Wow, you really just don't get Apple's business, do you? They don't care about consumers looking for a low end phone, their business is focused on huge profit margins selling at the high end of the market. A big part of Apple's continued growth is due to the fact that the iPhone's high price and reputation makes it a status symbol in Asia.
This only continues to work as long as they maintain their reputation. Most people I know switch back and forth between iphone and android phones regularly. I have several android devices and several apple devices. My current primary phone is an iphone 6. At the next upgrade cycle, I will likely go back to android as I like google voice search better than siri and google maps better than apple's maps. I also like the flexibility and customization that you can get with an android as well as having more choices of phones. Apple is making lots of money because they have no competition on the iphone side while there is lots of competition on the android side but as everyone upgrade every few years, it would only take a couple years of people starting to prefer android (like me and many of my friends) for their profit margins to start to erode. As long as they can maintain a quality product and noone on the android side starts to get good name recognition then they will be fine but if they start to slip and people start jumping ship (to what they already know on the android side), it wouldn't take long for them to disappear.
Why would it make sense? Because Elon said so? If the truck will actually be used like a truck there won't be any chargers around. If you are talking about rich dorks running around town to show off, than maybe you are right.
That's what I get for not reading the actual article. I just assumed (incorrectly) that Tesla was talking about big rigs. To me that's what makes sense for both electric and self-driving. Trains are already electric. Large hauling companies are more than willing to adopt new technology if it makes them money over the long term. They are not as concerned about up front cost and self-driving would be a huge money saver.
Just like Tesla's other ideas, a luxury sports car proves that it can be done so other people can copy it. It makes sense that a truck would be the next thing for Tesla to prove feasible. I don't think Tesla really wants to build cars or trucks but rather wants to run a think tank to prove it can be done. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla open sourced his car plans at some point so other people could manufacture them for him (and he can sell batteries to them, of course)
Hrm, that got me thinking. Does anyone know of a good monitoring software (preferably linux) that can show me what speed I'm getting? I can obviously go to a lot of different websites to do a one time spot check but having something that takes samples every 15 minutes around the clock and gives me a nice pretty graph might help me actually get something done about it.
Would you accept internet that is completely nonfunctional from 6-8PM every day? That satisfies your criterion above.
It's not like nobodies using the system when it's down. The system is down because it's being used. This is not an acceptable failure mode.
Exactly. Now add in the fact that tech support leaves at 5pm so is unavailable during peak load and then of course the internet is "working" again the next morning when you call to complain and even if you do manage to get someone on the line, the repairman works 9-5 so the next morning when he comes by to check the line everything is fine. Regardless of the industry, transient issues are notoriously hard to get resolved especially when it's "after-hour" transient issues. Oh, and let's not forget that when you're having problems so is everyone else so even if they are "open", good luck actually getting to a human on the other end.
Be warned that Marco Rubio also supports lowering the broadband standard, and is against net neutrality.
Anything less than 25/5 (and no scumsucking usage cap!) is like having to crawl across a swaying rope bridge on an Interstate Highway.
I've been on 25/5 and on 3/1 and really can't tell much difference because most stuff is oversold to be barely tolerable. I would have no problem with them coming to some reasonable middle ground if they could figure out how to solve the oversold problem**. I currently work from home and I'm on a middle tier package which works fine during the work day but evenings it is barely usable and I've actually had to call in sick on days when the local school district has a snow day because all the neighbor kids are home and using the internet.
** The oversold problem is fixable if they want it to be. Just like fractional reserve banking or landline phones, you require a certain reserve and you build out for peak demand. Yes, this means that you're running at 50% capacity most of the time but then your service is actually usable during peak times. You can also use education, software, and incentives to try to get certain heavy non time critical downloads to happen during times where bandwidth is virtually free.
One nice thing about special effects is, if done right, they age extremely well.
There, fixed that for you. It doesn't matter whether it's done with CGI or not, if it's done where it truly looks real then it will age well. Looking at Jaws or even the original star wars trilogy, there are scenes now that look terrible today. Guess what?, they looked terrible then too but it was the best they could do so people gave them a pass. If you are limited by technology then it will eventually age the movie but if it's done where it is indistinguishable from reality then it doesn't matter what technology you use whether practical effects or CGI. The only reason that practical effects have aged a little better in certain areas is because many times it's easier to make it look truly realistic with practical effects but we're now there with CGI if people are willing to put in the effort. CGI actually has surpassed many practical effects like animatronics.
