But if I'm on my Windows machine? I think I'm SOL... by design?
Since you are using Apple Pay, you have an iPhone. You whip out your phone, launch Wallet, tap the card you want to use, and then (new interface stuff is necessary, so we are guessing based on what Apple told us) you hit the "..." for more information, and then hit a button to generate a CVV, expiration and number for you. This isn't lock-in, per se, but it is an incentive to remain in the Apple ecosystem.
Same reason most people mow their yards, whether they know it or not, to keep mice and rats away from the home. I'm in an area with a lot of hay fields, so a lot of unchecked rodents. It's not perfectly effective, but keeping a big buffer from the main home, the detached garage and the pool is important to me and my family.
I've got a 6 acre plot, 4 of which is mowed. Generally this takes me 3 hours every Saturday during the warm months. I would love a robot mower. So far, they have all been random paths, except for some prototyping in Ardumower. Random paths are great for suburbia but they just can't cover large open spaces.
This market could really use someone who can handle straight paths. My kind of yard doesn't mind some radio beacons to help with DGPS signals, but fence type transmitters far from the home will be tough. In-ground wires aren't too much of an issue.
Right now, the only automatic mowers I can find that can handle more than 2 acres are more than my zero turn mower. Not that that's a deal breaker, but I would need to buy two to cover my whole yard -- which is the problem.
metal-to-metal friction is lower than rubber to concrete
But isn't that the problem too? Rubber is good at acceleration. Metal wheels aren't. For sufficiently long tunnels where the metal wheels can get up to speed and just cruise, I think you're right. But for the first few "proof of concept" tunnels that are supposed to be pretty small, only a mile or two, I don't think metal wheels give a significant friction advantage compared to the "wow" factor of being able to accelerate and brake faster.
For a 10 mile tunnel, I'd hope a car could park on a skate in some sort of loading zone, have the skate go through the tunnel at higher speeds and with lower friction and then decelerate into an unloading zone where cars can exit their skates.
You can always buy a truck from an American manufacturer
AC, I fail to see how it has any relevance to any discussion involving the proliferation of electric vehicles, or the segue into the support infrastructure that will need to drastically change for them to make them relevant to urban drivers, but I bought #6 on the list of cars that will have the biggest impact on the American economy. Of course, with such a throw-away comment, you may have a horse in the game. Are you also embarrassed at how few "American" cars made the list (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Jeep, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Dodge, etc)? 4 of the top 10 are "Japanese", for whatever that actually means anymore.
Re your needs. I think it's going to be a while before your needs are met. Maybe as much as 5 to 10 years at a competitive price point. But it's fairly unusual as a usage pattern.
I don't disagree, but I expect there is a pretty big percentage of people with what could reasonably be considered "fairly unusual usage patterns". Not that everybody has to do what I do, but just not fit in the standard "commute 10-30 miles to work twice a day" or "run 30 miles of errands" per day buckets. I also think there's a huge mental block between "does what I need it to do 360 days a year" and "I could reasonably rent a car to make up 5 days a year and still come out ahead".
Customers in the suburbs and rural areas have decent access to plugs. With a little infrastructure work, level 2 chargers could proliferate and this could be good for a lot of reasons.
For urban life where on-street parking is the norm, what are you gonna do? It's not like it's practical to deploy level 2 chargers (or anything else) along the sides of the road. Many of them are on the driver's side, which means those plugs would be subject to additional splashing and kick-up from passing road traffic. Additionally, those huge L2 plugs are now going to stick out an extra few inches. How do you do that without creating tripping hazards?
I'm all for increased electric car deployment. I was shopping hard for a pure electric car that would serve my needs, and failing that, a plug-in hybrid. My problem is that I need to go for trips with the Boy Scouts where I can tow a trailer over 1500 pounds (which drops all plug-in hybrids and I think only leaves the Model X for all-electrics) and those trips average 2-3 hours away (range is a problem). Stopping with a carload of boys to charge for 2 hours along the way is... not going to sell cars.
