In the case that started all this a man had been bankrupt. That's a fact, but one which credit rating agencies are not allowed to report after a certain period of time has passed. If any bank could see the newspaper reports about the bankruptcy simply by searching Google that would have been undermined - society decided that after time bankruptcy would be "forgotten" so people could move on with their lives.

So what does Google have to do with it? What's to stop a bank from using a different search engine to find past bankruptcies older than 7 years. Or running their searches on a VM hosted in a non-EU country.

The fundamental error in this ruling is the assumption that Google = History. All Google is is an algorithmic survey of which "historical facts" (things mentioned on websites) are more densely cross-linked. In programming terms, Google is a pointer, not the data itself. You delete the pointer, the data remains. You delete the data, the pointer is useless. If the EU were really serious about a right to be forgotten, they'd be encouraging Google to retain this stuff, and using Google to go after the sites which list the outdated information. For crying out loud, Google is doing a fantastic job telling you which sites with the most cross-links are hosting the outdated data. Way to shoot the messenger!

Going after Google reeks of a luddite misunderstanding of the difference between pointers and objects, thinking that eliminating the pointers will be a cheap and easy (for them) solution to the problem. Kinda like someone thinking that deleting all the shortcuts on his Windows desktop will free up disk space. Yeah it'll make you desktop look prettier, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problem.

I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule. Regardless of the technical nuances, Aereo operates like a rebroadcaster (takes services subscriptions, forwards broadcast transmissions to them). Therefore it must be a rebroadcaster.

I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas, and only charged an installation fee to host the antenna and monthly hardware insurance fee to replace broken ones. To draw from the analogy someone posted below, that'd be like you buying your own antenna and asking to place it on your neighbor's property because he sits on top of the hill blocking your house. Dynamically assigning a micro-antenna to a subscriber on-demand just blurs the line. (The fact that all this is technically stupid when you could just use a single antenna is simply a consequence of Copyright law creating artificial scarcity and giving content producers a monopoly on distribution.)

The units on gigawatts/hr works out to energy/time^2. I'm not even sure what that means. Rate of acceleration of energy use?

Assuming the Reuters reporter never took physics and the actual figure is 22 gigawatts, while it's an impressive amount, it's peak production. Solar has just about the worst capacity factor (ratio of average production to max peak production) of any energy source. If you look at Germany's solar statistics, they produced 31400 GWh in 2013. The average of their 2012 and 2013 installed (peak) generating capacity was (32.643+35.948) / 2 = 34.296 GW (averaged to take into account new plants coming online through the year).

34.3 GW * 8766 hours (1 year) = 1.08 * 10^18 joules
= 300673.8 GWh of potential solar production - i.e. how much the plants could have produced if they were operating at max capacity the entire year.

So their solar capacity factor is just 31400 / 300674 = 0.1044.

Compare to U.S. average capacity factors of
0.9 for nuclear
0.7 for geothermal
0.64 for coal
0.4 for hydro
0.35 for offshore wind
0.22 for onshre wind
0.145 for PV solar in the U.S. (not on chart)

So if Germany's peak solar production was equivalent to 20 nuclear plants, that means their entire installed base of solar plants has only eliminated the need for two nuclear plants. (There's some wriggle room here because they're comparing a peak load power source to a base load power source, but I'm just rolling with the comparison they made.) This is why you don't compare power production technologies based on peak production. It's like comparing the fuel efficiency of different cars only when they're going downhill - it unreasonably favors cars with low drag coefficients even if they may have inefficient engines. You should be comparing average production through the year (equivalent to peak production * capacity factor). Just like you should be comparing the average fuel efficiency of cars across all use cases.

It's pretty simple to me. Women tend to prefer careers where they interact with people. Men tend to prefer careers where they interact with things. When I worked at a hotel, the vast majority of applicants we got for front desk clerk or event planner were women. The vast majority of applicants for maintenance were men. CS just happens to be an extreme form of interacting with things. (The earlier comment about beta males fits too - part of being an alpha male is being able to interact well with other people.)

You'll see this disappear in low-income jobs (e.g. assembly line workers), where finances make the job a necessity. But by the time you get to mid- and high-paying jobs, the person has the luxury of choosing what he/she does, and this gender-based self-bias exerts itself.

Most women don't strive to immerse themselves in a culture that is predominated by socially awkward beta males. I don't understand why nobody accepts this obvious explanation for the lack of women.

