THIS is one of the most interesting points in the comparison. Why is LLVM replacing GCC? Is it technically superior, is it because of licensing differences, etc? And if it's technically superior, why is that? Because there was less legacy, because the maintainers/developers were better/had fewer internal issues, or because the license encouraged *more* contribution?
You''ll likely get a pile of different answers, because it is a large, complex project. I think all of these are factors:
LLVM/clang do not attempt to support as wide a range of platforms, instead focusing on excellence on the most popular platforms.
LLVM/clang were able to learn from those who came before, and start with a superior design. Any existing project would have more trouble adapting their architecture.
Apple had a huge monetary incentive (increasing their market share primarily, but also their cut of app store sales) to insure a vibrant ecosystem. That means attracting developers, which in turn means giving them high quality tools. Thus Apple invested a lot of money in the tools, LLVM in this case.
The license allows them to lean on the community, while keeping their own extensions secret. They can get the community to maintain things they don't care about being out in the open, while keeping their private bits in house and not having to disclose them.
To me, the last is really the only one that is directly affected by the license issue. However, by the license tilting that one issue, it also tilts where the money goes from the previous line.
But it's not black and white. Both licenses are trying to influence people to make particular choices, and in fact choices that are more similar than different. They have each been successful in different ways as a result. I think what gets a lot of the non-GNU folks annoyed is that the GNU folks seem to think their way should be dominate; that the best world is a 100% GNU world. There are those of us who don't think proprietary software is always evil, or that other licenses don't have important features for particular niches. It leaves the impression of zealotry, rather than rational believe in a better solution.
I was imprecise, we don't have source code to Xcode, including any local-to-apple extensions they have added on to LLVM (or even clang). It's believed Apple has customizations and changes to LLVM/clang that have not been contributed back upstream.
It turns out in this particular case the binary blob can be had for free in some cases. Both licenses allow for a plain binary distribution, so that part is not really relevant to this discussion.
The GPL is not about getting more contributors. The GPL is about eliminating proprietary software.
I believe these concepts are more related than you think, because if there was no proprietary software than everyone would be contributing their ideas to open-source software.
However if the goal is eliminating proprietary software then GNU might as well give up and go home now. History is littered with folks who tried to tell other people how to live their lives, and on balance almost all of them turn out pretty poorly. The more they tried to control, the more poorly in the end.
Imposing one software development model on the world is Totalitarianism, not Freedom.
My statement was aimed at the intellectual contributions, measured in lines of code and inventive ideas. Unfortunately that has almost no correlation to the popularity, that is the number of users of the software. They are both interesting measures, but I feel like by moving to the number of installed units you have changed the subject from the original discussion which revolved around getting contributions based on development license.
I will also point out that while Linux may dwarf OpenBSD (noting you cherry picked all of Linux against a single BSD distribution), OS X dwarfs Linux in deployed units, and includes BSD and BSD-like kernel licensed code having a history in FreeBSD and MACH.
So, yeh, the two can coexist, but the GPL does a lot more to ensure that we have great free software in the future. If you think that's a good thing, then use the GPL.
I think that's a debatable point, and that neither side has the high ground.
The GPL argument is that anyone who produces a derivative work must contribute back to the project, and thus the GPL generates more contributors.
The BSD argument is that there will always be people who create a non-free option, and if that is done by extending open-source the community may get some, if not all benefit from them.
I tend to think the second argument is better. Relevant to this discussion, Apple has taken free software like LLVM and turned it into something they package up in proprietary form (Xcode). Sure, we don't have all of Xcode for free, but then that was never an option. Apple was going to make that proprietary no matter what. However, there were parts of it Apple saw value in having open source, and getting a larger community, and in not being the long term maintainer, so they had their engineers do work on it and contribute those parts back to the community. That's part of why LLVM is better than gcc today. If LLVM had not been under a BSD license they wouldn't have used GCC, it's corporate poison, they would have rather licensed Intel's C compiler or something and the community would have gotten absolutely nothing.
The GPL is all or nothing, and the GPL community often gets absolutely nothing by insisting on all.