Exactly. If it needs a PIN, it's a debit transaction, not credit. Why would I want to enter my PIN into a keypad at the grocery store, in full view of dozens of strangers? What assurances do I have that the keypad itself doesn't have a skimmer installed on it?
Chip and Pin was designed to prevent people from being able to easily clone a physical credit card. It's outdated and doesn't really do much to help protect against modern skimming and POS compromise attacks.
Why would you *NOT* want to enter a pin? It's not like your credit card pin has to be the same as your debit card pin. How is not having a pin any more secure? You can argue that it doesn't add much additional protection but it's hard to argue that requiring a pin makes a credit card less secure. The only disadvantage I see with having a pin versus a signature is that it's easier to detect a forgery than if someone steals your pin. I think all debit and credit transactions including ATM withdrawals should require both a pin and a signature.
Banking websites require 1 capital, 1 symbol, and 1 number in the password, doesn't allow you to use the back button and logs you out after 5 minutes but then allows you to reset your password by knowing your pet's name, your birthday, or some other ridiculously easy to find information. Yes, the password is usually sent to an email address but that email address doesn't have any of the same security, a person is always logged in, and usually has similar easy to crack password resets. Oh, and let's not forget that they won't actually allow you to opt out of the password reset or set it to something reasonable (like maybe most recent deposit combined with text message combined with a letter they mail out combined with credit card number)
In the USA they recently rolled out "Chip and Pin" technology for credit cards but decided that "Chip and Pin" was too inconvenient so instead just made it "Chip" so that when/if they ever implement "Chip and Pin" they will have to retrain everyone a second time (aka won't happen anytime soon) It's not like people weren't already familiar with pins with debit cards. It would have been trivial to just add the pins on in one go.
As long as we continue to operate on the premise that convenience is more important than security we are going to continue to have security problems.
C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.
It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.
C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.
Because if I'm going to live forever, I want a bathroom, kitchen and real bed.
Exactly. I live about an 8 hour drive from the ocean. If gas prices stay cheap**, I would love to get in an RV on Friday night and wake up on the beach on Saturday morning and then go to bed Sunday night and be back in my hometown for work/school Monday morning.
**Even at high gas prices, if you put 3-4 people in a vehicle, it's still considerably cheaper than flying.
Also a car that is worn out still has a pretty poor resale value even if it is just a year old.
The point is that you've already used up it's value so resale value is not important. If a car is good for 200k miles and you drive 20k miles per year but the car is obsolete in 3 years then you're throwing away a perfectly good car which can still be driven 160k miles. On the other hand, if you drive 100k miles per year then the car is used up before it has a chance to become obsolete.
As far as your other point, new cars are not as bad of a deal as alot of people seem to think. There is a small hit for "new vs used" but there are many people that are just fine buying a car with only 5k miles on it and even a "new" car usually has a few hundred miles on it. As a total dollar amount, a new car might depreciates faster than a used car but as far as percentage of car price it's about the same. I believe it's about 20% a year (assuming the normal 1k miles/month) so whether you buy a new car or a used car for $50k, after 1 year it's worth about $40k. Likewise, a $5k car is worth about $4k after 1 year.
especially if you do it only because of the blackmail money - cheapskate
Not paying up for blackmail is not being a cheapskate. It makes zero sense to pay blackmail money. So you pay the $2k today, what did that actually gain you? What's to stop them from coming back tomorrow and demanding another $2k or the week after and demanding $40k? What's to stop someone else from demanding $2k? Paying to keep information secret is a game you can't win. Old movies would try to pretend that you are paying for the originals or that they destroy all the other copies but in today's world it's impossible to prove that so it makes zero sense to ever pay blackmail. The only place it might make a little sense is if you get in a situation where it's either a continue flow of money and/or the identity of the blackmailer is known and has something to lose if they are found out as well. This occasionally happens where some politician pays support money for an illegitimate child or something like that but even this is a fool's game as the blackmailer can always increase the amount of money required at any time. Any time you're in a situation where there is one sided leverage then your best and only option is to figure out how to remove that leverage from being used.
And if you've read Jared Diamond, there are other reasons for their lack of large empires and technological progress.
Many of his reasons like "division of labor", specialization, balkanization, domestication and even agriculture support what I was saying that with a slower life cycle we would likely see technological advances unfold very differently. Agriculture and domestication of animals likely wouldn't have even been necessary if our population stayed small enough to live off the land without improving it.
