if it's really as intended. But it's probably a typo that didn't get caught. They happen. Feynman has a story in one of his books about finding a math problem like
Johnny observes three stars through his telescope. The stars' temperatures are X, Y, and Z kelvin. What is the total temperature observed?
when he was asked to evaluate science textbooks for the school board in Pasadena.
I looked at the original article which Feynman wrote and your summary, while extremely condensed and accurate enough for here, just assumes that the reader will get the point of Feynman's dislike of the question. I bet most here will miss it. The reason that Feynman objected to the question in the textbook is that in real life there is no reason at all to add the temperatures of stars, not that the question had a horrible mistake in it. That's very different from the question in the parent article, which is to test critical thinking.
I'm American, not Finnish, so corrections from Finnish people are welcome.
Finland was conquered by Sweden until the Russians took it in the early 1800s. Finland became a Grand Duchy and my understanding is that legally this made it something like the personal property of the tsar of Russia. Finland wasn't really enthused about this arrangement despite the fact that the tsar did institute special rules for Finland to give them a bit more autonomy than places in Russia got. Finland became somewhat restive. During the overthrown of tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Revolution basically gave Finland independence because Finland was threatening to take advantage of the chaos and declare a war for independence. It got Finland to stand down and not be a distraction and honestly the area was never really very heavily Russianized anyway.
Stalin decided in the late 1930s that he wanted to get back every bit of land that got lost as a result of the formation of the USSR, so the deal with Hitler was perfect. The Soviet Union not only immediately invaded independent countries who were formerly part of the Russian Empire, they even pushed into Poland into territories that never belonged to Russia. Finland was invaded and a combination of fierce Finnish resistance and Soviet military incompetence made the invasion take a lot longer than Stalin expected, but eventually the Soviets started winning. Finland signed away about 10% of its territory to make peace and when Hitler double crossed Stalin, this looked like a great opportunity to reverse those losses. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was pretty brutal under Stalin and Ukrainians also viewed the original Nazi invaders as liberators from Soviet rule, not new oppressors.
The Nazis weren't very nice to Finland and they became problems so by 1944 what happened was that Finnish soldiers were fighting to kick the Nazis out on one hand and simultaneously fighting new Russian invasion forces on the other hand to prevent Finland from again becoming part of the USSR. Eventually Finland and the USSR reached a peace treaty, but Finland had to surrender a really big chunk of its eastern territory and in exchange, Finland had to adopt neutrality. Putin with his Cold War mentality and his cronies still view Finland as "lost territory" so that's part of why they continually bully Finland with border incursions and so on and then flip out when Finland threatens to join NATO for protection as a direct result of Russian provocations.
The highly rated commenters all think it's impossible that this access benefits the Russians in nefarious ways. It's not impossible. Basically the point of the article is that greedy companies let Mother Russia send her experts in to examine the code of various programs that the US government also uses so they could get sales in Russia. There are lots of smart Russians. I wouldn't say there is no chance that the Russians could find an exploit in such a code review and just carry it back in their memories and at home hammer on the program until they get it working. Of course the US government could be doing the same thing as a result of their own code review.
Guess he doesn't read the news then. Just a few weeks ago it made national news where a "swatting" incident happened and an innocent man was shot dead by police after they got a call claiming that the house where he lived had a hostage situation. Cops showed up in force under the assumption the call could only be true, made no attempt to determine if there was actually a hostage situation or not, and when the owner came out they shot him dead, claiming they thought he was armed. That wasn't the first time police showed up on a swatting call and made no attempt to determine the validity of it before taking action, but the previous ones usually don't end in death of a citizen. Cops routinely shoot unarmed civilians because the cop is "scared". So the only surprise to me is not that the cops went in like this but that the homeowner is still actually alive because I'd have expected a hair trigger hyped up cop to be ready to gun anybody down at a moment's notice.
China is. Look up the South China Sea disputes. China and the Philippines have an ongoing major dispute about various territories there. If America steals their secrets, they aren't going to use that to gain a military advantage over the Philippines because they are security allies and the USA has no territorial claims in the disputed area. China, on the other hand, could use secret information to their advantage.
I got to fly on a 380 some years ago between Singapore and Hong Kong. I thought it was great. The plane seemed to laugh at turbulence. The whole ride was smooth as silk. Too bad it hasn't really worked out for Airbus because I feel that if more passengers actually rode on it, they'd probably like it.
My conversation with quite a few "normal people" (non-iT folks) with a computer problem they asked me to look at....
"Yeah. That's going to take a reinstall to fix that. Do you have your Windows install disc?"
"Uh, what's that?"
