Nobody wants USB-C headphones. We want universal headphones that work not just with cell phones and computers, but professional audio equipment, older audio equipment...
Not to be argumentative but that's a limited set of people. I, for one, don't have any professional audio gear and rarely use my traditional stereo amplifier. When I do and want to use headphones, I've a fine set for that setup. Except I hate the cord, it's always getting in the way.
Other people, naturally, will have different preferences. It would be a boring world if we were all the same.
I expect there's a large group of people who just want something which works and sounds pretty good. Audio fidelity is just not that important to them. They have a limited set of devices to work with, perhaps only their phone so multi-device compatibility just isn't an issue. Things which bug me (cables) might not bug them and things which don't bug me enough ("the $*%^#@ headset didn't connect again") might drive them to drink.
But the bottom line seems to be there just aren't many USB-C headphones out there. That's giving Bluetooth headsets an opportunity to catch up in terms of compatibility, reliability, and audio quality. Really, this feels like a replay of the HD-DVD/BluRay war. By the time BluRay won, the market had moved to streaming and just didn't care.
So....know why do you think the US produces enough of our own food? Because of these subsidies.
For sure, some our surplus is because of subsidies. It's also because we have a great climate, industrious farmers, lots of fertile land, a good transportation system, inexpensive laborers sneaking across the border, stable(ish) finances and legal system, and so forth.
Point being, I think if we got rid of the subsidies, the US at least would be fine. There might be issues for our trading partners because we'd likely export less.
And when there's a conflict and that shipping no longer happens?
Well, for sure that's the counter-argument. Perhaps I'm being elitist or wildly optimistic but I don't see any signs of a major conflict erupting which disrupts global food shipments. There's also the argument that increasing trade decreases the likelihood of that conflict happening.
Realistically speaking, some areas of the world are more likely to have conflicts than other areas. I think the US produces enough of our own food, is safe enough, and has enough trading partners that we have the luxury of ignoring food security issues.
You're being too generous. IIRC, it's "pasteurized processed cheese food product". I don't know how a food is different from a food product and I'm pretty happy that way. I'll just stay away from the nasty stuff.
(Well, except I have a recipe for a Velveeta-based chili cheese dip. It's appalling but really tasty after a few beers.)
That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
Really? People have experienced famines since the dawn of time. The last century or so has been the first time in human history that we grew enough food that famine isn't a realistic possibility any more.
Now that I think about it, I wonder when the last US famine was? I've heard asserted that we grow enough food now that there's no reason to expect any human to ever starve again unless there's some political cause for a food shortage. If that's so, and I find it plausible, that's an historic achievement.
That's a reason but I don't think it's a great reason any more. Farmers worldwide are so productive and shipping is so efficient that it's really unlikely we'll have a world-wide famine. Or any famine, for that matter. It's quite safe to just depend on remote farmers.
I won't even get into asking what sort of security spending that money elsewhere could buy.
It's better than buying another stealth F-22 Raptor, and much cheaper.
I don't know about that. A Raptor costs what, $100 million? That's a lot but an order of magnitude or two less than farm subsidies (measured in the tens of billions per year, I think).
Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages. ...
Needing to find money to import food is not good.
The world has changed. It used to be shipping food was expensive and wasteful. Shipping is now so cheap and reliable it is much less important to grow all your own food.
It used to be the case that farmers didn't produce enough food for everyone to eat well. We now produce enough food that everyone could eat a nutritious diet of more than 2,000 calories. So producing enough food is no longer the problem, it's moving food to the people who want it.
With these changes, it no longer makes sense for each country to stockpile food in case of shortage. A reasonable strategy is to stockpile cash, if anything, and just import food when it's needed. And you'd buy it from whoever can grow it the most productively, which might not be your local farmers. If you import from high productivity farmers, you'll have more cash on hand because you didn't give it to less productive local farmers. So not only is this better for food security, it's arguably better for your local economy.
I was talking about regulation in general. Many regulations have the clear effect of stifling competition. Food safety regulations are a classic example. Food truck location restrictions are a great current example. Minimum wage regulations were initially motivated to protect white workers from blacks and immigrants.
In terms of energy, we've got coal, hydro, wind, natural gas, nuclear, solar thermal, photoelectric, biomass, geothermal, and oil all duking it out. Each one will happily use regulation to make their competitors more expensive or difficult to deploy.
And to ensure someone doesn't do something you're scared of, regardless of facts.
You do know we're talking about the same government that let BP resume their offshore drilling practices unchanged after destroying the Gulf of Mexico, yes? That has left the people of Flint with poisoned water for how many years now?
