any risks in a similar manner to accidentally stumbling into an errant cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas that somehow floated into the building.
Someone mentioned that many other cars, which don't cheat and have legal emissions programs, *also* have an enormous deviation between their emissions in testing conditions and their emissions in road conditions--this is why emissions are tested in standard conditions: the environment can push emissions outside testing conditions, and that's okay so long as the engine operates in a particular manner regarding emissions. If it emits high emissions in testing, it will emit *even* *higher* emissions in those real-world cases.
What if the engineer figured the car performs comparably to other, legal engines, but doesn't scale in the same manner, and so doesn't hit emissions targets during testing? The gap between a VW TDi and a compliant vehicle in real-world driving is *much* smaller (and occasionally inverted--the TDi sometimes has lower emissions) than the gap between a VW TDi on corrected software and a compliant vehicle in test conditions. It's no big deal and it doesn't matter in the real world.
An engineer with no work ethic would see no value in that; he'd just change the behavioral characteristics of the engine and be done with it. An engineer who wants to produce the best product would have it correct as it approaches test conditions--which is approximately what this engineer did. A malicious engineer could have obfuscated it by changing some math around so that it would look legit, but seem to dip around the testing conditions.
I'm not sure $200 billion is a lot of money in context; it could be.
America has 113,000 miles of fiber optic cable, with costs ranging from $30,000 to $80,000 to install, while a 6-fiber cable itself only costs $2,000 per mile. That's $0.226 billion for the cable and $3.39 to $9.04 billion to lay it. That's been incrementally installed over time. Caveat: that's 2016; in 1996, the unadjusted prices were much higher, because making a fiber optic cable involves engineering a composite material (flexible glass fiber reinforced by epoxy resin) with high-durability and precise optical properties, and the manufacture process today produces a higher percentage of usable, long cables (more yield, whereas past processes produced a lot of useless trash as part of the cost of a good cable).
You also have to consider specialized cables and other equipment. Even today, a trans-atlantic cable costs $300 million, and a trans-pacific is even bigger; placing the cable is expensive as hell; and there's a ton of other equipment and engineering involved in running the network using all these cables.
$200 billion seems like a lot for an infrastructure lay; it might be more reasonable for an upgrade (a lot of changing stuff around in-place, which adds costs). $200 billion as a seed for both initial deployment and long-term stable maintenance seems *very* reasonable. It's interesting, nonetheless, that this came from taxpayer money.
Still, net profits coming off these companies is only in the 5%-10% range. There's a gap somewhere between the ideal that they make a 97% margin and the reality that they only make a fraction of that.
Unless perhaps you live in a country with very low cost of living,
United States, baltimore city. The house was $50k and is 1.7 miles from the light rail system. Public transit is slow, so I drive; I may amend that again some time soon.
are single,
SPD, so aromantic and asexual (these are complex topics; sex isn't a non-thing for me, but doesn't provide a disproportionate rewards mechanism or impulsive excitement, so fairly less-interesting than pizza which necessarily has fewer complications and strings). If I were otherwise, the additional cost of living for a mate would be, optimized, around $350. Note that cooking for two is more efficient than cooking for one, and I'd have to convert to more eating at home in that scenario (which would save an additional couple hundred on my end, but let's ignore that). All further expenses are discretionary, although women tend to demand some kind of allowance because they're not house pets (this is reasonable, although it makes a hilarious parallel to whores-on-retainer who attach to one client and make him pay a few hundred a month).
Children are also cheap and less-demanding. People overestimate the cost of childcare; I saw a billboard claiming $750/month once, and did the math and figured on a lot less. Canned baby food is expensive; a food mill costs $50, and running bananas, peas, carrots, and green beans through that costs a lot less than buying tiny glass jars of same. There's a modern figure of over $1M to raise a child to age 18, which is patently ridiculous.
and have your home paid off.
Next year.
This month: $421 - Mortgage; $560 - Food (too many $20 meals; need to lay off the Peking Duck and seafood platters); $128 - Electricity/Gas (need to insulate my house...); $83 - Internet (170Mbit/s); $62 - Phone; $44 - Gasoline; about $80/month for car insurance (6mo $480) and $12/mo for AAA; $10/mo for Spotify; $6/mo for Web hosting; $250/mo for a loan. Total: $1,656.
