What is of more concern to me is how carefully AV1 has been constructed in terms of its coding tools to avoid patent trolling and patent submarining
I don't think you need to worry. When Google announced VP8, MPEG-LA publicly announced that they were setting up a patent pool for it; they encouraged all the patent holders who VP8 infringed to step forward and add their patents to the pool.
Nobody ever came up with anything, and after over a year, MPEG-LA accepted a small amount of money from Google in exchange for a promise to never sue over VP8. No patents, no royalties, just a one-time payment; that was pretty much unconditional victory for Google and VP8. The news coverage called this a "licensing agreement" but it was more like "here, take a small amount of money and go away forever."
When VP8 was first announced, many self-appointed experts here on Slashdot declared confidently that it just had to infringe on H.264 patents, as a reading of the standard revealed numerous similarities. I am not a patent expert but I was pretty sure they were mistaken about this... Google spent something like a year after they licensed the technology before they released the open-source VP8, and I assumed that they had paid patent lawyers to go over the standard and make sure it didn't infringe on anything. Also, it looked to me like the original developers of the code had deliberately studied the existing patents and implemented something just different enough not to infringe.
It may be possible that a patent could pop up from seemingly nowhere, some weird patent nobody was paying attention to, and AV1 would be found to infringe upon it. If this scenario is possible for AV1, what makes it impossible for H.265? In fact, I'd argue it might be more likely for H.265, which is a complicated thing to which many companies tried to contribute (so they could get a share of royalties). I would be interested to hear an expert's opinion on whether AV1 is less complex than H.265... I bet that it is. And more complexity would suggest greater danger from overlooked patents.
As for submarine patents, again I am not very worried. The USA changed its patent laws between 1995 through 2000 to prevent abuses like submarine patents. Patents are 20 years from the date of filing, so playing games with paperwork extensions can't keep a patent alive forever anymore; and since 2000 patent filings are public, so the secrecy needed for submarine patents is gone.
So unless someone has a suitable patent application, filed before the year 1995, that they have kept alive with paperwork wizardry in the patent office, and nobody knows about it, and they get it granted... unless all of that is true, it shouldn't be possible for a submarine patent to torpedo AV1.
The Force Awakens showed that Disney has the ability to make a movie that looks and feels like a Star Wars movie ought to. Its plot wasn't the best, but I cut them a lot of slack, figuring that movie had a crushing load to carry (it had to not fail, and it had to not have all the fans hate it) so it made sense that the plot was loaded up with things that we'd seen before.
I was looking forward to the next one... and then it was The Last Jedi which is just a bleak mess. Oh well.
Disney can manage the look and the feel. They just need to get a good story and let it play out properly on screen and we could yet get watchable Star Wars movies.
So now we find out that George Lucas's big vision was to do a new trilogy about mystical creatures being the power source for The Force? He still thinks midichlorians was a good idea, and he wants to use that for the new trilogy? That actually sounds worse than The Last Jedi to me.
George Lucas seems to be getting worse over time. I thought ewoks were kind of annoying... then, Jar Jar Binks... now "Whills"? I'm glad that didn't happen.
The original Star Wars movie was actually pretty terrible in its rough cut. Deft editing saved it, and Lucas had three people helping him sort out the edit. Then Empire Strikes Back he handed off script and directing to other people, who did a great job. Then in the prequel trilogy, he wrote and directed and what we got was exactly what he intended... and it wasn't great. He needed other people pushing back on his bad ideas and helping him in the areas where he is weak, and he didn't get that. His first idea went straight to screen and he was never forced to rework and improve. Lazy directing went straight to the screen. Nobody had the power to say "no" to him. Too bad.
P.S. If you haven't seen this, and you're a Star Wars fan, this is totally worth 20 minutes of your time: How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit
P.P.S. Oh wow, "Journal of the Whills" was part of George Lucas's original name for the movie! If you watch that video linked above, you can spot it on the picture of the first page of the script.
But even if George Lucas insists that this Whills/midiclorians thing was his original plan, I don't buy it. He was making things up as he went along. I'm certain that the plot point of Luke and Leia being siblings wasn't invented in time for the first movie, or else they would have probably skipped her giving him a peck on the cheek for luck; original concept art had everyone armed with glowing swords, not just a few characters; etc. A lot of what we love was added during the process of making the movies, and much of it came from creative contributions from people who were not George Lucas.
Politics is the art of the possible. I have a modest proposal that I think is possible: Allow unlimited copyright extensions that are not automatic or free.
Given how much money Disney and other big content-owning companies are going to spend on this, our elected representatives are going to roll over again... so it is not possible to roll back copyright protection to anything like the original short terms. It's pretty much certain that the terms are getting extended again. So my question is whether we can get the deal changed in some way that makes it better for us.
Disney is very motivated to keep the copyrights going forever on old cartoons like "Steamboat Willy". To them, it's just collateral damage that nothing else ever falls into the public domain... I don't think they care that old black-and-white movies not owned by Disney also aren't falling into the public domain.
So my modest proposal is that a corporation can extend the copyright on any property by filing a form and paying a nominal fee. For the sake of argument I propose $5 to be the fee and for the form to get a 5-year extension. A dollar per year! Cheap!
But if you fail to list some piece of content and file the form, it lapses into the public domain.
This fixes the murky issues around a lot of content, such as obscure video games from three decades ago. In many cases it would take lawsuits to figure out who is the current owner, so it's not possible to get a license for the content... so nobody is going to file the paperwork to extend the copyright, and the old forgotten content will lapse into the public domain.
This is still a screaming good deal for the content owners. The US government still acts as an enforcer to go after people infringing on the copyrights, and it would cost way more than $1 to hire private detectives or whatever to do the same thing without government.
