They would still have to maintain it, but they wouldn't need to add features. If they coded it well enough in the first place, that could be one person putting in 8 hours a month on the highest-priority issues in the backlog.
EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built in reading order.
I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.
This makes no sense to me. EPUB is basically HTML in a ZIP container with mandatory included files. If you already have a full-blown web browser, and a ZIP library at hand, naively rendering EPUB pages by unzipping to temp files and tweaking the URI resolver is an easy addition. If you already have a full-blown web browser that already renders EPUB pages better than a lot of EPUB-specific reader programs, removing that support is doing work to reduce functionality.
Ultrasonic/cavitation humidifiers create water droplet mists without a heated element. A piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer membrane vibrates faster than the speed of sound in water, and cavitation bubbles form that throw mist droplets into the air when they implode at the surface.
Propylene glycol (0.042 Pa-s) and glycerin (1.412 Pa-s) are more viscous than water (0.001 Pa-s). But glycerol is essentially non-volatile below 310K, and the vapor pressure of propylene glycol is less than 1% that of water. But if you're not depending on heat-vaporizing the carrier solution, you could add water to make it cold-mistable by ultrasonic cavitation. Both of the usual bases are miscible in water. Your cold-mist e-juice would not be compatible with regular vaporizers.
Maybe an impeller recirculating the fluid through a venturi could also lower the local pressure enough to help induce cavitation. I'm not sure how a laser would help, though.
The "fire in a crowded theater" metaphor is always mentioned in a discussion of free speech. It's like Godwin's Law. I'm tired of it.
You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.
It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.
8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.
Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.
The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.
The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.
And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.
It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.
That's just it. They require you to say how much it was worth when you got it.
But they really have no way to know whether you are lying. As a result, people lie about the value of traded goods, or art, or land properties, or unlisted financial instruments, to reduce the amount of income tax they purportedly owe. This is a major tax-evasion (not avoiding) and/or money-laundering loophole employed by the rich, especially when employing art and real estate, which may be justifiably non-comparable to similar goods due to uniqueness.
A law-obeying person would liquidate enough of the subjective-value goods to pay income tax at the maximum withholding rate at the time of receipt, and send that amount to the IRS at the end of the quarter, then claiming a refund from that amount with their return at the end of the year.
A practical, law-breaking person would just keep their mouth shut about it, and allow the IRS to claim it was income that had value, and only pay taxes on it (or dispute the amount demanded) if the IRS actually demanded an amount.
The enforcement on Bitcoin-holders is not to raise revenue in any meaningful sense. It is to discourage use of cryptocurrencies as a means of tax evasion--probably because middle-class people could make use of it. With respect to the means employed by the rich to evade and avoid taxes, an equivalent effort would likely return 1000 times greater rewards.
The problem there is that meat doesn't come in dollars; it comes in kilograms.
If you are paid in meat, you get something like 100 kg of pre-formed frozen ground beef patties. That doesn't have a dollar value unless you can find a buyer for it. Which is pretty easy to do if it's a commodity.
So let's try a more broken example. You get paid in sandstone triangular prisms machined to be 31 mm on the two longer sides, 19 mm on the short side, and 9mm in height. These then have a square(-ish) hole drilled in them, slightly off center, and then the sides are grooved, and the faces engraved. These triangles are called fubaar.
Fubaar have no fixed exchange rate with the dollar. For a job, you are paid 1000 fubaar. The value of a fubaar is very stable. One has been able to purchase the traditional formal attire of Barbazia for exactly 5 fubaar, for over 800 years. But you can't buy much with them on the international market except quuxfruit--which bruises easily, and smells like durian crossed with feet after four days.
At the end of the year, I could report that I earned 1000 fubaar since last year, and mail about 250 of them to the treasury. It's not my problem if the government can't convert them to dollars. They can go buy quuxfruit with it. But the treasury won't take anything but dollars. My only recourse is to say the fubaar represent $0 in income, because they really are essentially worth $0, having no inherent value.
The problem is that the gov't is levying taxes in dollars on income that is not dollars, and exporting the inconvenience of conversion to those least able to get a good conversion rate. Congress has the enumerated power to regulate the value of foreign coin. Why not use it? The Treasury also has the ability to accept foreign coin. For a good length of US history, much commerce was conducted in Spanish silver dollars, not US-minted coin. Those were acceptable for payment of taxes.
