24 hours a day - 8 hours of work/school - 8 hours of sleep = 8 hours remaining. So every waking moment that is not at work or asleep is spent watching TV??? On average?
So that means a significant portion are spending >8 hours a day! And it means the "average" American does absolutely no other thing with their day. No eating, no travel, no video games, no gardening, no soccer games, no taking out the trash. This doesn't seem believable. Even kids spend 8 hours schooling if you include travel to school and homework and the chorus concert.
We can draw no conclusions merely from knowing the median age. The older employees probably probably made more money and received more benefits. Money is certainly part of the calculations for layoffs. There is also a greater chance that they were out-of-date making their cost/benefit ratio lower. Counterbalance that with the fact that companies often prefer to layoff younger workers to reward years of service. So the determination of who to layoff is quite complex, but it certainly involves many factors that are only 1 hamming distance away from age. So even if there is age discrimination going on, it will be really tough to isolate that from the other parameters.
Thanks for doing that research. I hastily put those links in without really reading them. You are totally right about the smartbird. So perhaps this is the world's smallest untethered robotic insect, and it definitely deserves accolades for breaking new ground.
I also remember a DARPA project to create a flying insect with a camera, that was powered entirely by ambient wi-fi. It would fly a bit, then spend hours charging, then fly a bit more.
Proprietary file formats, databases, and such... But outside of Unix no one came up with a standardized mail format.
Thunderbird uses the cross-platform MBOX standard. I've even been in a triple-boot scenario where the Linux, OS X, and Windows Thunderbird clients could all access the same network share that held the email. It was great! Here is a list of other standards.
Anecdote 1: I am a Windows Thunderbird user with about 18 years worth of email in it, and it doesn't do any of these things. Anecdote 2: I am a Windows Outlook 365 user with about 5 years worth of email in it, and it does all of the things you listed. Actually, it did those things with 1 year of email in it.
Maybe this is a brilliant move to show China that the US can win a trade war. He found an opportunity to bring a bring Chinese company to the edge of disaster, then calls up his counterparts in the Chinese government and says "Ya know, I *could* save ZTE, and those of us in the know could make a lot of money now that the stock sank, but here's what I want in return..."
I use Skype for Business at work, and it is almost as good as it was back when they called it Lync. (That's high praise for Microsoft, as usually products go downhill as the version number increases). But I had family who used Skype years ago, and they haven't used it since Microsoft bought it. They use Apple Facetime and gave up entirely on people who don't have Apple products.
Side point: I know Android has a video chat feature, but I've never gotten it to work. My wife and I on the same plan, same exact phone, same Wifi, but still can't get it to work. It just gives ambiguous error messages. (Old-school geeks remember fondly when programs told you what went wrong so you could diagnose the problem.)
I've gotten calls like this with phone numbers similar to local friends, but up until today it never was actually one of my friends. I answered, thinking it was my neighbor, and *bam* robocall. How can they possibly make any money off of this? Who doesn't recognize it as a robocall and hang-up immediately? And of that percentage, who actually buys stuff?
I find more and more sites display a popup window telling me I need to turn off my ad blocker... when I don't use one. Hell, the dialog box is blocking some of the ads. Unfortunately, there is no button for "I'm not using an adblocker" so they don't get the message. It sure would be nice if they tested their own sites. I am almost certain that the problem is with the "do not track" options.
News Flash: IBM's IT department does what every other IT department does! Film at at 11! (Except I can't seem to copy it to my flash drive... lemme try DropBox... blocked, ummmm... how about my old university FTP sit... oh that's down... )
Isn't this a solved problem at this point? It seems like all the Chrome users are suddenly rediscovering all the features that have been in Firefox for decades.
Back around Y2K, you got this feature by installing the Flashblock extension. I stopped installing it when Firefox made it so that you had to click to start any plug-in. Now it is available as "media.autoplay.enabled" setting in about:config. I guess I am in shock that anybody *doesn't* set their computer this way. I think there is even an option in Firefox to say "it's okay to let *this* site autoplay stuff."
Here in the US, about 50% of the arcades I see are not video games, but gambling games. Is this the case in the Netherlands and Belgium?
The games I am talking about take a few forms: 1) Roll a coin down a track and if it gets in the right place you get a prize 2) Pull a lever and if it lands on the right spot you get a prize (or a larger number of tickets) 3) Hit a button at a certain time. Sometimes these games "feel" like games but there is not enough fidelity so they might be random. (Ex: Stacker)
Congress accidentally confirmed 3 cabinet members without knowing they were actually AI bots. The problem is that they can't figure out which ones. The Turing Test doesn't work to find them since politicians aren't actually human.
the majority of the price of a building in the bay area is the land.
I'm with you in that the cost of the land might be a significant part of it, but I'm not sure that the cost of the structure is "gravy." If it was that simple, then everyone would be putting solar panels on their houses today. In reality, people place solar panels on houses if they can afford the initial cost, and if the payback is worth it. That varies based on their electricity rates, proximity to trees, local climate, etc. California is a big state and those things vary.
