If humans truly are incapable of discerning the difference in a controlled study, doesn't that suggest that the test is flawed because it is being too strict for some arbitrary reason?
To better illustrate what I mean,say I want to buy hosting for a service and want 99% uptime. However, the person considering providers throws out any without guarantees of 99.999% uptime. They're not actually doing what I want and I may end up paying more than I would otherwise need to for no good reason. Or suppose I have a machine that judges produce and will remove anything that it thinks shoppers won't purchase (as a result of appearance, bruising, etc.) so that I don't waste resources shipping it to a store that will eventually have to throw it out as unsold. I want that machine to be as exact as possible because if it's being more picky than the shoppers, that's wasted produce I could otherwise be selling.
Bandwidth also follows it's own progression curve that looks a little bit like Moore's law. For a long time, we couldn't speed that along any faster than the underlying technological improvements and deployment could occur so it made sense to target our compression algorithms for improvement. Now we're coming out on the other side where we've got more than enough bandwidth to consume video,. While improvements to our compression algorithms will mean we save costs, the additional increases in bandwidth availability (and the associated decrease in cost to move some fixed amount of data) will start to dwarf algorithm improvements.
Realistically, this just means we'll stream higher resolution content and a higher framerate, but even that has a practical ceiling where humans aren't going to benefit much from 16K content at 240 FPS as opposed to 4K content at 60 FPS. Maybe they'll have to invent bionic eyes that can perceive that difference just so we have a reason to consume more bandwidth.
I've seen a few stores that actually charge for them now, and that model has been used frequently in other countries. The grocery store I go to doesn't charge for plastic bags, but they do give a small discount if you bring your own reusable bag. I also noticed that a lot of stores are adding plastic bag recycling bins at their stores, which probably helps considerably with cutting down on the number that end up in landfills.
Why would you even purchase something from a one-shot advertiser on the Facebook? Research a product you're interested in on as many sites as possible, and understand in advance that the internet practice of purchasing something you cannot 1st hold in your hands is an inexact science.
While this makes perfect sense to you and me, I'm going to guess that neither of us use Facebook. We've already got people getting their news from Facebook, so I expect purchasing decisions are the least of our worries.
I take it this is mostly in jest (not that what you say isn't true) but I think it does raise the point of something like this happening where some business (not necessarily Facebook) receives a lot of reports from an angry mob. That kind of action is right up the alley of the average "Kony 2012" internet slacktivist on Facebook.
Facebook isn't completely stupid, but there's no way they're in a good enough position to evaluate these kinds of reports accurately or fairly. I suspect that some bad companies will get passes because they're well connected and know how to grease palms and some other legitimate companies that get broadsided by this won't be large enough for Facebook to care.
Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
Which law specifically are you referring to, as there were laws in the mid-90's that stated as much, but many of those previsions were stripped away in subsequent revisions to those laws or other federal acts passed at later dates. There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense, but those were easily circumvented as long as some telco was selling dialup. A de facto monopoly is just as good as a de jure monopoly.
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
I somewhat picked Seattle at random as I am somewhat familiar with the internet situation there and their city code was easily accessible online. I don't live in Seattle, but I have several friends who still do and for a long while it was essentially Comcast only as far as cable (there was some DSL availability, but typically not something that anyone on/. would care to use) internet choices go. The city isn't required to grant anyone a franchise, so you can essentially create an unofficial monopoly if you've bought enough people to prevent competition from being permitted. There are plenty of new stories related to their problems with a lack of competition.
I will admit that I didn't read through the entire set of laws and was speaking in more of a general sense as most of the places I've lived over the years have had only a single choice for cable (and by extension internet) provider. You mention 14 ISPs serving Seattle, but I'm assuming you're speaking of the metro area and not the city proper. I'm also unsure as to what extent their coverage overlaps, but if there truly are 14 different companies offering service to the city, then I expect that consumers are getting much better deals than most other cities. You can't have 14 different companies competing for your money and making fat profits unless they're all colluding and engaging in price fixing, which would be quite hard with 14 different companies.
This has nothing to do with cable companies, and in any case does not create a government-granted monopoly. It's irrelevant.