VW (and the rest of the car makers) have a lot of work to do to overcome those challenges.
When someone defends an incorrect belief as "opinion", it's not an "opinion", it's "wrong".
When someone's incorrect belief is touted as correct, it's not "a lie" and [s]he is not "a liar", [s]he is "wrong".
Too much of our society today is getting wrapped up in ad hominem attacks. From people needing to defend themselves with words they don't understand to people rising to their own cause and attacking the person, not the incorrect fact. Take a step back. It's not hard to say that 95% of climate scientists believe the theory of climate change is real. Nor is it hard to point out that gravity is still "a theory" but we still are pretty sure it's real.
Wouldn't avoiding eating ghosts mean it just never got smart enough to know that you could eat power pills and then pass through them? That new optimal paths would arise when the power pill was active? If their algorithm added score for lower time or for points, I think this behavior would change.
"IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man to Avoid Ghosts Even When It Is Advantageous To Eat Them" might not have the same ring to it.
Macrumors reported that IOS12 will support CarPlay with third party navigation apps, specifically including Waze. This is huge for me! I hate all native car navigation apps and will use my phone mounted on my dashboard just to get Waze. Enabling CarPlay is a huge deal.
So, I'm at work, and a lot of sites are normally blocked (not even worth clicking on half of them), but how do these plugins work? Are they user-friendly torrent interfaces? So they're torrents under the hood? Do they troll through newsgroups? Or are there illicit http sites out there providing the data? Or something else entirely? I couldn't figure it out skimming TFA... did I miss something?
I feel like there's a huge market missed. I really want a computer screen on my face. I want all the real estate of a 60" screen, but with something more portable.
VR wastes a lot of time, money, effort, parts, power etc. on motion tracking, gyroscopes, external trackers and everything. Then there's the programming to make it immersive. What if I could just put one of those little screens on my face (minus some weight!) and then watch a movie on a bigger appearing screen than what my TV looks like? All that power and plastic wrapped up in big screens is wasted.
A 20 year old e-mail program is just as useful as a new one, while a 20 year old browser will probably crash once you try to open google.com.
I admit I lose track of time regularly, but a 20 year old e-mail program -- Eudora, Elm, what have you -- had no ability to parse HTML e-mail. I spend most of my time checking my e-mail with my phone and occasionally with a web browser and I use a desktop client every other month or so. I did find myself inspecting the source a few times last month, and I did have a few e-mails without the plain text equivalent. My conclusion was that there are e-mail clients or companies who send HTML only e-mails. This means old e-mail clients from 20 years ago would not be useful.
Each of my three kids has a Minecraft Creeper hoodie, my 10 year old has a half dozen books, my 13 year old has a bunch of paper models, there are at least two battery powered "torches" wandering around, and both of my older kids have a bunch of small plastic models.
We're in for two copies of Minecraft for Mac, another one for Xbox 360 and WiiU. If we've handed over less than $200 all total, I'd be surprised.
If this product can fix some problems with Google Glass, I'll buy one at twice a reasonable price.
Google Glass never looked comfortable or stylish. The camera made everyone uncomfortable. The battery wasn't great, and the resolution was terrible.
If Apple can come in and make it look reasonable, omit the camera, take advantage of some recent semiconductor technologies like fin fets or fdsoi, and make a 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, they have a blockbuster on their hands. I want to be able to access my digital world (Facebook, games, email, texts), and I want it to evolve into something better than what I've got. Already I barely use my home computer daily, no longer multiple times a day. My cell phone is my current tether to the internet. I'm not particularly enamored with it, but if it becomes a secondary device for my glasses -- cellular modem, hi def screen for necessary tasks, GPS, CPU and whatever chips eat the most power -- that's a great benefit.
For me, visual displays are "complete" when they can use a laser (or whatever) to project onto my retina a fully focused image that's of a "normal" brightness, taking the same arc size of a 24" screen a foot away, with a resolution better than I can detect. Glasses are the next logical step to this panacea.
