The incentive package Nevada offered Tesla includes $8 million in discounted electricity rates. So it's definitely a net-zero thing, not off-grid. In fact I'm still trying to figure out if it's net-zero in electrical production, or net-zero in electricity cost (i.e. sell solar to the grid during the day when rates are high, buy it back at night when rates are lower).

If you do it yourself, make sure you use a VCR with S-Video output. The regular composite cables (red, white, yellow) combines the chroma (color) and luminance (brightness) into one signal. That means boundary with a high brightness contrast will bleed into the color (and vice versa) and you'll get marching ants. S-Video encodes these two signals separately and eliminates that particular problem. The biggest quality improvement I saw while encoding VHS and Hi-8 tapes myself came from switching to S-Video cables.

For those who don't know how DMCA safe harbor provisions work, it protects a web site from liability if one of its users should violate copyright on it. e.g. Someone uploads a copyright movie to YouTube, and the safe harbor provision protects YouTube from being sued by the studios for copyright infringement. However, in order to qualify for the safe harbor provision, the site has to take certain measures. Most notably, they have to respond to those DMCA takedown notices within a reasonable timeframe by either taking the alleged infringing work down (and informing the user why and how to issue a challege), or with a response explaining why they're not taking it down. If they fail to do this, they become monetarily liable for the copyright infringement of their users.

Regardless of your opinion on celebrities, taking nude photos of yourself, cloud storage, porn, or hacking, this is pretty clearly a copyright violation. The copyright on the photos belong to the celebrities who took them, and they have sole, exclusive control over distribution in any country which is a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to register a copyright for a work to be copyrighted. Any copyrightable work you create is automatically copyrighted. The only thing registering does is raise the damage ceiling in a lawsuit (without registration you can only collect damages suffered; with registration the limit is $200,000 per infringed work). So Reddit may have been premature in quashing the subreddit before they got a DMCA notice, but it was inevitable they were going to get one and they would've had to quash it anyway.

I'd be happy if airlines made seats non-reclinable since the few degrees you get is pretty much useless;

Yeah, most of the time I don't even recline my seat. And when I do, it's usually because the person in front has reclined theirs, putting the video screen too close to my face for comfort.

Anyhow, if you want a few extra inches of legroom and don't care about reclining seats, check in early and get the emergency exit row seats. Because they're an egress route they need a lot of space between the seats to allow passengers to file out quickly, and the seats can't recline. Airlines generally can't pre-book those because they have to see you in person to verify that you're able to open the emergency exit seat (about 40-50 lbs). A few of them have started policies where frequent fliers (who've been allowed to use those seats before) can pre-book them.

Judging by images like these, today's business class is pretty much what economy class used to be in the 70s.

Hoo boy. Do you have any idea how much more expensive flying was in the 1970s, before deregulation?

In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (who worked with Senator Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s) wrote:
"In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268."

Of course that factoid cherry picked the 1974 fare to coincide with the Arab oil embargo. But current oil prices are actually higher in inflation-adjusted dollars, and a cheap ticket between LA and NY is still around $350.

Some argue that flying has become too cheap. I beg to disagree: flying in a humane manner has not become cheaper, it's just that you'd have to book business class nowadays.

Of course that's exactly what happened. Because back when the LGA-LAX ticket cost $1442, very few people flew. The fundamentals of weight on an airplane and fuel use means the more people you can squeeze on a plane, the cheaper it is (per seat) to operate. So when federal regulation fixed the lowest airline price at $1442 making it inaccessible to the vast majority of people, the planes were emptier and the airlines could get away with fewer seats.

Air travel is in the state it's currently in because passengers prioritized lower fares over seating space, and the airlines found a way to deliver upon passenger desires. If passengers had demanded lush, business-class seating as you suggest, then that's what airlines would have delivered. Most of the seats on airplanes would be business-class sized, and a LGA-LAX ticket would still be around $1442 (actually, probably higher since current real oil prices are higher than in 1974).

i.e. It's not that current seating is "inhumane", it's that your definition of "humane" differs from what the vast majority of people buying airline tickets consider to be acceptable. Many airlines have premium economy seats offering an extra 5-6 inches of legroom at a higher price. A few people are willing to pay for those, but not many. If more people were wiling to pay for those bigger seats, the airlines would put more of them in - unless you're a monopoly, you always make more money giving people what they want.