A free market requires competition between entities. It doesn't matter if those are public or private entities, merely that they compete against each other and that consumers have choice. Any law that prevents some option for competition is harmful to consumers. If public entities have to play by the same rules as private companies and aren't themselves given special treatment, I fail to see how they cause harm.
Some free market advocates seems to think that this means outlawing any kind of publicly owned entities from participating in the market, but that's a short-sighted view as there's nothing that indicates a publicly owned entity must be given special treatment. It would be no different than giving private companies special treatment, which many cities have done. Perhaps you don't live in one where this is an issue, but if there's only one game in town and they're charging outrageous prices for a shit service, I have a hard time believing that it's because none of the other avaricious companies have decided that they're suddenly against swooping in to undercut the competition.
It's the typical business model in most cities as far as cable companies go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_franchise_fee. This is an extension of rules created under the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which probably never anticipated cable companies becoming internet service providers. Here're the specific city laws for Seattle, though most cities will have something similar. Technically there's nothing there that necessitates a monopoly, but there's also nothing stopping a company from acquiring a non-compete clause either, which means they're legally the only company that has rights to offer service. Comcast was quite notorious for doing that.
Personally I'm of the opinion that cities should be in charge of their own infrastructure (they can contract this out to some private entity if they feel they lack the ability to do this effectively themselves) and allow various companies to offer competing services to the city's residents. The problem has been that cities tried to treat internet access like a utility without bothering to put any rules in place for price restrictions or service requirements.
If you want a choice of internet providers you should probably ask your local government to stop granting monopoly rights to a single company. Of course that would probably mean losing some kick-back money, so I don't see it happening unless you push for a municipal broadband initiative in your city. It might work if you're a small enough town, but good luck getting through the political machine in anything above 50,000 or more.
I think you're confusing libertarians with anarchists. Libertarians believe in strong property rights, which naturally implies borders and a need for some entity to enforce them. Some would argue that doesn't necessarily need to be a government, but historically that has been a major role of governments.
Most libertarians probably wouldn't care about immigration if the U.S. had no welfare state as was historically the case throughout most of the country's history. Once you got off the boat you were on your own, but plenty of people were perfectly happy with that arrangement. This generally worked quite well with the homestead system since anyone who wanted to move west could do so and a large number of immigrants did. You had the freedom to make something of yourself and if you couldn't that was your own problem.
However, the reality in modern America is that the government is expected to care for anyone who shows up and pay for their children's education and healthcare. That necessarily means taxation, which libertarians are generally loath to agree to outside of the limited government functions that they're in favor of, so they'll tend to be less in favor of immigration with those kinds of strings attached to it. If everyone immigrating from Mexico were a doctor, engineer, or otherwise highly skilled such that they'd pay more into the system than they get out of it, I suspect there'd be no disagreement with letting in as many people who fall into that category either.
National spending causes inflation and national taxation removes that inflation.
National spending has nothing to do with inflation. Governments printing additional money is what drives inflation whether that money is spent out by the government or a central bank loans it out privately.
For the poorest the tax rate should be effectively negative and beyond a certain point it should be in excess of 90%.
I'd disagree on both counts. In the first, I believe that everyone should pay tax or they lack any skin in the game and don't pay the necessary attention to what government is doing. People who don't pay for something, tend not to care if the government spends foolishly. After all, it's not their money. However, once a person becomes responsible for paying for something, they tend to devote a good deal more attention and care to how their money is being spent.
The second is just as foolish because no one will willingly pay that much in taxes. What you end up with is a lot of money spent to avoid paying 90% taxes, which works out well enough in practice such that the ultimate results is that the government's revenue decreases and a lot of labor is spent on activities that wouldn't need to exist if the tax rate wasn't 90%.
How would someone know that government officials in Florida weren't performing background checks though? Do nefarious people typically just apply for concealed weapon permits in other states on the off chance that someone's asleep at the wheel? Never mind that no one would have been able to have knowledge of the gaping hole in the system, since realistically, how many people even know they could apply for a permit in Florida that would be valid somewhere else?
Maybe one person who was issued a permit during this lapse in procedure falls into that category, and that's being generous.