More importantly, if it's ok for the US to spy on China, then it's A-Ok for China to spy on the US. Right?
Good thing none of our electrics are made in a country that might want to spy on us and controls industry so they can hide spy tech inside of it easily. Wait, uh, oops.
I hope you're right about how it works, but I think for the first time in history technology is putting people out of work faster than new jobs can be created. If so, that problem will have to be address, but I have no idea how.
Your recourse is to not buy that thing that lacks source, regardless of license.
If LLVM (or some viable BSD licensed thing) did not exist these companies wouldn't flock to GNU, they would rather flock to Intel, Microsoft, or a host of others that will allow them to keep the technology from you.
The only way the GNU folks get what they want (all code under GNU licenses) is if all other licenses cease to exist or are outlawed. Provided there is an alternative, from a private licensing deal, or BSD code, or whatever, folks will be able to avoid the GNU license and thus avoid sharing.
GNU: All or nothing. BSD: We'll take as much as we can get.
I worry about the future of your industry. While this model works great for iPhones, it doesn't work for heavier, lower margin commodities that need ship/rail/truck. However, with these small, high value, high profit items being taken out of your industry a significant profit driver will be removed, making it hard to stay in business with only the low margin stuff. But that gets back to the point of the original posting, in a lot of ways technology is unbalancing various parts of the supply chain, in ways I think many people don't even realize.
My last few Apple orders suggest otherwise. The tracking shows on a plane in Shenzhen China, a stop in Alaska to refuel and clear customs, a stop in Memphis to sort, and then on to my door. About 36 hours from when it left China it is in my hand.
There are also articles from credible sources that suggest Apple keeps 5.3 days of inventory on-hand, almost all in its retail stores, and that online orders ship directly from China in most cases. Other sources have documented a similar process, and suggested a Boeing 777 can carry 450,000 iPhones at a cost of $242,000 to charter, a whopping $0.56 per phone.
I'm going to bet most of your iPhones are destined for Best Buy, Wal Mart, AT&T, Radio Shack, or similar. Those vendors probably want Apple to bulk-ship into their normal supply chain where they can be sorted and intermixed with other goods going to those stores.
Let's say a company invents a proprietary bit of silicon, and wants a compiler for it. They may likely chose one that requires them not to spill the beans on their proprietary hardware in the process. So yes, it's true, you don't get the benefit of their "special sauce", but you were never going to get it anyway, so there is no loss.
However, that same company now has a lot of people using the code. It takes time and money to track separate changes, so if they find a bug in code not specific to their proprietary stuff they are likely to fix it, and submit it upstream so they don't have to maintain it going forward. That code will benefit you.
So basically, the people who find the GPL odious will never use gcc, and will find some alternative. Given those people have fully closed options (license Intel's compiler, or Microsoft's), or use something like LLVM. With the LLVM model they can submit fixes to their non-secret sauce upstream, as well as get others to help fix problems they find in the non-secret sauce part.
TL;DL, if you choose gcc or LLVM you're never getting their secret sauce, but if you choose LLVM you get more help on the non-secret sauce parts.
That is the real essence of the "BSD License" philosophy. You may or may not agree.
Actually I think if you look at the number of jobs created in those industries, and a realistic picture of the number of jobs they replaced in other industries the numbers are still significantly negative.
Let me use one simple example of the old way, compared to the new way, looking only at jobs in America. 20 years ago a product built in China would be shipped here on a boat. A team of 20 or so long shore man would unload the boat. 200 truck drivers would take the goods to an importers warehouse, employing another 200 to sort them. 5 customs inspectors would go over everything on the boat and make sure it passed muster. Another 200 drivers would set out across America to middle man warehouses. Each of those 200 warehouses would employ another 200 people to unload the trucks, break down boxes, sort, pick, and build new bundles, and send them to mom and pop stores in their area. Each mom and pop store would then employ 10-20 people to stay operating.