The fundamental problem with air travel is that it's too fast. People look at that tiny seat and figure they can deal with it for a few hours. If air travel were slower and you were stuck in that seat for a day or two, people would demand more room.

Basically they're providing insurance that pays out based on the odds that you don't get into a college they say you can get into. The fee they charge is the premium for that insurance. It doesn't affect your odds of getting accepted in any way compared to if you'd applied on your own. The only thing the information they provide you may change is which schools you decide to apply to. It's actually a pretty clever way to monetize on the risk and uncertainty of applying to colleges, though I suspect the steep price to play will discourage most applicants.

To put it another way - they're letting you place bets on whether you'll be rejected by a school. And like all good bookies, they've crunched the numbers to make sure that statistically they come out ahead. But based on those odds they've crunched, you can drop or add schools you apply to to increase your ratio of acceptances to rejections, making it a marginally useful service whereas just plain gambling would mean on average the client loses.

Me: Hi. I switched to Verizon, cancel my service
Comcast: Why do you want to cancel?

Yeah. Unfortunately that doesn't work if you're part of the huge chunk of the population whose only choices for Internet are a single cable company (hopefully not Comcast), 1.5 or 3.0 Mbps DSL, or wireless.

The idea of municipal governments granting cable monopolies was founded on good intentions. By holding out the carrot of a monopoly, they got the cable companies to agree to concessions like providing service to remote and poor areas which otherwise would've been tagged as uneconomical and ignored. But at this point I think we can all agree that the drawbacks of these monopolies far, far outweigh the benefits. They either need to be banned outright, or treated like the other government-granted monopolies - utilities whose rates and service are carefully monitored by a public utilities commission.

Merriam Webster
transitive verb
2: to put an end to scotched rumors of a military takeover>

Oxford
verb
1 [with object] Decisively put an end to: a spokesman has scotched the rumours

The problem is the way "Scotch" used in the headline, it can be either a verb or an adjective. This is compounded by "Court" also working as either a verb or an adjective. I was scratching my head for a minute trying to figure out why it was worth forging documents intended to court a review of an alcoholic drink.

The USPTO really needs to insist that patents be for an implementation of an idea, not the general concept. That was the problem with the Wright Brothers' patent - it basically covered the concept of moving surfaces as flight controls, even though the Wright Brothers' implementation via wing warping was something nobody else did nor does today. It hindered U.S. development of aircraft enough that by the time WWI came about, the U.S. was technologically behind the rest of the world partly because of the patent.

Likewise, if Bezos wants to patent an implementation of landing a rocket at sea, by all means he should be free to do so. But he should not be able to patent the concept of landing a rocket at sea.

For this solution to work, not only do you need to implement a new HTML element and get the servers and browsers to support it, people uploading photos (or their servers) need to generate and store multiple size versions of the same pic.

Kodak pretty much solved this problem in the 1990s with their ill-fated Photo CD format. JPEG encodes pictures in sequential 8x8 pixel blocks. So once you set the image size and encoding quality (which determines files size), everything from that point on is committed to those settings. By contrast, Photo CD encoded a low-res Base version of the picture (512x768). A double-resolution version (1024x1536) called 4 Base is then created by doubling the size of the base and storing the (compressed) delta from that and the resized original photo. The process is repeated for 16 Base (2048x3072).

Essentially, whereas JPEG stores the picture in sequential translated blocks, Photo CD stores the picture in zoomed blocks - kinda like a fractal. If you want the low-res Base version of the picture, you only have to read the first part of the image file. If you want the med-res 4 Base version, you read further along the image file. If you want the high-res 16 Base version, you read the entire image file. (Speaking of which, there was a fractal-based compression algorithm. But the licensing fees were so onerous it never went anywhere.)