Strange little anecdote here: In Palm Desert, CA - where it is sunny 364 days per year, where you can hardly grow a tree more than 1 story, where everyone has 2 air conditioners on their 1500 square foot homes - there are almost no solar panels. Reason? Building codes require a particular kind of roof, which isn't suited to putting panels on them. So basically, aesthetics. *shrug* Seems crazy to me. I'm curious how this state law like this would interact with a local ordinance.
California has areas with serious problems with affordable housing.
And that literally has nothing to do with the cost of the houses themselves but rather their scarce availability.
Not so. California's housing prices are a huge part of their affordable housing problem. In the booming tech cities, housing prices have gone up so much that minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city they work in.
This is required for the basic habitability of our planet.
You are dismissing an entirely valid line of thinking. In this specific case, the real goal is to make houses energy efficient, or carbon-neutral, or something like that. There's many ways to do that other than solar panels. Maybe someone wants to use a geothermal energy system, or a wind turbine. Or maybe they don't want to connect to the grid at all. Maybe they want to use a passive cooling design and a green roof. Often times regulations that tell people *how* to solve the problem are really corporations trying to use the regulations to steer people toward their products. Like requiring a particular safety valve, that only one company has a patent on. This prevents other companies from innovating by developing similar products.
The economic problem is actually worse than you stated: Spammers send spam email even if they don't make money off of it. Let us divide spam into two kinds: advertising, and malware.
Advertisers never knew how effective their ads were. (The web was supposed to fix that by giving them tons of analytics, but it never really worked out the way they hoped.) So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway. So penalizing them economically would be difficult.
Malware spam is often sent using someone else's resources, so making it uneconomical won't help here. The economic impact will be on the victim who had their computer systems compromised. That might lead them to do better security, but since an insecure system is already an outrageously expensive gamble, it doesn't seem like it will motivate anyone to secure their systems better. And many of the malware spammers do this for fun or vengeance rather than profit, so economics is ineffective on them even if you could make it pricier for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh yes, I completely missed the word "household." Whoops, thank you!
24 hours a day - 8 hours of work/school - 8 hours of sleep = 8 hours remaining. So every waking moment that is not at work or asleep is spent watching TV??? On average?
So that means a significant portion are spending >8 hours a day! And it means the "average" American does absolutely no other thing with their day. No eating, no travel, no video games, no gardening, no soccer games, no taking out the trash. This doesn't seem believable. Even kids spend 8 hours schooling if you include travel to school and homework and the chorus concert.
What am I missing?
We can draw no conclusions merely from knowing the median age. The older employees probably probably made more money and received more benefits. Money is certainly part of the calculations for layoffs. There is also a greater chance that they were out-of-date making their cost/benefit ratio lower. Counterbalance that with the fact that companies often prefer to layoff younger workers to reward years of service. So the determination of who to layoff is quite complex, but it certainly involves many factors that are only 1 hamming distance away from age. So even if there is age discrimination going on, it will be really tough to isolate that from the other parameters.
Thanks for doing that research. I hastily put those links in without really reading them. You are totally right about the smartbird. So perhaps this is the world's smallest untethered robotic insect, and it definitely deserves accolades for breaking new ground.
Not to poo-poo their work, but this is definitely not a first. A quick google search reveals several:
https://gizmodo.com/its-almost...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/auto...
https://www.ted.com/talks/a_ro...
I also remember a DARPA project to create a flying insect with a camera, that was powered entirely by ambient wi-fi. It would fly a bit, then spend hours charging, then fly a bit more.
Proprietary file formats, databases, and such... But outside of Unix no one came up with a standardized mail format.
Thunderbird uses the cross-platform MBOX standard. I've even been in a triple-boot scenario where the Linux, OS X, and Windows Thunderbird clients could all access the same network share that held the email. It was great! Here is a list of other standards.
Anecdote 1: I am a Windows Thunderbird user with about 18 years worth of email in it, and it doesn't do any of these things.
Anecdote 2: I am a Windows Outlook 365 user with about 5 years worth of email in it, and it does all of the things you listed. Actually, it did those things with 1 year of email in it.
Maybe this is a brilliant move to show China that the US can win a trade war. He found an opportunity to bring a bring Chinese company to the edge of disaster, then calls up his counterparts in the Chinese government and says "Ya know, I *could* save ZTE, and those of us in the know could make a lot of money now that the stock sank, but here's what I want in return..."
I use Skype for Business at work, and it is almost as good as it was back when they called it Lync. (That's high praise for Microsoft, as usually products go downhill as the version number increases). But I had family who used Skype years ago, and they haven't used it since Microsoft bought it. They use Apple Facetime and gave up entirely on people who don't have Apple products.
Side point: I know Android has a video chat feature, but I've never gotten it to work. My wife and I on the same plan, same exact phone, same Wifi, but still can't get it to work. It just gives ambiguous error messages. (Old-school geeks remember fondly when programs told you what went wrong so you could diagnose the problem.)
Thanks, I'll try that!
I've gotten calls like this with phone numbers similar to local friends, but up until today it never was actually one of my friends. I answered, thinking it was my neighbor, and *bam* robocall. How can they possibly make any money off of this? Who doesn't recognize it as a robocall and hang-up immediately? And of that percentage, who actually buys stuff?
