FTFY. Might be true someday, but not today...

In reality, public money passes through government default subsidized student loan programs to allow students to borrow money at favorable interest rates to allow many students to pay textbook companies that otherwise could not afford to pay textbook companies. But I digress...

Fortunately, student funding/debt has very little to do with how most universities are funding their research. In actuality, most prestigious research universities are pretty much directly funded by public money (including private institutions in the USA) in the form of research grants. The tuition they charge their student (esp at the undergraduate level) generally is a small part of a typical schools budget and generally could easily be covered by a fraction of their endowment income. Most grant money *includes* overhead for operations.

However, student funding has very much to do with how universities fund their non-research operations that aren't covered by grant overhead. This is especially true at institutions that do no research at all and of course most acute at diploma mills.

The reason that prestigious research universities charge students so much is that it conveys a sense of value to the education they are providing and is easy to get the students to take out loans (esp publically subsidized loans) for their education and once they max out loans, they often discount the remainder to cover the difference. The reason less prestigious universities charge so much is that more prestigious universities set the price point high (basically a type of comparative level-set pricing collusion).

Sadly, the way it is set up now, by making it so easy to borrow, the government is essentially tax/spending the students future income to transfer this wealth to universities. Is it fair that only students are burdened with this "tax" rather than the public at large? The universities are charging more because it's easy for the students to borrow the money and the students are caught in the middle. Why is the government making it so easy for students to go into massive debt (esp for diploma mill paper)? Well that's a political question...

Textbook money is also a drop in the bucket at any research university. Other than undergrads, who's using textbooks for research anyhow? Instead, researchers are reading and writing papers for journals that are probably 10x worse at gouging money than the worst offending textbook companies.

That summary is a total superficial read of the article.

It seems to me the point of the article was that 1994 (the web 1.0 boom of silicon valley) seemingly should have been more women friendly, but the valley was already being run by money from the previous booms in silicon valley and for a multitude of reasons which they list (e.g., male dominated venture capital firms), was unfriendly to women as chronicled by the biographies of the class of '94 from Stanford. One of the reason they cited was that women seem to gravitate towards "safe" jobs (e.g., law, finance, medicine) and a new "boys-club" mentality of the startup culture (specifically mentioning Paypal which was a Stanford dominated startup).

These same trends were most certainly true both before 1994 and after 1994 and not exclusive to Stanford... TFA didn't say techs' gender gap started at Stanford. TFA used Stanford as emblematic of the issue.

There's an obvious solution this... Assuming you don't want a cat or a home...

No? Can we assume this is the only product on the market (and before it was invented, cats littered homes with reckless abandon)...
If in the end, this is your only solution, then make your piece with the DRM, or with bypassing it. Don't forget, you always have a choice..

FWIW, the longshoremen solution is a container royalty central collection fund which is like a "tax" for intermodal shipping containers... The money from this "tax" goes to... the few folks that got to keep their jobs (to pay for lost employment opportunities).

There isn't a specific pallet tax that I know of... Yet... (although there are often redemption-like fee associated with pallets)

You may have meant it sarcastically, but since the 60's, longshoremen have acquiesced to the use of efficient containerization in exchange for a royalty payment to compensate for lost job opportunity... You can read about the on-going fight about this here

Of course, jobs have been lost, but the folks that still have jobs are being compensated quite well for the time they took to process the container, almost as if they actually stuffed and stripped the cargo (what packing/unpacking is called in maritime transport lingo) w/o actually doing so...

This has less to do with pallets, but advent of multi-modal shipping containers.

FWIW, having worked in a warehouse for a production line, I can say that even material handling w/o pallets is basically a non-starter. The line expediters in our warehouse worked with unpacked material and the inventory tracking and special transport handling that went along with that is easily on par with simply just discarding the partial pallet storage that was left in its wake. It isn't just shipping that relies on the magic of pallets...

Actually, what is surprising is that these supposed high value customers are not in fact actually bots (instead of essentially being web users programmed to be overconsumers by a history of exposure to saturation advertising and silly enough to click on adverts for stupid things).

Philosophically, when some thing exhibits indistinguishable from another (e.g, a consumer exhibiting behavior indistinguishable from a bot), are these high-value consumers not really acting like "artificial" bots? Because we know these "artificial" bots (aka high-value consumers) aren't actually buying anything, but are simply browsing indiscriminately out of boredom and collecting browser-based exploits from the wild to expand real bot nets in a symbiotic relationship.

On a similar note, people always wondered if the anti-virus companies actually were in cahoots with the virus writers. How do with know the ad platform companies aren't simply promulgating a myth of the ephemeral existence of high-value consumers that want to be identified in a sea of bots by the latest and greatest sophisticated ad platform subscription?

As I understand it, most of the power company's objections to solar is being forced to buy the power back and subsidize it.

