It's a horrible contract if it purports to require that consumers pay ESPN even if they don't want it. In fact, that's arguably illegal.
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Sorry, but ESPN has no legal standing to force the consumers of Verizon to essentially have a package which kicks back to ESPN.

You've got this backwards. The consumer has no standing because they never contracted with ESPN. The contract is between ESPN and Verizon. Customers are never paying ESPN. Verizon is paying ESPN. Customers are paying Verizon, but that doesn't give them standing on a contract between ESPN and Verizon. Just like if you bought something from Walmart, that doesn't give you standing to modify Walmart's wages to their employees.

Legally, the proper solution is for Verizon to charge all customers enough so that they can fulfill their contractual obligation to ESPN. If their contract says they need to pay ESPN $10/mo per customer (regardless of whether they view ESPN), then Verizon just needs to pay that and they've satisfied the terms of their contract with ESPN.

If Verizon wants to then turn around and charge ESPN-viewing customers $20/mo to cover their shortfall (assuming half their customers don't want ESPN), then that is between Verizon and their customer, and ESPN has no standing. In fact that's probably what Verizon is going for here - they're trying to collect real data on exactly what percentage of their customers are willing to pay for ESPN and how much, so they can use those figures for negotiations with ESPN.

That should get you a RICO conviction. Because if someone says "oh, sorry, but we have a contract with my cousin Vinnie, and you have to pay him every time you buy something from us".

Totally different. Verizon isn't telling you to send a check to ESPN. They're offering you a price for your cable package, and you're agreeing to pay that price. If Verizon decides to use some of the money they received from you to pay ESPN or Vinnie or for hookers and blow, you have no standing. You got the cable package you wanted at a price you agreed to pay.

Those stupidly overbright headlamps that dazzle you could be replaced by ones that dim themselves when they see oncoming traffic.

Wouldn't this do that automatically? The mechanism shouldn't be able to distinguish between light being reflected off a snowflake, and light coming from another car. And will dim its headlight aimed at that location in both cases.

What makes you think it'll be that expensive? A DLP projector does basically the same thing, and the DLP chip itself can be bought for a few bucks. All you need is a to pair it with a high-speed camera which picks out bright spots and immediately directs that individual DLP mirror away from that location.

I'm sure it'll be super-expensive when it first rolls out. But if the base technologies they're using are easily mass producible, it should get cheap quickly. The first flat screen TV hit the mass market just 17 years ago for over $20,000. You can now pick up a similar-sized one for about $400.

1) Huge landowning farmers are rich. On top of being rich, they get a lot of subsidies. They get the subsidies because, being rich, they can bribe politicians. This makes them richer, and more able to bribe. The EU is something I support entirely in principle, because trade is better than war, but in few areas has become more corrupt than subsidising landowners;

While I agree with the rest of what you say, farm subsidies are not entirely the result of corruption. They're a way for governments to tweak the supply/demand curve, so that there is a greater supply of food (farms) than demand. Farming is not like manufacturing, where you get an order 10,000 widgets so you manufacture 10,000 widgets. You plant enough crops to feed 10 million people, but if it turns out to be a bad year with crop failures and your yield is only enough for 9 million, well now you've got to decide between letting part of your population starve or putting everyone on rationing.

This can be avoided ahead of time if you subsidize farms to the point where they plant enough crops to feed 11 million. If it turns out to be a normal year and you have enough excess food for 1 million, that's preferable to being short food for 1 million. Turn it into feed for cattle (people won't complain about cheaper steaks), high fructose corn syrup, ethanol (which actually makes sense when done with excess corn instead of corn grown for the explicit purpose of turning into ethanol), and foreign aid. (Incidentally, this is why the U.S. pays some farmers not to grow any crops - if we suffer another Dust Bowl-like disaster, we'll have plenty of reserve farmland to fall back on the following year, but without upsetting food prices if there is no disaster this year.)

Even when you start with petroleum as your feedstock and only waste 10-15% of the energy it contains in refining and distribution, you've still got the car only turning 20% of the energy therein into useful kinetic energy (25% in the case of diesels), versus an average of about 85% of the electricty into kinetic energy (minus about 8% transmission losses), plus automatically gaining hybrid-style regen. Even if the process was 100% efficient - which it won't be anywhere even close to that - just the difference in propulsion technolgies would put the EV at 4 times the efficiency.

