Imagine if Microsoft's browser decided to take any search results for Chrome, Firefox, or other browsers and discard them or display its own results as a priority. I would imagine that most people don't know the actual website to get Chrome, they just fire up IE and search for it instead. Similarly, there are a lot of people who don't know the websites, or even if they do just enter the URL. Imagine if not just searching for "plane tickets", but also "Expedia", "Travelocity", or any of the other popular sites all returned Google's service as a first result instead of the actual website of that company.
Yes, most people on this website are savvy enough to navigate around that behavior and get what they actually want, just like they'll get around DRM, etc. as necessary. However, most people aren't that knowledgeable or possibly even capable of becoming sufficiently so. Consumer protection laws are there to protect the average consumer, or maybe even the lowest common denominator type ones.
I have problems with Google, but.... fining them for favoring its own shopping service?
Usually the argument is that if you are legally considered a monopoly (which Google probably is under EU law) then it is illegal for you to use your monopoly position in that area to promote or favor your other products or business areas. It's essentially the same thing that Microsoft ran afoul of with IE that led to requirements by the EU that Windows users would be able to select which browser they wanted to use when installing Windows. Whether or not you agree with that law, it is still the law that companies are required to abide by.
I've often wondered if you could get around those laws by creating a co-operative and having your customers be part owners and employees of the co-op. Basically create a gas station where in order to purchase from it you are required to be a member (owner) and employee which permits you to pump your own gas.
I'm not sure if the powers that be would like this blatant end-around of their shitty laws or be enthralled at the communal hippie co-op that's replacing evil capitalist enterprises. I suspect that they might try to pass a law that says you can't pump your own gas even if you are an employee, but this is where we can introduce some libertarian thinking so that employees aren't pumping gas for themselves but for a corporate entity that they are representing, like the crazy people who insist they're not driving, just traveling seem to do.
I don't know if it would be as easy with liquor, but at the same time the person would also be guilty of selling the liquor to themselves, which may prevent people from doing it, but doesn't help the company avoid losing its liquor license.
It has nothing to do with being on the receiving end, as the theory (which doesn't even require capitalism as it comes from game theory and any planned economy that wants to even have a chance of working is going to strive for perfect information) applies to anyone participating in the game, which consumers are definitely doing.
In the real world, perfect information is practically impossible, and even when it is potentially available, it is frequently too expensive to justify the cost of acquiring it. Capitalism as typically practiced is a decentralized economic approach, which tends to work well in practice because no one is a mind reader, so the individual players tend to make economic moves that are more locally informed on average than planned economies could ever hope to achieve.
You probably can't because there are far too many factors to control for. Even if you put the aside to focus on the costs themselves, you have to consider other factors driving the costs. The United States is probably one of the least healthy countries on the planet, so its little wonder that healthcare is more expensive when over one-third of the population is obese combined with a lot of other poor health habits that Americans have. Add in parts of the country where people are so far removed from major hospitals and population centers that major medical events necessitate an expensive helicopter ride and dozens of other unique factors and its difficult to pin down exactly what the best solution is, because you can't just take another countries implementation that works great for their particular set of circumstances without understanding why it works and what needs to be adapted without breaking the good outcomes.
I think the best solution would be a single-payer government provided solution that covers routine check-ups and major medical events so that ending up in the emergency room due to some accident probably outside of one's control is taken care of. I think that's a good idea not because people have some kind of right to health care, but because I feel it is pragmatic. Where that ends though is that if you're 70 and have cancer from smoking over five decades, I don't think the public should pay for anything if there are other people who require healthcare and didn't bring it upon themselves. If there's money left over at the end, maybe Mr. Destroyedhisownlungs gets some healthcare, otherwise it's just time to provide a way to ease suffering until death.
Of course no one really wants to die, so suppose our hypothetical person has a bunch of their own money stored away that they saved over the years (or a personal insurance plan they bought outside of the government single-payer plan) at which point they can buy whatever healthcare they want. The trick is finding a good balance between what percentage of healthcare is required as part of the government's single-payer plan and what percentage can be the pure unfettered capitalism in all its greed that ensures companies want to invest in healthcare.
No it doesn't. It has been shown repeatedly that the idea that thousands of people will look at code and magically spot bugs is a myth.
You don't need thousands of people doing that, and if you had closed code and paid for an audit of it, the auditors wouldn't do that either. But it is by definition easier for me, you, or anyone who actually cares to evaluate open source code because we actually have access to the code.
If you wanted to evaluate it really well what I'd suggest doing is creating a set of test cases prior to even looking at the code. If something gets caught by some simple black-box tests, it's obviously not very good. Better yet, open source your test cases so then can be reused and built-upon. But since you can access the code, you could also analyze it from a white-box perspective with the test cases and look for any branches or paths that the test cases didn't cover, which may be sources of bugs or intentional tampering.