The new way is that your iPhone is ordered online by a computer run by a fraction of personafter all a sysadmin these days can take care of a few thousand machines. It is made in China and put on a FedEx plane. A team of 3 pilots brings it to the US. 1 customs inspector spot checks a few things match the computer generated invoice. Perhaps a hundred folks at the FedEx shipping center help sort that package. Another 3 pilots take it to the destination city, where 1 loader puts it on a truck for 1 driver to drop off at your door.
That is supply chain efficiency. No inventory in warehouses, which means no warehouses. No middle men. No or limited retail stores. Handle the package a minimum number of times, don't let it sit around collecting dust and depreciating while tying up capital. It's all driven by computerized supply chain management.
And this doesn't even address the issue that many of our goods are so cheap now as to be disposable, eliminating whole industries of repair. Remember when their used to be TV Repair Shops? Yeah, those all went away when a new TV became $200.
So yes, there are millions of new jobs, but there's also no shortage of information suggesting that workers are more productive with technology, which means one new worker can do the job of more than one old-school worker. That's net negative for the job market. When we were at full employment that was good, freeing up some people to do new things, but now that we're at less than full employment it could quickly become a downward spiral as there are no new jobs, people go unemployed, lose skills, and stop contributing to the economy.
Agree in part, and disagree in part. A popular "strong man" competition is to pull a train car, of course the rolling friction of steel wheels on steel rails is low, hence railroad's efficiency advantage in the first place. Quite frankly a Fiat 500 could pull the space shuttle or a 727, particularly if it was only one time, on flat ground. Heck PEOPLE can pull a plane. So these sort of events really don't speak to the durability of a truck.
At the same time, these vehicles often go 250,000 miles without major maintenance in construction fleet duty being hammerer every day. They are very well, if not over engineered, and incredibility capable vehicles.
I'm not sure where the AC lives, but in the US a standard drivers licenses works for any combination of truck and trailer under 26,000 lbs in all 50 states, provided it's for personal use and not for hire. For hire 10,000 lbs is typically the first graduation to the next class of license. Heck, in some states you can drive an 80,000 lbs semi for personal use on a regular license!
When 25% of the pins encrypt to one string, and 25% to another, we'll know they used a symmetric cipher with a fixed key, and that one batch is "0000" and one is "1234".
I'd really like to see an sTec enterprise grade drive tested. It will be over the price point, but probably not by all that much and I suspect will perform great.
The lowest is an SVT Raptor with only 980 lb payload capacity, while the highest is a staggering 3,120 lb for a regular cab, 4x2 with the heavy duty payload package and a v8 engine! That's a 1.5 ton capacity!
I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.
Multiplestoriescorroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.
This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.
As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:
So what happens to the plans that don't meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.
What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?
One example: the "Go Blue Health Services Card'' for which cancer survivor Donnamarie Palin of New Port Richey has paid $79 a month. For that, she gets $50 toward each primary care doctor visit, $15 toward each drug — but zero coverage for big-ticket items like hospital stays.
Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.
But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.
Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but o
I've had the unpleasant opportunities to watch a number of relatives and neighbors spend their last months tortured by the medical profession. I really can't find a more appropriate word, even though everyone involved means well. It is hard for both families and medical providers to assert that sometimes the best thing that can be done is nothing.
Assisted suicide is only part of the issue, but perhaps it is where the conversation needs to begin. It is an option exercised millions of times each day on every animal except Humans as being more humane. However the conversation needs to continue from that point. I think of my 90 year old neighbor who had cancer. A type that if he was 30 surgery and treatment would have cured. One doctor wanted to operate, the other did not saying he would not make it. The family, ever hopeful, pushed for the surgery. What transpired after that was 5 weeks of torture. He did not do well in the surgery. Doped up in a hospital bed his wounds became infected, requiring another surgery. That necessitated a feeding tube, which then due to his poor condition also was infected. Finally after 5 weeks he was barely well enough to go home with 24x7 nurse care where he was able to somewhat peacefully pass away a few days later. The options here were all bleak, spend 3-4 months dying of painful cancer. Spend 5 weeks in the hospital undergoing multiple surgeries, doped up beyond belief. Assisted suicide, at the right time, might have been a good option. I have no idea what bills the family was left with as a result of all of this treatment, but I bet they added further pain after the fact.