And even after that, you still trust those clowns to enact sensible and functional regulation of nuclear power? I don't trust them to regulate a lemonade stand. (Oh wait, they've actually done that and forced kids out of "business". See rant about food safety regulations above.)
What kills nuclear power is cost.
And my assertion is what makes nuclear expensive is not the technology but bootlegger-and-baptist regulations. You've got the "baptists" who are, IMHO unjustifiably, fearful of nuclear accidents. These are community activist types who, to put it kindly, aren't engineers and are largely numerically illiterate. Joining forces are the "bootleggers", the people who make money on coal, oil, solar, and all the other alternatives. It's the same story we've played out a million times.
(Obligatory jab: if solar and wind are so great and cheap, and nuclear is so expensive, why are we still subsidizing solar? Why did California need to enact regulations forcing builders to include solar panels on homes? If it's so wonderful, why aren't people flocking to solar panels all by themselves?)
...none of this changes the fact that nuclear is stupidly expensive and uneconomical.
It's expensive because we make it expensive. The whole point of the current research efforts is to show we can make inexpensive and reliable nuclear power plants which are as safe or safer than conventional fossil fuel plants. The safety part isn't that hard since no one has ever died from a nuclear power plant (exceht Chernobyl), which you can't say about any fossil fuel.
The problem is we're so frightened of nuclear power we're unwilling to dispassionately listen to plausible arguments. I'm not saying they're right, just that they ought to get a fair hearing.
And why do you have regulation, Sherlock? To prevent the incompetent and corrupt from fucking everyone else over.
And to prevent competition. And to ensure someone doesn't do something you're scared of, regardless of facts. Regulations, regulators, lobbyists, and activists aren't always (*cough*never*cough*) good, honest, wise, and noble, searching for nothing but the optimal public good.
Since UBI is generally suggested at $10k or less, why did you pick $30k in your example?
Absolutely. If anyone talks about a UBI, the first question to ask is "how much per person or household are you thinking?" $6,000 versus $30,000 per adult are quite different programs.
The next question is what other programs, if any, would you replace with UBI. Keeping everything we have versus eliminate SS, Welfare, CHIP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance are also two very different concepts.
Personally, I'm open to something along the lines of $6k per person and eliminate the programs mentioned above. I think that may even cut the federal budget some.
What (Obama's) EPA analysia found was $10 billion a year in costs would have $20 million / year in benefits, including "human suffering". (You see why they didn't want to release their analysis).
What I found interesting in TFA was the benefit analysis. The EPA estimates the actual harm caused by the actual mercury to be about $20 million. There's an additional benefit from reducing soot and other pollutants which aren't mercury of billions of dollars more.
What I find absolutely infuriating is that the EPA and other administration people would deliberately mislead people by claiming the issue is mercury! I don't believe that was an accident. I am certain the whole point of the mercury restrictions was not mercury, it was other pollutants. So for crying out loud, be honest about it. Mercury is an easy "Eeek! Scary neurotoxin heavy metals!" sales pitch but it's dishonest.
If you want to reduce soot or carbon dioxide or something else, just say so. Don't distract us with side issues because they're scarier. If you can't make your case on honest facts, perhaps you don't have a case.
Well, from reading TFA, I think about half is released from the limestone and 40% is exhaust from heating the kiln. Thus, I suppose one "easy" answer is to use nuclear furnaces instead of natural gas ones. Instant 40% reduction (more or less).
One practical issue is there are cement plants all over the place. Much as I like the concept of small modular nuclear plants, I don't see us building nearly enough of them to put one next to every limestone quarry. And I got to believe a gas-fired kiln is a lot cheaper than even the cheapest modular nuclear plan we can imagine.
Oh, and I suppose we could try using solar energy (a mirror farm seems a reasonable approach) but that also seems wildly impractical. I dunno, an electric arc furnace powered by wind?
People like Vim because it's tiny, simple, powerful, and runs literally anywhere including platforms and situations
I get it. I use VI/VIm in situations where I can't or don't want to install something else. I just have never seen the attraction of using it as my day to day editor.
Oh, huh. That is pretty cool. I am not sure what those are, except for Skype, but sounds very good. I can feel my ironic beard growing.
You might just want to give some of them a try. Personally, I don't understand the Slack hype but lots of people seem to like it. VS Code is pretty dang cool, assuming you can pry yourself away from Vim (another program I've never understood why people liked).
To me "GUI" still spells "child's toy" most of the time.
That's fine but enjoy your increasingly isolated part of the IT world. The vast majority of users use GUIs. For system level work, CLIs still rule, but that's a tiny fraction of the people.