Hell, if you want cheap labor, just have an instructor make it a project for a testing or cryptography class. It gives the students something a little more real to work with, as well as the opportunity to get involved with an open source project.
Fuck you for thinking that people don't have a right to receive health care.
No, fuck you for thinking that they do have a right. Seriously. Fuck the other person who moderated this feel-good bullshit up as well.
If everyone else has a right to healthcare, then you have an obligation to provide it to them. It's their right after all. So whatever it is you're doing now, you need to stop doing it so you can go provide people healthcare for all the people who have a right to be treated. Instead of posting on Slashdot, you should be providing someone with healthcare. Assuming this is some kind of universal right (which all human rights should be by definition), you owe it to the whole world, not just members of your country.
Healthcare is something that has infinite cost, because people eventually get sick and die and no matter how much money you want to throw at it, its never enough because it just gets more and more costly. But you can't ever quit providing it, because it's everyone's right to healthcare, unless you believe that right goes away when they're 80 or some are more equal than others so they get what limited healthcare can be doled out. And then it no longer matters that someone was irresponsible and drank their body to death, destroyed their lungs from smoking, or scarfed Big Macs until their heart and arteries have become encased and clogged, because it's their right to be treated.
Putting the government solely in charge of health care is probably the worst thing you can do. If you want to see health care get cheaper, allow for more profits which provides natural incentive for people to find better solutions so they can make more money. Get rid of government restrictions that establish protectionist markets for drug companies and prevent people from getting cheaper alternatives. If you want a single payer solution for basic healthcare, I'm fine with that, but healthcare is not something that government is obligated to dole out in infinite amounts to anyone who wants it.
If you think you've got something that should be a human right, but it requires something from someone else in order for you to have it, you don't have a right. All you've done is to shackle someone else with obligations that they may not agree to. Government cannot provide rights, they can only take them from you.
Now this doesn't mean that governments can't do that thing, and it's pretty obvious that governments do a lot of things that have nothing to do with the rights of the people, but that doesn't make everything that governments do a right. But since you believe that healthcare is a right, put your money where you mouth is and start providing people with what you believe this theirs by right. I won't hold my breath on this.
I think the best idea would be to allow companies to repatriate as much as they want at 0% tax rate on the stipulation that the money be spent growing the company, whether that means domestic R&D development, building new manufacturing centers, or anything else that doesn't involve socking the money away in some investment vehicle.
Any of that activity is going to result in additional jobs, be it research positions, construction work to build facilities, or eventually people who need to staff those facilities. They eventually get taxed based on their income and then buy things which generates sales tax, and unless they're buying all foreign goods that means more revenue for other businesses who pay tax, hire more employees, and so on. Uncle Squeeze still gets a piece of the pie eventually.
With manufacturing trending towards robots, it doesn't really matter where you put them because their pay is the same no matter whether or not they're in the U.S. or China. It doesn't replace all of the jobs that were lost, but those were never coming back and are all slowly going the way of the buggy whip manufacturer anyways.
It's a bit dangerous to create a reliance on large institutions that can easily be turned into the purveyors of fake news themselves. You can look at it with only good in mind, perhaps like the BBC and think that they're more good than bad, but you can just as easily get something like RT (Russia Today) which (from my own subjective perspective at least) seems to be a bit more slanted. I'd be remiss to give the state anything that could approach a monopoly on the news. If you create a power structure like that, eventually you'll find it filled with the kinds of people who want to abase and abuse it for their own ends.
As you point out, yellow journalism has been around forever in some form or another. I think that people just haven't quite learned to understand the internet or online media yet, as I suspect that a lot of the people who get duped by so-called "fake news" are the same who would scoff at someone believing something that they read from the National Enquirer or any of those other tabloid rags that line the check-out aisles in grocery stores. It's a bit like exposing a population to a new disease, or a new strain of an old one. We haven't developed a resistance or defenses against this at a societal or cultural level yet, so it seems like a big problem.
Fundamentally, I think the problem is rooted at a deeper level of human nature. We prefer to seek out things which confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them, and this cuts across more than just the news. Without taking time to train ourselves not to fall into those cognitive traps, we're never going to solve the problem. Seeking the truth is a difficult task, not only because the path is fraught with peril, but because when you get to the end, the truth is often incredibly ugly. How often are people so disgusted by what they discovered that they shut it away completely or only let out parts of it?
The boards of these companies typically aren't any better than the CEOs they select. More often than not if you look at board memberships, the CEO of one company will be on the board of another (or several others), and so on. So why no just pick on of their friends to rake in a bunch of cash for a while, when it's likely that friend will be in a position to do the same for one of them at some point in the future.