End of life care is not a simple decision. Everyone involved, patient, family, doctors needs to realize we can't extend life forever. They need to realize that sometimes doing nothing is a better option than doing something, or that sometimes the something to do is to go ahead and choose to end life on the patients terms.
While for me this is 99.99% a moral and ethical issue, it is also a cost issue. For many patients more money is spent on their final month of medical care than in their entire life, because of these sort of heroic measures that lead to tragic outcomes. Fortunately I don't think saving money needs to be the primary concern here, but rather it can be a happy accident of doing the morally right thing.
There is ample evidence that Tesla's are keeping too much of their internal electronics fully powered when sitting there doing nothing, and it's wasting a lot of electricity. The prime evidence is the early cars that put everything to sleep and didn't have the power drain problem, but did have a host of waking from sleep problems.
However, the actual power figurers this guy has collected are extremely dubious due to poor measuring methodology. He has the car set to only do an 80% charge, leaves it unplugged, and then tracks the charge to top it off. Well, it's not actually possible to precisely measure "80%" on a battery, and so the charger is going to fire up at a relatively high level and watch the battery come up, and an algorithm is going to make a decision based on the voltage rise where 80% is located. This will depend on temperature for sure, but also a ton of random factors.
The much more accurate measurement would be to charge the car to 100% and let it float off for at least 1-2 days so the pack is stabilized at full charge, and then leave it plugged in and measure the power draw of the charger over 2-3 days. That graph should show the draw of just the active electronics over time pretty accurately.
To be even more accurate, the Telsa has a twin-battery system. The main pack that supplies the juice to drive the car also drives a DC-DC converter that charges an ordinary car battery that runs a 12v system. It's my understanding that 99.99% of the electronics are on that 12v system. Installing a DC Amp meter between the main pack and the 12v battery would allow tracking the draw of just the 12v system after all chargers and other things that lose power, and show only the vampire draw of the electronics that aren't shut down.
Slashdot Mirror
THIS is one of the most interesting points in the comparison. Why is LLVM replacing GCC? Is it technically superior, is it because of licensing differences, etc? And if it's technically superior, why is that? Because there was less legacy, because the maintainers/developers were better/had fewer internal issues, or because the license encouraged *more* contribution?
You''ll likely get a pile of different answers, because it is a large, complex project. I think all of these are factors:
To me, the last is really the only one that is directly affected by the license issue. However, by the license tilting that one issue, it also tilts where the money goes from the previous line.
But it's not black and white. Both licenses are trying to influence people to make particular choices, and in fact choices that are more similar than different. They have each been successful in different ways as a result. I think what gets a lot of the non-GNU folks annoyed is that the GNU folks seem to think their way should be dominate; that the best world is a 100% GNU world. There are those of us who don't think proprietary software is always evil, or that other licenses don't have important features for particular niches. It leaves the impression of zealotry, rather than rational believe in a better solution.
I was imprecise, we don't have source code to Xcode, including any local-to-apple extensions they have added on to LLVM (or even clang). It's believed Apple has customizations and changes to LLVM/clang that have not been contributed back upstream.
It turns out in this particular case the binary blob can be had for free in some cases. Both licenses allow for a plain binary distribution, so that part is not really relevant to this discussion.
The GPL is not about getting more contributors. The GPL is about eliminating proprietary software.
I believe these concepts are more related than you think, because if there was no proprietary software than everyone would be contributing their ideas to open-source software.
However if the goal is eliminating proprietary software then GNU might as well give up and go home now. History is littered with folks who tried to tell other people how to live their lives, and on balance almost all of them turn out pretty poorly. The more they tried to control, the more poorly in the end.
Imposing one software development model on the world is Totalitarianism, not Freedom.
I think you're measuring something different.
My statement was aimed at the intellectual contributions, measured in lines of code and inventive ideas. Unfortunately that has almost no correlation to the popularity, that is the number of users of the software. They are both interesting measures, but I feel like by moving to the number of installed units you have changed the subject from the original discussion which revolved around getting contributions based on development license.