For them to have a fully loaded semi on the freeway and the driver to get in the back seat was blatantly irresponsible. This experiment should never even have been legal.
According to TFA, they've been preparing for this one run for 6 months. Mapping it out, training the AI on the dynamics of loaded trailers, sending humans down the road to see when the safest time is, etc. You can bet more than a few lawyers were consulted during the course of this work between two companies.
AI cars have such a low safety requirement, they're going to have to swerve around them to avoid tripping over it. In cars, they have soccer moms with screaming kids and middle managers gabbing on cell phones, distracted driving accounts for half of the traffic out there. In the case of a commercial trucker, we're talking overtired and bored. An AI with an adequate vision system can easily out perform the most distracted drivers on controlled roads in perfect weather. We talk about self driving cars as though they only win the safety game with 0% accidents, but if safety concerned moms and wealthy business people buy them, I think tail end of the safety curve is going to get chopped off, bringing the averages up. Hell, I'd chip in for a retrofit on a BMW I keep seeing on my commute.
What is more important is verifying that no-one is running the red light when you enter the intersection.
Which in the US is an all too common occurrence.
Where snow is common, the first one or two seconds of a green don't count anyway. You've slid through a just-turned-red intersection once or twice yourself, you know somebody else can too. So you learn to pause just a moment. This habit doesn't completely clear during the summer, but it comes back come winter time again.
What do you think would Clinton "shake up?" She is the epitome of the status-quo!
There are several shake ups coming in November / January.
Let's look at the Senate. It's likely to swing Blue. This alone won't mean much because the House is likely to remain Red, but it's certainly going to change legislative agendas, which are important. Speaking of the House, with Trump at the top of the ticket, there will be downballot implications, some Republicans are going to have turnout trouble leading to Democrats taking some seats. I haven't seen any polls I believe in, but I think the House stays Red but with a bigger percentage Blue than before. That's a change that means more bipartisan cooperation will be necessary for anybody to get their personal agendas to see the light of day.
I can't see a Hillary executive changing much in terms of foreign policy, so full credit for "status-quo" there. Despite my preferences, she's likely to continue to antagonize Russia with anti-ICBM batteries and unified exercises close to Russia. She stands a chance of using executive orders to continue to shape the immigrant and minimum wage debates. And her ability to sign into law what the new Senate and the increasingly bipartisan House is important.
On the topic of Hillary being status-quo. Based on the rhetoric of the Republican Party for the last 2-3 years, a status-quo is in fact a shake up. All the stonewalling that's been done in Congress, all the scapegoating, all the blaming, and they can't get the American people to put them back into power. Heck, they need to tend to their own house as they realize 12 candidates can't make it through the primaries without a crazy making it out as the candidate. Then if you count that Hillary is almost certain to name at least one Supreme Court Justice in the next 4 years (with some guessing up to three!), this is going to be a "status-quo" that remains in place for a long time. Even if it's only Ginsberg and Breyer getting replaced with younger equivalents, that's a big deal. There's a 54% chance of a conservative justice kicking it in the next four years, so that's an even bigger deal.
A computer though, I have no idea how most people could last 5 years.
I'm typing this on a work issued 4.5 year old HP Probook 6455b. I've got an AMD Turion mobile processor and it wasn't fast when I got it. Two years ago, I tried to trade it in for a faster model. IT slapped some piece of crap slow SSD in it and refused me a new machine.
It's not fast. I can do some engineering work on it (CAD, statistics), but most of the time it runs Firefox and Chrome to get to Google Apps where the corporate IT infrastructure runs. For what modern work often is, 5 year old hardware is sufficient and I've decided the SSD is "fast enough" and it's not work arguing with IT.
Another angle: even if you don't need money, there are plenty of engineers who do - google can afford paying for these things full sticker.
Google is not avoiding paying one team, but several. Not only are they avoiding dealing with exclusively a firm at random, who, lacking financial competition, is likely to build in a decent profit margin, but they're soliciting from several teams who understand the nature of the competition. Regardless, they're catching a price break. Successful companies often get that way by avoiding paying money they don't have to. In this way, they're not ending up with an "average" design, and not only are they getting the "best" design, but they're getting a whole pile of designs. Any chance they see to pick design elements from a few of the "almost best" ones to make the "best" even better, that's something they can leverage.