If you wanted a really good CEO you'd find some engineer within the company that knows what the hell the company does and how it actually runs and pay for an MBA so they can speak the business lingo the position requires while being able to make informed decisions about the direction the company should take.
I think that in order to really want to be a CEO of a big company like that (which you didn't found yourself) you pretty much have to be a sociopath, or pretty close to one in a lot of ways. I think that explains why they just won't quit, because its about the power. The money is just a convenient way of keeping score.
I don't think its always a problem of chemistry or manufacturability, but one of existing patents meaning that unless you're willing to invest in a team yourself to invent something new that doesn't step on any patents, it's not financially feasible.
Self-driving tech has a massive profit potential. A quick Google search said there are about 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. and they have an average salary of $40,000. That means there's a $140 billion yearly market to be tapped into there alone. That's just truck drivers and just the U.S. There are all kinds of other jobs that require drivers (e.g. taxis) that could be replaced as well.
I expect that in Apple's case they want to sell you a car with their autonomous system, just like they want to sell you a Mac or an iDevice that run their various operating systems. That gives them some advantage in that they can offer a more integrated product and allows them to target the high-end of the market, just like they do with their other product lines.
It's probably not that surprising. The website states that it has over 15 million members so if only 1/10 are regulars and play about 10 matches per week, it would take under 6 years to exceed 2 billion games.
According to their site, 1,958,303 matches have already been played today. I don't know what time zone they're using, but assuming that it's the end of the day for them and that today doesn't deviate from the average, then it only takes around 3 years before hitting that billion game limit.
With the internet becoming more and more ubiquitous and millions of people now having access through their phones, you're going to get a lot of chess players even if there's only a small percentage of the population that plays.
If you replace "the Russians" with "the Jews" this would all sound like something spouted by some kind of rambling far-right conspiracy nut. Some people are too attached to the idea to let go of it now.
One would think that this would result in a push from both sides for open-sourcing the voting machines so that they can be properly audited, evaluated, and strengthened against attacks, but I don't see either party proposing that. Instead it's just an opportunity for political mud-slinging and grandstanding.
Yes, but we're reading about and discussing this marketing stunt on Slashdot, so it was a pretty good marketing stunt because its free advertising. Their strategy makes people think they were getting something unique, a literal one in a (seven) million. As a tactic I think it plays in well to the desire of so many to feel special and probably allows for all manner of viral marketing when those plonkers post images of their one-of-a-kind Nutella jar to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever people are using these days. If one stops to think about it, there isn't really anything in being special if everyone is special, but I don't believe most people will pause to have that thought.
While no union is going to officially come out and phrase it that way, the rules that they make essentially result in that consequence. Look no further than the New York teachers union which ends up keeping teachers in "rubber rooms" where they are paid to do anything other than teach because they were complete fuck ups in some way. We see the same thing when people invariably complain about some recent incident involving the police and why some cop isn't in jail or hasn't at least been fired. The answer is that the police union shields them. Perhaps this is more of a problem in the U.S. than Germany.
In the end it doesn't matter if a union props wages up if foreign companies can undercut prices. The American autoworkers eventually found out that you can't just keep demanding that the rest of the world support your costs when cheaper alternatives exist. Sure we can always go the protectionist route, but other countries respond in turn and almost no economic school thinks wide-scale protectionism is a good idea. Everyone likes it when the protectionism really only benefits them, but suddenly gets pissed when they have to pay more for a local product that has the costs jacked up in turn because it's not as efficient to make here.
Unions aren't inherently good or bad, but I don't think they make a lot of sense in a global market where a lot of countries are still industrializing and are more than willing to take what we'd consider dog scraps because to them it is a banquet. Economic osmosis is going to be painful to the countries where the wealth was concentrated, but eventually its going to reach a new equilibrium. I also think unions make less sense in fields where the individual differences between workers is larger. For assembly line workers, etc. changing one for another isn't going to matter much, but with something like programming where some coders are far beyond others, there isn't a lot of incentive for the best programmers to join a union because their talents are always going to be required somewhere and they'll be able to get work. Code monkey jobs on the other hand are easier to outsource, but I don't see it as a big problem because we're getting tools that are sophisticated enough so that the computer can do some of the lowest level code monkey work for us and let programmers focus on the more important tasks.
Or assuming that the government does have the ability and can do so fairly trivially, it's probably not worth letting the world know that they can do it over a few people protesting. Didn't the FBI basically drop a case against a guy running a child porn site so that they didn't have to reveal their software in court a few months ago?