That's a HUGE assumption. Heck, picture a species virtually identical to us, except that they reproduce much more slowly. Their pharmaceutical and industrial revolutions would go VERY differently without the rapid population explosion we experienced as a result. In fact, we're seeing today that well-to-do nations tend to fall to roughly zero population growth (discounting immigration), so there's a fair chance their global population might stabilize at far below a billion, something easily sustainable without stressing the planet's carrying capacity, eliminating or at least greatly simplifying virtually all of the problems we've created for ourselves, from war, to pollution, global warming, etc.
The industrial revolution might play out even more differently that what you are imagining. Our rapid growth is one of the things that spurred the industrial revolution. A longer life cycle would make cultural changes much slower. Also, without a high demand on resources, it becomes unnecessary. Look at the native americans. They had plenty of resources for a small population and therefore didn't progress to the large seafaring boats necessary to get more resources from afar (among other things). We might not have arose at all as resource scarcity is responsible for the growth of intelligence. Even if we would have made it to the industrial revolution, with a small population it becomes much more difficult to fund billion dollar projects like the space program as it's harder to skim that much money off the top. Basically, although there are disadvantages of a large population, there are also certain advantages like the ability of everyone to donate $1 and have enough money to fund huge enterprises as well as other indirect advantages like forcing innovation in order to survive.
Honestly, most of these benchmarks have LONG outlived the point where they provide any sort of useful information for anything.
I agree but so has CPU speed and number of cores but we need some way of comparing apples and oranges to decide which CPU a person should buy. I find AMD's approach interesting. A benchmark written in excel should be about as good as any for testing desktop work. Many video games like minecraft and even some first person games can be accessed via scripts so it would be simple enough to create benchmarks based on actual games too. This seems like the better approach. Build the benchmarks inside the actual games. Ideally you would have the benchmarks written by a trusted third party where the exact methods are not known by AMD/Intel so they can't be gamed but the second best solution would probably be to test on a half dozen or so games/apps and made it open source so that the multiple apps make it harder to game and the open source make it so that they can game it equally.
If Netflix doesn't fill the void... You should honestly get off the couch and re-evaluate your lifestyle.
Actually, I would argue the exact opposite. If all you're doing is filling the void then you're doing it wrong and and need to get off the couch and re-evaluate your lifestyle. I watch only about 2-3 total hours of tv/movies/shows combined on a heavy week and I am very selective about what I watch. I don't want to just "fill the void". I want to actually pick what I'm watching not just fill the void which is why netflix is a horrible mismatch for me. Amazon is a little better as I have a better selection but I find $2/episode a bit steep even for my limited watching that's why my suggestion was that netflix ditch the unlimited for the people like me that don't want to binge watch 100 hours a month but would be fine pay $1/hour to watch movies if it meant that I actually got a good selection to choose from.
I can always find something worthy on Netflix. And the price is right. It's hard to complain.
Finding something worth watching (however you define that) is not the same as finding what you want to watch. My kids and I want to watch specific movies. Redbox with it's extremely limited selection blows netflix out of the water when it comes to wanting to watch the latest movie. For TV shows, amazon's selection is pretty good IF you're willing to pay $2 per episode (which most people aren't). Luckily for me, my local library carries most tv shows and between redbox and the library I can cover most of what I want to watch. I've considered getting netflix by mail to cover the remaining 20% but it's too slow and too expensive. I think netflix streaming and netflix by mail could both benefit by getting rid of their flat rate. As I don't watch a lot of movies, a mail service where I paid the shipping and then paid $2/month/title rental would be a much better deal for me than $8/month. Something like that would also allow the customer to mail back 5 at a time, request 5 at a time, etc.. to cut costs. But back to the main point, streaming still sucks and even on old releases it can't compete with amazon prime where you can buy many movies for $5 and keep them as long as you like and then sell it back when you're done.
It is this IP address - one being used by a VPN service provider to tunnel in unauthorized viewers - that Netflix would be trying to block. And yes, it would be effective, although they admit it's "a cat and mouse game" because the VPN provider can switch to using a different IP address.
No, it's not effective. It's not that the VPN provider CAN switch it that it probably does. It likely has hundreds if not thousands of endpoints. Me, personally, if I wanted a VPN, I would just spin up an amazon or digital ocean image. If they blocked my IP, it would take only a few minutes to spin up another one or in the case of elastic IPs I wouldn't even need to spin up a new instance just assign a new IP to an existing instance. The only way to block VPN would be to start blocking large chunks of the cloud which would also be problematic for netflix as they are using that same cloud to provide their services.
