The obvious problem being "solved" is how to treat AI slaves. An industrial robot isn't the concern. They have been used for about 100 years (the moving assembly line being one of the earlier industrial robots, but the cotton gin being even earlier than that. Nobody is considering these as applying to the robots used in car manufacturing, but were drafted as being related to the ASMIO type machines. The AI-like "cute" robots.
Those applying it to single-task robots, even with AI-like features are deliberately being obtuse. The AI researchers do so much to over-state their success, that it's natural to start protecting AI. AI is no dumber than an octopus, so if we have laws protecting an octopus, so why not an AI?
It's not as simple as "sentient autonomous humanoid robot" versus "single-task industrial" robot. There is no reason that even a fully sentient robot will even have to have a body. It definitely doesn't have to be mobile. Likely those industrial robots will continue to get smarter and smarter until they cross over at some point. They won't have legs to move around or even audio to communicate but they can still perform tasks with humanlike intelligence.
Is a bulldozer a robot? What about an autonomous bulldozer? How many people did it replace? A bulldozer can do the work of 100 men with shovels but a much much smaller number of men if they also have a bulldozer. The only thing this would do would have companies skirting the law by redefining or crippling their products: That computer that fill drinks isn't a robot. That computer that folds clothes isn't a robot because it's been crippled to only fold clothes. etc. etc. Humanoid robots are likely always going to be a novelty. For most tasks, a non-humanoid version works better. Even for a general purpose robot, the humanoid form is probably not optimal.
but if you had battery powered headphones they could do all of the amplification.
But now you have two things that you have to keep charged instead of one. More importantly, the summary mentions they could have a larger battery if they got rid of the headphone jack. That is bizarre. If you want to increase the battery size, just do it. If you just made the iphone 6 the same depth as the camera on it, that would give you significantly more area to work with than removing the headphone jack. You would have also avoided "bendgate". What is apple's obsession with ultra thin devices? Give me a thicker phone and throw in a longer battery life and waterproofing. As it is the iphone is so thin and fragile that everyone ends up putting it in a case anyways.
Even smallish cities rely on a good bit of their development from this tax, which is often in excess of the normalsales tax rate.
Like the Uber service, this is a way to circumvent legacy fees to the municipality.
The hotel/motel tax in my town is used 100% for promoting tourism which brings in more people to use those hotels which airbnb benefits from too. The preferred solution to me would be maybe a revenue cap. If you make less than say $3000 per month then you're in the clear otherwise you need to register as a hotel. Another option would be a nightly stay cap like say 10 guests/month or 30 guests/month or even 100 guests/month. This would prevent businesses from using this loophole. The same could be said for lyft/uber, if you haul more than 50 passengers a month then you need to register, get regular inspections, have proper insurance, etc... This would still allow the casual person to do it without a bunch of hoops but gets them to do it properly once they are actually running a business. Many things already operate like this where certain regulations only kick in once a minumum size is reached.
An internet connection consists of the following:
1) The router in your home
2) The physical wire to the ISP
3) The router/hub/switch at the other end.
4) The connections, peering agreements, bandwidth purchases, etc.. the ISP has to the outside world.
5) The person you call when you have a problem.
Honestly, most of the problems I have ever had with my internet is either with #4 or #5, so this seems like a step in the right direction. When I get ping times of 1000ms, dropped packets, slow download speeds, jitter, blocked ports, etc... it's almost always #4 and I have to call #5 to deal with it. We have something similar in my town where a local ISP piggybacks their DSL on the local phone carrier's wire. I've heard that their connection is better but unfortunately you have to pay them AND the local phone carrier so your bill is significantly higher.
How does the decision affect zero rating and stuff like tmobile's binge on? Although I'm completely in support of net neutrality and all companies should be treated the same, I do support the idea of having different types of traffic. For instance making bittorent traffic lower priority than realtime streaming. This should preferably be controlled by the consumer though where they get some benefit for sending less traffic over the fast lane.