Too often agile skips (argue that this is doing it wrong all you like, it's often reality) trying to do an extensive requirements analysis to nail things down to the point where you can do a high-level design that will be useful for more than two sprints. The real failure is probably that no one really wants to do the hard bits first, so those tend to get left until too late into the development process and invariably lead to throwing out or seriously reworking a lot of the earlier effort that failed to account for something important.
I also want to say again, about gun violence, what is it about our culture and society that creates individuals who think gun violence is a good way to get their fame on social media/solve their problems.
I don't think there's anything particularly special about the United States in this regard. You find similar types of violence throughout the world. The Middle East is rife with it, but it takes on a much more religious bent. In European countries where access to guns is much more restricted, the weapon of choice now seems to be using vehicles on crowded streets. We even saw this in Canada from someone who carried out such an attack that had nothing to do with religion, lest anyone think this is just somehow a Muslim thing. There was even that Norwegian bloke from several years ago that massacred school children, so again I don't believe this is solely an American issue.
There's probably some illusion that this is a much larger problem then it actually is due to increased media coverage, and simply having more people than ever before on the planet. It's entirely possible for the total number of incidents to increase and for the per capita rate to decrease at the same time as a consequence of a growing population. Twenty-four hour news and the internet also mean that we're able to hear about any event that occurs, often as it's occurring. Previously, you might have found out about a major event a day or two later, typically with more information as reporters were able to piece together what had happened. Now you'll see a news story about something that's ongoing with little in the way of concrete information.
I believe that psychologists have stated that some of what the media was doing (showing pictures of the perpetrator, discussing why they did it, etc.) when we first started trending in this direction was likely to cause more incidents. If you give people attention for doing something, the kinds of people who crave attention are more likely to do those things. I don't know if it's completely fair to place the blame squarely there either. To some degree I suspect that up until some catalyst event, it had simply not occurred to most people to do something like that. Look again at the example of the use of vehicles to plow through crowds of people. Up until the last few years, this was almost entirely unheard of or if it did occur, more likely to be an accident or the result of an elderly person who perhaps shouldn't have been allowed to drive any longer. And soon, some new and unimaginable means of destruction will be unleashed on the world, and I'm not sure we'll understand it any better.
I would have assumed this was the case as well, but this is almost certainly one of their Skylake XCC (Extreme Core Count) chips that are used for the high-end Xeon processors that retail for around $10,000 depending on clock speeds. The cores are laid out on a 5 x 6 grid, but two of the spots are used for the memory controller. Here's a site with a good shot of the die and a diagram of the parts of the chip.
I don't know what they intend to charge for this thing, but it's a full chip and utterly massive at almost 700 mm^2. I don't expect it to normally run anywhere close to 5 GHz as one of the tech sites pointed out that Intel was using a stand alone water cooler rated for about ~1700W and that the power supply for their demo was a 1600W job, but even having 28 cores at 3.5 GHz is an insane amount of computational power. I expect it to be priced similarly.
Personally, I'd be glad for it. My taxes would be substantially lower if we weren't trying to be the world's police. Even if you could somehow demonstrate that it were good of us to do so anyway, I don't believe we have the moral authority to do regardless of what good may come of it. Furthermore, I suspect that our popularity would shoot up overnight were we to leave everyone else the hell alone.
The European countries would end up paying more for it, that much is certain. Though, whether that's in the form of additional taxes to support their own militaries or learning to speak Russian is a point of contention.
For companies in some sectors perhaps, but if you suddenly have a lot of people earning more money, they're going to spend some of it, which means other companies are going to see larger revenues and more profits. The trick is being able to determine where that extra money is going to go.
Also, if you offer the best pay, you can probably attract better employees. If that allows you to deliver superior products to market more quickly than your competition, it could mean that you actually increase revenue and profit even though you spend more money.
The other side of that is that if you aren't paying well enough, you'll probably lose some employees who go elsewhere seeking better pay. The employees that you lose are going to be the ones that have better skills and can convince someone to pay them more, and not the paper shufflers that don't do all that much. If employees roughly follow the 80/20 rule, then losing some of your best 20%, probably means losing significantly more than that in productivity.