For many if not most people, when this happens, the PC is bricked as far as they know. A new PC purchase is likely to follow.
Intel makes a monumental decision to benefit the short-term interest of their corporation at the long-term expense of their customers, then tries to weasel out of a equitable fix for their customers? It's not only their product that can't be trusted, it's their judgement at all levels. Heads need to roll at Intel for this....
Intel's stock price is down about $2 US since this became known, so I don't think I'd bet much on heads rolling. The problem is that most of the world is not IT geeks and for those non-iT people, many of them are scared of AMD. They know nothing about CPUs, so to them Intel is the safe choice because only Intel advertises on TV. Oddly, this may actually increase their fear of AMD because, as pointed out, Intel has managed to convince everybody that all CPUs have both problems so non-IT people are likely to think that Intel will probably fix it quickly and who knows when those weird "other companies" will do so.
My personal favorite from the time was a company I really wish I could remember the name of. USA Today profiled them along with 5 or 6 other start ups at the time. I can't find info on these guys on the internet, but basically 2 MBA grads from Harvard who knew almost nothing about PCs got this idea - the user would have a space type desktop with planets on it and the planets were like bookmarks where if you clicked on, say, Mars, you would go to the Amazon website. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of, but they opened an office in San Francisco, snagged multi-millions in VC funding, and threw some company stock at Patrick Stewart to get him to be their official spokesperson. For the year or so they were in business, you called these guys and Captain Picard's voice greeted you on their phone system.
I'm reminded of something I read around the time the housing bubble burst in the past decade. A finance writer said his dad told him years ago "Son, when stupid money starts to enter a market, it's time to get out of it." He talked about how a waitress at his favorite restaurant told him that she had just gotten her realtor's license and he said that at that moment he knew that the housing market was going to crash. Stupid money has clearly entered cryptocurrency.
Federal law -> state law -> local law
For example, this is why North Carolina passed its infamous "bathroom bill". Charlotte passed a non-discrimination law the state government didn't like, so the way to overcome that local law is to pass a state law. State net neutrality laws will only work if there is no overriding federal law on the subject. Someone pointed out that the FCC ruling stated that states can't pass their own net neutrality laws to get around new federal policy. It may take a court to rule on that, but basically states can't win if a court finds that the FCC decision is the equivalent of a federal law.
Well, OK... if you basically paid me to own one, I'd probably have one too.
This is true, but once you get started, you might find that you actually like or even love electric cars. I got a 3 year lease on a Nissan Leaf to use as a daily commute to work car (over 40 miles in total for going to work and coming back). I loved having an electric car. It cost me about $1 a day in electricity to drive it. My friends loved riding in the car and my (at the time) girlfriend loved riding in it too. I have relatives I need to see who moved away and unfortunately my other car basically died from old age, so an electric car with a range of 85 or so miles per full charge wasn't practical for me to use as an only car. But as range goes up, in a few more years it might be practical for me to go back to an electric car. No oil changes. No gasoline to buy. Fewer engine parts to break down over time. Yeah, I'd definitely go back.
And suddenly, legislation will appear that will extend the Public Domain timeout period by another 20 or 50 years.
Watch and see if this doesn't happen before the end of the year.
There's a way to both extend copyright on some works and still let most things enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable, why on earth is the US government extending them for free? That's insane. Here's a system that would let the very few people willing to extend their copyrights do so and yet make money for the government and let most stuff enter the public domain.
1) Current copyright law (so-called Bono Act) is retained.
2) Copyrights are not automatically extended beyond the Bono act terms. Owners must apply for an extension before the expiration. If they miss the application for any reason at all - too bad, so sad. The work goes into the public domain. This will eliminate the 2nd biggest problem with the Bono Act (the biggest problem is doing renewals for free) - not making people be responsible for their copyrights when a very small number of major failures (ie. It's A Wonderful Life) led to much crying and wailing by Hollywood.
3) Those who apply for an extension get one for 10 years. We could make it 5 if you like. The cost - $1 million per work. If you don't apply and pay the money, it goes into the public domain.
4) Every subsequent renewal costs 10 times what the previous one did. The 2nd renewal will cost $10 million. The 3rd will cost $100 million. The 4th will cost $1 billion. And so on. At some point even Disney will have to say "Enough is enough" on extending copyrights on things from the 1920s.
A police officer opened fire, shooting once, after the man quickly raised his hands and appeared to point a weapon at the officers, Livingston said.