Fix the food budget by cooking meals at home and I can eat well around $96/month; I can eat like a friggin' regent at $130/mo. Takes the till down to $1,226.
Insulating my house and replacing window AC with central air/heat pump (operating as a dehumidifier, while I run an evaporative cooler as major cooling) would drop around 40% off my electricity bill, rendering it to under $80/month year-round. $1,178.
Paying off the loan and mortgage would cut $671 out, taking the till to $507/month. I am 10 months away from that.
Right now, I don't have a dishwasher or a stove; I'm looking at a double-oven stove, a high-end dishwasher, and a massive refrigerator. It's about $6,000 of kitchen appliances, which is why I don't cook yet. Yes, I know 10 months of $480 excess spending is close to that; it's bad financial hygiene.
I really have done extreme budget estimates down to $25/month on food, part of an attempt to validate the $100/month budget ($106/month now, and now represented as a $180/month combined Food/Clothing/Personal Care budget) used as a baseline in my Citizen's Dividend plan (which had an original goal of ending all homelessness and hunger in the U.S., but turned out to be much better than that). Thing is I like to eat a lot more meat than all that.
If you're on the U.S. West Coast, there is still housing at the normalized values I computed. Bread flour costs exactly the same; 10lb of pinto beans in Seattle, WA costs 54 cents more. Seattle prices are ass-tier; if I lived in the area, I'd have to make around $145-$180k to have an equivalent income, in general. For example: $23 gets me two large 2-topping pizzas here; in Seattle, $30 will get you ONE PIZZA. Buying cheap import goods (e.g. GROCERIES, clothes) from wholesale clubs and big discount stores leaves an immense amount of additional spending money in your hands
You can't undo economic harm by moving money around. Monetary damages are only good for establishing some approximation of fairness.
But the question was "how many more", in response to "marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths", in the context of an increase in air pollution from VW TDi vehicles. Your response didn't state a new context, so it would only include those new deaths from VW TDi emission increases over the baseline emission control standards.
People are forgetting the early fall-out of the VW scandal was every other car manufacturer *also* appearing to perform a lot worse on emissions in the real-world than in testing conditions. VW pulled off theirs better than the rest of 'em.
"What does it matter to the CEO who still gets paid, cheat and get rewarded..."
That sounds pretty top-down to me.
They put out a minor and insignificant amount of nitrous oxide, which we control to an obsessive degree. Our entire infrastructure would have to get about 20 times as much atmospheric NOx to cause a health concern; and NOx breaks down harmlessly in atmosphere, with a shorter half life at higher concentrations (which is really interesting), so much so that reaching those levels is going to take 80-100 times the emissions.
The way you're talking, it's like someone ate cabbage last week and you've opened a campaign against them venting toxic hydrogen sulfide into the air to kill every living thing on the entire North American continent.
The bigger issue is everyone quickly blaming someone else. We're all engineers of some form or another here, and engineers implemented this criminal enhancement, so it must have been at the behedst of the evil rich guy.
I live in a country where our military invaded other countries and killed a lot of people. Soon they'll try to arrest me for war crimes!
If you really cared so much about vulnerable people, you would be doing social work or something along those lines.
I'd like to be a house representative. On the subject of vulnerable people, we can discuss new taxation plans which only marginally raise taxes on the rich (0.69% less income to the top 0.1%; 2% less income to someone with $10M annual salary) and the effects on the poor in a failing welfare system, as well as the stabilizing effect on all low-income families. In the long run, I want to target a maximum tax bracket of 1/3 above marginal (a United States flat income tax would be 29.97%; the top tax bracket I specify is 41%, and I want that to be no higher than 40%), rather than attempting to use the rich as some idealized Robin Hood funding source.
Is that along those lines?
As of october 1, 2012, vehicular manslaughter is a crime in my state. Previously, striking a pedestrian was possibly reckless driving, with the prosecution needing to prove negligence; this is technically impossible, so the only penalty was ever a $20 fine. After October 1, they use a reasonable person test: if you were doing something a reasonable person would consider to increase risk of injury or death (driving at excessive speeds, sexting, etc.) while driving and you killed someone, it's a $5,000 fine and 5 years in jail.
The bill in its current form hit the State legislature in 2004, and took 8 years of discussion and a small riot outside the state capitol on signing day before they were sure they wanted to pass it.