Let me throw that right back at you: Why do you think the culture is predominated by socially awkward beta males?

You admit that non-misogynistic factors cause the field to disproportionately attract one type of person (socially awkward beta males). Yet when considering a different type of person (women) you immediately shift the blame to misogyny rather than assuming those same non-misogynistic factors are what are deterring women. This self-contradiction is why it's not an "obvious" explanation.

The federal gas tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon, where it has been set since 1993, when gas cost $1.16 a gallon.

Since the gas tax is ostensibly for the construction and maintenance of roads and highways, it should be compared to that. The cost of maintenance and construction scale mostly according to CPI, not the price of gas. I can't think of any reason why you'd compare the tax to the price of gas unless you're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it needs to go up more (political arguments about energy taxes aside).

Putting $1.16 into an inflation calculator yields $1.90 in 2014 dollars, or a 64% increase. 64% of 18.4 cents is 11.7 cents. So a 12 cent increase is exactly what's needed for the tax to keep pace with inflation.

Up to now, they haven't wanted to. Japan, however, is threatened by not one but two nuclear-armed nations.

Three nuclear-armed nations. Part of the Kuril Islands are contested by Japan and Russia. Russia (the Soviets at the time) won control of the entire chain (plus Sakhalin) at the end of WWII as a hedge by the Allies. Basically we weren't sure if Japan would surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped. So we begged Russia to violate their non-aggression pact with Japan and invade after the bombings to put further pressure on Japan to surrender. They did so, and have claimed those territories ever since. Japan gave up most of their claims following WWII, but still claim four islands that Russia currently administrates.

I wonder if this ought to invalidate crap like the infamous Amazon one-click patent.

Unfortunately, you have to (1) be sued by Amazon for violating the patent (else you have no standing to challenge it), and (2) pay the expense of multi-year court battles with practically no hope of recouping your costs even if you win.

OTOH, I actually like the one-click patent even though I think it's a stupid and invalid patent. It prevents other online stores from putting in a button which can cause you to instantly buy something if you accidentally click it (this has happened to me on Amazon).

The person it's deriding gets to decide if it's offensive. That's kind of how it works. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Nigger is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Chink is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Redskin is a bad word. Etc etc etc... This is plain common sense, and everyone arguing against it is an ass.

I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.

The important thing is the intent of the person using the word. If the person is using it to denigrate someone or a group, it's offensive. If the person is using it out of ignorance or in an unrelated context, it's not offensive. The person feeling offended has nothing to do with it other than in the general social context that certain words are known to offend certain groups.

The problem comes about when the person using the word is using it to be offensive, but claims he's not. In that respect it's better to avoid using words known to be offensive. But it's just plain wrong to assume that any time an offensive word is used, that offense is intended.

You Ignorant Redneck Honkies. -- See what I did there? Doesn't seem offensive to ME... It's up to YOU to decide, because you're the ones I'm deriding.

When someone uses a derogatory word without intent to offend, and someone else is offended by the use of the word, it is a misunderstanding. Not an offense. However, in this case you clearly demonstrate that you knew the term could be offensive, and thus indict yourself that you wrote them with the intent to offend.

I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.

It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.

Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.

Some will call me a troll, but as a gamer I'm no longer interested in 4K video since I know Occulus Rift (and competing VR set) are coming.

Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?

You're making a fundamental error many people make when it comes to display resolution. What matters isn't resolution or pixels per inch. It's pixels per degree. Angular resolution, not linear resolution.

I've got a 1080p projector. When I project a 20 ft image onto a wall 10 ft away, the pixels are quite obvious and I wish I had a 4k projector. If I move back to 20 ft away from the wall, the image becomes acceptable again. It's the angle of view that matters not the size or resolution. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with 1 arc-minute separation. So within one degree (60 arc-minutes) you'd need 120 pixels to fool 20/20 vision.

This is where the 300 dpi standard comes from. Viewed from 2 ft away, one inch covers just about 2.5 degrees, which is 150 arc-minutes, which can be fully resolved with 300 dots. So for a printout viewed from 2 ft away, you want about 300 dpi to match 20/20 vision. If it's not necessary to perfectly fool the eye, you can cut this requirement to about half.