I think you need to examine this a little more carefully. The devil's in the details and people who advocate economic controls for social policies tend not to think much further than their pre-desired outcome and don't consider all of potential side effects.
First, does limiting the ability to use surge pricing cause an even greater reduction in the number of rides available such that it leaves even more people to drive while intoxicated? You can't make drivers work for $0, nor can you expect any customers to pay $10,000. Somewhere along that point you'll maximize the number of rides. What makes you think that you (or anyone) knows where that point is?
Second, does the perception of cheap rides available mean that more people are likely to become intoxicated than who would otherwise do so in the absence of cheap rides? In general, when you subsidize something, you tend to get more of it. Additionally, subsidies naturally have to come from somewhere else.
Third, to what extend to pre-planned major events even causing large spikes? If I'm a driver, I already know that when a game lets out that more people will need a ride, so I'm more likely to want to work when I know there's more demand. Uber should be giving this kind of information to their drivers to the largest extent possible such that surges only result due to unknown or unpredictable situations.
Mucking about with systems that we don't fully understand is a recipe for disaster. You're far less likely to achieve your desired outcomes, and will probably get something much worse as a result. Look no further than prohibition or the war on drugs to see how a misguided desire to consider social consequences of policy created a mess among all of the unintended consequences that have arisen.
If YouTube were only doing business in the U.S. that would be true, but I suspect that they also have a branch that operates in Austria and accepts money from Austrian companies for the purposes of advertising. If merely being incorporated in a different company allowed you to skirt any laws that you wanted, there would quickly be dozens of sites offering any copyright material you wanted with no possible legal recourse from anyone simply because that company happened to pick a country that doesn't recognize copyright laws.
We still do see quite a large number of sites that try to do this, but there is legal recourse against them so they do tend to get shut down frequently, or in some cases the people who run them are arrested and put in prison. It's mostly legal whack-a-mole though and does little to stem the overall amount of infringement.
I am comfortable with the idea that people can make huge profits by selling a scarce resource, but I can see why many people dislike that it is "profiteering" and restricting access to a relatively basic service for those with relatively low incomes.
The people selling rides are not incredibly wealthy corporations and are often just regular schlubs. Limiting their ability to engage in free commerce is just restricting their access to make a living for themselves. The real consequence of this are that if the profitability goes down too much, people will quit to find something else to do instead and there's more restricted access to this service regardless and that sellers will find new ways to discriminate when selecting customers because they can be more choosy when demand exceeds supply.
I personally think that Uber should allow drivers to charge whatever they want at any time. Let each driver and passenger set the price for each individual ride. This helps balance supply and demand and also allows drivers to ensure that they're making enough to cover their expenses instead of what Uber thinks they ought to receive. I think it would also go a long way towards helping Uber make the case that they're working with individual contractors and that their drivers are not employees.
I wouldn't place the blame squarely on Rian Johnson's shoulders. Part of the issue is that J.J. Abrams was given the first film and he's never been able to write a story from start to finish which you really need to do if you're making a trilogy. Look at something like Babylon 5 where J. Michael Straczynski had the overall story arc planned out in advance and was able to create something much more narratively satisfying because there was a point and purpose behind the different characters and events that occurred earlier in the series.
For Star Wars, there were no character arcs planned and in usual J.J. Abrams fashion he introduced plenty of unresolved and mysterious plot threads that he had no solid plans for resolving while essentially remaking Episode IV. Maybe that works great for something like Lost where you can jerk the audience around for 6 seasons, but for a Star Wars trilogy you need to know where the story is headed.
I suppose you could pass the buck to Disney who could have done a much better job of managing the Star Wars property. Why they didn't have an overall script or plan in place is beyond me. If you look at the Marvel cinematic universe they seem to have that much more planned out and I think that's why it's doing so well.
Slashdot Mirror
If humans truly are incapable of discerning the difference in a controlled study, doesn't that suggest that the test is flawed because it is being too strict for some arbitrary reason?