Very very few people will pay $10 and most balk at paying over $0
I would gladly pay $10 for a good app with a decent trial. I, however, don't want to pay $1 each just try 10 crappy apps that I'm going to immediately delete and I'm sure not going to pay $10 to try an app that I'm just going to delete. Apple and Google need to open their stores up and allow alternative business models. My preferred model would be free for the first 90 non-consecutive days. If I use your app for 90 days and I like it, then I will gladly pay $10 or even more. Very few apps reach this level of usefulness or quality. I would be ok with other models but there should be at a minimum a 100% automatic refund if an app is uninstalled in the first 24 hours. I would prefer 30 days but even 24 hours would greatly improve the quality of the apps out there. I shouldn't have to just eat the cost or jump thru hoops to get a refund for an app that obviously I don't even want. Apple and google both know when an app is uninstalled, just automatically credit me back if I immediately uninstall the app.
Personally I am not in favour of gutting the second. I would prefer its complete repeal. Before you could own a gun the burden kf proof should be on you that you are trustworthy, responsible and have a compelling reason.
What if the compelling reason is to protect yourself from an overreaching government? The reason we have a second amendment is to protect the constitution. Granted a hunting rifle is not going to be much protection against modern warfare weapons but it's still something. I'm all for trying to curb the mass killings but honestly if a few people have to die each year to protect our freedom to live in a free democracy, then I'm ok with that. Alot more people would die if we ever had to fight to regain our democracy after we lost it.
all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language,
There is (was )one of pearls greatest selling points which is still not available in "all" major languages.
CPAN.. mwhahaha!!
Not only CPAN, but I still find other language's regular expressions severely lacking. Most other languages now have them but they feel like a kludgy tackon and are much more cumbersome and harder to use.
Right... there actually was a wannabe terrorist who tried your "drive a car into people" approach to mass killing. He managed to injure one person, and got his ass arrested - turns out it is really hard to run people over on purpose once they know you are trying to. You can dodge a car, you can't dodge bullets. Nobody died. On the same day as Sandy Hook a lunatic in China tried to attack a school - he couldn't get a gun though so he attacked the place with a knife. He wounded three people before he was tackled and subdued. Nobody died.
So cars and knives might not be effective weapons. That doesn't negate at all the fact that the most deadly school attack in history was done with explosives not to mention that the worst attack of any kind on US soil to date was done with box cutters.
I'm not completely opposed to gun limits. I wouldn't be opposed to outlawing guns with magazines or the ability to be modified to shoot more than X rounds without reloading. I'm also all for background checks before allowing purchases. The biggest problem I have with gun control regulations is that they think it's going to solve the problem. Explosive material is just too easy to get. Also, in order to make any dent on the gun problem would require severe restrictions on gun rights. Ammo restriction would be the most effective way to regulate guns. If you tracked ammo like they track nasal decongestant, it would be easy to regulate. The problem is, what is an unusual amount? Shooting 100+ rounds in a weekend for target practising is pretty common. That's more than enough to cause mass havoc. Even if you restricted it to a small amount per day, it would be easy enough to stockpile a large amount over a short span of time. The amount of restrictions required to do anything meaningful would completely gut the second amendment.
There are fifty dead people in Florida, and many more who are wounded, many seriously, who are sure happy that your paranoia is intact. What's fifty lives next to the unlimited access to high powered weapons.
Like most American's I have a 2k+ pound vehicle in my garage filled with some of the most poisonous and explosive stuff there is. It would be trivial to use commonly available fuels to cause mass havoc. Likewise, I drive by a schoolyard every day on my way to work with a road leading onto the playground where hundreds of kids are playing. Driving a vehicle onto that playground (or anywhere else where people congregate) could also cause a huge number of deaths in a short amount of time. Getting rid of guns is not going to solve the mass killing problem. The "Bath school disaster" is still the worst recorded school massacre in the USA and it was done with explosives. Columbine, probably the most famous shooting, also used explosives. Luckily, the explosives didn't detonate or likely the explosives would have killed far more people than the guns actually did.
Do you really think it is any easier to replace the Display and Digitizer on ANY modern mobile device?
They are ALL essentially Unserviceable Units (BTW, that's the reason that "Ux" is the designator for ICs on many schematics. It stands for "Unservicable Unit". In other words, there is nothing inside that an average person can fix/replace.