Even if you're working on back end systems, there's likely a GUI on the front for non-techies to use the system. It's useful to be at least a little empathetic to how they use it so you don't screw them over.
It is great to have a single cross-platform standard. But really, JavaScript? We could have done far better than that.
As nerds, we have collectively failed humanity.
s/JavaScript/x86/g
Thing is, as an app developer, I really don't want to write a separate app for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. We've been trying for years to develop platforms to abstract away the GUI from the platform to solve this problem. I've seen at least a half dozen come and go. They all are great in some ways and all suck in significant other ways.
You'd think by now we'd have found a good compromise. But we haven't. We're still exploring human-computer interfaces and it seems we still keep finding good but mostly incompatible ways to interact. And about the time we figure out we don't care about fighting GUI wars any more, we'll have to worry about writing cross-platform skills for Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google.
It's a closely held secret, but it turns out that you can change laws more often than every 20 years.
What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing.
Yes, course, in theory we could. On the other hand, we still subsidize mohair wool production because we needed it to make World War I uniforms. More relevant, we still require ethanol in gasoline even though it's turned out not to help carbon emissions at all. Once policies get enacted, it turns out to be very difficult to get them changed.
So, here's what's interesting. The new autocratic dictates...er...breakthrough regulations don't require you have the panels on your house. TFA mentions you can pool together and install the panels somewhere else if you'd like.
What I don't know is how far away those panels can be. Can I put them 100 feet away? 100 meters? 100 miles? Because what I'd like to do is buy a 5 kW share of a solar farm in the middle of the Mojave desert. I expect that will be, by far, the cheapest way to install and maintain "my" panels, and keep them upgraded as solar technology improves.
Of course, this begs the questions of why couldn't I buy a share of a wind farm instead but I guess the fine people on the building codes committee thought about that and realized there is no doubt that solar panels are and always will be the most economical and effective approach. Wow, I wish I was as smart as they are! I can't even tell what the price of eggs will be next week let alone the relative price of solar vs. wind 20 years from now.
Does anyone have a reference to some sample video showing the difference between 24, 30, 60, and interpolated videos? I keep hearing people talk about how 24 is more "cinematic" but I haven't seen it side by side so I don't understand what they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody wants USB-C headphones. We want universal headphones that work not just with cell phones and computers, but professional audio equipment, older audio equipment...
Not to be argumentative but that's a limited set of people. I, for one, don't have any professional audio gear and rarely use my traditional stereo amplifier. When I do and want to use headphones, I've a fine set for that setup. Except I hate the cord, it's always getting in the way.
Other people, naturally, will have different preferences. It would be a boring world if we were all the same.
I expect there's a large group of people who just want something which works and sounds pretty good. Audio fidelity is just not that important to them. They have a limited set of devices to work with, perhaps only their phone so multi-device compatibility just isn't an issue. Things which bug me (cables) might not bug them and things which don't bug me enough ("the $*%^#@ headset didn't connect again") might drive them to drink.
But the bottom line seems to be there just aren't many USB-C headphones out there. That's giving Bluetooth headsets an opportunity to catch up in terms of compatibility, reliability, and audio quality. Really, this feels like a replay of the HD-DVD/BluRay war. By the time BluRay won, the market had moved to streaming and just didn't care.
So....know why do you think the US produces enough of our own food? Because of these subsidies.
For sure, some our surplus is because of subsidies. It's also because we have a great climate, industrious farmers, lots of fertile land, a good transportation system, inexpensive laborers sneaking across the border, stable(ish) finances and legal system, and so forth.
Point being, I think if we got rid of the subsidies, the US at least would be fine. There might be issues for our trading partners because we'd likely export less.
We already have a zillion ships moving food hither and yon. Why are bad actors not already disappearing ships?
And when there's a conflict and that shipping no longer happens?
Well, for sure that's the counter-argument. Perhaps I'm being elitist or wildly optimistic but I don't see any signs of a major conflict erupting which disrupts global food shipments. There's also the argument that increasing trade decreases the likelihood of that conflict happening.
Realistically speaking, some areas of the world are more likely to have conflicts than other areas. I think the US produces enough of our own food, is safe enough, and has enough trading partners that we have the luxury of ignoring food security issues.
The label says "pasteurized process cheese food".
You're being too generous. IIRC, it's "pasteurized processed cheese food product". I don't know how a food is different from a food product and I'm pretty happy that way. I'll just stay away from the nasty stuff.
(Well, except I have a recipe for a Velveeta-based chili cheese dip. It's appalling but really tasty after a few beers.)
That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
Really? People have experienced famines since the dawn of time. The last century or so has been the first time in human history that we grew enough food that famine isn't a realistic possibility any more.