But I don't see why the content owners should get endlessly-extended copyright terms where nothing ever falls into the public domain automatically for free and without even lifting a finger.
Copyright is supposed to be a three-cornered deal between the content owners, the government, and the people. The people are supposed to benefit by things falling into the public domain; that's why the phrase "for limited times" appears in the Constitution. The people would get nothing from a 140-year extension, but would get something from my proposal.
Wow, this isn't the first time you have said this right here on Slashdot. I remember you saying it, and I remember the flurry of posts trying to educate you as to why you were mistaken on this point. I guess you just didn't learn anything. Or maybe you prefer alternate facts?
It's dishonest to take all the money they make on car sales, then divide it by all the expenses they have (R&D, building out the Supercharger network, etc.) and claim that they are losing money on each car sold. No, they are making money on each car sold, and then spending it all, plus more money they borrowed, on all their growth plans. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/13/why-tesla-is-a-very-profitable-company-tesla-bankwuptcy-explained-part-2/
Not only is Tesla now very cost-efficient on battery cells due to having their own factory, they have developed their own next-generation battery pack technology. According to this teardown the Tesla Model 3 battery pack contains advanced technology unlike anything that came before. If you like geeky discussions of technology, you will enjoy reading this link: http://evtv.me/2018/05/tesla-model-3-gone-battshit/
Elon Musk has said that 2018 is going to be the year where Tesla starts making money. He has a simple plan: cut any excessive expenses (such as contractors that hire subcontractors that hire subcontractors; Musk compared this to a "Russian Doll") and get Model 3 production above 5000 per month. You will only have to wait a few months to see if he was correct in this prediction. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-says-tesla-will-be-profitable-in-q3-and-q4/
That's a pretty amazing news link you shared there.
Tesla's response seems to indicate that the company is unconcerned with what ought to be troubling test results.
Yeah, so unconcerned that they whipped out a fix in record time.
All this as the company, which is hemorrhaging cash, piles expensive features onto the car
There's some nice, neutral, even-handed reporting for you.
The car, which was originally slated for a minimum of 35 thousand dollars, is now more likely to first be released with features that bring it into the 70 to 80 thousand dollar range
"more likely to first be released"? The writer of that article seems to be blissfully unaware that the Model 3 has been shipping in quantity for months now and is in fact the most popular battery electric vehicle sold in the USA today. Why did you pick this as the reference to support your posting?
Tesla is selling their cars as fast as they can make them, and making them faster now. This posting on futurism.com does nothing to alter my opinion of Tesla or its future.
There was a human in the Uber car. Theoretically she was there to provide a human element that backed up the self-driving. But she was not giving her full attention to safety.
[The Uber safety driver] told investigators she had been "monitoring the self-driving system interface," which is displayed on an iPad mounted on the vehicle's center console.
I think Uber should change their procedure. Have two humans in the car: one to provide safety backup to the driving, and one to manage the iPad app. That will cost more than just having one human in the car, but would have saved a life in this case.
Note that the NTSB says the pedestrian was crossing unsafely, which contributed to the incident. Again quoting from the above-linked article in The Verge:
The report frames [the pedestrian's] actions in the moments before the crash in a fairly negative light. Investigators note she was crossing the street outside the crosswalk, wearing dark clothing, and, according to a post-crash toxicology report, had methamphetamine and marijuana in her system. The NTSB also notes that the median on Mill Avenue where [the pedestrian] was crossing the street was not illuminated by lighting and featured signage warning pedestrians not to cross there.
I don't see what the drugs in her system had to do with anything; I think this would have happened the same way even if she was completely sober. But she was doing an unsafe thing when she died.
When my nephew was 9, I set up a computer for him. I gave him a MATE desktop, which basically works similar to Windows, and he was able to use it right away.
I didn't give him root on his own machine. However, I gave his user sudo permission to run the Software Manager. I gave him Linux Mint, which is a tweaked version of Ubuntu, so it was basically the Ubuntu Software Manager. This is pretty similar to the app store on mobile devices. So he had no ability to screw up his system, but he could browse the Software Manager, find a game or something, and install it with a click.
My goal was to set his baseline expectations to Linux. I wanted him to see Windows and say "wait, there's no app store thing with free games on Windows? How primitive, give me my Linux please." I wouldn't say my brainwashing attempt succeeded, but he just turned 12 and he still uses the Linux computer for most of what he does on a computer. He also has a Windows laptop that he uses to run some Windows-only stuff he likes. But he chooses which computer to use just based on what he wants to run; he has no particular preference for Windows or for Linux.
P.S. His Linux computer is an all-in-one made by Lenovo, with a really nice and big screen. I got it really inexpensively on eBay; I believe it was off-lease.
I have read the papers on both sides. I find the pro-minimum-wage arguments to be uncompelling.
When you raise the price of anything, you get less of it. But minimum-wage proponents claim that it's possible to increase the cost of hiring employees without businesses cutting back on hiring.
Seattle is sort of getting away with its minimum wage law because it's already an expensive city, and the average wage is higher in Seattle already. A $15 minimum wage in a small town where average wages are low would have a much more shocking effect.
As the guy from the hamburger chain said, his chain will be expanding in cities other than Seattle. Any new jobs from his chain will not be in Seattle. That's not good news for Seattle or the people in Seattle who might want a job at a burger place. Is his business the only one making such a decision? I'll bet not.
I meant "a rich person might be able and willing to pay what it would take to have a huge mansion with a yard in Seattle." If you are not rich, but want a huge mansion with a yard, you won't be buying it in Seattle. (There might be places in the USA where you can get the house you want.)