It's not so much that it's "user servicable" as much as "third party servicable". We've already fought this war once with automobiles and luckily won. It's the reason that you can take your car to any place you want and get an oil change and if you're in an accident, you can get your car repaired by any repair shop that you want. The car manufacturers tried to prevent this saying that getting your car worked on by a third party voided your warrantee. Luckily there were laws written that made this not the case and it's now legal for anyone with the required skills to work on any car. We need to get those laws to be more general and apply to electronics too. The little "warrantee void if opened" stickers need to go away too. Third parties should have the right and ability to service other people's products the same way that I can take my toyota to a ford dealership to get the oil changed or even the car worked on and repaired.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond...
It would be much easier for a sentient undersea creature like an octopus to colonize the surface of their own planet than it would be for us to colonize the moon. As an added advantage, once a creature like the octopus has colonized the surface of their planet, they would already have most of the required technology to colonize other worlds. They would already have space suits, self-contained habitats, etc... The biggest problem I see (with an obvious LAWKI bias) is that most of our technology is electrical based and electricity experimentation would probably be a lot slower on a water based world.
Except that there is no significant cost reduction. You've got a certain amount of mail to deliver. That doesn't change. Reducing the number of delivery days simply means you have to deliver 6 days worth of mail in 5 days, so your overtime costs go up.
Are you sure about that? Are you sure that it's not "you have a certain amount of houses that need delivery to". If delivery trucks are operating at capacity then yes, reducing the number of days wouldn't help but the point is that the volume is down so by moving to every other day delivery, the volume on the remaining days increases while the same number of houses are served. The amount of time it takes to drive to each house is the same regardless if it is one letter or 10 letters but the revenue per house is 10 times if there are 10 letters per house instead of one with approximately the same gas and payroll expenses.
I'll bet this guy goes around looking for people with assets. He won't bother suing a poor person. How does one protect oneself from this kind of predatory legal action?
Not necessarily. You want someone with enough money to pay a few thousand bucks but not enough to immediately hire lawyers to deal with your BS. Predatory legal action like this works best against the average middle class guy who won't hire a lawyer until he's already been screwed. Selling a used printer is the perfect mark because it means that you're rich enough to own a few pieces of electronics but still poor enough not to throw a $40 printer in the trash.
A similar situation happened with my brother. One of his employees was suing for sexual harassment and wrongful termination. The lawyers were asking for 500k until my brother produced a cellphone recording of the exchange. He ended up settling with them for 3k because it was cheaper than continuing to pay his lawyer and he wanted them to just go away. Without that recording there would likely have been a very different outcome.
Using a very long passphrase rather than a password is the safest thing. How is anyone going to crack "Mydogateachickenandnowisi$ickwiththegout". It is very easy to remember. You have to make sure the app/OS uses the whole thing, not just silently truncates it.
Even if an application or OS doesn't support long passphrases, you can still use an abbreviated passphrase. The common one is the first letter of each word in your passphrase but there is no reason that you can't use the 2nd letter, the last letter, or some memorized sequence like "first-last-second". Using your passphrase above: "My dog ate a chicken and now is $ick with the gout" and "first-last-second", your passphrase becomes: "Mgtannnsiweo" Throw in a few number and symbols and uppercase letters and you are good to go.
That being said, my biggest problem is that even if I come up with a good formula that is easy for me and hard for everyone else, every site has their own idea of what a secure password is and won't allow an otherwise secure password because of random sometimes mutually exclusive rules like "must contain special characters" or "cannot contain special characters"
I think that universal basic income is inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.
As such, basic income will be required just to keep the country stable and productive.
Even if everything you say is true and robots do take most of the jobs, there are other solutions that can also solve the problem possibly even better. The problem is really increased productivity per person. One solution would be to lower the maximum work week from 40+ to something lower. Lowering the workweek to 20 hours would more than double the number of available jobs and would let everyone benefit from the increased productivity. Another solution would be government guaranteed jobs. If the government created guaranteed jobs that say paid $1 under minimum wage. Anyone over the age of 16 who showed up would be put to work regardless of skill or ability. This work might include picking up litter in a park, sorting recycle, improving a trail or this "job" might be just sitting in a classroom learning a new skill. Both of these solutions would accomplish the same thing and would be easier to phase in to our current system.
I get maybe 2 or 3 spams a week at most that make it through my filters.