In today's society, there would be plenty of things other than money that you could use as a reference currency before resorting to chickens. Government issued notes is safer and easier but if something happened to make them unappealing then it would be easy to switch to something else. Unleaded gas IOUs would be an almost perfect proxy for currency as a majority of people need and consume a good amount every day.
I think that's my number one pet peeve from incandescent fanboys. I've been using CFLs since about 2002 everywhere I can. I can't think of a single one that's taken time to come to life. The only thing that was weird was getting used to the new spectrum. It took about a week or two, and I haven't looked back.
I'm nowhere near a fanboy and I very much notice it. My house is probably 70% CFLs. I can't have CFLs in places with dimmers or motion sensors. I have also went back to incandescent in rooms with only 1 or 2 bulbs as the CFLs tend to take a while to kick on. In rooms with 3 or more lights, I run all CFLs but occasionally make one of them incandescent so that the lights actually kick on when I turn them on. I'm not sure how you can't notice it because with CFLs and incandescent side by side many times there is an almost 1 second delay for CFLs to kick on after the incandescent kicks on and many times a 10 second or even longer delay before the CFL reaches the same brightness as the incandescent. I have several different brands and have never systematically tried to see if some brands are worse than others but I do tend to move the slow starting ones to spots that cause me less annoyance.
If I'm a software company that works 5 days/week, I can outbid any competitor that only works 3 days/week as I can promise to deliver quicker than my competitor with the shorter work week.
You are assuming that the whole company just works Monday to Wednesday or something. In reality, people will spread their 3 days over the whole week. If you have a company with only one employee who has to work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week that's a different issue.
No, the assumption is that if it takes 2000 hours to complete a project, the company that employees are working 40 hours per week are going to get the project done quicker than the company where the employees are only working 20 hours per week.
Please tell me you're just missing a sarcasm tag? If not, your assertion is provably false. It didn't happen in the past, and if it didn't happen then, it won't happen in the future. Remember, all that sequestered carbon had to be free to be used by plants at some point in the past for it to get sequestered in the first place. Is releasing it all back into the atmosphere a good idea for our own survivability? Most probably not. Will it "cause the oceans to boil away"? Almost certainly not. Hyperbole doesn't help your argument.
You're make the false assumption that all the energy tied up in carbon was on the earth at the same time. If instead you think of "sequestered carbon" as "sequestered energy" and realize that those millions of years of sunlight is being stored in the hydrocarbon. What happens if you release a million years of the sun's energy in a short amount of time? More to the point though is to do the math. The link I provided shows the amount of additional energy we are adding to the earth's system and how quickly it is dissipating. With the exception of solar (which the article shows reaches it's limit quickly as well), most other forms of energy are actually adding heat to the surface of the earth and extrapolated out for a few hundred years and that extra heat starts to become a huge problem.
The person invoking laches is asserting that an opposing party has "slept on its rights," and that, as a result of this delay, circumstances have changed, witnesses and/or evidence may have been lost or no longer available, etc., such that it is no longer a just resolution to grant the plaintiff's claim
This probably works in cases of copyright infringement or even in cases where you're claiming damages but I doubt it will work well when you're actively consuming their resources. To encourage people to visit, Mcdonalds could give a free coffee to everyone that comes in their restaurant for 10 years but that doesn't obligate them to continue to provide that free coffee indefinitely in the future. Likewise, I could allow you to come pick apples off my tree for 10 years but assuming that it's clear that I own the land, there is nothing that says I have to continue to let you pick apples off my tree. In certain cases, where I let you borrow my truck for 10 years, you license it, maintain it, improve on it, etc.. then you again might be able to make the case but in this case, google is no longer wanting to provide service to this particular customer and it's in their right to do that.
That's a nice sounding ideology but the reality is that even if you start with a good 100% accurate street map, chances are you'll never be able to keep up with the updates on your own as governments build and change roads. That's of course, assuming you even have the resources to create one to begin with.
Since this is a one man operation, I really doubt your suggestion is at all practical.
"Always have a backup plan" is not the same as "don't use third party software". I work for a company that uses google for our maps. We can also switch over to an alternative api with a click of a button. We do it occasionally for testing and I believe there might have been a problem 4-5 years ago where we ran the alternate for certain failover conditions but for the most part it has never been activated on our live servers but it's there just in case. We also use several commercial apis and on several occasions have switched vendors and then switched back for pricing reasons. Not only does this protect us from cases where the third party is no longer available but it also helps with pricing negotiations as even if we prefer one vendor over another they know that if they try to raise our rates that we are not locked into their platform.