The articles I linked had an example of a 20-something who couldn't afford to spend very much on housing, and was quite happy in a micro-apartment in a lively neighborhood. Likely she would have enjoyed living in a huge mansion but she wasn't rich and didn't have that option. (She was lucky to get her micro-apartment... the Seattle city government has effectively made it illegal to build more apartments like hers.)
The housing market should cater to her, as well as to rich people who can afford a mansion.
I'm sure there's a suburb close enough that they can keep the same emplyees.
I live in a suburb near Seattle. Amazon could easily move to one or more of the nearby suburbs: Redmond (where Microsoft is), Kirkland (where Google has their second-largest campus after their headquarters), Bothell (not sexy or famous but has lots of business park space, and people are increasingly moving there because it's equidistant from Seattle and the rest of the suburbs), Bellevue (if you like skyscrapers, that's second after Seattle, and it's close to where the really rich people like Bill Gates live). If I were Amazon I'd be looking at having these cities bid against each other, and maybe even scattering buildings among multiple cities.
A significant fraction of Amazon's workers are commuting into Seattle from these nearby cities anyway. I know people who ride the bus into Seattle to work at Amazon, and would love it if Amazon moved closer to them.
If the Seattle City Council makes the pain threshold high enough, Amazon can and will pull out of Seattle.
And now that Seattle is asking Amazon to give a tiny percentage back to help the community that fostered them, they threaten to leave.
This argument would be more compelling if Seattle didn't already collect taxes from Amazon. Amazon already pays quite a lot in taxes. The Seattle city government basically said "We've decided we need even more money, you have money, so hand it over."
When even the extremely liberal Starbucks is complaining, maybe Seattle has gone too far.
Amazon doesn't like this, but it's really going to hurt low-margin businesses like fast food hamburger restaurants. The iconic local hamburger chain, Dick's Drive-in, will never open another location in Seattle, according to the founder's grandson Saul Spady.
"This is a tax on high-volume, low-margin businesses, like restaurants, and that's where it's going to put the most pain. And it's making restaurants like Dick's Drive-ins think really strongly about do we make our workforce more efficient, do we give less money to charity, or maybe we just don't be a business in Seattle."
Spady cites Denver's head tax equivalent, the Occupational Privilege Tax, saying, "If the nearest, largest head tax in the country is $50 and [Seattle's is] six times the nearest head tax, how is that a compromise?"
But at least Seattle didn't already do something crazy like pass a $15 per hour minimum wage law! Oh wait... yes they did.
If a city council giving orders truly leads to prosperity and happiness, then Seattle will be prosperous and happy. I fear it doesn't work that way.
you can't import more land from China, like you can with other goods.
True. But there are tradeoffs you could make. Maybe a rich guy with a family wants a huge mansion with a yard, but maybe a 20-something who rides the bus would be happy just to have a space all her own, even a tiny one, at a rent she can afford. So build micro-housing, where the same amount of land has many more apartments, and thus the rent per apartment is lower!
Seattle was actually where micro-housing first started out. And Seattle... killed it.
People in the Seattle government have used government power to keep the home builders from making more units of housing that would rent for less. There's less supply, and what supply remains costs more. Lose/lose.
The articles below have floor plans. When I was a 20-something I would have much preferred to live in any of those micro-apartments than to live in a shared space with housemates. But the Seattle city government doesn't think that people should have that choice.
My memory says I paid about $2 to travel about a mile. I can easily imagine people renting these to travel further than a mile, and spending more. Also, if you want to use a scooter for a round trip, you might keep it much longer than I did, and the cost meter would keep running while you kept it.
I was their worst case: a short, one-way trip.
In short I don't really know how much they gross per scooter per day.
I'm curious. In winter do you see people on electric scooters, with studded 8.5-inch (21.6 cm) scooter tyres?
I wonder about electric battery performance on a really cold day. These are simple scooters with no thermal management in the battery pack, so if a cold temperature causes poor battery performance, nothing would mitigate it. The battery pack is thin and not insulated.
I just skimmed your summery and my IQ dropped with 7 whole points. I can not imagine what the whole articlke would do to me. Well not after reading your summery anyway.
I read the whole thing.
My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.
I wonder how resistant they are to being taken apart. Some enterprising homeless could be on to a goldmine.
Bird scooters are constantly phoning home with their location, and likely have been modified with tampering sensors. A determined person could outfit a van with a Faraday cage and steal the scooters for disassembly at leisure, but an actually homeless person might be interrupted during the disassembly by people looking for the device at its last reported location.
The scooters themselves are relatively lightweight, so not immune from being destroyed, but reasonably sturdy.
I don't know how much of a problem they have with theft and vandalism, but they are still in business.
What the homeless will have trouble with is charging them.
Actually, that's not a problem. The user does not charge a Bird scooter. I believe that the scooters are picked up every night and charged overnight, then put back on the streets the next morning with a full charge. It's part of what you are paying for when you pay something like $2 to travel a bit over a mile.
(The scooters cost about $500 on Amazon, and can travel about 15 miles on a charge. I can imagine a scooter racking up over $25 of rental fees per day, so the payback period could be less than three weeks. I wonder how much expense Bird is facing due to theft, damage, etc.)
I used Bird scooters last year on a visit to Santa Monica. In the morning the app showed plenty of scooters, and in the evening the app showed only two or three, and when I looked for one it wasn't where the app said it should be. I think at one point I actually saw someone with a pickup truck loading Bird scooters into the back.
I first rented it because there was this huge wildfire in Southern California at the time, and the air in Santa Monica was smoky. I wasn't looking forward to walking 15 minutes, and instead I rented a Bird and made the trip in 5 minutes without arriving sweaty or breathing hard. I didn't knock anyone over, nor did I grind any homeless people's faces into the dirt, so I didn't feel particularly guilty about using a Bird scooter.