Maintaining the lines to your house is a fixed cost and they are recovering that cost using amortization over periodic billing based on usage. People who go solar are essentially the freeloaders in this system as they pay less of the overhead for the amount of transmission service they receive. This is not unlike the gasoline tax for highway funding debate or numerous other situations.

Governments tend to attempt to make things simpler for consumers by mandating "tariffed" service to avoid "skimming" by the providers. Unfortunately that generally doesn't work as governments generally attempt to use these regulations for subsidizing service for some by burdening others and the companies just get smarter about skimming. Unfortunately, some customers discover the workarounds to freeload for a while (e.g., internet VoIP w/o universal service fund fees, or solar panels with forced power buyback, or electric cars that pay no gas tax). They claim their microeconomic observation about their freeloading is the new economic reality and people should just wake up and smell the coffee.

Unfortunately, when there are too many freeloaders them, then the model just breaks down and need to be fixed so that more people pay full freight. Often, the freeloaders then discover that paying full freight isn't makes the it much less attractive (but at least they got theirs whilst the getting was good). The result is generally simply a different reality than the previous, but generally not much different.

For example, the power company would much rather demand be totally flat. Provisioning for more power is a big capital cost (building power plants, increasing transmission capacity, etc.) that they can only recover by amortization. This is the reality that the power companies lived in the 80's with nuclear power decommissioning. Sadly, we have a big nasty habit of kicking the can down the road on these things...

At least when you collect a welfare check directly from the government you are being honest with yourself...

FWIW, the bridgmanite samples in question (technically a phase of a perovskite crystal structure mineral) does not exist outside the pressure/temperatures which occur *in* the earth which is why samples have never been discovered *on* the earth before (although they certainly have likely existed, no-one has discovered/isolated them before). The interesting thing about this sample is that we didn't have to create the pressure/temperature (apparently 24 gigapascals and 2300 kelvin) in order to form it as these conditions were temporarily created when the meteorite impacted earth.

It would kind of be like if nobody had seen a diamond before, but they were theorized to exist, and someone held up amorphous coal and said it was a sample of diamond because it was just carbon. Of course even though diamonds take somewhat high temperature and pressure to create, it isn't too high, so there are an abundance of diamond fields that exist on the surface of the earth w/o any digging required, so this is kind of a bad example from a scarcity point of view, but from a phase mineral structure point of view, hopefully that "clarifies" it...

The downside is that although this discovery is consistent with the theory of bridgmanite, we still don't have a sample of bridgmanite created in its natural environment *in* the earth, so we still don't know if this is what is actually there. To dredge up the diamond analogy again, there is of course another carbon mineral that is even stronger than cubic diamond called lonsdaleite (aka hexagonal diamond) that can form under higher temperature/pressure conditions like meteorite strikes. So, since this is merely consistent with theory and not an actual sample, apparently, the jury is still out if this sample is representative of bridgmanite or perhaps there's yet another configuration of perovskite that occurs deep inside the earth we haven't figured out yet...

To create another analogy, it's kinda like how we keep on finding all sorts of carbon nano{tube,sheet,fibres} configurations that we haven't discovered before that have unique and potentially useful properties.

Harmonization in "4G" LTE is called carrier aggregation.

You might be assuming dramatic will be better.
You might also be assuming harmonization will mean everyone should use the same technology.

Perhaps you are misinterpreting this statement? They might be technically correct in their statement yet the technology will be a total fail, no? ;^)

At least in the USA for 4G, there was/is a lot of dramatic overhaul of the network after WiMax's demise and harmonization of the spectrum means the commercial availability of a penta-band phone...

I don't think you understand the economics of container shipping. First of all, they used the worst possible polluting fuel (aka bunker fuel) because it is unregulated internationally. Secondly, at 15 knots, these ship consume less than 50 tons/day. However at 25 knots, fuel consumption rises to about 300 tons/day. It's all about speed, not the moving with the ships.

(also cars and powerplants can't really use bunker fuel even if it's reprocessed, it won't be economical).

Not as "advanced" in image recognition as advertised.

Basically they took the output of a common object classifier and instead of just picking the most likely object (which is what a typical object classifier looks for), it leaves in in a form where multiple objects are detected in various parts of the scene. Then they train a neural network to create captions (by giving it training pictures with associated captions).

According to the paper, it sometimes apparently generates a reasonable description. Other times it reads in picture of a street sign covered with stickers and emits a caption like "refrigerator filled with lots of food and drink".

Actually the most interesting thing about it is the LSTM-based Sentence Generator that is used to generate the caption from the objects. LSTM's are notoriously hard to train and they apparently they borrow some results from language translation techniques to attempt to form intelligible sentences.

This is all very googly-researchy in that they want to see what the limits of pure data driven machine learning are (w/o human tuning). This is not a however much of an advance in image recognition as it is an advance in the language for caption construction.