That's what the police always say when they kill an unarmed civilian by mistake. But don't worry. Like in almost every case where a cop shoots someone without real justification, when it goes to trail the cop will just say he feared for his life and the odds are that the jury will buy it. And if you want to feel even worse about this, right now the caller is only looking at misdemeanor charges because, as he correctly stated on Twitter, calling in a false report is a misdemeanor and he didn't make the cops show up en masse nor did he make them pull the trigger. The DA may be able to creatively charge the caller with some contributing cause to a death, but I wouldn't bet that a jury would convict on it.
What we really need is for police departments nationwide to come up with a better way to investigate this stuff within reason so they don't just go in with guns blazing waiting for an innocent person to twitch so they can shoot him or her. There was a case a few years ago where an informant gave the police a wrong house number for a drug bust and police broke down the door of the house with the number they were given, a startled homeowner pulled a gun when seeing a bunch of strangers rush in and said homeowner was shot dead by the cops. Nobody got charged with anything in that one.
I can only imagine what the Nork government are doing to her and 3 generations of her family right now because they interpret the incident to be that she caused a westerner.to see that North Korean infrastructure is anything less than perfect.
I think without meaning to, you've actually hit on how Stalinist dictatorial regimes stay in power. Probably this specific incident isn't a big deal and nothing happens to anybody. But that is kind of how these regimes survive. You never really know what exactly is going to set off the top guy or somebody near him. People think that if they act loyally that they never have to worry about someone coming after them, but that's not true at all. Your neighbor can have a grudge against you and report you as a spy and the people in charge may find it easier to just kill you and not have to worry about you than to investigate the charge. You never know who might be a government spy, so you can't plan revolution with anybody because they might be a spy or they might simply turn you in to try to elevate themselves. Graveyards are filled with loyal subjects to Stalinist regimes who thought "They'll never come after me because I'm loyal". So while you're probably not really correct here, the unpredictability of who they will come after and when is how they never get overthrown.
Clearly they are wielding monopoly power now against GOVERNMENT-BACKED legal tender.
I know it seems that way, but it's actually quite legal. The Fed said basically there's no law compelling businesses to accept cash, so refusing to do so is not illegal. A lawyer said that as long as the business states up front you have to pay by credit card to get service and they don't take cash at all, that's also not illegal.
The poor still don't have free cards. They either have to pay for a credit card, usually via super high interest rates, or have to pay for a bank account.
The restaurants in the article are hipster restaurants in New York City, so the poor aren't going to be eating there any way. Now if this was something like McDonald's refusing to accept payment in anything but a credit card, that might be a problem for the poor.
The problem is that most theaters are not equipped for this level of quality. For example, where I live theaters insist on using obsolete and really bad projectors, the price of only one bag of popcorn is enough to buy kilograms of popcorn in any supermarket and finally the quality of the image and the sound are mediocre compared to quality and sound of a good TV these days.
This is a perfect example of flawed reasoning from the specific to the general. I'm sorry that in your specific small town that this is true, but it's not true everywhere.
I have a 3D TV and I have only used that feature a handful of times because it was very difficult to sit at the correct angle for it to work properly.
Unless your TV is junk or your eyes have problems, this is not true. I also have a 3D TV and it works well even for people sitting off center. Over the years I've read and heard a lot of complaints about 3D in home and theaters by people with eye issues and they don't understand that the vast majority of humans have eyes that work perfectly fine for 3D viewing. Those with such problems complain loudly and don't understand that they are the exception not the rule and most people don't have the kind of problems they do, so they always express disbelief at how anybody can enjoy 3D because they don't.
I know you're being sarcasm, I can tell by the font you're using...except there is an issue I haven't seen addressed yet.
When Iron Giant came out my local multiplex showed it only one day a week at about 10-11am on Saturday. That's it. All the employees including management said the same thing, "If we don't do this then Disney won't give us their next big animated release."
I'm not disputing that you were told that, but that doesn't actually make it correct. Please note that Iron Giant was a Warner Brothers film, not Disney. I know it's always fun here to blame Disney for everything possible, but I am not seeing at all how Disney could possibly dictate terms to a theater chain about a film a competitor had and everybody would go along with it. I discovered Iron Giant years after it came out and it's a great film, but honestly it wasn't promoted all that well at the time and it didn't do well in the USA, making less than a third of its estimated budget. I'm just not buying that Warner Brothers allowed Disney to push them around and just took it. If you watch the extras on the recent Blu Ray release people on the staff talk about how poorly it was promoted and the fact that Warner basically shut down the animation department but allowed the staff to finish the film didn't help matters any.
check wikipedia or the guardian project to figure out what this man actually did and who he worked for.