I'm still puzzled by the economics of these prize driven challenges. Look at the winning design: (pdf) [littleboxchallenge.com]. R&D costs of it (including expertise, etc) well exceed $1mil. And having a lot of teams working on their designs... Assuming that there are at least 3 other good teams means then expected payout is laughable $250k...
The $250k is only a small part of the payment. Look at the biographies at the back of that PDF. This team isn't doing it for the cash, they're doing it for the publicity. They might want to get Google to conduct business with them more regularly, perhaps even manufacturing these boxes for them, but they really want the wider engineering market to see what they're doing as innovative. This isn't some cheapskate bully firm screwing an individual graphic artist by offering only publicity for their hard earned work (and nobody cares about it), this is GOOGLE. This publicity is worth something. In their portfolio, they can now put "Winner of the Google Little Box Challenge" and they'll shove that in any prospective client's faces. I don't know if this is going to help them seal any deals or get higher profit margins, but I'd expect it's one of those two.
Wasn't this a feature in the 60 minute Viper commercials in 1994? I seem to remember that among the absurdities it had the ability to launch a flying drone type thing from the trunk.
A friend of mine had a similar problem, and found he couldn't get a computer monitor big enough. He ended up getting a 40" LCD TV with a HDMI input. It's on his desk at what I'd consider an uncomfortably close distance, but he swears by it.
I have a stupid question... If the fat mass fell by a mean of 0.3 kg, and the fat free mass fell by a mean of 0.6 kg, what's making up that fat free mass? Water would be an easy culprit, but does that indicate that less sugar resulted in less water retention, or that the subjects also decreased their sodium intake concurrently? I think it's easy to blame sugar for some of the effects, but I'm not convinced it's the only variable that was changed.
Like everyone else, I think the in-car navigation is done better by anyone else. Tom-toms, Garmins, or in my case, Waze on my phone.
What if the in-car entertainment system had a set of APIs that could be controlled by an external device like a phone? That external device could then have a variety of different apps that could use the APIs, even set up several competing apps to take advantage of them. If car companies write off the tiny incremental income from the people who use the services, or even offset it by having their own branded apps cost money, perhaps they could concentrate on making those APIs secure and decrease the impact of successful hacks?
A car company that was able to do that successfully would have quite a selling point to people who were in BYOD and security.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you are using Apple Pay, you have an iPhone. You whip out your phone, launch Wallet, tap the card you want to use, and then (new interface stuff is necessary, so we are guessing based on what Apple told us) you hit the "..." for more information, and then hit a button to generate a CVV, expiration and number for you. This isn't lock-in, per se, but it is an incentive to remain in the Apple ecosystem.
Same reason most people mow their yards, whether they know it or not, to keep mice and rats away from the home. I'm in an area with a lot of hay fields, so a lot of unchecked rodents. It's not perfectly effective, but keeping a big buffer from the main home, the detached garage and the pool is important to me and my family.
I've got a 6 acre plot, 4 of which is mowed. Generally this takes me 3 hours every Saturday during the warm months. I would love a robot mower. So far, they have all been random paths, except for some prototyping in Ardumower. Random paths are great for suburbia but they just can't cover large open spaces.
This market could really use someone who can handle straight paths. My kind of yard doesn't mind some radio beacons to help with DGPS signals, but fence type transmitters far from the home will be tough. In-ground wires aren't too much of an issue.
Right now, the only automatic mowers I can find that can handle more than 2 acres are more than my zero turn mower. Not that that's a deal breaker, but I would need to buy two to cover my whole yard -- which is the problem.
But isn't that the problem too? Rubber is good at acceleration. Metal wheels aren't. For sufficiently long tunnels where the metal wheels can get up to speed and just cruise, I think you're right. But for the first few "proof of concept" tunnels that are supposed to be pretty small, only a mile or two, I don't think metal wheels give a significant friction advantage compared to the "wow" factor of being able to accelerate and brake faster.