It's not the real spam as much as the psuedo-spam. Every single website, grocery store, credit card, etc... requires you to confirm your account with an email address and then each of these sites send you 2-3 emails per week. You've technically opted in but really only wanted a password not constant irrelevant updates. After a while, you have several hundred of these and many of them require you to remember your password and log into their site to unsubscribe. My postal mail is the same way. I have all my bills autodebited but they still send me a letter every month telling me that they autodebited plus random crap that goes straight in he trash. My electric company, my grocery store, and even Geico sends out a "magazine" each month. Does anyone actually read the geico magazine? I have something in my mailbox every day but probably only receive 1 letter a month that is important if that.
It has none of these problems, and far more benefits.
Because email has it's own problems. Mainly spam and pseudo-spam. I completely abandoned email a couple years ago. I still have an email address but the only thing I use it for is to search for a message that someone has told me via IM/text/phone that they sent me. If someone sends me an email message without notifying me via some other method that they are sending it to me then there is a 90+% probability that I won't read it.
That being said, I also uninstalled facebook messenger from my phone because I don't want to be notified at 2am that someone sent me a message. People are generally smart enough to not have 2am phone calls or texts but facebook messenger not so much. I am one of those people who use facebook via the web browser on my phone and not allowing messenger via the web browser will not get me to install messenger but rather will just get me to use facebook less.
There'll be quite a few people wishing they could go back when Microsoft cranks up the "monetize the sheep" dial.
Every time you turn on your computer there'll be a new nag screen telling you about the latest must-have Windows apps and asking for a credit card.
Even microsoft is not immune to people jumping ship. Not only will there be third party programs to block this stuff but it will only encourage more and more people to jump to linux or mac.
I upgraded my windows 8 box because I hate windows 8. Still trying to decide whether to upgrade my windows 7 box. Really not super important to me as my primary OS is linux.
Even if it survived the impact, a small 2ft by 2ft piece of orange foam is basically invisible.
Nothing is "invisible" if it is continuously transmitting it's GPS coordinates.
Which is exactly why I said a passive "usb drive" isn't going to work. A passive device is basically invisible. Something that can transmit it's GPS signal is going to cost AT LEAST $1k for a consumer grade device which means a minimum of 20k per plane for 20 of such devices and likely considerably more if we're talking about something actually hardened and reliable.
You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, and so on; to say nothing of the rest of your equipment list.
My point *was* to lowball it but even then it becomes insanely expensive. Even if you mass produce them and skip on the "aviation certified" versions, it still can't be done at a reasonable price point. Even if all we want is a long range beacon that can be picked up in space, we're still talking several hundred dollars. Even an off the shelf satphone runs into the hundreds of dollars. And again, if we're talking something passive, then the airplane itself is already a giant pile of passive debris.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp
^ Says the person who doesn't know anything about what it costs to install equipment to an airliner...
It would probably add $50,000 to the price of each airplane, for something so rarely used...
Just a ballpark figure: $200 for gps, $200 for 2 way satphone, $200 for hardened case, $200 for 30 day battery, and $200 for long range antenna and everything else I forgot. So that's about $1000 per unit. For 20 of them we are up to 20k and I seriously doubt you can get all that for the prices I quoted. This doesn't include installation, maintenance, or the added weight of having 20 primitive black boxes on every airplane. As far as an inert object like a usb drive, I think the OP doesn't realize how big the ocean is. Even if it survived the impact, a small 2ft by 2ft piece of orange foam is basically invisible. They are having a hard time finding an entire plane. It would likely never make it to shore and even if it did it would likely be destroyed by the salt water and more importantly, they want to know what happened now not 10 years from now.
Look, the economics of this is simple: By producing data that can be monitized, the cloud companies can reduce the up-front price. Most people go with the cheapest option. This reduces costs even more, since NRE can be spread over more units. It would be very difficult for a non-cloud company to compete with that. People that care about their privacy, and are willing to pay extra to protect it, are a niche market.
I think the solution is probably to do what the amazon fire does and charge a premium for ad-free. The monitization really doesn't produce a huge amount of money. Even facebook, one of the kings of data mining and selling ads, only makes like $1/month/user. It should be relatively simple for someone like nest to sell a $200 box that replaces the "cloud" for people that want local control.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious problem being "solved" is how to treat AI slaves. An industrial robot isn't the concern. They have been used for about 100 years (the moving assembly line being one of the earlier industrial robots, but the cotton gin being even earlier than that. Nobody is considering these as applying to the robots used in car manufacturing, but were drafted as being related to the ASMIO type machines. The AI-like "cute" robots.