This entire thread ignores that you can invent something by observing current available techniques, well-ahead of refinement of said techniques. The artificial respirator was invented in like 1658; the first one was built in the 1800s, after multiple revisions to the steel-making process, the last one moving to a hot-blast furnace such that the same labor (wages!) required to make 400 tonnes of steel now made 80,000 tonnes of steel. For hundreds of years, building the patented device cost a *large*, and then a small fortune--think of it like your cheap, used, economy car costs as much as a high-end Ferrari (multiple millions) instead of $4,000, and the rest of the market is adjusted up accordingly (meaning almost 100% of the cars bought today would be unpurchaseable even by the super-mega-rich; there wouldn't be enough human labor to make those cars *and* food).
We don't have an activation clause in patent law, and activation has all kinds of problems (patent trolls). At the same time, the United States is a first-to-file system: if you invent something, wait for the market to be capable of providing it, and then another inventor files the same invention, your 20 years of documented proof that you invented it back when it would have been impossible to market during the patent term doesn't mean shit; and if you try to make the device you invented, you have to pay a patent license. Further, new inventions in the field may make your previously-novel idea obvious, obviating a patent.
Patents are way harder than copyright.
I'm paid $75,000 annually and I put about $2,300 in the bank each month. I don't cook at home, at all, ever. I spend excessively, and still bank over 60% of my paycheck. This time next year, it will be over 85% of my paycheck.
$75k is pocket change at my level. I've been offered $135,000 plus a $13k hiring bonus.
Yeah, on the one hand, patent litigation to stunt a market is kind of bad play. On the other, patents are reasonable (14 years? Many technologies are too expensive or not ground-breaking enough to warrant licensing when invented, and *have* to sit; historically, patents on complex medical technology have frequently appeared over 150 years *before* the technology was feasible), you should negotiate reasonable licensing fees, and Arista is made up of a bunch of people who bailed on CISCO to compete with CISCO using CISCO technology they stole.
It's hard to back people who get paid to work for someone, then run off with the work they did.
Hollywood accounting is only useful when you're giving a share of the net profits to an investor, because your budgeted object (e.g. movie) shows no profit. Your vertical-monopoly suppliers (other corporations you own) still reflect a profit, which the government taxes; your partners get a reflected low profit, and don't get a share from your supply firms.
Comcast has multiple divisions, but doesn't generally operate as separate firms (they have *many* subsidiaries). Both Comcast Cable and NBC Universal are divisions of Comcast. Comcast Cable is an LLC holding of Comcast; however, Comcast is responsible for its debts and obligations, as Comcast Cable is a legal division of Comcast.
Amusing: People have tried to claim a 97% profit margin on Time Warner Cable by citing the Gross Profit. Gross Profit is revenue minus cost of good sold, meaning if you buy $100 of brass and make a $250 trombone you have $150 of gross profit on the Trombone; this ignores all other operating expenses of business. The gross profits on intangible goods ignore the tangible cost of business, e.g. gross profits on iTunes will measure the cost of bandwidth (at a fraction of a cent per hundreds of songs) and register approximately a 100% profit margin, while ignoring the cost of servers and such (because additional hardware isn't needed per song sold; it's needed only when so much happens as to overload the servers, or when the servers get old and need replacement, thus the marginal cost of those servers per song depends on the number of songs sold). The gross profit analysis ignores the cost of cable infrastructure.
Binge On is 1.5Mbps. You can cram 720p in that at high quality.
In some cases, they avoid a $1,000 cost by accepting a $10 cost.
Joshua Foer, like any individual, proves nothing. If there was a class teaching the memory techniques he used, taking more or less random people in, and they all had incredibly good memories, I'd be impressed.
Well there's a few studies, such as:
All students (n = 78) were taught insulin and DM in a didactic fashion, consisting of two traditional lectures. Each lecture spanned 60 min.
After the didactic lectures had been completed, 28 students were randomly selected and then taught insulin and DM through the MOL technique. Continued participation in the study was, in any case, entirely voluntary.
The rest of the class (n = 50) studied the same topics (insulin and DM) and completed in-class worksheets. Students were allowed open textbook reference and were allowed to take the completed worksheets home. This was a self-directed learning session under instructor supervision. The entire class was, thus, studying the same topic during the same time, albeit in different ways.