For a 10 mile tunnel, I'd hope a car could park on a skate in some sort of loading zone, have the skate go through the tunnel at higher speeds and with lower friction and then decelerate into an unloading zone where cars can exit their skates.
AC, I fail to see how it has any relevance to any discussion involving the proliferation of electric vehicles, or the segue into the support infrastructure that will need to drastically change for them to make them relevant to urban drivers, but I bought #6 on the list of cars that will have the biggest impact on the American economy. Of course, with such a throw-away comment, you may have a horse in the game. Are you also embarrassed at how few "American" cars made the list (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Jeep, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Dodge, etc)? 4 of the top 10 are "Japanese", for whatever that actually means anymore.
I don't disagree, but I expect there is a pretty big percentage of people with what could reasonably be considered "fairly unusual usage patterns". Not that everybody has to do what I do, but just not fit in the standard "commute 10-30 miles to work twice a day" or "run 30 miles of errands" per day buckets. I also think there's a huge mental block between "does what I need it to do 360 days a year" and "I could reasonably rent a car to make up 5 days a year and still come out ahead".
Customers in the suburbs and rural areas have decent access to plugs. With a little infrastructure work, level 2 chargers could proliferate and this could be good for a lot of reasons.
For urban life where on-street parking is the norm, what are you gonna do? It's not like it's practical to deploy level 2 chargers (or anything else) along the sides of the road. Many of them are on the driver's side, which means those plugs would be subject to additional splashing and kick-up from passing road traffic. Additionally, those huge L2 plugs are now going to stick out an extra few inches. How do you do that without creating tripping hazards?
I'm all for increased electric car deployment. I was shopping hard for a pure electric car that would serve my needs, and failing that, a plug-in hybrid. My problem is that I need to go for trips with the Boy Scouts where I can tow a trailer over 1500 pounds (which drops all plug-in hybrids and I think only leaves the Model X for all-electrics) and those trips average 2-3 hours away (range is a problem). Stopping with a carload of boys to charge for 2 hours along the way is ... not going to sell cars.
VW (and the rest of the car makers) have a lot of work to do to overcome those challenges.
When someone defends an incorrect belief as "opinion", it's not an "opinion", it's "wrong".
When someone's incorrect belief is touted as correct, it's not "a lie" and [s]he is not "a liar", [s]he is "wrong".
Too much of our society today is getting wrapped up in ad hominem attacks. From people needing to defend themselves with words they don't understand to people rising to their own cause and attacking the person, not the incorrect fact. Take a step back. It's not hard to say that 95% of climate scientists believe the theory of climate change is real. Nor is it hard to point out that gravity is still "a theory" but we still are pretty sure it's real.
Rise up.
Wouldn't avoiding eating ghosts mean it just never got smart enough to know that you could eat power pills and then pass through them? That new optimal paths would arise when the power pill was active? If their algorithm added score for lower time or for points, I think this behavior would change.
"IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man to Avoid Ghosts Even When It Is Advantageous To Eat Them" might not have the same ring to it.
Macrumors reported that IOS12 will support CarPlay with third party navigation apps, specifically including Waze. This is huge for me! I hate all native car navigation apps and will use my phone mounted on my dashboard just to get Waze. Enabling CarPlay is a huge deal.
So, I'm at work, and a lot of sites are normally blocked (not even worth clicking on half of them), but how do these plugins work? Are they user-friendly torrent interfaces? So they're torrents under the hood? Do they troll through newsgroups? Or are there illicit http sites out there providing the data? Or something else entirely? I couldn't figure it out skimming TFA... did I miss something?
I feel like there's a huge market missed. I really want a computer screen on my face. I want all the real estate of a 60" screen, but with something more portable.
VR wastes a lot of time, money, effort, parts, power etc. on motion tracking, gyroscopes, external trackers and everything. Then there's the programming to make it immersive. What if I could just put one of those little screens on my face (minus some weight!) and then watch a movie on a bigger appearing screen than what my TV looks like? All that power and plastic wrapped up in big screens is wasted.