The founder of Bird is quoted as having said he wants there to be "more Birds than cars".
I'm pretty sure what he wants to see is people riding mass transit and using a Bird to get from the transit to their home. This might actually work in Los Angeles, but I am dubious about the idea in any place where winter involves snow and ice.
It would work great if we all moved into giant underground cities, but if we do that, I want to see slidewalks as shown in The Caves of Steel.
* Bird scooters are electric scooters that one rents using a mobile app.
* Bird scooters are becoming common, and the writer complains he has a near-collision "almost daily" with someone driving a Bird scooter unsafely.
* Homeless people are a problem. Bird, along with all other tech companies, is making this problem worse, because they buy real estate and build new buildings.
* People who work for tech companies ignore homeless people. Zipping along on a scooter makes this easier. Therefore, Bird scooters are "tearing apart the fabric of our Westside society" (this is a word-for-word quote). I guess Westside means the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, which he just calls "Venice" in this article.
* Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them, and Bird should feel bad about that. (However, the writer also opines that nobody needs a Bird scooter, since it's no real trouble to walk a mile instead of riding a scooter for a mile.)
It's a stupid article and I feel stupider for having read it.
The Model S and Model X are high cost to try and actually make money off of them. Pretty much the only reason Tesla has lasted this long, and gotten this far, is by aiming high and building brand reputation. There's just no margin in $35K vehicles and they'd never sell without the branding to back them up.
You aren't quite correct here.
It's true that the price of the Model S and Model X is high to make a profit. However, it's not true that there is "no margin in $35K vehicles"... Tesla has spent big on factories (including their own battery factory) so that they can make a car at that price point and make a profit.
Their plan, which was never a secret: first, make the Roadster; sell it for $120,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold. Then, use the lessons learned from the Roadster and make the Model S, sell that for $60,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold. Finally, use the lessons learned from Model S, Model X, and the Roadster, make the Model 3, sell it for $35,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold.
One of the nice things about this plan is that at each step, the number of vehicles they make goes up. A problem on the Roadster didn't affect that many cars. A problem on the Model S would affect more cars. They had best have the problems figured out before mass-producing the Model 3. I think overall they have... the Model 3 is getting really good reviews, and the only real problem is that they can't make them fast enough yet.
Note that GM takes a loss on the Chevy Bolt, which is why they sell enough of them to collect EV credits but they aren't going for mass production. The Model 3 is a much better car, and Tesla will be able to sell it for $35,000 at a profit once Tesla has the production rate up high enough. (Right now their factory expenses are being spread across 2000 to 3000 cars per week, instead of the planned 5000 per week. Once the per-car factory expenses are low enough Tesla will be making money on the cars. Even though their expenses are high right now, they are generating cash flow, which is a good thing for them, and much better than paying for the factories while not selling any cars at all.)
Only Tesla knows for sure, but experts are guessing that Tesla will make a 25% margin on the Model 3.
I am not very sore at the massive per-unit subsidies that Tesla's above-average wealthy customers are getting on cars
So not very sore that you described it using passive-aggressive terms. But yep, Tesla gets the same electric car tax credit that all the other battery electric vehicle car manufacturers can also take advantage of. Unless you are going to claim there is a special subsidy just for Tesla?
News flash: when the government wants something to happen, one lever they use is tax breaks. The government would like to see electric cars happen sooner, so they gave tax breaks. To everyone. Equally.
And yes, new technology is more expensive than older established technology, which in turn means that the initial customers might be more affluent. Not news.
NTSB is basically deputized to solve private sector problems at taxpayer expense. How much longer does Tesla and it's financiers get this free tax benefit?
NTSB is investigating because of the lithium ion batteries, the same battery technology used in every modern electric car. How much longer does GM (Chevy Bolt), Nissan (Leaf), VW (eGolf), Ford (Focus Electric), BMW (i3), etc. etc. get this free tax benefit?
NTSB has, over the years, spent quite a lot of time investigating gasoline car crashes. They've slowed down a lot because they've got a solid knowledge base.
So it's patently unreasonable for you to claim that this is somehow special treatment given Tesla. Tesla cars are the most popular electric cars right now, even though they are expensive; so there are crashes from time to time, just as with gasoline cars.
If the NTSB investigates a Nissan Leaf crash, will you rail against Nissan, or is Tesla just special?
You can find where they are, how much they cost, how much parking costs (some places have free charging but you must pay for parking, and some places you have to pay for both), how many chargers, what hours the chargers are available, and a rating from 1 to 10 for how good the charger is (10 if it's always in working order and usually available, 1 if it's always broken or always blocked or whatever).
Also, I have their app on my phone; I use it to find chargers sometimes, and I also have used it a few times to pay for charging at some J1772 chargers.
One correction: the Tesla Supercharger in Spokane is not open yet; it's scheduled to open before the end of 2018. So if I were driving to Spokane I would hit both Supercharger stations. The first one might be as little as 15 minutes, but the second one is 60 miles from Spokane so I would let the car spend a full hour charging while I would eat a meal. That would leave me with plenty of charge for driving around Spokane.
I just checked on PlugShare.com and there are plenty of chargers in Spokane, including some Tesla Destination Chargers. A Tesla driver could stay at a hotel and charge the car overnight.
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What is of more concern to me is how carefully AV1 has been constructed in terms of its coding tools to avoid patent trolling and patent submarining
I don't think you need to worry. When Google announced VP8, MPEG-LA publicly announced that they were setting up a patent pool for it; they encouraged all the patent holders who VP8 infringed to step forward and add their patents to the pool.