I find more and more sites display a popup window telling me I need to turn off my ad blocker... when I don't use one. Hell, the dialog box is blocking some of the ads. Unfortunately, there is no button for "I'm not using an adblocker" so they don't get the message. It sure would be nice if they tested their own sites. I am almost certain that the problem is with the "do not track" options.
To clarify: It blocks html5 audio & video autoplay on both sites, but Vimeo's play button never actually plays the video.
Well hopefully those sites will fix it soon, since it is causing trouble for Chrome users too. I see that YouTube works fine but Vimeo doesn't.
Just tested. Youtube is fine but it does break Vimeo. The play button just sits there. I have to turn off the setting and reload the page.
News Flash: IBM's IT department does what every other IT department does! Film at at 11!
(Except I can't seem to copy it to my flash drive... lemme try DropBox... blocked, ummmm... how about my old university FTP sit... oh that's down... )
It's been working for me since forever. Currently on Firefox 59.0.3 (64-bit). I just tested it and it seems to be working.
Isn't this a solved problem at this point? It seems like all the Chrome users are suddenly rediscovering all the features that have been in Firefox for decades.
Back around Y2K, you got this feature by installing the Flashblock extension. I stopped installing it when Firefox made it so that you had to click to start any plug-in. Now it is available as "media.autoplay.enabled" setting in about:config. I guess I am in shock that anybody *doesn't* set their computer this way. I think there is even an option in Firefox to say "it's okay to let *this* site autoplay stuff."
Here in the US, about 50% of the arcades I see are not video games, but gambling games. Is this the case in the Netherlands and Belgium?
The games I am talking about take a few forms:
1) Roll a coin down a track and if it gets in the right place you get a prize
2) Pull a lever and if it lands on the right spot you get a prize (or a larger number of tickets)
3) Hit a button at a certain time. Sometimes these games "feel" like games but there is not enough fidelity so they might be random. (Ex: Stacker)
Congress accidentally confirmed 3 cabinet members without knowing they were actually AI bots. The problem is that they can't figure out which ones. The Turing Test doesn't work to find them since politicians aren't actually human.
I still want to know why nobody seems to care that the driver wasn't looking at the road. The software bug is secondary.
the majority of the price of a building in the bay area is the land.
I'm with you in that the cost of the land might be a significant part of it, but I'm not sure that the cost of the structure is "gravy." If it was that simple, then everyone would be putting solar panels on their houses today. In reality, people place solar panels on houses if they can afford the initial cost, and if the payback is worth it. That varies based on their electricity rates, proximity to trees, local climate, etc. California is a big state and those things vary.
Strange little anecdote here: In Palm Desert, CA - where it is sunny 364 days per year, where you can hardly grow a tree more than 1 story, where everyone has 2 air conditioners on their 1500 square foot homes - there are almost no solar panels. Reason? Building codes require a particular kind of roof, which isn't suited to putting panels on them. So basically, aesthetics. *shrug* Seems crazy to me. I'm curious how this state law like this would interact with a local ordinance.
It's called price and demand.
Supply and demand actually, but close enough. You got the point.
But neither of those are for housing
They most definitely are! A simple web search will show some of the options.
This is an inexpensive way to ensure the proliferation of renewable energy.
How does mandating things make them inexpensive?
Nobody is requiring any special patented solar panels
I never claimed they were.
California has areas with serious problems with affordable housing.
And that literally has nothing to do with the cost of the houses themselves but rather their scarce availability.
Not so. California's housing prices are a huge part of their affordable housing problem. In the booming tech cities, housing prices have gone up so much that minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city they work in.
Here’s how many minimum-wage hours it takes to afford a two-bed in SF
Low-wage jobs are plentiful in S.F., but where can you live?
I tried living on an $8 per hour salary in San Francisco and it was a disaster
This is required for the basic habitability of our planet.
You are dismissing an entirely valid line of thinking. In this specific case, the real goal is to make houses energy efficient, or carbon-neutral, or something like that. There's many ways to do that other than solar panels. Maybe someone wants to use a geothermal energy system, or a wind turbine. Or maybe they don't want to connect to the grid at all. Maybe they want to use a passive cooling design and a green roof. Often times regulations that tell people *how* to solve the problem are really corporations trying to use the regulations to steer people toward their products. Like requiring a particular safety valve, that only one company has a patent on. This prevents other companies from innovating by developing similar products.
The economic problem is actually worse than you stated: Spammers send spam email even if they don't make money off of it. Let us divide spam into two kinds: advertising, and malware.
Advertisers never knew how effective their ads were. (The web was supposed to fix that by giving them tons of analytics, but it never really worked out the way they hoped.) So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway. So penalizing them economically would be difficult.
Malware spam is often sent using someone else's resources, so making it uneconomical won't help here. The economic impact will be on the victim who had their computer systems compromised. That might lead them to do better security, but since an insecure system is already an outrageously expensive gamble, it doesn't seem like it will motivate anyone to secure their systems better. And many of the malware spammers do this for fun or vengeance rather than profit, so economics is ineffective on them even if you could make it pricier for them.