How long did the console market exist before Microsoft brought the XBox to market? The 360 certainly gave the PS3 a run for its money.
I admit I lose track of time regularly, but a 20 year old e-mail program -- Eudora, Elm, what have you -- had no ability to parse HTML e-mail. I spend most of my time checking my e-mail with my phone and occasionally with a web browser and I use a desktop client every other month or so. I did find myself inspecting the source a few times last month, and I did have a few e-mails without the plain text equivalent. My conclusion was that there are e-mail clients or companies who send HTML only e-mails. This means old e-mail clients from 20 years ago would not be useful.
Email is changing, but far more slowly.
Each of my three kids has a Minecraft Creeper hoodie, my 10 year old has a half dozen books, my 13 year old has a bunch of paper models, there are at least two battery powered "torches" wandering around, and both of my older kids have a bunch of small plastic models.
We're in for two copies of Minecraft for Mac, another one for Xbox 360 and WiiU. If we've handed over less than $200 all total, I'd be surprised.
If this product can fix some problems with Google Glass, I'll buy one at twice a reasonable price.
Google Glass never looked comfortable or stylish. The camera made everyone uncomfortable. The battery wasn't great, and the resolution was terrible.
If Apple can come in and make it look reasonable, omit the camera, take advantage of some recent semiconductor technologies like fin fets or fdsoi, and make a 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, they have a blockbuster on their hands. I want to be able to access my digital world (Facebook, games, email, texts), and I want it to evolve into something better than what I've got. Already I barely use my home computer daily, no longer multiple times a day. My cell phone is my current tether to the internet. I'm not particularly enamored with it, but if it becomes a secondary device for my glasses -- cellular modem, hi def screen for necessary tasks, GPS, CPU and whatever chips eat the most power -- that's a great benefit.
For me, visual displays are "complete" when they can use a laser (or whatever) to project onto my retina a fully focused image that's of a "normal" brightness, taking the same arc size of a 24" screen a foot away, with a resolution better than I can detect. Glasses are the next logical step to this panacea.
According to TFA, they've been preparing for this one run for 6 months. Mapping it out, training the AI on the dynamics of loaded trailers, sending humans down the road to see when the safest time is, etc. You can bet more than a few lawyers were consulted during the course of this work between two companies.
AI cars have such a low safety requirement, they're going to have to swerve around them to avoid tripping over it. In cars, they have soccer moms with screaming kids and middle managers gabbing on cell phones, distracted driving accounts for half of the traffic out there. In the case of a commercial trucker, we're talking overtired and bored. An AI with an adequate vision system can easily out perform the most distracted drivers on controlled roads in perfect weather. We talk about self driving cars as though they only win the safety game with 0% accidents, but if safety concerned moms and wealthy business people buy them, I think tail end of the safety curve is going to get chopped off, bringing the averages up. Hell, I'd chip in for a retrofit on a BMW I keep seeing on my commute.
Where snow is common, the first one or two seconds of a green don't count anyway. You've slid through a just-turned-red intersection once or twice yourself, you know somebody else can too. So you learn to pause just a moment. This habit doesn't completely clear during the summer, but it comes back come winter time again.
There are several shake ups coming in November / January.
Let's look at the Senate. It's likely to swing Blue. This alone won't mean much because the House is likely to remain Red, but it's certainly going to change legislative agendas, which are important. Speaking of the House, with Trump at the top of the ticket, there will be downballot implications, some Republicans are going to have turnout trouble leading to Democrats taking some seats. I haven't seen any polls I believe in, but I think the House stays Red but with a bigger percentage Blue than before. That's a change that means more bipartisan cooperation will be necessary for anybody to get their personal agendas to see the light of day.