Those applying it to single-task robots, even with AI-like features are deliberately being obtuse. The AI researchers do so much to over-state their success, that it's natural to start protecting AI. AI is no dumber than an octopus, so if we have laws protecting an octopus, so why not an AI?
It's not as simple as "sentient autonomous humanoid robot" versus "single-task industrial" robot. There is no reason that even a fully sentient robot will even have to have a body. It definitely doesn't have to be mobile. Likely those industrial robots will continue to get smarter and smarter until they cross over at some point. They won't have legs to move around or even audio to communicate but they can still perform tasks with humanlike intelligence.
Is a bulldozer a robot? What about an autonomous bulldozer? How many people did it replace? A bulldozer can do the work of 100 men with shovels but a much much smaller number of men if they also have a bulldozer. The only thing this would do would have companies skirting the law by redefining or crippling their products: That computer that fill drinks isn't a robot. That computer that folds clothes isn't a robot because it's been crippled to only fold clothes. etc. etc.
Humanoid robots are likely always going to be a novelty. For most tasks, a non-humanoid version works better. Even for a general purpose robot, the humanoid form is probably not optimal.
but if you had battery powered headphones they could do all of the amplification.
But now you have two things that you have to keep charged instead of one. More importantly, the summary mentions they could have a larger battery if they got rid of the headphone jack. That is bizarre. If you want to increase the battery size, just do it. If you just made the iphone 6 the same depth as the camera on it, that would give you significantly more area to work with than removing the headphone jack. You would have also avoided "bendgate". What is apple's obsession with ultra thin devices? Give me a thicker phone and throw in a longer battery life and waterproofing. As it is the iphone is so thin and fragile that everyone ends up putting it in a case anyways.
Even smallish cities rely on a good bit of their development from this tax, which is often in excess of the normal sales tax rate.
Like the Uber service, this is a way to circumvent legacy fees to the municipality.
The hotel/motel tax in my town is used 100% for promoting tourism which brings in more people to use those hotels which airbnb benefits from too. The preferred solution to me would be maybe a revenue cap. If you make less than say $3000 per month then you're in the clear otherwise you need to register as a hotel. Another option would be a nightly stay cap like say 10 guests/month or 30 guests/month or even 100 guests/month. This would prevent businesses from using this loophole. The same could be said for lyft/uber, if you haul more than 50 passengers a month then you need to register, get regular inspections, have proper insurance, etc... This would still allow the casual person to do it without a bunch of hoops but gets them to do it properly once they are actually running a business. Many things already operate like this where certain regulations only kick in once a minumum size is reached.
An internet connection consists of the following:
1) The router in your home
2) The physical wire to the ISP
3) The router/hub/switch at the other end.
4) The connections, peering agreements, bandwidth purchases, etc.. the ISP has to the outside world.
5) The person you call when you have a problem.
Honestly, most of the problems I have ever had with my internet is either with #4 or #5, so this seems like a step in the right direction.
When I get ping times of 1000ms, dropped packets, slow download speeds, jitter, blocked ports, etc... it's almost always #4 and I have to call #5 to deal with it.
We have something similar in my town where a local ISP piggybacks their DSL on the local phone carrier's wire. I've heard that their connection is better but unfortunately you have to pay them AND the local phone carrier so your bill is significantly higher.
How does the decision affect zero rating and stuff like tmobile's binge on? Although I'm completely in support of net neutrality and all companies should be treated the same, I do support the idea of having different types of traffic. For instance making bittorent traffic lower priority than realtime streaming. This should preferably be controlled by the consumer though where they get some benefit for sending less traffic over the fast lane.