Nobody ever came up with anything, and after over a year, MPEG-LA accepted a small amount of money from Google in exchange for a promise to never sue over VP8. No patents, no royalties, just a one-time payment; that was pretty much unconditional victory for Google and VP8. The news coverage called this a "licensing agreement" but it was more like "here, take a small amount of money and go away forever."
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-licensing-agreement-covering-googles-vp8-video-codec-clearing-the-way-for-wider-adoption/
When VP8 was first announced, many self-appointed experts here on Slashdot declared confidently that it just had to infringe on H.264 patents, as a reading of the standard revealed numerous similarities. I am not a patent expert but I was pretty sure they were mistaken about this... Google spent something like a year after they licensed the technology before they released the open-source VP8, and I assumed that they had paid patent lawyers to go over the standard and make sure it didn't infringe on anything. Also, it looked to me like the original developers of the code had deliberately studied the existing patents and implemented something just different enough not to infringe.
It may be possible that a patent could pop up from seemingly nowhere, some weird patent nobody was paying attention to, and AV1 would be found to infringe upon it. If this scenario is possible for AV1, what makes it impossible for H.265? In fact, I'd argue it might be more likely for H.265, which is a complicated thing to which many companies tried to contribute (so they could get a share of royalties). I would be interested to hear an expert's opinion on whether AV1 is less complex than H.265... I bet that it is. And more complexity would suggest greater danger from overlooked patents.
As for submarine patents, again I am not very worried. The USA changed its patent laws between 1995 through 2000 to prevent abuses like submarine patents. Patents are 20 years from the date of filing, so playing games with paperwork extensions can't keep a patent alive forever anymore; and since 2000 patent filings are public, so the secrecy needed for submarine patents is gone.
So unless someone has a suitable patent application, filed before the year 1995, that they have kept alive with paperwork wizardry in the patent office, and nobody knows about it, and they get it granted... unless all of that is true, it shouldn't be possible for a submarine patent to torpedo AV1.
The Force Awakens showed that Disney has the ability to make a movie that looks and feels like a Star Wars movie ought to. Its plot wasn't the best, but I cut them a lot of slack, figuring that movie had a crushing load to carry (it had to not fail, and it had to not have all the fans hate it) so it made sense that the plot was loaded up with things that we'd seen before.
I was looking forward to the next one... and then it was The Last Jedi which is just a bleak mess. Oh well.
Disney can manage the look and the feel. They just need to get a good story and let it play out properly on screen and we could yet get watchable Star Wars movies.
So now we find out that George Lucas's big vision was to do a new trilogy about mystical creatures being the power source for The Force? He still thinks midichlorians was a good idea, and he wants to use that for the new trilogy? That actually sounds worse than The Last Jedi to me.
George Lucas seems to be getting worse over time. I thought ewoks were kind of annoying... then, Jar Jar Binks... now "Whills"? I'm glad that didn't happen.
The original Star Wars movie was actually pretty terrible in its rough cut. Deft editing saved it, and Lucas had three people helping him sort out the edit. Then Empire Strikes Back he handed off script and directing to other people, who did a great job. Then in the prequel trilogy, he wrote and directed and what we got was exactly what he intended... and it wasn't great. He needed other people pushing back on his bad ideas and helping him in the areas where he is weak, and he didn't get that. His first idea went straight to screen and he was never forced to rework and improve. Lazy directing went straight to the screen. Nobody had the power to say "no" to him. Too bad.
P.S. If you haven't seen this, and you're a Star Wars fan, this is totally worth 20 minutes of your time: How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit
P.P.S. Oh wow, "Journal of the Whills" was part of George Lucas's original name for the movie! If you watch that video linked above, you can spot it on the picture of the first page of the script.
But even if George Lucas insists that this Whills/midiclorians thing was his original plan, I don't buy it. He was making things up as he went along. I'm certain that the plot point of Luke and Leia being siblings wasn't invented in time for the first movie, or else they would have probably skipped her giving him a peck on the cheek for luck; original concept art had everyone armed with glowing swords, not just a few characters; etc. A lot of what we love was added during the process of making the movies, and much of it came from creative contributions from people who were not George Lucas.
Politics is the art of the possible. I have a modest proposal that I think is possible: Allow unlimited copyright extensions that are not automatic or free.
Given how much money Disney and other big content-owning companies are going to spend on this, our elected representatives are going to roll over again... so it is not possible to roll back copyright protection to anything like the original short terms. It's pretty much certain that the terms are getting extended again. So my question is whether we can get the deal changed in some way that makes it better for us.
Disney is very motivated to keep the copyrights going forever on old cartoons like "Steamboat Willy". To them, it's just collateral damage that nothing else ever falls into the public domain... I don't think they care that old black-and-white movies not owned by Disney also aren't falling into the public domain.
So my modest proposal is that a corporation can extend the copyright on any property by filing a form and paying a nominal fee. For the sake of argument I propose $5 to be the fee and for the form to get a 5-year extension. A dollar per year! Cheap!
But if you fail to list some piece of content and file the form, it lapses into the public domain.
This fixes the murky issues around a lot of content, such as obscure video games from three decades ago. In many cases it would take lawsuits to figure out who is the current owner, so it's not possible to get a license for the content... so nobody is going to file the paperwork to extend the copyright, and the old forgotten content will lapse into the public domain.
This is still a screaming good deal for the content owners. The US government still acts as an enforcer to go after people infringing on the copyrights, and it would cost way more than $1 to hire private detectives or whatever to do the same thing without government.
But I don't see why the content owners should get endlessly-extended copyright terms where nothing ever falls into the public domain automatically for free and without even lifting a finger.