Despite Kodak's eventual demise, they were at the forefront of digital imaging (why they held on as long as they did - they owned most of the digital photography patents). And their engineers put a lot of time and thought into the Photo CD format and future-proofing it.

because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup).

I realize this is a common tenet of anti-farm conglomerate arguments, and I am all against farm conglomerates. But this tidbit simply isn't true. HFCS is not mostly fructose as the name implies. The most common forms used in soft drinks and processed foods are 55% fructose, 42% glucose. Or 42% fructose, 53% glucose. Your body breaks down sucrose (e.g. natural cane sugar) into 50% fructose, 50% glucose. So for all intents and purposes they're the same thing once your body gets a hold of them.

It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger percentage of fructose than normal corn syrup, which is mostly glucose.

And while we're on the topic, carbs are just lots of sugars linked together into a longer molecule. Heck, wood/cellulose is just lots of sugars linked together (in a form which is extremely difficult for animals to break down; ruminants do it by chewing it twice and digesting it 4 times, termites do it with the assistance of a special kind of bacteria in their gut). It is extremely difficult to avoid sugars in your diet even if you eat no simple or processed sugars. Bread is sugar. Rice is sugar. Noodles are sugar. Potatoes are sugar. So it's quite misleading to blame things on the "vast amounts of sugar" in processed foods. (Unless you're talking at the caloric level, and taking into account all forms of sugar like starches and carbohydrates.)

I suspect that's why the low-carb diet trumped the low-fat diet. Those on the low-carb diet were restricting their intake of sugar (in the form of carbs), while in the back of their minds they were conscious about avoiding too much fat. Those on the low-fat diet figured since they were avoiding fat, everything was ok so they piled on the carbs.

You want to keep spent fuel. It's not really "waste" - the anti-nuclear lobby just likes to call it that to hype up opposition. Current light water reactor designs use only about 5% of the U-235 in the fuel rods, and only about 1% of the total energy extractable from the uranium. That's why spent fuel remains "hot" for so long - the vast majority of the energy it contains is still there, and is emitted over time as radioactive energy as it decays.

So in essence, the "waste" is really fuel containing 100x as much energy as you've already extracted from it. If you send it to a breeder reactor, it can use the "waste" as fuel thus extracting more energy. The "waste" from that process converts it into a form which light water reactors can use again as fuel. You extract a much larger fraction of the energy from the original uranium, and the end product of all this would only remain "hot" for a few centuries instead of dozens of millenia.

"OMG - this solves the nuclear waste problem! Why aren't we doing this?" Unfortunately, breeder reactors create weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. That's the only reason we don't do it - it's a purely political reason, not technical. President Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. in the interest of non-proliferation (the military still can and does use them).

I won't judge whether Carter made the correct call - that's a political decision. But you can see why you do not want to be selling spent fuel to a country you frequently butt heads with on the geopolitical arena. First, you're selling them cheap energy (that we ourselves choose not to tap for political reasons). Second, you're selling them the means to make more nukes.

While I generally agree with you that this judge's order is silly, I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it out to be. If you base jurisdiction over the data entirely upon where the data is stored, then multi-national corporations will start criss-crossing their data storage. e.g. Data for their European operations gets stored in the U.S. Data for their U.S. operations gets stored in Europe.

If the U.S. government investigates Microsoft demanding they turn over info about their U.S. operations, Microsoft will say sorry, that data is stored in Europe. The U.S. will then have to go through the European legal system to get their hands on their data. Same if Europe asks for data on Microsoft's European operations. Microsoft says it's stored in the U.S. And they have to petition the U.S. government before they can get their hands on the data. The company gets double-protection - in order for a government to subpoena any corporate data, they have to first clear it with their court system, then clear it with the court system of the country where the data is stored. Both countries' courts have to agree to release the data before it actually gets released.

I don't know what the solution is. But it's not as simple as you're making it out to be. The relevance of the data to the country requesting it somehow needs to be taken into account.