WebOS may have been ahead of its time, but Palm was massively behind the curve in getting it out into the market. If they had launched it two years earlier around the same time as the original iPhone I think they'd still be around. By the time they came out it was too late as iOS and Android were already fairly entrenched and the two biggest carriers in the U.S. were locked into their camps and strategies and had little need for the Pre and it wasn't so much better than anything else to cause people to abandon their carriers for Sprint.
HP was also a bad buyer for the company. They had no real strategic vision at the time or ability to make the product a success. As funny as it sounds, I think Microsoft would have been a better buyer and could have built on top of the established OS and market share instead of putting effort into their own mobile OS that they trotted out just to see it go through the same set of problems as WebOS due to Apple and Google having such a lead by that point that only a huge mistake on their parts could cause them to fail.
Atlas Shrugged needed a lot of editing. I may be being somewhat unfair to someone writing a massive novel in their non-native language, but it has problems beyond prose which have more to do with pacing.
However, asking someone who claims to have read the book if they actually managed to make it through the John Galt radio speech without skipping over it is a good way of determining if they're full of shit, a bit touched, or actually a lizard person in a human suit.
The more likely explanation is that it evolved somewhere else at an earlier time, spread to multiple places, and there aren't enough remaining traces of it to get the full picture. The other alternative is that two distinct species (with obvious common ancestor) became similar because evolutionary pressures strongly favored a particular outcome. The first seems more likely to me at this time, but as we learn more about genetics and their role in various lifeforms the second might become more plausible.
The sad thing is that the political landscape will somehow drag itself down to even lower depths and in sufficient time we'll find people legitimately pining for days of the Trump administration. We really need to get rid of our first past the post voting system, because combined with gerrymandering it basically ensures that we end up with a lot of crap ideologues from both parties.
That of course assumes that it is something solvable. Obviously not everyone in prison in some kind of hopeless case with no hope of redemption. That some people get out and turn their lives around disproves that quite easily, but there are some people who clearly can't function in society or be let out. The obvious examples like Charles Manson or serial rapists probably aren't "curable" by modern means. If it were that easy, we'd have already figured out how to cure things like ADD or schizophrenia.
The real question is where is the line drawn. We know that there's a group that can come out of prison and integrate into society without further problem and we know there's another group on the other side that are beyond hope and can't ever come out. But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
Not quite, because knowing the odds of winning with cheating by itself says nothing. It's like having over one thousand people play, but always concluding that the winner cheated because the odds that they could win (.1%) are so small that they must have cheated, without considering that when you have that many people playing, even though the odds of winning are individually low, there are enough people to make it likely that at least one person wins.
If you do a binomial calculation with.1% chance of success it only takes 693 people playing before there's a 50% chance of seeing at least one winner. The fallacy is mistakenly believing that it's 99.9% likely that a person cheated to win instead of something much, much smaller if we use your 1:100 odds of winning with cheating above. Even if cheating guarantees a win, then it's still only 50% likely at most (remember with 693 people all playing fair, we expect at least one winner 50% of the time) so you're basically convicting on a coin flip. Now if on the other hand there's a lot of other evidence to suggest that a person cheated, then it can valid to use the low likelihood of success in support of that other evidence. But if there's absolutely nothing else to support a claim of cheating, then it isn't reasonable to assume a person cheated based on low likelihood of individual success when there are a large number of players.
It's trivial to get an RNG to generate normally distributed results by applying the central limit theorem. Consider generating a random number between 1 and 10. Run it 100,000 times and track the results and you'll have a uniform distribution, or should unless your RNG is terrible. Instead of doing that, generate 10 random numbers and take the average (which will always be a number between 1 and 10) and record that, then repeat that 100,000 times. You end up with a normal distribution. You can write the code to do it yourself if you don't believe me.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from. Infant mortality rate was through the roof in primitive societies and as soon as humans moved from nomadic tribes and started building cities, the chronic diseases of civilization became widespread. Up until recently, diseases such as cholera, polio, small pox, measles, etc. were extremely common and were only made rare or eradicated through innovation. Sure back in primitive societies, if you didn't die early in your life you could certainly live to be 80 and I'll grant that people were on the whole healthier because almost all work involved physical labor and even if you had the equivalent of an office job, you still needed to walk to work. However, the chances of any person actually living to 80 was far, far lower. If the various diseases and lack of treatment didn't kill you, invading neighbors would probably do it quite well. So unless you're proposing we abandon civilization and go back to hunter-gatherer groups, your assertion is just wrong.
Tech innovation has done more for the poor having healthcare than anything else. Even safety nets can't provide services to everyone that haven't been invented or are incredibly costly. Just look at the positive outcomes of Golden Rice in ensuring that some of the world's poorest don't suffer from conditions due to vitamin A deficiency.