Copyright is supposed to be a three-cornered deal between the content owners, the government, and the people. The people are supposed to benefit by things falling into the public domain; that's why the phrase "for limited times" appears in the Constitution. The people would get nothing from a 140-year extension, but would get something from my proposal.
What profits??? Tesla has NO PROFITS.
Wow, this isn't the first time you have said this right here on Slashdot. I remember you saying it, and I remember the flurry of posts trying to educate you as to why you were mistaken on this point. I guess you just didn't learn anything. Or maybe you prefer alternate facts?
Tesla is believed to make over $20K per Model S and Model X. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/03/27/how-tesla-motors-could-be-profitable-if-it-wanted.aspx
Tesla is expected to make about a 25% profit margin on each Model 3 once they hit the production rate of 5000 cars per month. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/14/tesla-model-3-gross-margins/
It's dishonest to take all the money they make on car sales, then divide it by all the expenses they have (R&D, building out the Supercharger network, etc.) and claim that they are losing money on each car sold. No, they are making money on each car sold, and then spending it all, plus more money they borrowed, on all their growth plans. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/13/why-tesla-is-a-very-profitable-company-tesla-bankwuptcy-explained-part-2/
Note that GM is believed to lose about $9K per Chevy Bolt sold; the car only pencils out because of EV credits. Tesla is on track to make more money per Model 3 than GM loses. If GM wants to get serious about EVs, then GM needs to invest heavily in battery technology the way Tesla did. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/02/tesla-model-3-competitive-advantage-costs-10000-less-to-make-than-chevy-bolt/
Not only is Tesla now very cost-efficient on battery cells due to having their own factory, they have developed their own next-generation battery pack technology. According to this teardown the Tesla Model 3 battery pack contains advanced technology unlike anything that came before. If you like geeky discussions of technology, you will enjoy reading this link: http://evtv.me/2018/05/tesla-model-3-gone-battshit/
Elon Musk has said that 2018 is going to be the year where Tesla starts making money. He has a simple plan: cut any excessive expenses (such as contractors that hire subcontractors that hire subcontractors; Musk compared this to a "Russian Doll") and get Model 3 production above 5000 per month. You will only have to wait a few months to see if he was correct in this prediction. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-says-tesla-will-be-profitable-in-q3-and-q4/
That's a pretty amazing news link you shared there.
Yeah, so unconcerned that they whipped out a fix in record time.
There's some nice, neutral, even-handed reporting for you.
"more likely to first be released"? The writer of that article seems to be blissfully unaware that the Model 3 has been shipping in quantity for months now and is in fact the most popular battery electric vehicle sold in the USA today. Why did you pick this as the reference to support your posting?
Tesla is selling their cars as fast as they can make them, and making them faster now. This posting on futurism.com does nothing to alter my opinion of Tesla or its future.
There was a human in the Uber car. Theoretically she was there to provide a human element that backed up the self-driving. But she was not giving her full attention to safety.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17388696/uber-self-driving-crash-ntsb-report
I think Uber should change their procedure. Have two humans in the car: one to provide safety backup to the driving, and one to manage the iPad app. That will cost more than just having one human in the car, but would have saved a life in this case.
Note that the NTSB says the pedestrian was crossing unsafely, which contributed to the incident. Again quoting from the above-linked article in The Verge:
I don't see what the drugs in her system had to do with anything; I think this would have happened the same way even if she was completely sober. But she was doing an unsafe thing when she died.
Congratulations! You spoiled him!
It's my prerogative as his uncle to spoil him if I want. His mom, my sister, was fine with it.
And actually, he never asked for a Linux computer... I just wanted him to have one and I made it happen.
But thanks for telling me your opinion! I always worry I'm not getting enough input into my decisions from Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot.
When my nephew was 9, I set up a computer for him. I gave him a MATE desktop, which basically works similar to Windows, and he was able to use it right away.
I didn't give him root on his own machine. However, I gave his user sudo permission to run the Software Manager. I gave him Linux Mint, which is a tweaked version of Ubuntu, so it was basically the Ubuntu Software Manager. This is pretty similar to the app store on mobile devices. So he had no ability to screw up his system, but he could browse the Software Manager, find a game or something, and install it with a click.
My goal was to set his baseline expectations to Linux. I wanted him to see Windows and say "wait, there's no app store thing with free games on Windows? How primitive, give me my Linux please." I wouldn't say my brainwashing attempt succeeded, but he just turned 12 and he still uses the Linux computer for most of what he does on a computer. He also has a Windows laptop that he uses to run some Windows-only stuff he likes. But he chooses which computer to use just based on what he wants to run; he has no particular preference for Windows or for Linux.
P.S. His Linux computer is an all-in-one made by Lenovo, with a really nice and big screen. I got it really inexpensively on eBay; I believe it was off-lease.
I have read the papers on both sides. I find the pro-minimum-wage arguments to be uncompelling.
When you raise the price of anything, you get less of it. But minimum-wage proponents claim that it's possible to increase the cost of hiring employees without businesses cutting back on hiring.
Seattle is sort of getting away with its minimum wage law because it's already an expensive city, and the average wage is higher in Seattle already. A $15 minimum wage in a small town where average wages are low would have a much more shocking effect.
As the guy from the hamburger chain said, his chain will be expanding in cities other than Seattle. Any new jobs from his chain will not be in Seattle. That's not good news for Seattle or the people in Seattle who might want a job at a burger place. Is his business the only one making such a decision? I'll bet not.
I meant "a rich person might be able and willing to pay what it would take to have a huge mansion with a yard in Seattle." If you are not rich, but want a huge mansion with a yard, you won't be buying it in Seattle. (There might be places in the USA where you can get the house you want.)