Med students, 28 using method of loci, 50 using self-directed study.
We observed a highly significant increase (P < 0.003) in the number of correct responses on the questions when attempted by students who had been taught insulin and DM through didactic lectures and the MOL technique (mean: 9.31, SD: 1.12) compared with students who had been taught through didactic lectures and the self-directed learning session (mean: 8.10, SD: 1.85). Two participants of the MOL group did not appear for the quiz.
So a random subset of medical students, having been *just* taught how to use the Method of Loci and given strict, directed mind palaces (sub-optimal: they're unfamiliar with the technique, it's a lot of cognitive load, and it's not self-directed), shifted itself up almost an entire standard deviation. That means more than 85% of the Mnemonics group *outperformed the mean* of the control group; the remaining 15% were *still* in the first deviation.
Put another way: there was not some subset of MOL subjects who moved up; the entire smooth bell curve shifted to the right. The bell curve was also tighter: the standard deviation among students using mnemonics was 60% as wide as the standard deviation among the control group. That means the students clustered closer together. In a class where students ranged across 30 points (e.g. 60%-90%), these students would have ranged across 18 points (e.g. 78%-96%).
A surprising amount of mnemonics study is done on the elderly (to combat age-related memory loss) and medical students (because the material is complex and filled with facts). The outcomes are always the same: a marked improvement in ability to remember things if those things are intentionally structured.
but it really seems to me that this would have massive real-world effects if it actually worked, and I'm not seeing them.
Why would it? You'd have to institutionalize and standardize education first, and then change that institutionalized behavior when new research came out. Each change is a risk, and requires some administrative oversight. On an individual level, all of these techniques are *skills* which require *effort*, just like any other skill, and the time spent learning is annoying and boring and exhausting. Why would these things be adopted? Why would they have an impact on the world just because some academics know about them?
We already know the Japanese methods of basic mathematics education universally produce human calculators. We instead use friendly numbers and common core.
The best bit is he's definitely guilty, and trying to get off on a technicality. The argument is the entire body of evidence collected since this whole thing started is tainted, and they have no valid reason to search him (knowing that his house is still full of child pornography because they already did an *illegal* search isn't a justifiable cause), so he gets away scot free because the authorities fucked up.
This is *exactly* what we want. We want the authorities to follow the rules, and we want people who can hide in the rules to get away with it. We don't need the FBI searching you because they feel like it, finding evidence for an unpredicted crime, then charging you for it based on an illegal search. That leads to all kinds of vindictive political control, turning political opponents and other undesirables into targets to be ground away at by government overreach.
The biggest danger is the public realizing what just happened and crying out against a child porn hoarder getting off free, and then demanding the repeal of the fourth and fifth amendments immediately. The second biggest danger is the FBI succeeding with their bluff, either having no evidence to present ("we used a thing that got us information, but we won't show you that thing, so just trust us about the evidence chain") or being forced to present and being called on performing an illegal search (hacked your computer) and then *not* penalized for it ("this is all technically inadmissible, but we'll allow it anyway").
The neutral state is the FBI being forced to present and arguing (successfully and correctly) the defendant was *not* subject to an illegal search because the FBI had ample reason to believe the target site *was* doing illegal things and that its visitors were engaging in illegal activities (similar to a sting on a whore house). The outcome of being forced to present is the public can examine the code used to break Tor, then counteract it (technical arms race); Darby goes to jail; and the case sets no legal precedents weakening constitutional law.
That gets into things like entrapment and the oddities of law. In computers, a random pile of data is a random pile of data; in law, a random pile of data that has transformed from another particular pile of data is a derivative work and subject to copyright. Likewise, being invited into a house as a civilian and finding contraband is different from deciding you can't legally get a warrant, posing as a non-cop, gaining trust, and being invited into a house as an undercover officer. Both of these involve the same behaviors and the same outcomes, but one involves malicious intent to circumvent search and seizure laws.
Copyright law gives the copyright holder the right to dictate who can copy and for what use. That means license--contract--has legal force, and violation of license is violation of law.
The broken-window-blind analogy works if your computer is openly broadcasting data or accepting access: if you're running a P2P application or an HTTP server sharing all your files to the world, that's your fault. Computer services are passively providing service, same as if you put a sign out front that said "FREE WEED!"--or didn't, but the cops heard people go to your house for that sort of thing, and walked up and knocked on the door and said the rumored password, and got weed.