Now that I think about it, I wonder when the last US famine was? I've heard asserted that we grow enough food now that there's no reason to expect any human to ever starve again unless there's some political cause for a food shortage. If that's so, and I find it plausible, that's an historic achievement.
There's a very good national security reason:
That's a reason but I don't think it's a great reason any more. Farmers worldwide are so productive and shipping is so efficient that it's really unlikely we'll have a world-wide famine. Or any famine, for that matter. It's quite safe to just depend on remote farmers.
I won't even get into asking what sort of security spending that money elsewhere could buy.
It's better than buying another stealth F-22 Raptor, and much cheaper.
I don't know about that. A Raptor costs what, $100 million? That's a lot but an order of magnitude or two less than farm subsidies (measured in the tens of billions per year, I think).
Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
...
Needing to find money to import food is not good.
The world has changed. It used to be shipping food was expensive and wasteful. Shipping is now so cheap and reliable it is much less important to grow all your own food.
It used to be the case that farmers didn't produce enough food for everyone to eat well. We now produce enough food that everyone could eat a nutritious diet of more than 2,000 calories. So producing enough food is no longer the problem, it's moving food to the people who want it.
With these changes, it no longer makes sense for each country to stockpile food in case of shortage. A reasonable strategy is to stockpile cash, if anything, and just import food when it's needed. And you'd buy it from whoever can grow it the most productively, which might not be your local farmers. If you import from high productivity farmers, you'll have more cash on hand because you didn't give it to less productive local farmers. So not only is this better for food security, it's arguably better for your local economy.
Amen. Why in the world do we need a cheese stockpile?
Competition from what?
I was talking about regulation in general. Many regulations have the clear effect of stifling competition. Food safety regulations are a classic example. Food truck location restrictions are a great current example. Minimum wage regulations were initially motivated to protect white workers from blacks and immigrants.
In terms of energy, we've got coal, hydro, wind, natural gas, nuclear, solar thermal, photoelectric, biomass, geothermal, and oil all duking it out. Each one will happily use regulation to make their competitors more expensive or difficult to deploy.
And even after that, you still trust those clowns to enact sensible and functional regulation of nuclear power? I don't trust them to regulate a lemonade stand. (Oh wait, they've actually done that and forced kids out of "business". See rant about food safety regulations above.)
What kills nuclear power is cost.
And my assertion is what makes nuclear expensive is not the technology but bootlegger-and-baptist regulations. You've got the "baptists" who are, IMHO unjustifiably, fearful of nuclear accidents. These are community activist types who, to put it kindly, aren't engineers and are largely numerically illiterate. Joining forces are the "bootleggers", the people who make money on coal, oil, solar, and all the other alternatives. It's the same story we've played out a million times.
(Obligatory jab: if solar and wind are so great and cheap, and nuclear is so expensive, why are we still subsidizing solar? Why did California need to enact regulations forcing builders to include solar panels on homes? If it's so wonderful, why aren't people flocking to solar panels all by themselves?)
...none of this changes the fact that nuclear is stupidly expensive and uneconomical.
It's expensive because we make it expensive. The whole point of the current research efforts is to show we can make inexpensive and reliable nuclear power plants which are as safe or safer than conventional fossil fuel plants. The safety part isn't that hard since no one has ever died from a nuclear power plant (exceht Chernobyl), which you can't say about any fossil fuel.
The problem is we're so frightened of nuclear power we're unwilling to dispassionately listen to plausible arguments. I'm not saying they're right, just that they ought to get a fair hearing.
And why do you have regulation, Sherlock? To prevent the incompetent and corrupt from fucking everyone else over.
And to prevent competition. And to ensure someone doesn't do something you're scared of, regardless of facts. Regulations, regulators, lobbyists, and activists aren't always (*cough*never*cough*) good, honest, wise, and noble, searching for nothing but the optimal public good.
Since UBI is generally suggested at $10k or less, why did you pick $30k in your example?
Absolutely. If anyone talks about a UBI, the first question to ask is "how much per person or household are you thinking?" $6,000 versus $30,000 per adult are quite different programs.
The next question is what other programs, if any, would you replace with UBI. Keeping everything we have versus eliminate SS, Welfare, CHIP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance are also two very different concepts.
Personally, I'm open to something along the lines of $6k per person and eliminate the programs mentioned above. I think that may even cut the federal budget some.
What (Obama's) EPA analysia found was $10 billion a year in costs would have $20 million / year in benefits, including "human suffering". (You see why they didn't want to release their analysis).
What I found interesting in TFA was the benefit analysis. The EPA estimates the actual harm caused by the actual mercury to be about $20 million. There's an additional benefit from reducing soot and other pollutants which aren't mercury of billions of dollars more.