To better illustrate what I mean,say I want to buy hosting for a service and want 99% uptime. However, the person considering providers throws out any without guarantees of 99.999% uptime. They're not actually doing what I want and I may end up paying more than I would otherwise need to for no good reason. Or suppose I have a machine that judges produce and will remove anything that it thinks shoppers won't purchase (as a result of appearance, bruising, etc.) so that I don't waste resources shipping it to a store that will eventually have to throw it out as unsold. I want that machine to be as exact as possible because if it's being more picky than the shoppers, that's wasted produce I could otherwise be selling.
Bandwidth also follows it's own progression curve that looks a little bit like Moore's law. For a long time, we couldn't speed that along any faster than the underlying technological improvements and deployment could occur so it made sense to target our compression algorithms for improvement. Now we're coming out on the other side where we've got more than enough bandwidth to consume video,. While improvements to our compression algorithms will mean we save costs, the additional increases in bandwidth availability (and the associated decrease in cost to move some fixed amount of data) will start to dwarf algorithm improvements.
Realistically, this just means we'll stream higher resolution content and a higher framerate, but even that has a practical ceiling where humans aren't going to benefit much from 16K content at 240 FPS as opposed to 4K content at 60 FPS. Maybe they'll have to invent bionic eyes that can perceive that difference just so we have a reason to consume more bandwidth.
I've seen a few stores that actually charge for them now, and that model has been used frequently in other countries. The grocery store I go to doesn't charge for plastic bags, but they do give a small discount if you bring your own reusable bag. I also noticed that a lot of stores are adding plastic bag recycling bins at their stores, which probably helps considerably with cutting down on the number that end up in landfills.
Why would you even purchase something from a one-shot advertiser on the Facebook? Research a product you're interested in on as many sites as possible, and understand in advance that the internet practice of purchasing something you cannot 1st hold in your hands is an inexact science.
While this makes perfect sense to you and me, I'm going to guess that neither of us use Facebook. We've already got people getting their news from Facebook, so I expect purchasing decisions are the least of our worries.
They write thousand million
Letting a perfectly good milliard go to waste.
I take it this is mostly in jest (not that what you say isn't true) but I think it does raise the point of something like this happening where some business (not necessarily Facebook) receives a lot of reports from an angry mob. That kind of action is right up the alley of the average "Kony 2012" internet slacktivist on Facebook.
Facebook isn't completely stupid, but there's no way they're in a good enough position to evaluate these kinds of reports accurately or fairly. I suspect that some bad companies will get passes because they're well connected and know how to grease palms and some other legitimate companies that get broadsided by this won't be large enough for Facebook to care.
it wasn't just corporations protesting this. Unions didn't like it either.
Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
Which law specifically are you referring to, as there were laws in the mid-90's that stated as much, but many of those previsions were stripped away in subsequent revisions to those laws or other federal acts passed at later dates. There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense, but those were easily circumvented as long as some telco was selling dialup. A de facto monopoly is just as good as a de jure monopoly.
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
I somewhat picked Seattle at random as I am somewhat familiar with the internet situation there and their city code was easily accessible online. I don't live in Seattle, but I have several friends who still do and for a long while it was essentially Comcast only as far as cable (there was some DSL availability, but typically not something that anyone on /. would care to use) internet choices go. The city isn't required to grant anyone a franchise, so you can essentially create an unofficial monopoly if you've bought enough people to prevent competition from being permitted. There are plenty of new stories related to their problems with a lack of competition.
I will admit that I didn't read through the entire set of laws and was speaking in more of a general sense as most of the places I've lived over the years have had only a single choice for cable (and by extension internet) provider. You mention 14 ISPs serving Seattle, but I'm assuming you're speaking of the metro area and not the city proper. I'm also unsure as to what extent their coverage overlaps, but if there truly are 14 different companies offering service to the city, then I expect that consumers are getting much better deals than most other cities. You can't have 14 different companies competing for your money and making fat profits unless they're all colluding and engaging in price fixing, which would be quite hard with 14 different companies.
This has nothing to do with cable companies, and in any case does not create a government-granted monopoly. It's irrelevant.
A free market requires competition between entities. It doesn't matter if those are public or private entities, merely that they compete against each other and that consumers have choice. Any law that prevents some option for competition is harmful to consumers. If public entities have to play by the same rules as private companies and aren't themselves given special treatment, I fail to see how they cause harm.