That's really good advice. I believed the original reports about Snowden and let's just say that they ended up being very far from the truth. Some time ago I did exactly what you suggest and I was very surprised to find out that Snowden's life was actually quite different from what some reports claimed.
Recently I read that only 15% of Americans actually own stocks. It would appear that maybe some of those 15% don't really know what they are doing. Earlier this year before Snap Inc. (parent company of Snapchat and other programs) did its IPO, an unrelated company named Snap Interactive suddenly started having a lot more interest in its stock because people thought it was the parent company of Snapchat. Snap Interactive didn't even do anything to deceive anybody. People just wrong assumed they owned Snapchat. What's sad is that they could do just a small amount of research via searches on Google, Bing, etc. and determine that Snap Interactive wasn't the owner of Snapchat, but heck, it's just easier to buy stock on speculation rather than check stuff so let's do that.
I rarely go in Walmart, but the last time I did I saw four self-checkouts and only two human cashiers. The rest of the checkouts were unused and the lines were really backed up. I didn't buy anything, just turned around and walked out.
The idea of customers checking out their own items is great in theory, but it just doesn't work that well most of the time.
Unfortunately I have to shop at Walmart at times because Target keeps closing stores that are close to me and sometimes Target simply doesn't have what I need to buy. Your experience is pretty typical of most Walmarts, but I've never been to one where they didn't at least hve 2 checkout lines open with a human cashier. Those do get backed up. Walmart attracts a lot of low income, price conscious shoppers and they tend to not be the smartest people, which is a big part of why they have low incomes. My experience is that if a Walmart has a huge section of self-checkout terminals, like 8 or more, things move pretty well. When they only have 4, which is how it is in most stores, it's going to typically take quite a while. You'll see people who take a full minute for each item they scan. You'll also see the stupid people who just don't really understand how this self-checkout thing works, but they never go to the line with human cashiers because that would waste their time. Yet they don't get the irony of them wasting the time of everybody behind them because they don't really know how to use the self-checkout systems. And then you'll get the people who say they got overcharged because they swear this item was $1 cheaper where they picked it up.
As far as I know, Walmart leads the USA in credit card fraud because before they started using credit card readers with chip readers, everybody who skimmed a card quickly went to Walmart, bought many hundreds of dollars worth of stuff, and then promptly took it to a different Walmart and asked for a cash refund. At no time did Walmart ever ask "Hmm... seems kind of suspicious that you would buy all that stuff at a different store with a credit card and then come here and return it all for a cash refund". So I won't be surprised at all if people just simply find a way to exploit these no human involved systems for stealing.
I installed Plex years ago and I used it some, but what I didn't like was that it would just refuse to play certain files that it could, in theory, play. I looked for information and basically it came down to the fact that Plex actually had issues not with the content of the problem files but with their names. You could rename a file and Plex would then magically play it without issues. But nobody knew for sure what caused the name problem or exactly what fixed it. I found Plex to be more trouble than it was worth as it failed on about 20% of what I wanted it to play, but I wasn't paying anything for it so I could live with that. Then despite me not ever updating my supposed free version of Plex, the people behind it found a way to make the free one not work any more at all. Oh sure, I can now pay a subscription fee each month to use Plex, but I've never been able to find out if they ever fixed the name problem, so I'm going to pass.
I get that everybody doesn't care about this, but I liked about Winamp was that you could see the actual bit rate of a file as it played. If you had a VBR MP3 file, you could see what bit rates it was actually using at various places. It's the only program I've found that does that. So from what I can see it seems that this new one doesn't really display much of anything except the name of the song being somehow played (others here say you can't browse so I guess you have to drag and drop to get it to play anything) and some kind of weird semi-psychedelic image. Hard pass on this one. I wait for the day when Plex announces that you'll have to pay to keep using this because that is what they do.
100 million Americans have but one provider to choose from. Google is struggling to compete.
I can assure you that Google's struggles are self-inflicted here. Google is available in my metro area with the biggest ever possible catch - unless you live within the city limits, and as best I can tell 90% of metro area residents do not, you can't get Google. My county has more than double the population of the city center but none of us can get Google because none of the county is within city limits in our metro area. Sadly, those who live in the city limits are basically the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich. The first group can't afford Google - period. The 2nd group doesn't care what it costs because they can afford to pay for internet and TV with anybody, so they have no compelling reason to move to Google. Google did this to make things simpler for themselves, but maybe if they had studied demographics better they might have done something differently. I'd love to switch to Google if I could, but Google didn't want the business of anybody in my county. Again, we're more than double the population of the city center but Google doesn't want our money.
