The Zeppelins of yonder didn't need much in the way of power to get aloft. Not really anti-gravity, just a smart use of differences in densities of various gases. Not fast either, compared to modern aircraft, yet not exactly slow either when it comes to typical city-level distances.
As a person who prefers to spend a little more to buy solidly built items that last, I don't really see any harm it would have if cheap imported crap was more expensive than it is now.
Your "solidly built items" are most likely also mostly made in China.
China produces a lot of crap, but they are absolutely able to produce quality stuff, too. They just don't have the ability to sell quality products (mostly due to the total lack of known brands). And for the lack of a known brand name (which in turn gives a measure of quality - could be low, could be high, at least you have an idea of what quality level you can expect) the only thing they have left to compete on is price, and that in turn means quality suffers as corners are cut to shave off that last tiny bit of a penny.
A 10% tarriff on a $150 unbranded Android phone makes the phone cost $165.
A 10% tarriff on a $1,000 iPhone makes that phone cost $1,100.
That has two effects: 1) the iPhone may be pushed just out of the affordability range of some people, while that's not likely to happen for the cheap Android phone; 2) the price difference between the two increases from $850 to $935.
I don't see how this is an advantage for expensive Apple over the cheap competition. Also many shipments from eBay or Aliexpress are out of US warehouses so any applicable duties have been taken care of already. Which is a good thing as otherwise your US customs department would be totally overloaded handling all those small shipments.
And how are these companies supposed to 1) know that a piece of material is copyrighted and 2) know that the uploader doesn't have the right to upload it?
1) is easy. All material that's not ancient is copyrighted, by default. Everything. Blogs, books, news articles, song recordings - all of it.
2) is the hard part. The US DMCA got that one correct, though: if uploader says they have the right to upload and publish material for distribution, the host is in the clear, and other people that claim copyright over the same material will have to battle it out with the (by then known!) uploader.
Now the interesting thing with WhatsApp, if they have the encryption done the way they say it's done (with messages encrypted before they leave your phone, only to be decrypted by the recipient), the company staff can not read the messages in any way. Not being able to read the messages Facebook doesn't know what's being communicated on their WhatsApp platform, so even if they wanted to control this kind of rumours/misinformation there's nothing they can do. At all.
Except maybe WhatsApp groups. I don't know if those messages are also encrypted to the same extent.
Well, that's my first thought as well. But a trap for what? What's there to lose for OSM, really? It's an independent project, the mapping data is open, everyone can copy and fork it were MS to manage to fully take over. This assuming MS is releasing the data under a proper (sufficiently permissive) license.
It continues to break the WiFi and touchpad drivers on my laptop when installing updates. Last month I spent two days fixing it - not easy to fix your WiFi without working Internet connection, resorted to tethering over Bluetooth through my phone to my home WiFi - and in the end the solution was to install Win8 drivers. Reinstalling the Win10 drivers didn't work this time, probably because the old (working) drivers were gone when I cleaned up the hard disk to get rid of old, unused versions of Windows. Go figure.
The touchpad at least worked when reinstalling the Win10 drivers. That wasn't the first time.
It's been over a decade since I had any driver issues with Linux. It just works. Same for playing videos, Linux just works, Windows not so much.
The only reason I still have Windows is for backwards compatibility - the Taobao chat app is Windows only...
Good old RS485, two wires offering mutliple drops, can do way more than 300m. When pulling wires anyway it's trivial to add power wires, so no problem there.
The main problem of bringing power that far is the low voltage so relatively high currents and with it high cable losses.
That stopped being true at least a decade ago, when more and more speeding tickets were processed fully automatically (by computers reading the licence plates from photos taken by speed cameras).
Some motorways in The Netherlands measure the speed of vehicles over a long distance (so not at a point) and register every single car twice; when they enter and when they exit the area, to calculate the average speed and issue tickets based on that if needed. Fully automated, all machine reading of license plates.
I for one didn't even know it's possible to delete anything from Facebook.