If you don't think its fast enough, you are free to start your own company to rectify the situation. Or is everything just someone else's problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if Microsoft's browser decided to take any search results for Chrome, Firefox, or other browsers and discard them or display its own results as a priority. I would imagine that most people don't know the actual website to get Chrome, they just fire up IE and search for it instead. Similarly, there are a lot of people who don't know the websites, or even if they do just enter the URL. Imagine if not just searching for "plane tickets", but also "Expedia", "Travelocity", or any of the other popular sites all returned Google's service as a first result instead of the actual website of that company.
Yes, most people on this website are savvy enough to navigate around that behavior and get what they actually want, just like they'll get around DRM, etc. as necessary. However, most people aren't that knowledgeable or possibly even capable of becoming sufficiently so. Consumer protection laws are there to protect the average consumer, or maybe even the lowest common denominator type ones.
I have problems with Google, but .... fining them for favoring its own shopping service?
Usually the argument is that if you are legally considered a monopoly (which Google probably is under EU law) then it is illegal for you to use your monopoly position in that area to promote or favor your other products or business areas. It's essentially the same thing that Microsoft ran afoul of with IE that led to requirements by the EU that Windows users would be able to select which browser they wanted to use when installing Windows. Whether or not you agree with that law, it is still the law that companies are required to abide by.
I've often wondered if you could get around those laws by creating a co-operative and having your customers be part owners and employees of the co-op. Basically create a gas station where in order to purchase from it you are required to be a member (owner) and employee which permits you to pump your own gas.
I'm not sure if the powers that be would like this blatant end-around of their shitty laws or be enthralled at the communal hippie co-op that's replacing evil capitalist enterprises. I suspect that they might try to pass a law that says you can't pump your own gas even if you are an employee, but this is where we can introduce some libertarian thinking so that employees aren't pumping gas for themselves but for a corporate entity that they are representing, like the crazy people who insist they're not driving, just traveling seem to do.
I don't know if it would be as easy with liquor, but at the same time the person would also be guilty of selling the liquor to themselves, which may prevent people from doing it, but doesn't help the company avoid losing its liquor license.
It has nothing to do with being on the receiving end, as the theory (which doesn't even require capitalism as it comes from game theory and any planned economy that wants to even have a chance of working is going to strive for perfect information) applies to anyone participating in the game, which consumers are definitely doing.
In the real world, perfect information is practically impossible, and even when it is potentially available, it is frequently too expensive to justify the cost of acquiring it. Capitalism as typically practiced is a decentralized economic approach, which tends to work well in practice because no one is a mind reader, so the individual players tend to make economic moves that are more locally informed on average than planned economies could ever hope to achieve.
You probably can't because there are far too many factors to control for. Even if you put the aside to focus on the costs themselves, you have to consider other factors driving the costs. The United States is probably one of the least healthy countries on the planet, so its little wonder that healthcare is more expensive when over one-third of the population is obese combined with a lot of other poor health habits that Americans have. Add in parts of the country where people are so far removed from major hospitals and population centers that major medical events necessitate an expensive helicopter ride and dozens of other unique factors and its difficult to pin down exactly what the best solution is, because you can't just take another countries implementation that works great for their particular set of circumstances without understanding why it works and what needs to be adapted without breaking the good outcomes.
I think the best solution would be a single-payer government provided solution that covers routine check-ups and major medical events so that ending up in the emergency room due to some accident probably outside of one's control is taken care of. I think that's a good idea not because people have some kind of right to health care, but because I feel it is pragmatic. Where that ends though is that if you're 70 and have cancer from smoking over five decades, I don't think the public should pay for anything if there are other people who require healthcare and didn't bring it upon themselves. If there's money left over at the end, maybe Mr. Destroyedhisownlungs gets some healthcare, otherwise it's just time to provide a way to ease suffering until death.
Of course no one really wants to die, so suppose our hypothetical person has a bunch of their own money stored away that they saved over the years (or a personal insurance plan they bought outside of the government single-payer plan) at which point they can buy whatever healthcare they want. The trick is finding a good balance between what percentage of healthcare is required as part of the government's single-payer plan and what percentage can be the pure unfettered capitalism in all its greed that ensures companies want to invest in healthcare.
No it doesn't. It has been shown repeatedly that the idea that thousands of people will look at code and magically spot bugs is a myth.
You don't need thousands of people doing that, and if you had closed code and paid for an audit of it, the auditors wouldn't do that either. But it is by definition easier for me, you, or anyone who actually cares to evaluate open source code because we actually have access to the code.
If you wanted to evaluate it really well what I'd suggest doing is creating a set of test cases prior to even looking at the code. If something gets caught by some simple black-box tests, it's obviously not very good. Better yet, open source your test cases so then can be reused and built-upon. But since you can access the code, you could also analyze it from a white-box perspective with the test cases and look for any branches or paths that the test cases didn't cover, which may be sources of bugs or intentional tampering.