I can't see a Hillary executive changing much in terms of foreign policy, so full credit for "status-quo" there. Despite my preferences, she's likely to continue to antagonize Russia with anti-ICBM batteries and unified exercises close to Russia. She stands a chance of using executive orders to continue to shape the immigrant and minimum wage debates. And her ability to sign into law what the new Senate and the increasingly bipartisan House is important.
On the topic of Hillary being status-quo. Based on the rhetoric of the Republican Party for the last 2-3 years, a status-quo is in fact a shake up. All the stonewalling that's been done in Congress, all the scapegoating, all the blaming, and they can't get the American people to put them back into power. Heck, they need to tend to their own house as they realize 12 candidates can't make it through the primaries without a crazy making it out as the candidate. Then if you count that Hillary is almost certain to name at least one Supreme Court Justice in the next 4 years (with some guessing up to three!), this is going to be a "status-quo" that remains in place for a long time. Even if it's only Ginsberg and Breyer getting replaced with younger equivalents, that's a big deal. There's a 54% chance of a conservative justice kicking it in the next four years, so that's an even bigger deal.
I'm typing this on a work issued 4.5 year old HP Probook 6455b. I've got an AMD Turion mobile processor and it wasn't fast when I got it. Two years ago, I tried to trade it in for a faster model. IT slapped some piece of crap slow SSD in it and refused me a new machine.
It's not fast. I can do some engineering work on it (CAD, statistics), but most of the time it runs Firefox and Chrome to get to Google Apps where the corporate IT infrastructure runs. For what modern work often is, 5 year old hardware is sufficient and I've decided the SSD is "fast enough" and it's not work arguing with IT.
Google is not avoiding paying one team, but several. Not only are they avoiding dealing with exclusively a firm at random, who, lacking financial competition, is likely to build in a decent profit margin, but they're soliciting from several teams who understand the nature of the competition. Regardless, they're catching a price break. Successful companies often get that way by avoiding paying money they don't have to. In this way, they're not ending up with an "average" design, and not only are they getting the "best" design, but they're getting a whole pile of designs. Any chance they see to pick design elements from a few of the "almost best" ones to make the "best" even better, that's something they can leverage.
The $250k is only a small part of the payment. Look at the biographies at the back of that PDF. This team isn't doing it for the cash, they're doing it for the publicity. They might want to get Google to conduct business with them more regularly, perhaps even manufacturing these boxes for them, but they really want the wider engineering market to see what they're doing as innovative. This isn't some cheapskate bully firm screwing an individual graphic artist by offering only publicity for their hard earned work (and nobody cares about it), this is GOOGLE. This publicity is worth something. In their portfolio, they can now put "Winner of the Google Little Box Challenge" and they'll shove that in any prospective client's faces. I don't know if this is going to help them seal any deals or get higher profit margins, but I'd expect it's one of those two.
Wasn't this a feature in the 60 minute Viper commercials in 1994? I seem to remember that among the absurdities it had the ability to launch a flying drone type thing from the trunk.
A friend of mine had a similar problem, and found he couldn't get a computer monitor big enough. He ended up getting a 40" LCD TV with a HDMI input. It's on his desk at what I'd consider an uncomfortably close distance, but he swears by it.
I have a stupid question... If the fat mass fell by a mean of 0.3 kg, and the fat free mass fell by a mean of 0.6 kg, what's making up that fat free mass? Water would be an easy culprit, but does that indicate that less sugar resulted in less water retention, or that the subjects also decreased their sodium intake concurrently? I think it's easy to blame sugar for some of the effects, but I'm not convinced it's the only variable that was changed.
Like everyone else, I think the in-car navigation is done better by anyone else. Tom-toms, Garmins, or in my case, Waze on my phone.
What if the in-car entertainment system had a set of APIs that could be controlled by an external device like a phone? That external device could then have a variety of different apps that could use the APIs, even set up several competing apps to take advantage of them. If car companies write off the tiny incremental income from the people who use the services, or even offset it by having their own branded apps cost money, perhaps they could concentrate on making those APIs secure and decrease the impact of successful hacks?
A car company that was able to do that successfully would have quite a selling point to people who were in BYOD and security.