Disable your account, sure. Hide messages from everyone including your self, no problem. But actually deleting stuff? I highly doubt it. Whatever you place on Facebook will be there for eternity.
Just like/. comments, for that matter. But without that much tracking.
Anyway, not going to delete my account. Too useful to promote my local business, and it helps many people to contact me. If only they realise that it's not the way for last-moment contact (that's why I always give my phone number) as I don't have the app. Never had. Don't want to. Too little use and WAY too much tracking/monitoring.
By law, all companies (so also the subsidiary of the telco that owns/maintains/operates the cables and other local infrastructure) have to get access to the same cables at the same price.
Works great. Lots of ISPs to choose from where-ever you live; excellent prices and service quality.
If you can see that little, it's not safe to drive at the speed limit. You should slow down to a safe speed - allowing you to stop whenever there's an obstacle in front of you. This may be a pedestrian, but also another car that's stopped due to traffic ahead. If your vision is about two meters, that's not much more than walking speed.
That said, if it rains that hard, you'd better park your car at an elevated spot and sit it out, instead of getting hit by a flash flood.
Remember, there WAS a human sitting behind the wheel. The fact that he didn't see here / could not react in time means she was (A) really hard to see, and (b) probably came in front of the car very suddenly.
Or something like: "oh, obstacle ahead. Car is in self-driving mode, it's going to slow down and come to a stop. It'll start doing that about now. Mmm... It's a bit slow in reacting. Shouldn't it start braking? Wait, what, it's not reacting!" And by that time it's too late to stop, and the obstacle (pedestrian, truck blocking the road trying to make a turn, whatever) gets hit.
The problem: when should the human intervene? In case of sudden obstacles the car will probably react before the human driver even realises there's an obstacle - and that's for humans that are actively driving. If the car doesn't react, the human driver will be too late to take over. For obstacles seen from afar (and e.g. traffic lights) the human expects the car to react, so won't do anything until he realises the car doesn't react, and then it's too late.
Linux (or better: open source, Linux is merely the public face of the open source movement) started as something small. Then it started to grow, become bigger and bigger. They tried radiotherapy (SCO) to get rid of it, but the treatment failed miserably. It was too little, too late. The Open Source cancer had already started to spread, leaving the server world and entering the desktop world. (by now the time line is well past the "cancer" remark but the cancerous spread continues). It took over a larger part of MS's main rival (Apple - OS-X). It then spread to mobile world (Android), quickly dominating it. It spread to the browser world (Mozilla, Chromium). It forced MS to amputate their IE. The replacement (Edge) is a mere prosthetic. It can't take the place of the original. There's nothing MS can do about it any more. Open Source continues to grow, and like a cancer it's killing its host (Windows - arguably in part responsible for the ubiquitous PC itself).
The only thing that goes really wrong in the comparison is that a cancer usually dies with its host. Open Source doesn't
How come a country as highly developed and as rich as the USA doesn't even have A/C in schools in what is possibly one of the hottest parts of the country? And, as others pointed out, an electricity network that is not even able to provide the power for those A/C units? At maybe 10 kW per classroom (with halfway decent isolation that should be more than enough to cool it down) that's a mere 25 MW of electricity - spread out over the network.
To get Wikipedia on a data connection without data charges those people would have some mobile Internet device (e.g. a smartpone), and a mobile data connection, normally paid for already.
Now SOME providers in their country offer access to one web site (i.e. Wikipedia) for free (i.e. included in their data plan). Stopping this project, or cancelling existing such contracts, does not cut off those people from Wikipedia. It will just be included in their normal data charges - just like users of the other providers in the same country. Also why would it have to be limited to Wikipedia, and not also say the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and a few international news papers?
I don't see much difference with what is (used to be?) offered around my place for packages that include free access to WhatsApp and the mobile site of Facebook. I don't know if Facebook pays for that, actually I doubt it.
Net neutrality is about not giving preferred access to certain sites, or giving different rates (cost, speed) to access different sites using the same connection or being allowed to access certain sites at all. That is regardless of whether the site(s) in question pay for their preferred access.