Some free market advocates seems to think that this means outlawing any kind of publicly owned entities from participating in the market, but that's a short-sighted view as there's nothing that indicates a publicly owned entity must be given special treatment. It would be no different than giving private companies special treatment, which many cities have done. Perhaps you don't live in one where this is an issue, but if there's only one game in town and they're charging outrageous prices for a shit service, I have a hard time believing that it's because none of the other avaricious companies have decided that they're suddenly against swooping in to undercut the competition.
It's the typical business model in most cities as far as cable companies go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_franchise_fee. This is an extension of rules created under the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which probably never anticipated cable companies becoming internet service providers. Here're the specific city laws for Seattle, though most cities will have something similar. Technically there's nothing there that necessitates a monopoly, but there's also nothing stopping a company from acquiring a non-compete clause either, which means they're legally the only company that has rights to offer service. Comcast was quite notorious for doing that.
There are also a large number of states which have laws that attempt to hinder or outright prevent local municipalities from creating their own ISP, which almost ensures they'll have to deal with one of the large national ISPs.
Personally I'm of the opinion that cities should be in charge of their own infrastructure (they can contract this out to some private entity if they feel they lack the ability to do this effectively themselves) and allow various companies to offer competing services to the city's residents. The problem has been that cities tried to treat internet access like a utility without bothering to put any rules in place for price restrictions or service requirements.
If you want a choice of internet providers you should probably ask your local government to stop granting monopoly rights to a single company. Of course that would probably mean losing some kick-back money, so I don't see it happening unless you push for a municipal broadband initiative in your city. It might work if you're a small enough town, but good luck getting through the political machine in anything above 50,000 or more.
Could it be used to cure the cancer that itself caused?
Infinite recursion detected.
Though if you tell that to the pharmaceutical companies, they'll fund the fuck out of it.
Nah. Most of human progress has been less perfect knowledge and careful action and more "hold my beer and check this shit out!"
Anyone who's delivered software should intuitively realize this to be true.
I think you're confusing libertarians with anarchists. Libertarians believe in strong property rights, which naturally implies borders and a need for some entity to enforce them. Some would argue that doesn't necessarily need to be a government, but historically that has been a major role of governments.
Most libertarians probably wouldn't care about immigration if the U.S. had no welfare state as was historically the case throughout most of the country's history. Once you got off the boat you were on your own, but plenty of people were perfectly happy with that arrangement. This generally worked quite well with the homestead system since anyone who wanted to move west could do so and a large number of immigrants did. You had the freedom to make something of yourself and if you couldn't that was your own problem.
However, the reality in modern America is that the government is expected to care for anyone who shows up and pay for their children's education and healthcare. That necessarily means taxation, which libertarians are generally loath to agree to outside of the limited government functions that they're in favor of, so they'll tend to be less in favor of immigration with those kinds of strings attached to it. If everyone immigrating from Mexico were a doctor, engineer, or otherwise highly skilled such that they'd pay more into the system than they get out of it, I suspect there'd be no disagreement with letting in as many people who fall into that category either.
National spending causes inflation and national taxation removes that inflation.
National spending has nothing to do with inflation. Governments printing additional money is what drives inflation whether that money is spent out by the government or a central bank loans it out privately.
For the poorest the tax rate should be effectively negative and beyond a certain point it should be in excess of 90%.
I'd disagree on both counts. In the first, I believe that everyone should pay tax or they lack any skin in the game and don't pay the necessary attention to what government is doing. People who don't pay for something, tend not to care if the government spends foolishly. After all, it's not their money. However, once a person becomes responsible for paying for something, they tend to devote a good deal more attention and care to how their money is being spent.
The second is just as foolish because no one will willingly pay that much in taxes. What you end up with is a lot of money spent to avoid paying 90% taxes, which works out well enough in practice such that the ultimate results is that the government's revenue decreases and a lot of labor is spent on activities that wouldn't need to exist if the tax rate wasn't 90%.