Slow down there. You're comparing the complete-cycle efficiency for petroleum to just the end-stage efficiency for electric. That electricity needs to be made somehow. Toss in 40% efficiency for coal plants (we'll leave out pumping/mining and fuel transport costs for now, assuming they're similar for oil and coal), battery charging efficiency of about 75% (discharge efficiency is unspecified, but since the EPA mileage estimates are based on battery capacity it's safe to ignore it), and the 85% motor efficiency you've specified, and suddenly your EV is .4*.75*.85 = 25.5% efficient. Same as a diesel.

This is the big thing a lot of EV proponents miss. Their EV is cheaper to operate not because the EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.

Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the costs of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.)

Your post missed my point, that my G+ circles have more content, and the unspoken point, that G+ gives me more control over content.

On the contrary. If one platform has more content than the other, that's a result of your choices, not the platform. If you fail to exercise the options offered over the content resulting a lower s/n ratio, that's your choice, not the platforms fault.

My answer isn't "typical FB-style", it's the blunt truth. You're a clueless fool who is blaming the tool rather than the operator.

If only your "Exhibit A" wasn't mostly selective golden memory tinted by rose colored glasses. The "great uplift" was indeed (mostly) great - if you were a white collar worker in the city, or an industrial worker with a union. For the laborers down on the farm, the topic of discussion, not so much.

And even then the "great uplift" wasn't powered by smaller profit margins or worker's rights - it was powered by rising salaries, employment, and consumer spending. (Emphasis on the last.) It couldn't last, and it didn't.

 

Or is your argument really that there fundamentally aren't enough physical resources for everyone to get high quality goods ?

My argument is that you're fundamentally clueless to the nature of the discussion, and confuse nebulous and abstract "high quality goods" with the reality of agriculture.

I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap.

That's a function of the people you allow to post on your feed - not the platform. Or, to put it another way, you can't have meaningful discussions on FB because you're an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn how to prevent unwanted people from posting on your page or to limit a particular discussion to a defined subset of people.

Don't blame the platform because you can't be bothered to figure out how use it.

It failed because anyone interested in joining couldn't join because it was Invite Only, then they stopped caring.

And even if you did manage to get an invite - odds are, most of your friends didn't. And even if they did, G+ was very feature incomplete - basically a graphical twitter interface and very little more.

Pretty much every I knew eventually got an account because "someday everyone will have an account, and then it will be worth using"... But even though Google finally opened the gates and let everyone in, nobody really switched over because "well, most of my friends haven't so I'll wait". Google is still waiting for that day, pretty much everyone else has given up.

I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?

Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.

You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.

Would make sense to have pv panels charge them up during the day and release energy at night.

No that doesn't make any sense. The power companies are subsidizing this because it helps even out the day/night usage curve. Right now they have to build enough generating capacity for the daytime peak, then shut down a good chunk of it during the night. If they can keep it running during the night, store the power in people's home batteries, which then make it available during the day, it flattens that curve. They can satisfy more demand without having to build more plants.

That's why prices are higher during the day - there's more demand at that time. Time-shfting solar from day to night is pointless (unless you're off the grid). Just send the power from the PV panels straight onto the grid during the day when demand and prices are highest.

Also note that Scenario B may be automatic grounds for invalidating the patent, since for it to have happened the patented idea in many cases must have been "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art."

I did over 50 interviews of technical candidates while at Google, and 6 of them were phone screens.

One of them tried this on me, so it definitely happens. Two of them tried the "look things up on the Internet to answer the question" trick.

Personally, I would have had him drive the hour and a half from Boynton Beach to the Miami MarCom office, and interview from there. I don't recruit directly since my pre-Google/pre-Apple/Pre-IBM days, but if you are acting as a recruiter, one of the best gauges of a candidates personality is the front desk person's opinion of them. I can't see a recruiter passing on that information.

Shields should have gone up from the they-contact-you-because-you're-desirable-then-they-phone-screen moment. If they want you, they'll call you in, and if they *really* want you, they'll fly you to Mountain View to get a full team on your interview.

PS: I was 5 minutes late to exactly one of them because the bike I was riding to the building broke down. It would be interesting to hear an explanation of why the recruiter was not on the line with the person at the appointed time, and telling them of the schedule change and asking if it was OK with the candidate. For the on-site I was late for, the last interviewer stayed with the candidate until I got there. At a full 10 minutes of no-show I would have been substituted.

Cassini having plutonium fuel was about as close as I can recall, but even that was a blip by comparison to the LHC.

The Cassini flyby was before Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, the rise of clickbait journalism has made it very difficult to discriminate between genuine public concern and the meme-of-the-moment.

"... that aims to automatically suggest cancer diagnoses..." even if you don't actually have cancer.