It sounds to me that you have to separate goals: 1) work as a free lance developer 2) work on an open source project.
Those are definitely not mutually exclusive. I've developed a system (hardware & software - for monitoring and automation of hydroponic growing) based completely on open source/open hardware components, and as soon as I get around figuring out what I'm doing wrong with Github will have it open sourced myself. Software code, circuit diagrams, and probably even the PCB designs. In the meantime I'm talking to some people on commercialising the whole thing. My business model is two-fold. I'm available for hire to do similar projects or to help implement my system in another (including my expertise on the hydroponic growing part), and sell a finished product to end users. There are lots of people out there that will want to use it, but don't have the skill (or time/interest) to build it from scratch. It's ready to go. Others may want to tinker with it. Change the software, whatever. That's explicitly allowed, and that's where the open source and open hardware comes in play - I'd like to cater to that market, too. It seems to be a pretty big chunk of hydroponic hobby growers have at least the skills to do so. Of course other companies may try to clone what I have, and make their own. I'm not too afraid of that, they can't provide any support as they don't have the experience with the product I do.
Buses and so work poorly for those sprawling cities the US likes to build. Too few people for the same route at the same time.
On the other hand, taking TFS at face value (which may be a bad idea considering other comments): if Uber and Lyft were so mighty popular it actually reduced car ownership and private car use, this also means the existing, licensed and legal, taxi companies could do a lot more business. The big question would be, why would a private taxi company like Uber or Lyft put a dent in private car ownership, while the long established taxi companies can not? That points to a serious case of mismanagement from the side of those taxi companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Details, details :-)
The Zeppelins of yonder didn't need much in the way of power to get aloft. Not really anti-gravity, just a smart use of differences in densities of various gases. Not fast either, compared to modern aircraft, yet not exactly slow either when it comes to typical city-level distances.
As a person who prefers to spend a little more to buy solidly built items that last, I don't really see any harm it would have if cheap imported crap was more expensive than it is now.
Your "solidly built items" are most likely also mostly made in China.
China produces a lot of crap, but they are absolutely able to produce quality stuff, too. They just don't have the ability to sell quality products (mostly due to the total lack of known brands). And for the lack of a known brand name (which in turn gives a measure of quality - could be low, could be high, at least you have an idea of what quality level you can expect) the only thing they have left to compete on is price, and that in turn means quality suffers as corners are cut to shave off that last tiny bit of a penny.
Would be a pretty accurate description of you run-of-the-mill mobile phone.
A 10% tarriff on a $150 unbranded Android phone makes the phone cost $165.
A 10% tarriff on a $1,000 iPhone makes that phone cost $1,100.
That has two effects: 1) the iPhone may be pushed just out of the affordability range of some people, while that's not likely to happen for the cheap Android phone; 2) the price difference between the two increases from $850 to $935.
I don't see how this is an advantage for expensive Apple over the cheap competition. Also many shipments from eBay or Aliexpress are out of US warehouses so any applicable duties have been taken care of already. Which is a good thing as otherwise your US customs department would be totally overloaded handling all those small shipments.
And how are these companies supposed to 1) know that a piece of material is copyrighted and 2) know that the uploader doesn't have the right to upload it?
1) is easy. All material that's not ancient is copyrighted, by default. Everything. Blogs, books, news articles, song recordings - all of it.
2) is the hard part. The US DMCA got that one correct, though: if uploader says they have the right to upload and publish material for distribution, the host is in the clear, and other people that claim copyright over the same material will have to battle it out with the (by then known!) uploader.
Now the interesting thing with WhatsApp, if they have the encryption done the way they say it's done (with messages encrypted before they leave your phone, only to be decrypted by the recipient), the company staff can not read the messages in any way. Not being able to read the messages Facebook doesn't know what's being communicated on their WhatsApp platform, so even if they wanted to control this kind of rumours/misinformation there's nothing they can do. At all.
Except maybe WhatsApp groups. I don't know if those messages are also encrypted to the same extent.