Very very few people will pay $10 and most balk at paying over $0
I would gladly pay $10 for a good app with a decent trial. I, however, don't want to pay $1 each just try 10 crappy apps that I'm going to immediately delete and I'm sure not going to pay $10 to try an app that I'm just going to delete. Apple and Google need to open their stores up and allow alternative business models. My preferred model would be free for the first 90 non-consecutive days. If I use your app for 90 days and I like it, then I will gladly pay $10 or even more. Very few apps reach this level of usefulness or quality. I would be ok with other models but there should be at a minimum a 100% automatic refund if an app is uninstalled in the first 24 hours. I would prefer 30 days but even 24 hours would greatly improve the quality of the apps out there. I shouldn't have to just eat the cost or jump thru hoops to get a refund for an app that obviously I don't even want. Apple and google both know when an app is uninstalled, just automatically credit me back if I immediately uninstall the app.
Personally I am not in favour of gutting the second. I would prefer its complete repeal. Before you could own a gun the burden kf proof should be on you that you are trustworthy, responsible and have a compelling reason.
What if the compelling reason is to protect yourself from an overreaching government? The reason we have a second amendment is to protect the constitution. Granted a hunting rifle is not going to be much protection against modern warfare weapons but it's still something. I'm all for trying to curb the mass killings but honestly if a few people have to die each year to protect our freedom to live in a free democracy, then I'm ok with that. Alot more people would die if we ever had to fight to regain our democracy after we lost it.
all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language,
There is (was )one of pearls greatest selling points which is still not available in "all" major languages.
CPAN .. mwhahaha!!
Not only CPAN, but I still find other language's regular expressions severely lacking. Most other languages now have them but they feel like a kludgy tackon and are much more cumbersome and harder to use.
I can answer that one: white space defined functions. Seriously, what the hell?
Wrong language. Perl, like C, has no white space restrictions. If I understand your statement correctly, I assume you're thinking of python not perl.
Right... there actually was a wannabe terrorist who tried your "drive a car into people" approach to mass killing. He managed to injure one person, and got his ass arrested - turns out it is really hard to run people over on purpose once they know you are trying to. You can dodge a car, you can't dodge bullets. Nobody died.
On the same day as Sandy Hook a lunatic in China tried to attack a school - he couldn't get a gun though so he attacked the place with a knife. He wounded three people before he was tackled and subdued. Nobody died.
So cars and knives might not be effective weapons. That doesn't negate at all the fact that the most deadly school attack in history was done with explosives not to mention that the worst attack of any kind on US soil to date was done with box cutters.
I'm not completely opposed to gun limits. I wouldn't be opposed to outlawing guns with magazines or the ability to be modified to shoot more than X rounds without reloading. I'm also all for background checks before allowing purchases. The biggest problem I have with gun control regulations is that they think it's going to solve the problem. Explosive material is just too easy to get. Also, in order to make any dent on the gun problem would require severe restrictions on gun rights. Ammo restriction would be the most effective way to regulate guns. If you tracked ammo like they track nasal decongestant, it would be easy to regulate. The problem is, what is an unusual amount? Shooting 100+ rounds in a weekend for target practising is pretty common. That's more than enough to cause mass havoc. Even if you restricted it to a small amount per day, it would be easy enough to stockpile a large amount over a short span of time. The amount of restrictions required to do anything meaningful would completely gut the second amendment.
There are fifty dead people in Florida, and many more who are wounded, many seriously, who are sure happy that your paranoia is intact. What's fifty lives next to the unlimited access to high powered weapons.
Like most American's I have a 2k+ pound vehicle in my garage filled with some of the most poisonous and explosive stuff there is. It would be trivial to use commonly available fuels to cause mass havoc. Likewise, I drive by a schoolyard every day on my way to work with a road leading onto the playground where hundreds of kids are playing. Driving a vehicle onto that playground (or anywhere else where people congregate) could also cause a huge number of deaths in a short amount of time. Getting rid of guns is not going to solve the mass killing problem. The "Bath school disaster" is still the worst recorded school massacre in the USA and it was done with explosives. Columbine, probably the most famous shooting, also used explosives. Luckily, the explosives didn't detonate or likely the explosives would have killed far more people than the guns actually did.
Do you really think it is any easier to replace the Display and Digitizer on ANY modern mobile device?
They are ALL essentially Unserviceable Units (BTW, that's the reason that "Ux" is the designator for ICs on many schematics. It stands for "Unservicable Unit". In other words, there is nothing inside that an average person can fix/replace.
It's not so much that it's "user servicable" as much as "third party servicable". We've already fought this war once with automobiles and luckily won. It's the reason that you can take your car to any place you want and get an oil change and if you're in an accident, you can get your car repaired by any repair shop that you want.