I will also point out that while Linux may dwarf OpenBSD (noting you cherry picked all of Linux against a single BSD distribution), OS X dwarfs Linux in deployed units, and includes BSD and BSD-like kernel licensed code having a history in FreeBSD and MACH.
So, yeh, the two can coexist, but the GPL does a lot more to ensure that we have great free software in the future. If you think that's a good thing, then use the GPL.
I think that's a debatable point, and that neither side has the high ground.
The GPL argument is that anyone who produces a derivative work must contribute back to the project, and thus the GPL generates more contributors.
The BSD argument is that there will always be people who create a non-free option, and if that is done by extending open-source the community may get some, if not all benefit from them.
I tend to think the second argument is better. Relevant to this discussion, Apple has taken free software like LLVM and turned it into something they package up in proprietary form (Xcode). Sure, we don't have all of Xcode for free, but then that was never an option. Apple was going to make that proprietary no matter what. However, there were parts of it Apple saw value in having open source, and getting a larger community, and in not being the long term maintainer, so they had their engineers do work on it and contribute those parts back to the community. That's part of why LLVM is better than gcc today. If LLVM had not been under a BSD license they wouldn't have used GCC, it's corporate poison, they would have rather licensed Intel's C compiler or something and the community would have gotten absolutely nothing.
The GPL is all or nothing, and the GPL community often gets absolutely nothing by insisting on all.
More importantly, if it's ok for the US to spy on China, then it's A-Ok for China to spy on the US. Right? Good thing none of our electrics are made in a country that might want to spy on us and controls industry so they can hide spy tech inside of it easily. Wait, uh, oops.
I didn't offer up inefficiency as a solution.
I hope you're right about how it works, but I think for the first time in history technology is putting people out of work faster than new jobs can be created. If so, that problem will have to be address, but I have no idea how.
secret sauce
Your recourse is to not buy that thing that lacks source, regardless of license.
If LLVM (or some viable BSD licensed thing) did not exist these companies wouldn't flock to GNU, they would rather flock to Intel, Microsoft, or a host of others that will allow them to keep the technology from you.
The only way the GNU folks get what they want (all code under GNU licenses) is if all other licenses cease to exist or are outlawed . Provided there is an alternative, from a private licensing deal, or BSD code, or whatever, folks will be able to avoid the GNU license and thus avoid sharing.
GNU: All or nothing. BSD: We'll take as much as we can get.
I worry about the future of your industry. While this model works great for iPhones, it doesn't work for heavier, lower margin commodities that need ship/rail/truck. However, with these small, high value, high profit items being taken out of your industry a significant profit driver will be removed, making it hard to stay in business with only the low margin stuff. But that gets back to the point of the original posting, in a lot of ways technology is unbalancing various parts of the supply chain, in ways I think many people don't even realize.
My last few Apple orders suggest otherwise. The tracking shows on a plane in Shenzhen China, a stop in Alaska to refuel and clear customs, a stop in Memphis to sort, and then on to my door. About 36 hours from when it left China it is in my hand.
There are also articles from credible sources that suggest Apple keeps 5.3 days of inventory on-hand, almost all in its retail stores, and that online orders ship directly from China in most cases. Other sources have documented a similar process, and suggested a Boeing 777 can carry 450,000 iPhones at a cost of $242,000 to charter, a whopping $0.56 per phone.
I'm going to bet most of your iPhones are destined for Best Buy, Wal Mart, AT&T, Radio Shack, or similar. Those vendors probably want Apple to bulk-ship into their normal supply chain where they can be sorted and intermixed with other goods going to those stores.
There actually is a good reason.
Let's say a company invents a proprietary bit of silicon, and wants a compiler for it. They may likely chose one that requires them not to spill the beans on their proprietary hardware in the process. So yes, it's true, you don't get the benefit of their "special sauce", but you were never going to get it anyway, so there is no loss.
However, that same company now has a lot of people using the code. It takes time and money to track separate changes, so if they find a bug in code not specific to their proprietary stuff they are likely to fix it, and submit it upstream so they don't have to maintain it going forward. That code will benefit you.