"Facebook did nothing" - this may actually be part of the problem.
Well, that's my first thought as well. But a trap for what? What's there to lose for OSM, really? It's an independent project, the mapping data is open, everyone can copy and fork it were MS to manage to fully take over. This assuming MS is releasing the data under a proper (sufficiently permissive) license.
It's still pretty terrible.
It continues to break the WiFi and touchpad drivers on my laptop when installing updates. Last month I spent two days fixing it - not easy to fix your WiFi without working Internet connection, resorted to tethering over Bluetooth through my phone to my home WiFi - and in the end the solution was to install Win8 drivers. Reinstalling the Win10 drivers didn't work this time, probably because the old (working) drivers were gone when I cleaned up the hard disk to get rid of old, unused versions of Windows. Go figure.
The touchpad at least worked when reinstalling the Win10 drivers. That wasn't the first time.
It's been over a decade since I had any driver issues with Linux. It just works. Same for playing videos, Linux just works, Windows not so much.
The only reason I still have Windows is for backwards compatibility - the Taobao chat app is Windows only...
Good old RS485, two wires offering mutliple drops, can do way more than 300m. When pulling wires anyway it's trivial to add power wires, so no problem there.
The main problem of bringing power that far is the low voltage so relatively high currents and with it high cable losses.
It also makes the answer simple.
Study what you find interesting! If only because personal interest tends to be the strongest, longest lasting motivator.
It will be the same person most of the times. I expect 80-90% of the time, maybe even more. Good enough for most tracking purposes.
That stopped being true at least a decade ago, when more and more speeding tickets were processed fully automatically (by computers reading the licence plates from photos taken by speed cameras).
Some motorways in The Netherlands measure the speed of vehicles over a long distance (so not at a point) and register every single car twice; when they enter and when they exit the area, to calculate the average speed and issue tickets based on that if needed. Fully automated, all machine reading of license plates.
Maybe your country is behind the times in that?
I for one didn't even know it's possible to delete anything from Facebook.
Disable your account, sure. Hide messages from everyone including your self, no problem. But actually deleting stuff? I highly doubt it. Whatever you place on Facebook will be there for eternity.
Just like /. comments, for that matter. But without that much tracking.
Anyway, not going to delete my account. Too useful to promote my local business, and it helps many people to contact me. If only they realise that it's not the way for last-moment contact (that's why I always give my phone number) as I don't have the app. Never had. Don't want to. Too little use and WAY too much tracking/monitoring.
Look at how the EU is doing this.
By law, all companies (so also the subsidiary of the telco that owns/maintains/operates the cables and other local infrastructure) have to get access to the same cables at the same price.
Works great. Lots of ISPs to choose from where-ever you live; excellent prices and service quality.
If you can see that little, it's not safe to drive at the speed limit. You should slow down to a safe speed - allowing you to stop whenever there's an obstacle in front of you. This may be a pedestrian, but also another car that's stopped due to traffic ahead. If your vision is about two meters, that's not much more than walking speed.
That said, if it rains that hard, you'd better park your car at an elevated spot and sit it out, instead of getting hit by a flash flood.
Remember, there WAS a human sitting behind the wheel. The fact that he didn't see here / could not react in time means she was (A) really hard to see, and (b) probably came in front of the car very suddenly.
Or something like: "oh, obstacle ahead. Car is in self-driving mode, it's going to slow down and come to a stop. It'll start doing that about now. Mmm... It's a bit slow in reacting. Shouldn't it start braking? Wait, what, it's not reacting!" And by that time it's too late to stop, and the obstacle (pedestrian, truck blocking the road trying to make a turn, whatever) gets hit.
The problem: when should the human intervene?
In case of sudden obstacles the car will probably react before the human driver even realises there's an obstacle - and that's for humans that are actively driving. If the car doesn't react, the human driver will be too late to take over.
For obstacles seen from afar (and e.g. traffic lights) the human expects the car to react, so won't do anything until he realises the car doesn't react, and then it's too late.