Slashdot Mirror
if it's really as intended. But it's probably a typo that didn't get caught. They happen. Feynman has a story in one of his books about finding a math problem like
Johnny observes three stars through his telescope. The stars' temperatures are X, Y, and Z kelvin. What is the total temperature observed?
when he was asked to evaluate science textbooks for the school board in Pasadena.
I looked at the original article which Feynman wrote and your summary, while extremely condensed and accurate enough for here, just assumes that the reader will get the point of Feynman's dislike of the question. I bet most here will miss it. The reason that Feynman objected to the question in the textbook is that in real life there is no reason at all to add the temperatures of stars, not that the question had a horrible mistake in it. That's very different from the question in the parent article, which is to test critical thinking.
I'm American, not Finnish, so corrections from Finnish people are welcome.
Finland was conquered by Sweden until the Russians took it in the early 1800s. Finland became a Grand Duchy and my understanding is that legally this made it something like the personal property of the tsar of Russia. Finland wasn't really enthused about this arrangement despite the fact that the tsar did institute special rules for Finland to give them a bit more autonomy than places in Russia got. Finland became somewhat restive. During the overthrown of tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Revolution basically gave Finland independence because Finland was threatening to take advantage of the chaos and declare a war for independence. It got Finland to stand down and not be a distraction and honestly the area was never really very heavily Russianized anyway.
Stalin decided in the late 1930s that he wanted to get back every bit of land that got lost as a result of the formation of the USSR, so the deal with Hitler was perfect. The Soviet Union not only immediately invaded independent countries who were formerly part of the Russian Empire, they even pushed into Poland into territories that never belonged to Russia. Finland was invaded and a combination of fierce Finnish resistance and Soviet military incompetence made the invasion take a lot longer than Stalin expected, but eventually the Soviets started winning. Finland signed away about 10% of its territory to make peace and when Hitler double crossed Stalin, this looked like a great opportunity to reverse those losses. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was pretty brutal under Stalin and Ukrainians also viewed the original Nazi invaders as liberators from Soviet rule, not new oppressors.
The Nazis weren't very nice to Finland and they became problems so by 1944 what happened was that Finnish soldiers were fighting to kick the Nazis out on one hand and simultaneously fighting new Russian invasion forces on the other hand to prevent Finland from again becoming part of the USSR. Eventually Finland and the USSR reached a peace treaty, but Finland had to surrender a really big chunk of its eastern territory and in exchange, Finland had to adopt neutrality. Putin with his Cold War mentality and his cronies still view Finland as "lost territory" so that's part of why they continually bully Finland with border incursions and so on and then flip out when Finland threatens to join NATO for protection as a direct result of Russian provocations.
Unlikely != Impossible .
The highly rated commenters all think it's impossible that this access benefits the Russians in nefarious ways. It's not impossible. Basically the point of the article is that greedy companies let Mother Russia send her experts in to examine the code of various programs that the US government also uses so they could get sales in Russia. There are lots of smart Russians. I wouldn't say there is no chance that the Russians could find an exploit in such a code review and just carry it back in their memories and at home hammer on the program until they get it working. Of course the US government could be doing the same thing as a result of their own code review.
Guess he doesn't read the news then. Just a few weeks ago it made national news where a "swatting" incident happened and an innocent man was shot dead by police after they got a call claiming that the house where he lived had a hostage situation. Cops showed up in force under the assumption the call could only be true, made no attempt to determine if there was actually a hostage situation or not, and when the owner came out they shot him dead, claiming they thought he was armed. That wasn't the first time police showed up on a swatting call and made no attempt to determine the validity of it before taking action, but the previous ones usually don't end in death of a citizen. Cops routinely shoot unarmed civilians because the cop is "scared". So the only surprise to me is not that the cops went in like this but that the homeowner is still actually alive because I'd have expected a hair trigger hyped up cop to be ready to gun anybody down at a moment's notice.
China is. Look up the South China Sea disputes. China and the Philippines have an ongoing major dispute about various territories there. If America steals their secrets, they aren't going to use that to gain a military advantage over the Philippines because they are security allies and the USA has no territorial claims in the disputed area. China, on the other hand, could use secret information to their advantage.
I got to fly on a 380 some years ago between Singapore and Hong Kong. I thought it was great. The plane seemed to laugh at turbulence. The whole ride was smooth as silk. Too bad it hasn't really worked out for Airbus because I feel that if more passengers actually rode on it, they'd probably like it.
How is that bricking?
My conversation with quite a few "normal people" (non-iT folks) with a computer problem they asked me to look at....
"Yeah. That's going to take a reinstall to fix that. Do you have your Windows install disc?"
"Uh, what's that?"