The articles I linked had an example of a 20-something who couldn't afford to spend very much on housing, and was quite happy in a micro-apartment in a lively neighborhood. Likely she would have enjoyed living in a huge mansion but she wasn't rich and didn't have that option. (She was lucky to get her micro-apartment... the Seattle city government has effectively made it illegal to build more apartments like hers.)
The housing market should cater to her, as well as to rich people who can afford a mansion.
Sorry I didn't write that more clearly.
I'm sure there's a suburb close enough that they can keep the same emplyees.
I live in a suburb near Seattle. Amazon could easily move to one or more of the nearby suburbs: Redmond (where Microsoft is), Kirkland (where Google has their second-largest campus after their headquarters), Bothell (not sexy or famous but has lots of business park space, and people are increasingly moving there because it's equidistant from Seattle and the rest of the suburbs), Bellevue (if you like skyscrapers, that's second after Seattle, and it's close to where the really rich people like Bill Gates live). If I were Amazon I'd be looking at having these cities bid against each other, and maybe even scattering buildings among multiple cities.
A significant fraction of Amazon's workers are commuting into Seattle from these nearby cities anyway. I know people who ride the bus into Seattle to work at Amazon, and would love it if Amazon moved closer to them.
If the Seattle City Council makes the pain threshold high enough, Amazon can and will pull out of Seattle.
And now that Seattle is asking Amazon to give a tiny percentage back to help the community that fostered them, they threaten to leave.
This argument would be more compelling if Seattle didn't already collect taxes from Amazon. Amazon already pays quite a lot in taxes. The Seattle city government basically said "We've decided we need even more money, you have money, so hand it over."
When even the extremely liberal Starbucks is complaining, maybe Seattle has gone too far.
Amazon doesn't like this, but it's really going to hurt low-margin businesses like fast food hamburger restaurants. The iconic local hamburger chain, Dick's Drive-in, will never open another location in Seattle, according to the founder's grandson Saul Spady.
But at least Seattle didn't already do something crazy like pass a $15 per hour minimum wage law! Oh wait... yes they did.
If a city council giving orders truly leads to prosperity and happiness, then Seattle will be prosperous and happy. I fear it doesn't work that way.
you can't import more land from China, like you can with other goods.
True. But there are tradeoffs you could make. Maybe a rich guy with a family wants a huge mansion with a yard, but maybe a 20-something who rides the bus would be happy just to have a space all her own, even a tiny one, at a rent she can afford. So build micro-housing, where the same amount of land has many more apartments, and thus the rent per apartment is lower!
Seattle was actually where micro-housing first started out. And Seattle... killed it.
People in the Seattle government have used government power to keep the home builders from making more units of housing that would rent for less. There's less supply, and what supply remains costs more. Lose/lose.
The articles below have floor plans. When I was a 20-something I would have much preferred to live in any of those micro-apartments than to live in a shared space with housemates. But the Seattle city government doesn't think that people should have that choice.
http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/
http://www.sightline.org/2017/03/20/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing-again/
My memory says I paid about $2 to travel about a mile. I can easily imagine people renting these to travel further than a mile, and spending more. Also, if you want to use a scooter for a round trip, you might keep it much longer than I did, and the cost meter would keep running while you kept it.
I was their worst case: a short, one-way trip.
In short I don't really know how much they gross per scooter per day.
I'm curious. In winter do you see people on electric scooters, with studded 8.5-inch (21.6 cm) scooter tyres?
I wonder about electric battery performance on a really cold day. These are simple scooters with no thermal management in the battery pack, so if a cold temperature causes poor battery performance, nothing would mitigate it. The battery pack is thin and not insulated.
I just skimmed your summery and my IQ dropped with 7 whole points. I can not imagine what the whole articlke would do to me. Well not after reading your summery anyway.
I read the whole thing.
My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.
Daisy, daisy, give me your answer true...
I wonder how resistant they are to being taken apart. Some enterprising homeless could be on to a goldmine.
Bird scooters are constantly phoning home with their location, and likely have been modified with tampering sensors. A determined person could outfit a van with a Faraday cage and steal the scooters for disassembly at leisure, but an actually homeless person might be interrupted during the disassembly by people looking for the device at its last reported location.
The scooters themselves are relatively lightweight, so not immune from being destroyed, but reasonably sturdy.
I don't know how much of a problem they have with theft and vandalism, but they are still in business.
What the homeless will have trouble with is charging them.
Actually, that's not a problem. The user does not charge a Bird scooter. I believe that the scooters are picked up every night and charged overnight, then put back on the streets the next morning with a full charge. It's part of what you are paying for when you pay something like $2 to travel a bit over a mile.
(The scooters cost about $500 on Amazon, and can travel about 15 miles on a charge. I can imagine a scooter racking up over $25 of rental fees per day, so the payback period could be less than three weeks. I wonder how much expense Bird is facing due to theft, damage, etc.)
I used Bird scooters last year on a visit to Santa Monica. In the morning the app showed plenty of scooters, and in the evening the app showed only two or three, and when I looked for one it wasn't where the app said it should be. I think at one point I actually saw someone with a pickup truck loading Bird scooters into the back.
I first rented it because there was this huge wildfire in Southern California at the time, and the air in Santa Monica was smoky. I wasn't looking forward to walking 15 minutes, and instead I rented a Bird and made the trip in 5 minutes without arriving sweaty or breathing hard. I didn't knock anyone over, nor did I grind any homeless people's faces into the dirt, so I didn't feel particularly guilty about using a Bird scooter.
The founder of Bird is quoted as having said he wants there to be "more Birds than cars".