Hell, if you want cheap labor, just have an instructor make it a project for a testing or cryptography class. It gives the students something a little more real to work with, as well as the opportunity to get involved with an open source project.
Fuck you for thinking that people don't have a right to receive health care.
No, fuck you for thinking that they do have a right. Seriously. Fuck the other person who moderated this feel-good bullshit up as well.
If everyone else has a right to healthcare, then you have an obligation to provide it to them. It's their right after all. So whatever it is you're doing now, you need to stop doing it so you can go provide people healthcare for all the people who have a right to be treated. Instead of posting on Slashdot, you should be providing someone with healthcare. Assuming this is some kind of universal right (which all human rights should be by definition), you owe it to the whole world, not just members of your country.
Healthcare is something that has infinite cost, because people eventually get sick and die and no matter how much money you want to throw at it, its never enough because it just gets more and more costly. But you can't ever quit providing it, because it's everyone's right to healthcare, unless you believe that right goes away when they're 80 or some are more equal than others so they get what limited healthcare can be doled out. And then it no longer matters that someone was irresponsible and drank their body to death, destroyed their lungs from smoking, or scarfed Big Macs until their heart and arteries have become encased and clogged, because it's their right to be treated.
Putting the government solely in charge of health care is probably the worst thing you can do. If you want to see health care get cheaper, allow for more profits which provides natural incentive for people to find better solutions so they can make more money. Get rid of government restrictions that establish protectionist markets for drug companies and prevent people from getting cheaper alternatives. If you want a single payer solution for basic healthcare, I'm fine with that, but healthcare is not something that government is obligated to dole out in infinite amounts to anyone who wants it.
If you think you've got something that should be a human right, but it requires something from someone else in order for you to have it, you don't have a right. All you've done is to shackle someone else with obligations that they may not agree to. Government cannot provide rights, they can only take them from you.
Now this doesn't mean that governments can't do that thing, and it's pretty obvious that governments do a lot of things that have nothing to do with the rights of the people, but that doesn't make everything that governments do a right. But since you believe that healthcare is a right, put your money where you mouth is and start providing people with what you believe this theirs by right. I won't hold my breath on this.
I think the best idea would be to allow companies to repatriate as much as they want at 0% tax rate on the stipulation that the money be spent growing the company, whether that means domestic R&D development, building new manufacturing centers, or anything else that doesn't involve socking the money away in some investment vehicle.
Any of that activity is going to result in additional jobs, be it research positions, construction work to build facilities, or eventually people who need to staff those facilities. They eventually get taxed based on their income and then buy things which generates sales tax, and unless they're buying all foreign goods that means more revenue for other businesses who pay tax, hire more employees, and so on. Uncle Squeeze still gets a piece of the pie eventually.
With manufacturing trending towards robots, it doesn't really matter where you put them because their pay is the same no matter whether or not they're in the U.S. or China. It doesn't replace all of the jobs that were lost, but those were never coming back and are all slowly going the way of the buggy whip manufacturer anyways.
It's a bit dangerous to create a reliance on large institutions that can easily be turned into the purveyors of fake news themselves. You can look at it with only good in mind, perhaps like the BBC and think that they're more good than bad, but you can just as easily get something like RT (Russia Today) which (from my own subjective perspective at least) seems to be a bit more slanted. I'd be remiss to give the state anything that could approach a monopoly on the news. If you create a power structure like that, eventually you'll find it filled with the kinds of people who want to abase and abuse it for their own ends.
As you point out, yellow journalism has been around forever in some form or another. I think that people just haven't quite learned to understand the internet or online media yet, as I suspect that a lot of the people who get duped by so-called "fake news" are the same who would scoff at someone believing something that they read from the National Enquirer or any of those other tabloid rags that line the check-out aisles in grocery stores. It's a bit like exposing a population to a new disease, or a new strain of an old one. We haven't developed a resistance or defenses against this at a societal or cultural level yet, so it seems like a big problem.
Fundamentally, I think the problem is rooted at a deeper level of human nature. We prefer to seek out things which confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them, and this cuts across more than just the news. Without taking time to train ourselves not to fall into those cognitive traps, we're never going to solve the problem. Seeking the truth is a difficult task, not only because the path is fraught with peril, but because when you get to the end, the truth is often incredibly ugly. How often are people so disgusted by what they discovered that they shut it away completely or only let out parts of it?
The boards of these companies typically aren't any better than the CEOs they select. More often than not if you look at board memberships, the CEO of one company will be on the board of another (or several others), and so on. So why no just pick on of their friends to rake in a bunch of cash for a while, when it's likely that friend will be in a position to do the same for one of them at some point in the future.