So basically, the people who find the GPL odious will never use gcc, and will find some alternative. Given those people have fully closed options (license Intel's compiler, or Microsoft's), or use something like LLVM. With the LLVM model they can submit fixes to their non-secret sauce upstream, as well as get others to help fix problems they find in the non-secret sauce part.
TL;DL, if you choose gcc or LLVM you're never getting their secret sauce, but if you choose LLVM you get more help on the non-secret sauce parts.
That is the real essence of the "BSD License" philosophy. You may or may not agree.
Actually I think if you look at the number of jobs created in those industries, and a realistic picture of the number of jobs they replaced in other industries the numbers are still significantly negative.
Let me use one simple example of the old way, compared to the new way, looking only at jobs in America. 20 years ago a product built in China would be shipped here on a boat. A team of 20 or so long shore man would unload the boat. 200 truck drivers would take the goods to an importers warehouse, employing another 200 to sort them. 5 customs inspectors would go over everything on the boat and make sure it passed muster. Another 200 drivers would set out across America to middle man warehouses. Each of those 200 warehouses would employ another 200 people to unload the trucks, break down boxes, sort, pick, and build new bundles, and send them to mom and pop stores in their area. Each mom and pop store would then employ 10-20 people to stay operating.
The new way is that your iPhone is ordered online by a computer run by a fraction of personafter all a sysadmin these days can take care of a few thousand machines. It is made in China and put on a FedEx plane. A team of 3 pilots brings it to the US. 1 customs inspector spot checks a few things match the computer generated invoice. Perhaps a hundred folks at the FedEx shipping center help sort that package. Another 3 pilots take it to the destination city, where 1 loader puts it on a truck for 1 driver to drop off at your door.
That is supply chain efficiency. No inventory in warehouses, which means no warehouses. No middle men. No or limited retail stores. Handle the package a minimum number of times, don't let it sit around collecting dust and depreciating while tying up capital. It's all driven by computerized supply chain management.
And this doesn't even address the issue that many of our goods are so cheap now as to be disposable, eliminating whole industries of repair. Remember when their used to be TV Repair Shops? Yeah, those all went away when a new TV became $200.
So yes, there are millions of new jobs, but there's also no shortage of information suggesting that workers are more productive with technology, which means one new worker can do the job of more than one old-school worker. That's net negative for the job market. When we were at full employment that was good, freeing up some people to do new things, but now that we're at less than full employment it could quickly become a downward spiral as there are no new jobs, people go unemployed, lose skills, and stop contributing to the economy.
You should be modded Insightful.
Agree in part, and disagree in part. A popular "strong man" competition is to pull a train car, of course the rolling friction of steel wheels on steel rails is low, hence railroad's efficiency advantage in the first place. Quite frankly a Fiat 500 could pull the space shuttle or a 727, particularly if it was only one time, on flat ground. Heck PEOPLE can pull a plane. So these sort of events really don't speak to the durability of a truck.
At the same time, these vehicles often go 250,000 miles without major maintenance in construction fleet duty being hammerer every day. They are very well, if not over engineered, and incredibility capable vehicles.
I'm not sure where the AC lives, but in the US a standard drivers licenses works for any combination of truck and trailer under 26,000 lbs in all 50 states, provided it's for personal use and not for hire. For hire 10,000 lbs is typically the first graduation to the next class of license. Heck, in some states you can drive an 80,000 lbs semi for personal use on a regular license!
I hate to reply to my own post, but I appear to be modded "Insightful". The correct mod selection was "Funny".
*sigh*
Winner winner chicken dinner!
When 25% of the pins encrypt to one string, and 25% to another, we'll know they used a symmetric cipher with a fixed key, and that one batch is "0000" and one is "1234".
Agreed.
I'd really like to see an sTec enterprise grade drive tested. It will be over the price point, but probably not by all that much and I suspect will perform great.
What you're saying is they really need titanium trucks?
When they first came out, that was true:
(And for my fine foreign friends, that's US ton, 2,000 lb, or 907 kg.)