In terms of Occulus Rift, a 1080p screen is 2203 pixels diagonal, so this corresponds to 18.4 degrees to fool 20/20 vision, 39 degrees to be adequate. If you want your VR display to look decent while covering a substantially wider angle of view than 39 degrees, you will want better than 1080p resolution. I'm gonna go out on a limb, and predict that most people will want more than a 39 degree field of view in their VR headset.

That actually gets to the real heart of the matter. Going after Google for this or the European right to be forgotten thing is shooting the messenger. Google doesn't actually host the content in question, and removing it from their index doesn't actually make the content disappear. The only reason it ranked highly in a Google search is because lots of websites linked to it, so removing it from Google's index won't stop people from getting to the info via the intermediary sites. It is literally like sticking your head in the sand in hopes it'll make the bad thing go away.

Starbuck's CEO Schultz is a smart cookie. He realizes while raising the minimum wage will ameliorate the problem, it is ultimately not a solution. Wages for low-skill jobs are low because of simple supply/demand economics. Too many unskilled workers + not enough jobs for them = low wages for them.

Schultz recognizes that the ultimate solution is to change this supply/demand balance. Technological progress means low-skilled jobs are disappearing, so the only avenue available is to reduce the number of unskilled workers. We need to educate them so that they are no longer unskilled or low-skilled.

So the whole point of this program is to educate people in a medium-skill or high-skill job. That way they are able to get a better, higher-paying job, removing themselves from the supply of unskilled workers, thus helping to naturally increase wages for unskilled workers.

The point of this program is not to let you get a degree in something you think is "fun" or "always wanted to do" with zero regard for its applicability or usefulness to society (the mistake most kids make when their parents are paying for their education). You're supposed to study so you can get a job which takes some skill, but is readily available and useful to society, and hopefully you enjoy doing.

You see, while raising the minimum wage alters the income distribution, it is a zero-sum proposition (possibly even negative-sum, as it eliminates some low-end jobs). It does not increase the net productivity of the population, so it is merely dividing the pie a different way. OTOH, educating people for a higher-skill job increases their productivity - it makes the pie bigger, and is thus the preferable solution.

I've stopped buying consumer electronics that take the markedly ANTI-consumer and needless action of making non-removable batteries.

That was true about 10 years ago, but I don't think it's true anymore.

• 10 years ago, devices typically used the full capacity of the battery and topped off when full. Consequently it would wear out quicker. After a year of use, it would probably only hold half the charge it did new. After 3 years it would probably only last 5-15 minutes. Being able to replace the battery was important then for the longevity of the device. Today most manufacturers do not use the battery's full capacity. They typically allow it to be charged only to 90% of real max capacity (the software just reports this as 100%), and discharged to 10% (reported by the software as 0%). The batteries on all my newer devices which are 3-5 years old are still lasting 70%-90% as long as they did new.
• 10 years ago, laptop batteries in particular would only last 1.5-2.5 hours on a charge. Anything over 3 hours was considered long. Today, 4-5 hours is typical, and many will operate 6-10 hours. So there's less need to have a second spare battery you can swap in.

I empathize with those whose usage patterns fall outside of these cases, and who could really use a second battery to swap in. But in general I think the extra capacity and smaller size that comes from molding the battery to fit in limited space and not having to encase the battery in a protective plastic housing are a worthwhile tradeoff. Bear in mind that when user-replaceable batteries were common, they were substantially overpriced and probably represented the biggest rip-off in the tech market after $100 for an extra 16 GB of flash memory.

In the end, if the game plays out correctly, low income individuals will still payer higher taxes, large companies will pay less taxes, but it will sound a lot like the opposite is occurring. You'll be happy and the economy will be slightly less screwed than if we listened to you and made companies actually pay 30% - 40% of their income directly to the treasury trough.

Taxing corporations doesn't really gain you anything. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to individuals, they give up x% of their money to the government. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to corporations, the people still give up x% of their money to the government, just in the form of higher prices and lower wages. Income (money) is just a representation of productivity, and the only source of productivity is people. Corporations are just organizational groupings of people. Remove the people and the corporation's productivity is zero.

There are good reasons to tax corporations - excise taxes to pay for regulation enforcement, VATs to discourage middlemen, etc., and in this particular case to prevent shifting of tax revenue out of countries where the purchase transactions were actually made. But taxing corporations doesn't magically increase government revenue or the purchasing power of individuals. Corporate taxes are still paid for entirely by you and me - we just pay them indirectly via higher prices and lower wages, instead of directly to the government.