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Wow, you really just don't get Apple's business, do you? They don't care about consumers looking for a low end phone, their business is focused on huge profit margins selling at the high end of the market. A big part of Apple's continued growth is due to the fact that the iPhone's high price and reputation makes it a status symbol in Asia.
This only continues to work as long as they maintain their reputation. Most people I know switch back and forth between iphone and android phones regularly. I have several android devices and several apple devices. My current primary phone is an iphone 6. At the next upgrade cycle, I will likely go back to android as I like google voice search better than siri and google maps better than apple's maps. I also like the flexibility and customization that you can get with an android as well as having more choices of phones. Apple is making lots of money because they have no competition on the iphone side while there is lots of competition on the android side but as everyone upgrade every few years, it would only take a couple years of people starting to prefer android (like me and many of my friends) for their profit margins to start to erode. As long as they can maintain a quality product and noone on the android side starts to get good name recognition then they will be fine but if they start to slip and people start jumping ship (to what they already know on the android side), it wouldn't take long for them to disappear.
Why would it make sense? Because Elon said so? If the truck will actually be used like a truck there won't be any chargers around. If you are talking about rich dorks running around town to show off, than maybe you are right.
That's what I get for not reading the actual article. I just assumed (incorrectly) that Tesla was talking about big rigs. To me that's what makes sense for both electric and self-driving. Trains are already electric. Large hauling companies are more than willing to adopt new technology if it makes them money over the long term. They are not as concerned about up front cost and self-driving would be a huge money saver.
Just like Tesla's other ideas, a luxury sports car proves that it can be done so other people can copy it. It makes sense that a truck would be the next thing for Tesla to prove feasible. I don't think Tesla really wants to build cars or trucks but rather wants to run a think tank to prove it can be done. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla open sourced his car plans at some point so other people could manufacture them for him (and he can sell batteries to them, of course)
Hrm, that got me thinking. Does anyone know of a good monitoring software (preferably linux) that can show me what speed I'm getting? I can obviously go to a lot of different websites to do a one time spot check but having something that takes samples every 15 minutes around the clock and gives me a nice pretty graph might help me actually get something done about it.
Would you accept internet that is completely nonfunctional from 6-8PM every day? That satisfies your criterion above.
It's not like nobodies using the system when it's down. The system is down because it's being used. This is not an acceptable failure mode.
Exactly. Now add in the fact that tech support leaves at 5pm so is unavailable during peak load and then of course the internet is "working" again the next morning when you call to complain and even if you do manage to get someone on the line, the repairman works 9-5 so the next morning when he comes by to check the line everything is fine. Regardless of the industry, transient issues are notoriously hard to get resolved especially when it's "after-hour" transient issues. Oh, and let's not forget that when you're having problems so is everyone else so even if they are "open", good luck actually getting to a human on the other end.
Be warned that Marco Rubio also supports lowering the broadband standard, and is against net neutrality.
Anything less than 25/5 (and no scumsucking usage cap!) is like having to crawl across a swaying rope bridge on an Interstate Highway.
I've been on 25/5 and on 3/1 and really can't tell much difference because most stuff is oversold to be barely tolerable. I would have no problem with them coming to some reasonable middle ground if they could figure out how to solve the oversold problem**. I currently work from home and I'm on a middle tier package which works fine during the work day but evenings it is barely usable and I've actually had to call in sick on days when the local school district has a snow day because all the neighbor kids are home and using the internet.
** The oversold problem is fixable if they want it to be. Just like fractional reserve banking or landline phones, you require a certain reserve and you build out for peak demand. Yes, this means that you're running at 50% capacity most of the time but then your service is actually usable during peak times. You can also use education, software, and incentives to try to get certain heavy non time critical downloads to happen during times where bandwidth is virtually free.
One nice thing about special effects is, if done right, they age extremely well.
There, fixed that for you. It doesn't matter whether it's done with CGI or not, if it's done where it truly looks real then it will age well. Looking at Jaws or even the original star wars trilogy, there are scenes now that look terrible today. Guess what?, they looked terrible then too but it was the best they could do so people gave them a pass. If you are limited by technology then it will eventually age the movie but if it's done where it is indistinguishable from reality then it doesn't matter what technology you use whether practical effects or CGI. The only reason that practical effects have aged a little better in certain areas is because many times it's easier to make it look truly realistic with practical effects but we're now there with CGI if people are willing to put in the effort. CGI actually has surpassed many practical effects like animatronics.
Exactly. If it needs a PIN, it's a debit transaction, not credit.