What I find absolutely infuriating is that the EPA and other administration people would deliberately mislead people by claiming the issue is mercury! I don't believe that was an accident. I am certain the whole point of the mercury restrictions was not mercury, it was other pollutants. So for crying out loud, be honest about it. Mercury is an easy "Eeek! Scary neurotoxin heavy metals!" sales pitch but it's dishonest.
If you want to reduce soot or carbon dioxide or something else, just say so. Don't distract us with side issues because they're scarier. If you can't make your case on honest facts, perhaps you don't have a case.
Can we spend money on electric busses instead of a bullet train to nowhere, from nowhere, routed through the middle of nowhere?
Well, from reading TFA, I think about half is released from the limestone and 40% is exhaust from heating the kiln. Thus, I suppose one "easy" answer is to use nuclear furnaces instead of natural gas ones. Instant 40% reduction (more or less).
One practical issue is there are cement plants all over the place. Much as I like the concept of small modular nuclear plants, I don't see us building nearly enough of them to put one next to every limestone quarry. And I got to believe a gas-fired kiln is a lot cheaper than even the cheapest modular nuclear plan we can imagine.
Oh, and I suppose we could try using solar energy (a mirror farm seems a reasonable approach) but that also seems wildly impractical. I dunno, an electric arc furnace powered by wind?
People like Vim because it's tiny, simple, powerful, and runs literally anywhere including platforms and situations
I get it. I use VI/VIm in situations where I can't or don't want to install something else. I just have never seen the attraction of using it as my day to day editor.
Oh, huh. That is pretty cool. I am not sure what those are, except for Skype, but sounds very good. I can feel my ironic beard growing.
You might just want to give some of them a try. Personally, I don't understand the Slack hype but lots of people seem to like it. VS Code is pretty dang cool, assuming you can pry yourself away from Vim (another program I've never understood why people liked).
Oops, my system crashed! Time to access the magnetic core memory and take a core dump to see what went wrong.
Core dump? Bah. Back when I was a lad, we debugged with iron filings and a magnifying glass. Core dump indeed.
To me "GUI" still spells "child's toy" most of the time.
That's fine but enjoy your increasingly isolated part of the IT world. The vast majority of users use GUIs. For system level work, CLIs still rule, but that's a tiny fraction of the people.
Even if you're working on back end systems, there's likely a GUI on the front for non-techies to use the system. It's useful to be at least a little empathetic to how they use it so you don't screw them over.
It is great to have a single cross-platform standard. But really, JavaScript? We could have done far better than that.
As nerds, we have collectively failed humanity.
s/JavaScript/x86/g
Thing is, as an app developer, I really don't want to write a separate app for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. We've been trying for years to develop platforms to abstract away the GUI from the platform to solve this problem. I've seen at least a half dozen come and go. They all are great in some ways and all suck in significant other ways.
You'd think by now we'd have found a good compromise. But we haven't. We're still exploring human-computer interfaces and it seems we still keep finding good but mostly incompatible ways to interact. And about the time we figure out we don't care about fighting GUI wars any more, we'll have to worry about writing cross-platform skills for Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google.
It's a closely held secret, but it turns out that you can change laws more often than every 20 years.
What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing.
Yes, course, in theory we could. On the other hand, we still subsidize mohair wool production because we needed it to make World War I uniforms. More relevant, we still require ethanol in gasoline even though it's turned out not to help carbon emissions at all. Once policies get enacted, it turns out to be very difficult to get them changed.
So, here's what's interesting. The new autocratic dictates...er...breakthrough regulations don't require you have the panels on your house. TFA mentions you can pool together and install the panels somewhere else if you'd like.
What I don't know is how far away those panels can be. Can I put them 100 feet away? 100 meters? 100 miles? Because what I'd like to do is buy a 5 kW share of a solar farm in the middle of the Mojave desert. I expect that will be, by far, the cheapest way to install and maintain "my" panels, and keep them upgraded as solar technology improves.
Of course, this begs the questions of why couldn't I buy a share of a wind farm instead but I guess the fine people on the building codes committee thought about that and realized there is no doubt that solar panels are and always will be the most economical and effective approach. Wow, I wish I was as smart as they are! I can't even tell what the price of eggs will be next week let alone the relative price of solar vs. wind 20 years from now.
...and no incentive for landlord to install panels since the landlord doesn't pay the electricity bill.
Does anyone have a reference to some sample video showing the difference between 24, 30, 60, and interpolated videos? I keep hearing people talk about how 24 is more "cinematic" but I haven't seen it side by side so I don't understand what they're talking about.