Only to the extent that the relationship between race and culture is causative rather than correlative.
If forced at gunpoint to trust one person in my supply chain, I would instantly choose the Taiwanese-American in San Jose over the mainland-Chinese in Shenzhen, every time. Likewise, I think exactly the same Indian employee will be more productive if physically transplanted to Silicon Valley and surrounded by assimilated Indian-Americans than if set up in an office in Bangalore surrounded at all times by other Indians and Indian businesses. And equally likewise, I have noted a large difference in my own work productivity doing similar tasks under different employers, or even in different work groups under the same employer.
So it isn't even national culture, racial culture, or regional culture, but also corporate culture. Breaking news on the Obvious Channel: social apes found to be heavily influenced by their peers.
Ancestor post was obliquely referring to the oft-reported tendency of mainland-Chinese manufacturers to try to cheat their customers. They have been caught copying protected or trade-secret IP, counterfeiting, substituting cheaper out-of-spec parts, and inserting hidden hardware backdoors. Outside of China, engineering/construction companies tend to import Chinese subcontractors rather than use any local labor. That's all just PRC-Chinese business culture. If you pluck individual employees out of a Chinese firm, and hire them into a multinational based out of another country, they will be perfectly fine, aside from the slightly elevated possibility that PRC intelligence will aggressively recruit them as an asset to steal exploitable business secrets. If you can manage to pull everyone they care about out of the reach of the PRC, they will likely be a great investment for you.
Clearly, the national-political-business culture of mainland PRC China is hostile to businesses that have significant interests outside of China. The government there is racist, controlling, and mercantilist-protectionist, and the businesses with a physical presence have to fit in to that culture in order to exist, along with the traditional system of guanxi social capital. It makes them difficult to work with, but as long as the price is right, it's still worth it to try. You just don't give them access to any secrets, and make sure your QA department is full of no-nonsense hardasses. And as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, that means you may have to measure total mass and moment of inertia around multiple rotational axes in order to find any unauthorized modifications that might expose you to company-bankrupting liability in your business culture. You can't "trust, but verify"; you might just have to check every unit of every shipment.
As for culture culture--wushu martial arts, the action movies including it, silk, noodles, jadeite carvings, fine porcelain, traditional architecture, religions, herbalism, the woo-woo pseudo-religion attached to the medicine traditions, etc.--Chinese culture is indisputably great, especially considering that it's what's left after the PRC government tried to annihilate most of it as part of their revolution.
Pure water boils at 100 ºC, in an environment at standard temperature and pressure, with sufficient vapor bubble nucleation sites.
If you're a cook, you don't really need to know all that, because you either live up in the mountains (at lower pressure) or you don't. You either have hard water (with more dissolved ions) or you don't. And your pots are never scrubbed perfectly clean.
Suppose that in a few centuries, stairs will have to account for different numbers of legs, or wheels, or different foot types, or varying amounts of gravity, or track gauge, or crystal habit, or effect on convection and ventilation, or whether classical Earth-standard humans will ever be expected to use them.
If you smash a salt crystal with a hammer, all the resulting pieces end up with equal charges of anions and cations, so were any ionic bonds really broken?
That covalent bonds are broken seems obvious if you ditch the paper and cut through a sheet of long-chain polyethylene. The scissors don't just stop if they're about to break a polymer chain.
Liquid water has a vapor pressure, dependent mostly on temperature. When this vapor pressure exceeds the partial pressure of the water in the gas phase, water crosses the phase barrier. This is how you can have trace measurements of water vapor in (1 bar) air that is cooler than 100 degC.
Some volatile chemicals--such as the acetone in nail polish remover--are detectable as odors even when their temperature is well below their boiling point. This is the liquid phase establishing an equilibrium with the gas phase at that temperature. The most energetic molecules in the liquid escape into the gas (cooling the liquid in the process).
Imagine a lake in a desert. The maximum daytime temperature in that desert is 40 degC, well below the boiling point of 100 degC. The lake has no outflows. Over the course of a month, the lake disappears. Where did the water go? It evaporated, and the water in the gas phase blew away and was replaced by dry air, thus allowing more of the liquid water to evaporate. If you put an airtight dome over it, the lake would stay put, and the air in the dome would get very humid. You would probably also be able to see condensation on its walls, as the vapor movement continuously transfers heat from the lake to the dome.