However, that is no longer true, and the wide variety of sub models makes it even more complicated. Here's a payload capacity chart for the 2014 F-150.
The lowest is an SVT Raptor with only 980 lb payload capacity, while the highest is a staggering 3,120 lb for a regular cab, 4x2 with the heavy duty payload package and a v8 engine! That's a 1.5 ton capacity!
F-250's and F-350's have similar ranges.
A 2 week minimum turnaround? Who's crappy service are you using?
AppleCare has fixed many a Mac problems in
I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.
Multiple stories corroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.
This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.
As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:
So what happens to the plans that don't meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.
What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?
One example: the "Go Blue Health Services Card'' for which cancer survivor Donnamarie Palin of New Port Richey has paid $79 a month. For that, she gets $50 toward each primary care doctor visit, $15 toward each drug — but zero coverage for big-ticket items like hospital stays.
Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.
But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.
Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but o
I've had the unpleasant opportunities to watch a number of relatives and neighbors spend their last months tortured by the medical profession. I really can't find a more appropriate word, even though everyone involved means well. It is hard for both families and medical providers to assert that sometimes the best thing that can be done is nothing.
Assisted suicide is only part of the issue, but perhaps it is where the conversation needs to begin. It is an option exercised millions of times each day on every animal except Humans as being more humane. However the conversation needs to continue from that point. I think of my 90 year old neighbor who had cancer. A type that if he was 30 surgery and treatment would have cured. One doctor wanted to operate, the other did not saying he would not make it. The family, ever hopeful, pushed for the surgery. What transpired after that was 5 weeks of torture. He did not do well in the surgery. Doped up in a hospital bed his wounds became infected, requiring another surgery. That necessitated a feeding tube, which then due to his poor condition also was infected. Finally after 5 weeks he was barely well enough to go home with 24x7 nurse care where he was able to somewhat peacefully pass away a few days later. The options here were all bleak, spend 3-4 months dying of painful cancer. Spend 5 weeks in the hospital undergoing multiple surgeries, doped up beyond belief. Assisted suicide, at the right time, might have been a good option. I have no idea what bills the family was left with as a result of all of this treatment, but I bet they added further pain after the fact.
End of life care is not a simple decision. Everyone involved, patient, family, doctors needs to realize we can't extend life forever. They need to realize that sometimes doing nothing is a better option than doing something, or that sometimes the something to do is to go ahead and choose to end life on the patients terms.
While for me this is 99.99% a moral and ethical issue, it is also a cost issue. For many patients more money is spent on their final month of medical care than in their entire life, because of these sort of heroic measures that lead to tragic outcomes. Fortunately I don't think saving money needs to be the primary concern here, but rather it can be a happy accident of doing the morally right thing.
There is ample evidence that Tesla's are keeping too much of their internal electronics fully powered when sitting there doing nothing, and it's wasting a lot of electricity. The prime evidence is the early cars that put everything to sleep and didn't have the power drain problem, but did have a host of waking from sleep problems.
However, the actual power figurers this guy has collected are extremely dubious due to poor measuring methodology. He has the car set to only do an 80% charge, leaves it unplugged, and then tracks the charge to top it off. Well, it's not actually possible to precisely measure "80%" on a battery, and so the charger is going to fire up at a relatively high level and watch the battery come up, and an algorithm is going to make a decision based on the voltage rise where 80% is located. This will depend on temperature for sure, but also a ton of random factors.
The much more accurate measurement would be to charge the car to 100% and let it float off for at least 1-2 days so the pack is stabilized at full charge, and then leave it plugged in and measure the power draw of the charger over 2-3 days. That graph should show the draw of just the active electronics over time pretty accurately.
To be even more accurate, the Telsa has a twin-battery system. The main pack that supplies the juice to drive the car also drives a DC-DC converter that charges an ordinary car battery that runs a 12v system. It's my understanding that 99.99% of the electronics are on that 12v system. Installing a DC Amp meter between the main pack and the 12v battery would allow tracking the draw of just the 12v system after all chargers and other things that lose power, and show only the vampire draw of the electronics that aren't shut down.