The car manufacturers tried to prevent this saying that getting your car worked on by a third party voided your warrantee. Luckily there were laws written that made this not the case and it's now legal for anyone with the required skills to work on any car. We need to get those laws to be more general and apply to electronics too. The little "warrantee void if opened" stickers need to go away too. Third parties should have the right and ability to service other people's products the same way that I can take my toyota to a ford dealership to get the oil changed or even the car worked on and repaired.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond...
It would be much easier for a sentient undersea creature like an octopus to colonize the surface of their own planet than it would be for us to colonize the moon. As an added advantage, once a creature like the octopus has colonized the surface of their planet, they would already have most of the required technology to colonize other worlds. They would already have space suits, self-contained habitats, etc... The biggest problem I see (with an obvious LAWKI bias) is that most of our technology is electrical based and electricity experimentation would probably be a lot slower on a water based world.
Except that there is no significant cost reduction. You've got a certain amount of mail to deliver. That doesn't change. Reducing the number of delivery days simply means you have to deliver 6 days worth of mail in 5 days, so your overtime costs go up.
Are you sure about that? Are you sure that it's not "you have a certain amount of houses that need delivery to". If delivery trucks are operating at capacity then yes, reducing the number of days wouldn't help but the point is that the volume is down so by moving to every other day delivery, the volume on the remaining days increases while the same number of houses are served. The amount of time it takes to drive to each house is the same regardless if it is one letter or 10 letters but the revenue per house is 10 times if there are 10 letters per house instead of one with approximately the same gas and payroll expenses.
I'll bet this guy goes around looking for people with assets. He won't bother suing a poor person. How does one protect oneself from this kind of predatory legal action?
Not necessarily. You want someone with enough money to pay a few thousand bucks but not enough to immediately hire lawyers to deal with your BS. Predatory legal action like this works best against the average middle class guy who won't hire a lawyer until he's already been screwed. Selling a used printer is the perfect mark because it means that you're rich enough to own a few pieces of electronics but still poor enough not to throw a $40 printer in the trash.
A similar situation happened with my brother. One of his employees was suing for sexual harassment and wrongful termination. The lawyers were asking for 500k until my brother produced a cellphone recording of the exchange. He ended up settling with them for 3k because it was cheaper than continuing to pay his lawyer and he wanted them to just go away. Without that recording there would likely have been a very different outcome.
Using a very long passphrase rather than a password is the safest thing. How is anyone going to crack "Mydogateachickenandnowisi$ickwiththegout". It is very easy to remember. You have to make sure the app/OS uses the whole thing, not just silently truncates it.
Even if an application or OS doesn't support long passphrases, you can still use an abbreviated passphrase. The common one is the first letter of each word in your passphrase but there is no reason that you can't use the 2nd letter, the last letter, or some memorized sequence like "first-last-second". Using your passphrase above: "My dog ate a chicken and now is $ick with the gout" and "first-last-second", your passphrase becomes: "Mgtannnsiweo" Throw in a few number and symbols and uppercase letters and you are good to go.
That being said, my biggest problem is that even if I come up with a good formula that is easy for me and hard for everyone else, every site has their own idea of what a secure password is and won't allow an otherwise secure password because of random sometimes mutually exclusive rules like "must contain special characters" or "cannot contain special characters"
I think that universal basic income is inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.
As such, basic income will be required just to keep the country stable and productive.
Even if everything you say is true and robots do take most of the jobs, there are other solutions that can also solve the problem possibly even better. The problem is really increased productivity per person. One solution would be to lower the maximum work week from 40+ to something lower. Lowering the workweek to 20 hours would more than double the number of available jobs and would let everyone benefit from the increased productivity. Another solution would be government guaranteed jobs. If the government created guaranteed jobs that say paid $1 under minimum wage. Anyone over the age of 16 who showed up would be put to work regardless of skill or ability. This work might include picking up litter in a park, sorting recycle, improving a trail or this "job" might be just sitting in a classroom learning a new skill. Both of these solutions would accomplish the same thing and would be easier to phase in to our current system.
I get maybe 2 or 3 spams a week at most that make it through my filters.