The dicamba is likely evaporating from the soil into air with no gaseous dicamba in it, blowing to adjacent fields, and the plants are uptaking it as a gas via their normal respiration. No condensation is required, for the same reason that plants don't eat dry ice to get their CO2. Once inside the plant, the vapor dicamba is free to dissolve into the plant's own water. It is not necessary for it to dissolve in water outside the plant to be taken up by the roots. Those plant cells might not have a lot of water in them, or they might be filled to bursting with it. Plants have to deal with deluge and drought differently than we animals do.
The questions everyone have to ask are what concentration of dicamba is damaging to the plant, and what is the exact relationship between wind, distance, ambient moisture, and concentration? By calculating from the vapor pressure vs temperature of the chemical, and solubility, you should be able to draw a plume-shaped area on a map that shows where dicamba-vulnerable plants will die after an application. If plants outside that area die, something in your model is wrong. And people are claiming that plants outside the area are dying. What part of the model is wrong? Based on the article, it seems like the volatility is off.
You can discuss your own observations without ever referring to your conversation with the housekeeper, or even admitting that a conversation happened.
This is why US government employees and employees of contractors get mandatory training in how to recognize human trafficking.
In this situation, at the very minimum, you need to ask "Do you feel your employer treats you fairly? I will keep your answer confidential."
If the answer is "yes", then your moral obligation is satisfied. If the answer is "no", you may have to dig down through "uncomfortable situation," potentially to "friendship-ending argument about unethical behavior."
Of course no one pays that much, directly. 90% of America cannot afford that all at once.
So the trick is to get Americans to pay $10/pill at the point of purchase, and an additional $3 taken out of every paycheck, before taxes, whether they get the pill or not.
The US healthcare system is a cesspool of interlocking scams and cons. Those who genuinely want people to be healthy, and for sick people to get well, are constantly at war with those who operate under the assumption that a person will hand over everything they own (and maybe even some stuff that other people own) for a decent chance at not dying before they're ready to go--and then still charge a little extra to help someone die when they are ready.
The pill is $5 in Africa, because it costs less than $5 to sell it in Africa. It costs $100 in the US because some Americans can afford to pay that much for one pill, and the rest can use manufacturers' coupons or collectively-bargained pricing agreements to pay less.
Oversight, regulation, and certification is what prevents some applecart-upsetter from barging in to the market, charging $12/pill without any haggling. Instead, the incumbents can be tipped off by captured regulators that someone who won't play ball is on his way, so they can temporarily lower their price to $5/pill until the new jerk runs out of funding and dies. Then it's back to $100/pill. Heck, make it $1500/pill, pour encourager les autres.
People like to punish the messenger bearing bad news, for some bizarre reason.
American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected."
And the patient blames him for the injury.
All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now.
This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future.
I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time.
In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.
I read it again. What you may not realize is that people with many friends and people with few or none have different meanings for that word.
He may simply be describing the two people that would actually notice if he vanished from the face of the planet as his friends because that is the closest thing he has to one.
It's fine to wash dishes if you need money, but if he ever wants a better life for himself, putting up with the annoyances of people who are not like you is a skill that must be both learned and practiced. Introverts, especially extreme loner hermits, have to sacrifice some of their essential spiritual essence to the vampiric extroverts occasionally, in order to have a better quality of being left the hell alone the rest of the time.
A guy like this really needs a mediator to introduce him to more outgoing types, let them have a taste, and then protect him before they scare him back into the shell. It's very unlikely he could do it alone.
Especially since he is almost always technically correct--the best kind of correct.
What OpenBSD foundation really needs is a tactful and charismatic person to act as firewall and pf between Theo and the people with overflowing bank accounts, who are more accustomed to dealing with obsequious salesdroids than a person who is not only ten times smarter than their entire golf group put together, but also so aware of it that he cannot hide how much of a waste of time it is for him to suck up to any one of them, no matter how much he could use the cash.
Do you think Apple would have gone anywhere if Wozniak was the one talking to all the investors?
EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built in reading order.
I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.