How would someone know that government officials in Florida weren't performing background checks though? Do nefarious people typically just apply for concealed weapon permits in other states on the off chance that someone's asleep at the wheel? Never mind that no one would have been able to have knowledge of the gaping hole in the system, since realistically, how many people even know they could apply for a permit in Florida that would be valid somewhere else?
Maybe one person who was issued a permit during this lapse in procedure falls into that category, and that's being generous.
Too often agile skips (argue that this is doing it wrong all you like, it's often reality) trying to do an extensive requirements analysis to nail things down to the point where you can do a high-level design that will be useful for more than two sprints. The real failure is probably that no one really wants to do the hard bits first, so those tend to get left until too late into the development process and invariably lead to throwing out or seriously reworking a lot of the earlier effort that failed to account for something important.
Yeah, this has been known for a while.
I also want to say again, about gun violence, what is it about our culture and society that creates individuals who think gun violence is a good way to get their fame on social media/solve their problems.
I don't think there's anything particularly special about the United States in this regard. You find similar types of violence throughout the world. The Middle East is rife with it, but it takes on a much more religious bent. In European countries where access to guns is much more restricted, the weapon of choice now seems to be using vehicles on crowded streets. We even saw this in Canada from someone who carried out such an attack that had nothing to do with religion, lest anyone think this is just somehow a Muslim thing. There was even that Norwegian bloke from several years ago that massacred school children, so again I don't believe this is solely an American issue.
There's probably some illusion that this is a much larger problem then it actually is due to increased media coverage, and simply having more people than ever before on the planet. It's entirely possible for the total number of incidents to increase and for the per capita rate to decrease at the same time as a consequence of a growing population. Twenty-four hour news and the internet also mean that we're able to hear about any event that occurs, often as it's occurring. Previously, you might have found out about a major event a day or two later, typically with more information as reporters were able to piece together what had happened. Now you'll see a news story about something that's ongoing with little in the way of concrete information.
I believe that psychologists have stated that some of what the media was doing (showing pictures of the perpetrator, discussing why they did it, etc.) when we first started trending in this direction was likely to cause more incidents. If you give people attention for doing something, the kinds of people who crave attention are more likely to do those things. I don't know if it's completely fair to place the blame squarely there either. To some degree I suspect that up until some catalyst event, it had simply not occurred to most people to do something like that. Look again at the example of the use of vehicles to plow through crowds of people. Up until the last few years, this was almost entirely unheard of or if it did occur, more likely to be an accident or the result of an elderly person who perhaps shouldn't have been allowed to drive any longer. And soon, some new and unimaginable means of destruction will be unleashed on the world, and I'm not sure we'll understand it any better.
I would have assumed this was the case as well, but this is almost certainly one of their Skylake XCC (Extreme Core Count) chips that are used for the high-end Xeon processors that retail for around $10,000 depending on clock speeds. The cores are laid out on a 5 x 6 grid, but two of the spots are used for the memory controller. Here's a site with a good shot of the die and a diagram of the parts of the chip.
I don't know what they intend to charge for this thing, but it's a full chip and utterly massive at almost 700 mm^2. I don't expect it to normally run anywhere close to 5 GHz as one of the tech sites pointed out that Intel was using a stand alone water cooler rated for about ~1700W and that the power supply for their demo was a 1600W job, but even having 28 cores at 3.5 GHz is an insane amount of computational power. I expect it to be priced similarly.
Personally, I'd be glad for it. My taxes would be substantially lower if we weren't trying to be the world's police. Even if you could somehow demonstrate that it were good of us to do so anyway, I don't believe we have the moral authority to do regardless of what good may come of it. Furthermore, I suspect that our popularity would shoot up overnight were we to leave everyone else the hell alone.
The European countries would end up paying more for it, that much is certain. Though, whether that's in the form of additional taxes to support their own militaries or learning to speak Russian is a point of contention.
For companies in some sectors perhaps, but if you suddenly have a lot of people earning more money, they're going to spend some of it, which means other companies are going to see larger revenues and more profits. The trick is being able to determine where that extra money is going to go.
Also, if you offer the best pay, you can probably attract better employees. If that allows you to deliver superior products to market more quickly than your competition, it could mean that you actually increase revenue and profit even though you spend more money.