All adversarial accesses (trojan downloader, remote exploit, password cracking) are akin to bypassing your windows or door locks. A trojan downloader is an undeclared search, like sneaking a cop into your house by posing as a horny bar girl and following you home. These aren't the same thing as finding an open port or active service.
The judge's analysis is ridiculous.
You pointed out that YouTube already does it, implying that the complaint is 100% valid; except YouTube appears to not do it, so what's the big deal? Is Google maliciously allowing copyrighted works?
Google can't readily assemble a list of all songs requiring a certain action, and can't readily determine what is fair use. They have been able to work with artists to compromise on the fair use angle by triggering ads via detection.
Some labels claim Google isn't 100% squashing anything that they haven't agreed is allowed. A video which contains some music is actually fair-use and not necessarily infringing; a video which is some music is infringing. The distinction can be a matter of legal debate. For example: you can argue the first video's primary entertainment value is its original content, and that it's enhanced by the music, and thus is fair use; while you might argue an AMV is derivative of music (it's a video made to express music, rather than an entertainment piece given a musical backing), and thus not fair use.
This seems strange to people because most of us like to analyze state; a lot of law relies on analyzing how state gets reached. One person tried to explain it as lawyers identifying computer bits as having color, even though we know bits can't carry any such information.
So how does Youtube know the difference?
The money spent by consumers to roll into the profits which then get paid out to create those 7,000 jobs is not spent elsewhere. Consumers have limited money, and not limited desires: if you give someone twice as much salary, he's going to buy stuff with it. That means those 7,000 jobs represent their combined salary elsewhere (7,000 jobs at 3 times minimum wage could instead be 21,000 minimum-wage jobs or 3,000 Silicon Valley tech jobs).
Indirectly, the build-out could reduce cost of services elsewhere, thus leading to a long-term net gain. Think of it this way: it takes 20% of your population to make food; *or* it takes 2% of your population on the farm and 8% making machines and diesel fuel, only 10% of your population, and food costs half as much. This reduction in food costs means you'd have to pay people slightly *less* (as a proportion of per-capita income) to maintain their standard of living, allowing you to sweep the remainder on the end into more jobs, lowering the unemployment rate. The corresponding reduction in scarcity means you can support a larger population, leading to population growth. (The Solow-Swan model allows you to compute how much growth came from technology and how much came from population growth as a result.)
With inflationary markets and other complex interactions, that's exactly what happens: income gaps widen, the bottom and middle standard-of-living grows anyway (slower than what would be called "completely fair" because of the income gap widening), and the wage growth lags a bit behind inflation and thus spreads wages to new jobs and reduces unemployment (it spreads because people in the middle are able to buy more from people on the bottom, who experience the slowest growth, and thus they increase bottom-end employment demand).
To put this into perspective: my Citizen's Dividend plan has a secondary goal of causing an 18% overemployment (negative unemployment), which is resolved by cutting the work week to four eight-hour days; and replacing the 30-year mortgage with a 10-year mortgage is wholly-doable, which would mean nearly everyone over 30 has 16%-20% of their income freed up, meaning four 7-hour work days or three 9-hour work days at most to stabilize the job market.
(Cutting the work week raises unemployment because, wage raise or not, those people are getting a proportional reduction in buying power, thus reducing the number of jobs they can support with their purchases. For mortgages, in a 14% mortgage prime rate market, an extra $300/month on an $1,180/month mortgage pays off the house in 10 years; and the construction industry *has* operated with construction costs matching that market condition, so you'd shave down the economic rent and convert it to a spreading of spending.)
The widening income gap has mostly prevented a labor shortage in this way; and doing all of this at once would actually reduce the amount of stuff produced, meaning yes we would be poorer (although we could just import more?). I don't know the full impact, and suspect rapid population growth is a second resolution (to create more scarcity). Honestly, if I had all the answers, economic theory would be solved, and there'd be no more human advancement in the field ever; I've only gotten as far as to say we can make a second resolution by trading material wealth for time wealth. I suspect making that decision for America will get me flamed by anyone who thinks far enough to realize I'm essentially deciding that anyone making $120,000/year or so should instead make $96,000/year and have every Friday off (that's a choice you could negotiate with your employer, or just become a contractor; reducing the work week is making that choice for you).