Why would I want to enter my PIN into a keypad at the grocery store, in full view of dozens of strangers? What assurances do I have that the keypad itself doesn't have a skimmer installed on it?
Chip and Pin was designed to prevent people from being able to easily clone a physical credit card. It's outdated and doesn't really do much to help protect against modern skimming and POS compromise attacks.
Why would you *NOT* want to enter a pin? It's not like your credit card pin has to be the same as your debit card pin. How is not having a pin any more secure? You can argue that it doesn't add much additional protection but it's hard to argue that requiring a pin makes a credit card less secure. The only disadvantage I see with having a pin versus a signature is that it's easier to detect a forgery than if someone steals your pin. I think all debit and credit transactions including ATM withdrawals should require both a pin and a signature.
Banking websites require 1 capital, 1 symbol, and 1 number in the password, doesn't allow you to use the back button and logs you out after 5 minutes but then allows you to reset your password by knowing your pet's name, your birthday, or some other ridiculously easy to find information. Yes, the password is usually sent to an email address but that email address doesn't have any of the same security, a person is always logged in, and usually has similar easy to crack password resets. Oh, and let's not forget that they won't actually allow you to opt out of the password reset or set it to something reasonable (like maybe most recent deposit combined with text message combined with a letter they mail out combined with credit card number)
In the USA they recently rolled out "Chip and Pin" technology for credit cards but decided that "Chip and Pin" was too inconvenient so instead just made it "Chip" so that when/if they ever implement "Chip and Pin" they will have to retrain everyone a second time (aka won't happen anytime soon) It's not like people weren't already familiar with pins with debit cards. It would have been trivial to just add the pins on in one go.
As long as we continue to operate on the premise that convenience is more important than security we are going to continue to have security problems.
C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.
It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.
C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.
Because if I'm going to live forever, I want a bathroom, kitchen and real bed.
Exactly. I live about an 8 hour drive from the ocean. If gas prices stay cheap**, I would love to get in an RV on Friday night and wake up on the beach on Saturday morning and then go to bed Sunday night and be back in my hometown for work/school Monday morning.
**Even at high gas prices, if you put 3-4 people in a vehicle, it's still considerably cheaper than flying.
Also a car that is worn out still has a pretty poor resale value even if it is just a year old.
The point is that you've already used up it's value so resale value is not important. If a car is good for 200k miles and you drive 20k miles per year but the car is obsolete in 3 years then you're throwing away a perfectly good car which can still be driven 160k miles. On the other hand, if you drive 100k miles per year then the car is used up before it has a chance to become obsolete.
As far as your other point, new cars are not as bad of a deal as alot of people seem to think. There is a small hit for "new vs used" but there are many people that are just fine buying a car with only 5k miles on it and even a "new" car usually has a few hundred miles on it. As a total dollar amount, a new car might depreciates faster than a used car but as far as percentage of car price it's about the same. I believe it's about 20% a year (assuming the normal 1k miles/month) so whether you buy a new car or a used car for $50k, after 1 year it's worth about $40k. Likewise, a $5k car is worth about $4k after 1 year.
especially if you do it only because of the blackmail money - cheapskate
Not paying up for blackmail is not being a cheapskate. It makes zero sense to pay blackmail money. So you pay the $2k today, what did that actually gain you? What's to stop them from coming back tomorrow and demanding another $2k or the week after and demanding $40k? What's to stop someone else from demanding $2k? Paying to keep information secret is a game you can't win. Old movies would try to pretend that you are paying for the originals or that they destroy all the other copies but in today's world it's impossible to prove that so it makes zero sense to ever pay blackmail. The only place it might make a little sense is if you get in a situation where it's either a continue flow of money and/or the identity of the blackmailer is known and has something to lose if they are found out as well. This occasionally happens where some politician pays support money for an illegitimate child or something like that but even this is a fool's game as the blackmailer can always increase the amount of money required at any time. Any time you're in a situation where there is one sided leverage then your best and only option is to figure out how to remove that leverage from being used.
And if you've read Jared Diamond, there are other reasons for their lack of large empires and technological progress.
Many of his reasons like "division of labor", specialization, balkanization, domestication and even agriculture support what I was saying that with a slower life cycle we would likely see technological advances unfold very differently. Agriculture and domestication of animals likely wouldn't have even been necessary if our population stayed small enough to live off the land without improving it.