Linux (or better: open source, Linux is merely the public face of the open source movement) started as something small.
Then it started to grow, become bigger and bigger.
They tried radiotherapy (SCO) to get rid of it, but the treatment failed miserably. It was too little, too late.
The Open Source cancer had already started to spread, leaving the server world and entering the desktop world.
(by now the time line is well past the "cancer" remark but the cancerous spread continues).
It took over a larger part of MS's main rival (Apple - OS-X).
It then spread to mobile world (Android), quickly dominating it.
It spread to the browser world (Mozilla, Chromium). It forced MS to amputate their IE. The replacement (Edge) is a mere prosthetic. It can't take the place of the original.
There's nothing MS can do about it any more. Open Source continues to grow, and like a cancer it's killing its host (Windows - arguably in part responsible for the ubiquitous PC itself).
The only thing that goes really wrong in the comparison is that a cancer usually dies with its host. Open Source doesn't
How come a country as highly developed and as rich as the USA doesn't even have A/C in schools in what is possibly one of the hottest parts of the country?
And, as others pointed out, an electricity network that is not even able to provide the power for those A/C units?
At maybe 10 kW per classroom (with halfway decent isolation that should be more than enough to cool it down) that's a mere 25 MW of electricity - spread out over the network.
To get Wikipedia on a data connection without data charges those people would have some mobile Internet device (e.g. a smartpone), and a mobile data connection, normally paid for already.
Now SOME providers in their country offer access to one web site (i.e. Wikipedia) for free (i.e. included in their data plan). Stopping this project, or cancelling existing such contracts, does not cut off those people from Wikipedia. It will just be included in their normal data charges - just like users of the other providers in the same country. Also why would it have to be limited to Wikipedia, and not also say the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and a few international news papers?
I don't see much difference with what is (used to be?) offered around my place for packages that include free access to WhatsApp and the mobile site of Facebook. I don't know if Facebook pays for that, actually I doubt it.
Net neutrality is about not giving preferred access to certain sites, or giving different rates (cost, speed) to access different sites using the same connection or being allowed to access certain sites at all. That is regardless of whether the site(s) in question pay for their preferred access.
we have partnered with 97 mobile carriers in 72 countries to provide access to Wikipedia to more than 800 million people free of mobile data charges.
These agreements ought to be illegal, and in many countries they would be (and rightfully so).
It sounds to me that you have to separate goals: 1) work as a free lance developer 2) work on an open source project.
Those are definitely not mutually exclusive.
I've developed a system (hardware & software - for monitoring and automation of hydroponic growing) based completely on open source/open hardware components, and as soon as I get around figuring out what I'm doing wrong with Github will have it open sourced myself. Software code, circuit diagrams, and probably even the PCB designs.
In the meantime I'm talking to some people on commercialising the whole thing.
My business model is two-fold. I'm available for hire to do similar projects or to help implement my system in another (including my expertise on the hydroponic growing part), and sell a finished product to end users.
There are lots of people out there that will want to use it, but don't have the skill (or time/interest) to build it from scratch. It's ready to go. Others may want to tinker with it. Change the software, whatever. That's explicitly allowed, and that's where the open source and open hardware comes in play - I'd like to cater to that market, too. It seems to be a pretty big chunk of hydroponic hobby growers have at least the skills to do so.
Of course other companies may try to clone what I have, and make their own. I'm not too afraid of that, they can't provide any support as they don't have the experience with the product I do.
A completely failed attack on an airport can do serious damage for decades.
Or are we allowed to bring bottles of water again?
Buses and so work poorly for those sprawling cities the US likes to build. Too few people for the same route at the same time.
On the other hand, taking TFS at face value (which may be a bad idea considering other comments): if Uber and Lyft were so mighty popular it actually reduced car ownership and private car use, this also means the existing, licensed and legal, taxi companies could do a lot more business. The big question would be, why would a private taxi company like Uber or Lyft put a dent in private car ownership, while the long established taxi companies can not? That points to a serious case of mismanagement from the side of those taxi companies.