For many if not most people, when this happens, the PC is bricked as far as they know. A new PC purchase is likely to follow.
Intel makes a monumental decision to benefit the short-term interest of their corporation at the long-term expense of their customers, then tries to weasel out of a equitable fix for their customers? It's not only their product that can't be trusted, it's their judgement at all levels. Heads need to roll at Intel for this....
Intel's stock price is down about $2 US since this became known, so I don't think I'd bet much on heads rolling. The problem is that most of the world is not IT geeks and for those non-iT people, many of them are scared of AMD. They know nothing about CPUs, so to them Intel is the safe choice because only Intel advertises on TV. Oddly, this may actually increase their fear of AMD because, as pointed out, Intel has managed to convince everybody that all CPUs have both problems so non-IT people are likely to think that Intel will probably fix it quickly and who knows when those weird "other companies" will do so.
My personal favorite from the time was a company I really wish I could remember the name of. USA Today profiled them along with 5 or 6 other start ups at the time. I can't find info on these guys on the internet, but basically 2 MBA grads from Harvard who knew almost nothing about PCs got this idea - the user would have a space type desktop with planets on it and the planets were like bookmarks where if you clicked on, say, Mars, you would go to the Amazon website. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of, but they opened an office in San Francisco, snagged multi-millions in VC funding, and threw some company stock at Patrick Stewart to get him to be their official spokesperson. For the year or so they were in business, you called these guys and Captain Picard's voice greeted you on their phone system.
I'm reminded of something I read around the time the housing bubble burst in the past decade. A finance writer said his dad told him years ago "Son, when stupid money starts to enter a market, it's time to get out of it." He talked about how a waitress at his favorite restaurant told him that she had just gotten her realtor's license and he said that at that moment he knew that the housing market was going to crash. Stupid money has clearly entered cryptocurrency.
Federal law -> state law -> local law For example, this is why North Carolina passed its infamous "bathroom bill". Charlotte passed a non-discrimination law the state government didn't like, so the way to overcome that local law is to pass a state law. State net neutrality laws will only work if there is no overriding federal law on the subject. Someone pointed out that the FCC ruling stated that states can't pass their own net neutrality laws to get around new federal policy. It may take a court to rule on that, but basically states can't win if a court finds that the FCC decision is the equivalent of a federal law.
Well, OK ... if you basically paid me to own one, I'd probably have one too.
This is true, but once you get started, you might find that you actually like or even love electric cars. I got a 3 year lease on a Nissan Leaf to use as a daily commute to work car (over 40 miles in total for going to work and coming back). I loved having an electric car. It cost me about $1 a day in electricity to drive it. My friends loved riding in the car and my (at the time) girlfriend loved riding in it too. I have relatives I need to see who moved away and unfortunately my other car basically died from old age, so an electric car with a range of 85 or so miles per full charge wasn't practical for me to use as an only car. But as range goes up, in a few more years it might be practical for me to go back to an electric car. No oil changes. No gasoline to buy. Fewer engine parts to break down over time. Yeah, I'd definitely go back.
And suddenly, legislation will appear that will extend the Public Domain timeout period by another 20 or 50 years.
Watch and see if this doesn't happen before the end of the year.
There's a way to both extend copyright on some works and still let most things enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable, why on earth is the US government extending them for free? That's insane. Here's a system that would let the very few people willing to extend their copyrights do so and yet make money for the government and let most stuff enter the public domain.
1) Current copyright law (so-called Bono Act) is retained.
2) Copyrights are not automatically extended beyond the Bono act terms. Owners must apply for an extension before the expiration. If they miss the application for any reason at all - too bad, so sad. The work goes into the public domain. This will eliminate the 2nd biggest problem with the Bono Act (the biggest problem is doing renewals for free) - not making people be responsible for their copyrights when a very small number of major failures (ie. It's A Wonderful Life) led to much crying and wailing by Hollywood.
3) Those who apply for an extension get one for 10 years. We could make it 5 if you like. The cost - $1 million per work. If you don't apply and pay the money, it goes into the public domain.
4) Every subsequent renewal costs 10 times what the previous one did. The 2nd renewal will cost $10 million. The 3rd will cost $100 million. The 4th will cost $1 billion. And so on. At some point even Disney will have to say "Enough is enough" on extending copyrights on things from the 1920s.
A police officer opened fire, shooting once, after the man quickly raised his hands and appeared to point a weapon at the officers, Livingston said.