That's a HUGE assumption. Heck, picture a species virtually identical to us, except that they reproduce much more slowly. Their pharmaceutical and industrial revolutions would go VERY differently without the rapid population explosion we experienced as a result. In fact, we're seeing today that well-to-do nations tend to fall to roughly zero population growth (discounting immigration), so there's a fair chance their global population might stabilize at far below a billion, something easily sustainable without stressing the planet's carrying capacity, eliminating or at least greatly simplifying virtually all of the problems we've created for ourselves, from war, to pollution, global warming, etc.
The industrial revolution might play out even more differently that what you are imagining. Our rapid growth is one of the things that spurred the industrial revolution. A longer life cycle would make cultural changes much slower. Also, without a high demand on resources, it becomes unnecessary. Look at the native americans. They had plenty of resources for a small population and therefore didn't progress to the large seafaring boats necessary to get more resources from afar (among other things). We might not have arose at all as resource scarcity is responsible for the growth of intelligence. Even if we would have made it to the industrial revolution, with a small population it becomes much more difficult to fund billion dollar projects like the space program as it's harder to skim that much money off the top. Basically, although there are disadvantages of a large population, there are also certain advantages like the ability of everyone to donate $1 and have enough money to fund huge enterprises as well as other indirect advantages like forcing innovation in order to survive.
Honestly, most of these benchmarks have LONG outlived the point where they provide any sort of useful information for anything.
I agree but so has CPU speed and number of cores but we need some way of comparing apples and oranges to decide which CPU a person should buy. I find AMD's approach interesting. A benchmark written in excel should be about as good as any for testing desktop work. Many video games like minecraft and even some first person games can be accessed via scripts so it would be simple enough to create benchmarks based on actual games too. This seems like the better approach. Build the benchmarks inside the actual games. Ideally you would have the benchmarks written by a trusted third party where the exact methods are not known by AMD/Intel so they can't be gamed but the second best solution would probably be to test on a half dozen or so games/apps and made it open source so that the multiple apps make it harder to game and the open source make it so that they can game it equally.
If Netflix doesn't fill the void... You should honestly get off the couch and re-evaluate your lifestyle.
Actually, I would argue the exact opposite. If all you're doing is filling the void then you're doing it wrong and and need to get off the couch and re-evaluate your lifestyle. I watch only about 2-3 total hours of tv/movies/shows combined on a heavy week and I am very selective about what I watch. I don't want to just "fill the void". I want to actually pick what I'm watching not just fill the void which is why netflix is a horrible mismatch for me. Amazon is a little better as I have a better selection but I find $2/episode a bit steep even for my limited watching that's why my suggestion was that netflix ditch the unlimited for the people like me that don't want to binge watch 100 hours a month but would be fine pay $1/hour to watch movies if it meant that I actually got a good selection to choose from.
I can always find something worthy on Netflix. And the price is right. It's hard to complain.
Finding something worth watching (however you define that) is not the same as finding what you want to watch. My kids and I want to watch specific movies. Redbox with it's extremely limited selection blows netflix out of the water when it comes to wanting to watch the latest movie. For TV shows, amazon's selection is pretty good IF you're willing to pay $2 per episode (which most people aren't). Luckily for me, my local library carries most tv shows and between redbox and the library I can cover most of what I want to watch. I've considered getting netflix by mail to cover the remaining 20% but it's too slow and too expensive. I think netflix streaming and netflix by mail could both benefit by getting rid of their flat rate. As I don't watch a lot of movies, a mail service where I paid the shipping and then paid $2/month/title rental would be a much better deal for me than $8/month. Something like that would also allow the customer to mail back 5 at a time, request 5 at a time, etc.. to cut costs. But back to the main point, streaming still sucks and even on old releases it can't compete with amazon prime where you can buy many movies for $5 and keep them as long as you like and then sell it back when you're done.
It is this IP address - one being used by a VPN service provider to tunnel in unauthorized viewers - that Netflix would be trying to block. And yes, it would be effective, although they admit it's "a cat and mouse game" because the VPN provider can switch to using a different IP address.
No, it's not effective. It's not that the VPN provider CAN switch it that it probably does. It likely has hundreds if not thousands of endpoints. Me, personally, if I wanted a VPN, I would just spin up an amazon or digital ocean image. If they blocked my IP, it would take only a few minutes to spin up another one or in the case of elastic IPs I wouldn't even need to spin up a new instance just assign a new IP to an existing instance. The only way to block VPN would be to start blocking large chunks of the cloud which would also be problematic for netflix as they are using that same cloud to provide their services.