Put another way, if autonomous cars started off working on 0% of roads and you want them to eventually work on 100% of roads, well somewhere in between you have to pass through 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90%. It's rather disingenuous to criticize them for not getting all the way to 100% in one fell swoop. I'm shopping for a new car right now, and the new autonomous-like features like adaptive cruise control, lane change assist, and parking assist are really nice (haven't gotten to play with lane departure warning or assist yet). By themselves, no they don't make a 100% autonomous car. But each gets you a small fraction of the way there.

It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.

I see that problem mostly being attacked from the opposite direction. With cars getting radar and proximity sensors, and being able to electronically communicate their intent with each other before actually moving, you reduce the need for the AI to improvise. If an autonomous car wants to pull in front of your car, the two car AIs will communicate it with each other and work out a plan to make it happen before changing lanes. No improvisation required. Sure you might get the stray deer hopping through traffic that requires a human to take control and improvise. But the vast majority of improvisation situations can be eliminated before they ever happen with better communication. That is after all the whole idea behind brake lights and turn signals - to allow you to communicate your intent to the drivers behind/beside you so they don't have to improvise in response to your sudden moves.

all taxes have to be included in prices

It's the government's fault that U.S. companies don't do that, not companies'. Most countries have a single unified tax structure. A store can set a price, and advertise that price inclusive of taxes nationwide.

The U.S. is an amalgam of tax-governing bodies. The States can set their own sales tax. The counties can set their own sales tax. The cities can set their own sales tax. Consequently, the sales tax rate differs, sometimes from city to city. A store sets a price and advertises that price + taxes, it's correct for one locale, incorrect everywhere else. The only way to advertise a "correct" price is without taxes. Not because the price varies or because they're trying to hide the final price from you, but because the tax rate varies.

There are currently close to 10,000 different sales tax rates in the U.S. With more states trying to impose sales tax on Internet purchases, it's actually becoming a barrier to entry for small businesses trying to start up Internet sales. The sales tax rates can change at any time if some local governing body decides to change it, so you have to either watch daily for new tax rate changes, or hire someone to do it for you (but you still have to pay if they make a mistake). Amazon tried to harmonize sales taxes in the U.S. because of this, but the States were more interested in casting it as "protecting brick and mortar stores from unfair Internet competition" than addressing the real problem.

The best solution (other than a harmonized sales tax) would be if the Federal government set up a website listing the ~10,000 different tax rates, and forced states and local governments to update their entry in the site before a sales tax rate was "official". Businesses could then just download all the different tax rates every night and be sure they're charging the correct sales tax.

and if you buy something you have all kinds of rights (two week period to send stuff back/cancel contracts

That's the case for nearly everything in the U.S. too. In fact most shops have 30-90 day return policies.

two year warranty on physical items and such) that cannot be taken away by ToSs.

Warranties are just insurance policies. Just because the law forces companies to provide them to everyone does not mean they're free. Their cost is rolled into the price of the item you're buying.

In general, insurance is not worth it (otherwise someone wouldn't be selling it to you). It makes sense to insure items whose prices are so high it'd be difficult for you to replace (e.g. cars, houses, maybe appliances depending on your income level). But for items costing a few hundreds of dollars or less, you actually save money by just replacing the things which break rather than taking out an insurance policy/requiring a warranty for them. This is why larger companies and organizations self-insure rather than buying insurance for things like mailed packages and fleet cars. You'll notice the more expensive items like large appliances and cars already come with multi-year warranties exceeding what's required by EU law. That's because being an insurance policy on something that's difficult for the buyer to afford to replace, it's additional profit for the manufacturer to provide the 5- or 10-year warranty and raise the price accordingly.

The one place warranties do help is setting a baseline for product durability. i.e. It weeds out products which are so shabbily made it'll break after a few months. The cost of providing warranty service is so high the manufacturer goes back and redesigns the product to be more durable. At least usually that's how it works. Sometimes it doesn't (e.g. hard drives, where manufacturers can refurbish enough drives returned under warranty to replace new drives which fail during their warranty period). But overall, very few products I've encountered are that shabbily made (in fact the only one I can think of was a portable DVD player made by a company which went bankrupt anyway a few months later, so I would've been out the warranty even if I'd bought it in the EU).