That's what the police always say when they kill an unarmed civilian by mistake. But don't worry. Like in almost every case where a cop shoots someone without real justification, when it goes to trail the cop will just say he feared for his life and the odds are that the jury will buy it. And if you want to feel even worse about this, right now the caller is only looking at misdemeanor charges because, as he correctly stated on Twitter, calling in a false report is a misdemeanor and he didn't make the cops show up en masse nor did he make them pull the trigger. The DA may be able to creatively charge the caller with some contributing cause to a death, but I wouldn't bet that a jury would convict on it.
What we really need is for police departments nationwide to come up with a better way to investigate this stuff within reason so they don't just go in with guns blazing waiting for an innocent person to twitch so they can shoot him or her. There was a case a few years ago where an informant gave the police a wrong house number for a drug bust and police broke down the door of the house with the number they were given, a startled homeowner pulled a gun when seeing a bunch of strangers rush in and said homeowner was shot dead by the cops. Nobody got charged with anything in that one.
The 3 greatest tech companies are leading the way! The future will soon be here!
Note to self: Blockchain may not be as important as many people think given who is leading the way with it.
I can only imagine what the Nork government are doing to her and 3 generations of her family right now because they interpret the incident to be that she caused a westerner.to see that North Korean infrastructure is anything less than perfect.
I think without meaning to, you've actually hit on how Stalinist dictatorial regimes stay in power. Probably this specific incident isn't a big deal and nothing happens to anybody. But that is kind of how these regimes survive. You never really know what exactly is going to set off the top guy or somebody near him. People think that if they act loyally that they never have to worry about someone coming after them, but that's not true at all. Your neighbor can have a grudge against you and report you as a spy and the people in charge may find it easier to just kill you and not have to worry about you than to investigate the charge. You never know who might be a government spy, so you can't plan revolution with anybody because they might be a spy or they might simply turn you in to try to elevate themselves. Graveyards are filled with loyal subjects to Stalinist regimes who thought "They'll never come after me because I'm loyal". So while you're probably not really correct here, the unpredictability of who they will come after and when is how they never get overthrown.
Clearly they are wielding monopoly power now against GOVERNMENT-BACKED legal tender.
I know it seems that way, but it's actually quite legal. The Fed said basically there's no law compelling businesses to accept cash, so refusing to do so is not illegal. A lawyer said that as long as the business states up front you have to pay by credit card to get service and they don't take cash at all, that's also not illegal.
The poor still don't have free cards. They either have to pay for a credit card, usually via super high interest rates, or have to pay for a bank account.
The restaurants in the article are hipster restaurants in New York City, so the poor aren't going to be eating there any way. Now if this was something like McDonald's refusing to accept payment in anything but a credit card, that might be a problem for the poor.
The problem is that most theaters are not equipped for this level of quality. For example, where I live theaters insist on using obsolete and really bad projectors, the price of only one bag of popcorn is enough to buy kilograms of popcorn in any supermarket and finally the quality of the image and the sound are mediocre compared to quality and sound of a good TV these days.
This is a perfect example of flawed reasoning from the specific to the general. I'm sorry that in your specific small town that this is true, but it's not true everywhere.
I have a 3D TV and I have only used that feature a handful of times because it was very difficult to sit at the correct angle for it to work properly.
Unless your TV is junk or your eyes have problems, this is not true. I also have a 3D TV and it works well even for people sitting off center. Over the years I've read and heard a lot of complaints about 3D in home and theaters by people with eye issues and they don't understand that the vast majority of humans have eyes that work perfectly fine for 3D viewing. Those with such problems complain loudly and don't understand that they are the exception not the rule and most people don't have the kind of problems they do, so they always express disbelief at how anybody can enjoy 3D because they don't.
I know you're being sarcasm, I can tell by the font you're using...except there is an issue I haven't seen addressed yet.
When Iron Giant came out my local multiplex showed it only one day a week at about 10-11am on Saturday. That's it. All the employees including management said the same thing, "If we don't do this then Disney won't give us their next big animated release."
I'm not disputing that you were told that, but that doesn't actually make it correct. Please note that Iron Giant was a Warner Brothers film, not Disney. I know it's always fun here to blame Disney for everything possible, but I am not seeing at all how Disney could possibly dictate terms to a theater chain about a film a competitor had and everybody would go along with it. I discovered Iron Giant years after it came out and it's a great film, but honestly it wasn't promoted all that well at the time and it didn't do well in the USA, making less than a third of its estimated budget. I'm just not buying that Warner Brothers allowed Disney to push them around and just took it. If you watch the extras on the recent Blu Ray release people on the staff talk about how poorly it was promoted and the fact that Warner basically shut down the animation department but allowed the staff to finish the film didn't help matters any.
check wikipedia or the guardian project to figure out what this man actually did and who he worked for.