I'm pretty sure what he wants to see is people riding mass transit and using a Bird to get from the transit to their home. This might actually work in Los Angeles, but I am dubious about the idea in any place where winter involves snow and ice.
It would work great if we all moved into giant underground cities, but if we do that, I want to see slidewalks as shown in The Caves of Steel .
I skimmed the article so you don't have to.
* Bird scooters are electric scooters that one rents using a mobile app.
* Bird scooters are becoming common, and the writer complains he has a near-collision "almost daily" with someone driving a Bird scooter unsafely.
* Homeless people are a problem. Bird, along with all other tech companies, is making this problem worse, because they buy real estate and build new buildings.
* People who work for tech companies ignore homeless people. Zipping along on a scooter makes this easier. Therefore, Bird scooters are "tearing apart the fabric of our Westside society" (this is a word-for-word quote). I guess Westside means the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, which he just calls "Venice" in this article.
* Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them, and Bird should feel bad about that. (However, the writer also opines that nobody needs a Bird scooter, since it's no real trouble to walk a mile instead of riding a scooter for a mile.)
It's a stupid article and I feel stupider for having read it.
my point was it would have been impossible for them to start out with a low cost vehicle like the Model 3.
Oh, I see. I agree completely with you, then.
The Model S and Model X are high cost to try and actually make money off of them. Pretty much the only reason Tesla has lasted this long, and gotten this far, is by aiming high and building brand reputation. There's just no margin in $35K vehicles and they'd never sell without the branding to back them up.
You aren't quite correct here.
It's true that the price of the Model S and Model X is high to make a profit. However, it's not true that there is "no margin in $35K vehicles"... Tesla has spent big on factories (including their own battery factory) so that they can make a car at that price point and make a profit.
Their plan, which was never a secret: first, make the Roadster; sell it for $120,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold. Then, use the lessons learned from the Roadster and make the Model S, sell that for $60,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold. Finally, use the lessons learned from Model S, Model X, and the Roadster, make the Model 3, sell it for $35,000 and up, and make a profit on each car sold.
One of the nice things about this plan is that at each step, the number of vehicles they make goes up. A problem on the Roadster didn't affect that many cars. A problem on the Model S would affect more cars. They had best have the problems figured out before mass-producing the Model 3. I think overall they have... the Model 3 is getting really good reviews, and the only real problem is that they can't make them fast enough yet.
Note that GM takes a loss on the Chevy Bolt, which is why they sell enough of them to collect EV credits but they aren't going for mass production. The Model 3 is a much better car, and Tesla will be able to sell it for $35,000 at a profit once Tesla has the production rate up high enough. (Right now their factory expenses are being spread across 2000 to 3000 cars per week, instead of the planned 5000 per week. Once the per-car factory expenses are low enough Tesla will be making money on the cars. Even though their expenses are high right now, they are generating cash flow, which is a good thing for them, and much better than paying for the factories while not selling any cars at all.)
Only Tesla knows for sure, but experts are guessing that Tesla will make a 25% margin on the Model 3.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/02/tesla-model-3-competitive-advantage-costs-10000-less-to-make-than-chevy-bolt/
I am not very sore at the massive per-unit subsidies that Tesla's above-average wealthy customers are getting on cars
So not very sore that you described it using passive-aggressive terms. But yep, Tesla gets the same electric car tax credit that all the other battery electric vehicle car manufacturers can also take advantage of. Unless you are going to claim there is a special subsidy just for Tesla?
News flash: when the government wants something to happen, one lever they use is tax breaks. The government would like to see electric cars happen sooner, so they gave tax breaks. To everyone. Equally.
And yes, new technology is more expensive than older established technology, which in turn means that the initial customers might be more affluent. Not news.
NTSB is basically deputized to solve private sector problems at taxpayer expense. How much longer does Tesla and it's financiers get this free tax benefit?
NTSB is investigating because of the lithium ion batteries, the same battery technology used in every modern electric car. How much longer does GM (Chevy Bolt), Nissan (Leaf), VW (eGolf), Ford (Focus Electric), BMW (i3), etc. etc. get this free tax benefit?
NTSB has, over the years, spent quite a lot of time investigating gasoline car crashes. They've slowed down a lot because they've got a solid knowledge base.
So it's patently unreasonable for you to claim that this is somehow special treatment given Tesla. Tesla cars are the most popular electric cars right now, even though they are expensive; so there are crashes from time to time, just as with gasoline cars.
If the NTSB investigates a Nissan Leaf crash, will you rail against Nissan, or is Tesla just special?
I can't figure out how to identify [places with public J1772 chargers] on a map yet, compared to being able to find Tesla stations
FYI, there is an extremely useful web site for this:
https://www.plugshare.com/
You can find where they are, how much they cost, how much parking costs (some places have free charging but you must pay for parking, and some places you have to pay for both), how many chargers, what hours the chargers are available, and a rating from 1 to 10 for how good the charger is (10 if it's always in working order and usually available, 1 if it's always broken or always blocked or whatever).
Also, I have their app on my phone; I use it to find chargers sometimes, and I also have used it a few times to pay for charging at some J1772 chargers.
One correction: the Tesla Supercharger in Spokane is not open yet; it's scheduled to open before the end of 2018. So if I were driving to Spokane I would hit both Supercharger stations. The first one might be as little as 15 minutes, but the second one is 60 miles from Spokane so I would let the car spend a full hour charging while I would eat a meal. That would leave me with plenty of charge for driving around Spokane.
I just checked on PlugShare.com and there are plenty of chargers in Spokane, including some Tesla Destination Chargers. A Tesla driver could stay at a hotel and charge the car overnight.