The other side of that is that if you aren't paying well enough, you'll probably lose some employees who go elsewhere seeking better pay. The employees that you lose are going to be the ones that have better skills and can convince someone to pay them more, and not the paper shufflers that don't do all that much. If employees roughly follow the 80/20 rule, then losing some of your best 20%, probably means losing significantly more than that in productivity.
I think you need to examine this a little more carefully. The devil's in the details and people who advocate economic controls for social policies tend not to think much further than their pre-desired outcome and don't consider all of potential side effects.
First, does limiting the ability to use surge pricing cause an even greater reduction in the number of rides available such that it leaves even more people to drive while intoxicated? You can't make drivers work for $0, nor can you expect any customers to pay $10,000. Somewhere along that point you'll maximize the number of rides. What makes you think that you (or anyone) knows where that point is?
Second, does the perception of cheap rides available mean that more people are likely to become intoxicated than who would otherwise do so in the absence of cheap rides? In general, when you subsidize something, you tend to get more of it. Additionally, subsidies naturally have to come from somewhere else.
Third, to what extend to pre-planned major events even causing large spikes? If I'm a driver, I already know that when a game lets out that more people will need a ride, so I'm more likely to want to work when I know there's more demand. Uber should be giving this kind of information to their drivers to the largest extent possible such that surges only result due to unknown or unpredictable situations.
Mucking about with systems that we don't fully understand is a recipe for disaster. You're far less likely to achieve your desired outcomes, and will probably get something much worse as a result. Look no further than prohibition or the war on drugs to see how a misguided desire to consider social consequences of policy created a mess among all of the unintended consequences that have arisen.
If YouTube were only doing business in the U.S. that would be true, but I suspect that they also have a branch that operates in Austria and accepts money from Austrian companies for the purposes of advertising. If merely being incorporated in a different company allowed you to skirt any laws that you wanted, there would quickly be dozens of sites offering any copyright material you wanted with no possible legal recourse from anyone simply because that company happened to pick a country that doesn't recognize copyright laws.
We still do see quite a large number of sites that try to do this, but there is legal recourse against them so they do tend to get shut down frequently, or in some cases the people who run them are arrested and put in prison. It's mostly legal whack-a-mole though and does little to stem the overall amount of infringement.
I am comfortable with the idea that people can make huge profits by selling a scarce resource, but I can see why many people dislike that it is "profiteering" and restricting access to a relatively basic service for those with relatively low incomes.
The people selling rides are not incredibly wealthy corporations and are often just regular schlubs. Limiting their ability to engage in free commerce is just restricting their access to make a living for themselves. The real consequence of this are that if the profitability goes down too much, people will quit to find something else to do instead and there's more restricted access to this service regardless and that sellers will find new ways to discriminate when selecting customers because they can be more choosy when demand exceeds supply.
I personally think that Uber should allow drivers to charge whatever they want at any time. Let each driver and passenger set the price for each individual ride. This helps balance supply and demand and also allows drivers to ensure that they're making enough to cover their expenses instead of what Uber thinks they ought to receive. I think it would also go a long way towards helping Uber make the case that they're working with individual contractors and that their drivers are not employees.
I wouldn't place the blame squarely on Rian Johnson's shoulders. Part of the issue is that J.J. Abrams was given the first film and he's never been able to write a story from start to finish which you really need to do if you're making a trilogy. Look at something like Babylon 5 where J. Michael Straczynski had the overall story arc planned out in advance and was able to create something much more narratively satisfying because there was a point and purpose behind the different characters and events that occurred earlier in the series.
For Star Wars, there were no character arcs planned and in usual J.J. Abrams fashion he introduced plenty of unresolved and mysterious plot threads that he had no solid plans for resolving while essentially remaking Episode IV. Maybe that works great for something like Lost where you can jerk the audience around for 6 seasons, but for a Star Wars trilogy you need to know where the story is headed.
I suppose you could pass the buck to Disney who could have done a much better job of managing the Star Wars property. Why they didn't have an overall script or plan in place is beyond me. If you look at the Marvel cinematic universe they seem to have that much more planned out and I think that's why it's doing so well.