That's really good advice. I believed the original reports about Snowden and let's just say that they ended up being very far from the truth. Some time ago I did exactly what you suggest and I was very surprised to find out that Snowden's life was actually quite different from what some reports claimed.
Recently I read that only 15% of Americans actually own stocks. It would appear that maybe some of those 15% don't really know what they are doing. Earlier this year before Snap Inc. (parent company of Snapchat and other programs) did its IPO, an unrelated company named Snap Interactive suddenly started having a lot more interest in its stock because people thought it was the parent company of Snapchat. Snap Interactive didn't even do anything to deceive anybody. People just wrong assumed they owned Snapchat. What's sad is that they could do just a small amount of research via searches on Google, Bing, etc. and determine that Snap Interactive wasn't the owner of Snapchat, but heck, it's just easier to buy stock on speculation rather than check stuff so let's do that.
I rarely go in Walmart, but the last time I did I saw four self-checkouts and only two human cashiers. The rest of the checkouts were unused and the lines were really backed up. I didn't buy anything, just turned around and walked out.
The idea of customers checking out their own items is great in theory, but it just doesn't work that well most of the time.
Unfortunately I have to shop at Walmart at times because Target keeps closing stores that are close to me and sometimes Target simply doesn't have what I need to buy. Your experience is pretty typical of most Walmarts, but I've never been to one where they didn't at least hve 2 checkout lines open with a human cashier. Those do get backed up. Walmart attracts a lot of low income, price conscious shoppers and they tend to not be the smartest people, which is a big part of why they have low incomes. My experience is that if a Walmart has a huge section of self-checkout terminals, like 8 or more, things move pretty well. When they only have 4, which is how it is in most stores, it's going to typically take quite a while. You'll see people who take a full minute for each item they scan. You'll also see the stupid people who just don't really understand how this self-checkout thing works, but they never go to the line with human cashiers because that would waste their time. Yet they don't get the irony of them wasting the time of everybody behind them because they don't really know how to use the self-checkout systems. And then you'll get the people who say they got overcharged because they swear this item was $1 cheaper where they picked it up.
As far as I know, Walmart leads the USA in credit card fraud because before they started using credit card readers with chip readers, everybody who skimmed a card quickly went to Walmart, bought many hundreds of dollars worth of stuff, and then promptly took it to a different Walmart and asked for a cash refund. At no time did Walmart ever ask "Hmm... seems kind of suspicious that you would buy all that stuff at a different store with a credit card and then come here and return it all for a cash refund". So I won't be surprised at all if people just simply find a way to exploit these no human involved systems for stealing.
I installed Plex years ago and I used it some, but what I didn't like was that it would just refuse to play certain files that it could, in theory, play. I looked for information and basically it came down to the fact that Plex actually had issues not with the content of the problem files but with their names. You could rename a file and Plex would then magically play it without issues. But nobody knew for sure what caused the name problem or exactly what fixed it. I found Plex to be more trouble than it was worth as it failed on about 20% of what I wanted it to play, but I wasn't paying anything for it so I could live with that. Then despite me not ever updating my supposed free version of Plex, the people behind it found a way to make the free one not work any more at all. Oh sure, I can now pay a subscription fee each month to use Plex, but I've never been able to find out if they ever fixed the name problem, so I'm going to pass.
I get that everybody doesn't care about this, but I liked about Winamp was that you could see the actual bit rate of a file as it played. If you had a VBR MP3 file, you could see what bit rates it was actually using at various places. It's the only program I've found that does that. So from what I can see it seems that this new one doesn't really display much of anything except the name of the song being somehow played (others here say you can't browse so I guess you have to drag and drop to get it to play anything) and some kind of weird semi-psychedelic image. Hard pass on this one. I wait for the day when Plex announces that you'll have to pay to keep using this because that is what they do.
100 million Americans have but one provider to choose from. Google is struggling to compete.
I can assure you that Google's struggles are self-inflicted here. Google is available in my metro area with the biggest ever possible catch - unless you live within the city limits, and as best I can tell 90% of metro area residents do not, you can't get Google. My county has more than double the population of the city center but none of us can get Google because none of the county is within city limits in our metro area. Sadly, those who live in the city limits are basically the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich. The first group can't afford Google - period. The 2nd group doesn't care what it costs because they can afford to pay for internet and TV with anybody, so they have no compelling reason to move to Google. Google did this to make things simpler for themselves, but maybe if they had studied demographics better they might have done something differently. I'd love to switch to Google if I could, but Google didn't want the business of anybody in my county. Again, we're more than double the population of the city center but Google doesn't want our money.