In today's society, there would be plenty of things other than money that you could use as a reference currency before resorting to chickens. Government issued notes is safer and easier but if something happened to make them unappealing then it would be easy to switch to something else. Unleaded gas IOUs would be an almost perfect proxy for currency as a majority of people need and consume a good amount every day.
I think that's my number one pet peeve from incandescent fanboys. I've been using CFLs since about 2002 everywhere I can. I can't think of a single one that's taken time to come to life. The only thing that was weird was getting used to the new spectrum. It took about a week or two, and I haven't looked back.
I'm nowhere near a fanboy and I very much notice it. My house is probably 70% CFLs. I can't have CFLs in places with dimmers or motion sensors. I have also went back to incandescent in rooms with only 1 or 2 bulbs as the CFLs tend to take a while to kick on. In rooms with 3 or more lights, I run all CFLs but occasionally make one of them incandescent so that the lights actually kick on when I turn them on. I'm not sure how you can't notice it because with CFLs and incandescent side by side many times there is an almost 1 second delay for CFLs to kick on after the incandescent kicks on and many times a 10 second or even longer delay before the CFL reaches the same brightness as the incandescent. I have several different brands and have never systematically tried to see if some brands are worse than others but I do tend to move the slow starting ones to spots that cause me less annoyance.
If I'm a software company that works 5 days/week, I can outbid any competitor that only works 3 days/week as I can promise to deliver quicker than my competitor with the shorter work week.
You are assuming that the whole company just works Monday to Wednesday or something. In reality, people will spread their 3 days over the whole week. If you have a company with only one employee who has to work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week that's a different issue.
No, the assumption is that if it takes 2000 hours to complete a project, the company that employees are working 40 hours per week are going to get the project done quicker than the company where the employees are only working 20 hours per week.
Please tell me you're just missing a sarcasm tag? If not, your assertion is provably false. It didn't happen in the past, and if it didn't happen then, it won't happen in the future. Remember, all that sequestered carbon had to be free to be used by plants at some point in the past for it to get sequestered in the first place. Is releasing it all back into the atmosphere a good idea for our own survivability? Most probably not. Will it "cause the oceans to boil away"? Almost certainly not. Hyperbole doesn't help your argument.
You're make the false assumption that all the energy tied up in carbon was on the earth at the same time. If instead you think of "sequestered carbon" as "sequestered energy" and realize that those millions of years of sunlight is being stored in the hydrocarbon. What happens if you release a million years of the sun's energy in a short amount of time? More to the point though is to do the math. The link I provided shows the amount of additional energy we are adding to the earth's system and how quickly it is dissipating. With the exception of solar (which the article shows reaches it's limit quickly as well), most other forms of energy are actually adding heat to the surface of the earth and extrapolated out for a few hundred years and that extra heat starts to become a huge problem.
The person invoking laches is asserting that an opposing party has "slept on its rights," and that, as a result of this delay, circumstances have changed, witnesses and/or evidence may have been lost or no longer available, etc., such that it is no longer a just resolution to grant the plaintiff's claim
This probably works in cases of copyright infringement or even in cases where you're claiming damages but I doubt it will work well when you're actively consuming their resources. To encourage people to visit, Mcdonalds could give a free coffee to everyone that comes in their restaurant for 10 years but that doesn't obligate them to continue to provide that free coffee indefinitely in the future. Likewise, I could allow you to come pick apples off my tree for 10 years but assuming that it's clear that I own the land, there is nothing that says I have to continue to let you pick apples off my tree. In certain cases, where I let you borrow my truck for 10 years, you license it, maintain it, improve on it, etc.. then you again might be able to make the case but in this case, google is no longer wanting to provide service to this particular customer and it's in their right to do that.
That's a nice sounding ideology but the reality is that even if you start with a good 100% accurate street map, chances are you'll never be able to keep up with the updates on your own as governments build and change roads. That's of course, assuming you even have the resources to create one to begin with.
Since this is a one man operation, I really doubt your suggestion is at all practical.
"Always have a backup plan" is not the same as "don't use third party software". I work for a company that uses google for our maps. We can also switch over to an alternative api with a click of a button. We do it occasionally for testing and I believe there might have been a problem 4-5 years ago where we ran the alternate for certain failover conditions but for the most part it has never been activated on our live servers but it's there just in case. We also use several commercial apis and on several occasions have switched vendors and then switched back for pricing reasons. Not only does this protect us from cases where the third party is no longer available but it also helps with pricing negotiations as even if we prefer one vendor over another they know that if they try to raise our rates that we are not locked into their platform.