If you wanted a really good CEO you'd find some engineer within the company that knows what the hell the company does and how it actually runs and pay for an MBA so they can speak the business lingo the position requires while being able to make informed decisions about the direction the company should take.
I think that in order to really want to be a CEO of a big company like that (which you didn't found yourself) you pretty much have to be a sociopath, or pretty close to one in a lot of ways. I think that explains why they just won't quit, because its about the power. The money is just a convenient way of keeping score.
I don't think its always a problem of chemistry or manufacturability, but one of existing patents meaning that unless you're willing to invest in a team yourself to invent something new that doesn't step on any patents, it's not financially feasible.
Self-driving tech has a massive profit potential. A quick Google search said there are about 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. and they have an average salary of $40,000. That means there's a $140 billion yearly market to be tapped into there alone. That's just truck drivers and just the U.S. There are all kinds of other jobs that require drivers (e.g. taxis) that could be replaced as well.
I expect that in Apple's case they want to sell you a car with their autonomous system, just like they want to sell you a Mac or an iDevice that run their various operating systems. That gives them some advantage in that they can offer a more integrated product and allows them to target the high-end of the market, just like they do with their other product lines.
It's probably not that surprising. The website states that it has over 15 million members so if only 1/10 are regulars and play about 10 matches per week, it would take under 6 years to exceed 2 billion games.
According to their site, 1,958,303 matches have already been played today. I don't know what time zone they're using, but assuming that it's the end of the day for them and that today doesn't deviate from the average, then it only takes around 3 years before hitting that billion game limit.
With the internet becoming more and more ubiquitous and millions of people now having access through their phones, you're going to get a lot of chess players even if there's only a small percentage of the population that plays.
If you replace "the Russians" with "the Jews" this would all sound like something spouted by some kind of rambling far-right conspiracy nut. Some people are too attached to the idea to let go of it now.
One would think that this would result in a push from both sides for open-sourcing the voting machines so that they can be properly audited, evaluated, and strengthened against attacks, but I don't see either party proposing that. Instead it's just an opportunity for political mud-slinging and grandstanding.
Yes, but we're reading about and discussing this marketing stunt on Slashdot, so it was a pretty good marketing stunt because its free advertising. Their strategy makes people think they were getting something unique, a literal one in a (seven) million. As a tactic I think it plays in well to the desire of so many to feel special and probably allows for all manner of viral marketing when those plonkers post images of their one-of-a-kind Nutella jar to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever people are using these days. If one stops to think about it, there isn't really anything in being special if everyone is special, but I don't believe most people will pause to have that thought.
While no union is going to officially come out and phrase it that way, the rules that they make essentially result in that consequence. Look no further than the New York teachers union which ends up keeping teachers in "rubber rooms" where they are paid to do anything other than teach because they were complete fuck ups in some way. We see the same thing when people invariably complain about some recent incident involving the police and why some cop isn't in jail or hasn't at least been fired. The answer is that the police union shields them. Perhaps this is more of a problem in the U.S. than Germany.
In the end it doesn't matter if a union props wages up if foreign companies can undercut prices. The American autoworkers eventually found out that you can't just keep demanding that the rest of the world support your costs when cheaper alternatives exist. Sure we can always go the protectionist route, but other countries respond in turn and almost no economic school thinks wide-scale protectionism is a good idea. Everyone likes it when the protectionism really only benefits them, but suddenly gets pissed when they have to pay more for a local product that has the costs jacked up in turn because it's not as efficient to make here.
Unions aren't inherently good or bad, but I don't think they make a lot of sense in a global market where a lot of countries are still industrializing and are more than willing to take what we'd consider dog scraps because to them it is a banquet. Economic osmosis is going to be painful to the countries where the wealth was concentrated, but eventually its going to reach a new equilibrium. I also think unions make less sense in fields where the individual differences between workers is larger. For assembly line workers, etc. changing one for another isn't going to matter much, but with something like programming where some coders are far beyond others, there isn't a lot of incentive for the best programmers to join a union because their talents are always going to be required somewhere and they'll be able to get work. Code monkey jobs on the other hand are easier to outsource, but I don't see it as a big problem because we're getting tools that are sophisticated enough so that the computer can do some of the lowest level code monkey work for us and let programmers focus on the more important tasks.
Or assuming that the government does have the ability and can do so fairly trivially, it's probably not worth letting the world know that they can do it over a few people protesting. Didn't the FBI basically drop a case against a guy running a child porn site so that they didn't have to reveal their software in court a few months ago?