It's not the real spam as much as the psuedo-spam. Every single website, grocery store, credit card, etc... requires you to confirm your account with an email address and then each of these sites send you 2-3 emails per week. You've technically opted in but really only wanted a password not constant irrelevant updates. After a while, you have several hundred of these and many of them require you to remember your password and log into their site to unsubscribe. My postal mail is the same way. I have all my bills autodebited but they still send me a letter every month telling me that they autodebited plus random crap that goes straight in he trash. My electric company, my grocery store, and even Geico sends out a "magazine" each month. Does anyone actually read the geico magazine? I have something in my mailbox every day but probably only receive 1 letter a month that is important if that.
Why not just use email?
It has none of these problems, and far more benefits.
Because email has it's own problems. Mainly spam and pseudo-spam. I completely abandoned email a couple years ago. I still have an email address but the only thing I use it for is to search for a message that someone has told me via IM/text/phone that they sent me. If someone sends me an email message without notifying me via some other method that they are sending it to me then there is a 90+% probability that I won't read it.
That being said, I also uninstalled facebook messenger from my phone because I don't want to be notified at 2am that someone sent me a message. People are generally smart enough to not have 2am phone calls or texts but facebook messenger not so much.
I am one of those people who use facebook via the web browser on my phone and not allowing messenger via the web browser will not get me to install messenger but rather will just get me to use facebook less.
There'll be quite a few people wishing they could go back when Microsoft cranks up the "monetize the sheep" dial.
Every time you turn on your computer there'll be a new nag screen telling you about the latest must-have Windows apps and asking for a credit card.
Even microsoft is not immune to people jumping ship. Not only will there be third party programs to block this stuff but it will only encourage more and more people to jump to linux or mac.
I upgraded my windows 8 box because I hate windows 8. Still trying to decide whether to upgrade my windows 7 box. Really not super important to me as my primary OS is linux.
Even if it survived the impact, a small 2ft by 2ft piece of orange foam is basically invisible.
Nothing is "invisible" if it is continuously transmitting it's GPS coordinates.
Which is exactly why I said a passive "usb drive" isn't going to work. A passive device is basically invisible. Something that can transmit it's GPS signal is going to cost AT LEAST $1k for a consumer grade device which means a minimum of 20k per plane for 20 of such devices and likely considerably more if we're talking about something actually hardened and reliable.
You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, and so on; to say nothing of the rest of your equipment list.
My point *was* to lowball it but even then it becomes insanely expensive. Even if you mass produce them and skip on the "aviation certified" versions, it still can't be done at a reasonable price point. Even if all we want is a long range beacon that can be picked up in space, we're still talking several hundred dollars. Even an off the shelf satphone runs into the hundreds of dollars. And again, if we're talking something passive, then the airplane itself is already a giant pile of passive debris.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp
^ Says the person who doesn't know anything about what it costs to install equipment to an airliner...
It would probably add $50,000 to the price of each airplane, for something so rarely used...
Just a ballpark figure: $200 for gps, $200 for 2 way satphone, $200 for hardened case, $200 for 30 day battery, and $200 for long range antenna and everything else I forgot. So that's about $1000 per unit. For 20 of them we are up to 20k and I seriously doubt you can get all that for the prices I quoted. This doesn't include installation, maintenance, or the added weight of having 20 primitive black boxes on every airplane. As far as an inert object like a usb drive, I think the OP doesn't realize how big the ocean is. Even if it survived the impact, a small 2ft by 2ft piece of orange foam is basically invisible. They are having a hard time finding an entire plane. It would likely never make it to shore and even if it did it would likely be destroyed by the salt water and more importantly, they want to know what happened now not 10 years from now.
Look, the economics of this is simple: By producing data that can be monitized, the cloud companies can reduce the up-front price. Most people go with the cheapest option. This reduces costs even more, since NRE can be spread over more units. It would be very difficult for a non-cloud company to compete with that. People that care about their privacy, and are willing to pay extra to protect it, are a niche market.
I think the solution is probably to do what the amazon fire does and charge a premium for ad-free. The monitization really doesn't produce a huge amount of money. Even facebook, one of the kings of data mining and selling ads, only makes like $1/month/user. It should be relatively simple for someone like nest to sell a $200 box that replaces the "cloud" for people that want local control.