WebOS may have been ahead of its time, but Palm was massively behind the curve in getting it out into the market. If they had launched it two years earlier around the same time as the original iPhone I think they'd still be around. By the time they came out it was too late as iOS and Android were already fairly entrenched and the two biggest carriers in the U.S. were locked into their camps and strategies and had little need for the Pre and it wasn't so much better than anything else to cause people to abandon their carriers for Sprint.
HP was also a bad buyer for the company. They had no real strategic vision at the time or ability to make the product a success. As funny as it sounds, I think Microsoft would have been a better buyer and could have built on top of the established OS and market share instead of putting effort into their own mobile OS that they trotted out just to see it go through the same set of problems as WebOS due to Apple and Google having such a lead by that point that only a huge mistake on their parts could cause them to fail.
Atlas Shrugged needed a lot of editing. I may be being somewhat unfair to someone writing a massive novel in their non-native language, but it has problems beyond prose which have more to do with pacing.
However, asking someone who claims to have read the book if they actually managed to make it through the John Galt radio speech without skipping over it is a good way of determining if they're full of shit, a bit touched, or actually a lizard person in a human suit.
The more likely explanation is that it evolved somewhere else at an earlier time, spread to multiple places, and there aren't enough remaining traces of it to get the full picture. The other alternative is that two distinct species (with obvious common ancestor) became similar because evolutionary pressures strongly favored a particular outcome. The first seems more likely to me at this time, but as we learn more about genetics and their role in various lifeforms the second might become more plausible.
The sad thing is that the political landscape will somehow drag itself down to even lower depths and in sufficient time we'll find people legitimately pining for days of the Trump administration. We really need to get rid of our first past the post voting system, because combined with gerrymandering it basically ensures that we end up with a lot of crap ideologues from both parties.
That of course assumes that it is something solvable. Obviously not everyone in prison in some kind of hopeless case with no hope of redemption. That some people get out and turn their lives around disproves that quite easily, but there are some people who clearly can't function in society or be let out. The obvious examples like Charles Manson or serial rapists probably aren't "curable" by modern means. If it were that easy, we'd have already figured out how to cure things like ADD or schizophrenia.
The real question is where is the line drawn. We know that there's a group that can come out of prison and integrate into society without further problem and we know there's another group on the other side that are beyond hope and can't ever come out. But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
Not quite, because knowing the odds of winning with cheating by itself says nothing. It's like having over one thousand people play, but always concluding that the winner cheated because the odds that they could win (.1%) are so small that they must have cheated, without considering that when you have that many people playing, even though the odds of winning are individually low, there are enough people to make it likely that at least one person wins.
.1% chance of success it only takes 693 people playing before there's a 50% chance of seeing at least one winner. The fallacy is mistakenly believing that it's 99.9% likely that a person cheated to win instead of something much, much smaller if we use your 1:100 odds of winning with cheating above. Even if cheating guarantees a win, then it's still only 50% likely at most (remember with 693 people all playing fair, we expect at least one winner 50% of the time) so you're basically convicting on a coin flip. Now if on the other hand there's a lot of other evidence to suggest that a person cheated, then it can valid to use the low likelihood of success in support of that other evidence. But if there's absolutely nothing else to support a claim of cheating, then it isn't reasonable to assume a person cheated based on low likelihood of individual success when there are a large number of players.
If you do a binomial calculation with
It's trivial to get an RNG to generate normally distributed results by applying the central limit theorem. Consider generating a random number between 1 and 10. Run it 100,000 times and track the results and you'll have a uniform distribution, or should unless your RNG is terrible. Instead of doing that, generate 10 random numbers and take the average (which will always be a number between 1 and 10) and record that, then repeat that 100,000 times. You end up with a normal distribution. You can write the code to do it yourself if you don't believe me.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from. Infant mortality rate was through the roof in primitive societies and as soon as humans moved from nomadic tribes and started building cities, the chronic diseases of civilization became widespread. Up until recently, diseases such as cholera, polio, small pox, measles, etc. were extremely common and were only made rare or eradicated through innovation. Sure back in primitive societies, if you didn't die early in your life you could certainly live to be 80 and I'll grant that people were on the whole healthier because almost all work involved physical labor and even if you had the equivalent of an office job, you still needed to walk to work. However, the chances of any person actually living to 80 was far, far lower. If the various diseases and lack of treatment didn't kill you, invading neighbors would probably do it quite well. So unless you're proposing we abandon civilization and go back to hunter-gatherer groups, your assertion is just wrong.
Tech innovation has done more for the poor having healthcare than anything else. Even safety nets can't provide services to everyone that haven't been invented or are incredibly costly. Just look at the positive outcomes of Golden Rice in ensuring that some of the world's poorest don't suffer from conditions due to vitamin A deficiency.
If you don't think its fast enough, you are free to start your own company to rectify the situation. Or is everything just someone else's problem?