I suspect that it's a combination of two things: In Ye Distante Past, the 140 character limit was hard and fast because SMS is inflexible like that. Since that time, any SMS-related limitations have become somewhere between effectively obsolete and laughably irrelevant; but (given the absolute profusion of make-noise-on-the-internet services with which they compete) Twitter is loath to do anything that makes them less distinctive, and their somewhat tenuous claim to survivability, much less value, that much less evident.
Had twitter been designed from the ground up as a fully capable platform; but with a 'brevity is the soul of wit' house rule, it might well be as you suggest(at least until some agonizing trend of using metadata stuffing to produce paragraph-length word soup tweets hit the system); but it wasn't. It was designed as just plain less capable, to interact with a just plain less capable technology, and has since had surprisingly good luck with how much people like the (now architecturally irrelevant) limits.
Shhh. Don't let the secret out. Our entire 'digital economy' consists of re-implementing concepts from 1975-1995(approximately) either on mobile phones, in HTML/JS, or both, and then snorting the VC money. We can't let them know that.
So, according to the story, 'every employee' receives the cards, for distribution to 'any customer with cable or internet trouble'. Do remind me, then, of what advantage these cards have over the ordinary support apparatus (allegedly) handling customers who are having issues?
Either the story is BS, and the cards are in fact better than being stuck in phone-drone hell; or the cards are BS, and nothing more than an informational tool to see what comcast employee ended up referring you to the same quagmire that everyone wanders through. Decisions, decisions.
If you pick your location right, the same is true of various terrestrial locations ( if you know how to work the 'development incentives' game your tax rate can easily approach zero, and insure vs. self-insure is mostly a question of cost effectiveness for everyone except those who simply couldn't afford the latter.) That's honestly why it's a bit surprising to see Thiel hanging out with these guys.
If you have interests in some industry with brutal externalities(extraction industries, some chemical synthesis and heavy industrial processes, certain types of power generation, among others) there's a strong pragmatic logic to being a 'libertarian' at least where the EPA is concerned. If you are basically small-time, and don't have access to most of the best just-not-actually-paying-many-taxes strategies, there's a certain ideological and pragmatic attraction to libertarianism. Somebody playing at Thiel's level, though, could likely do better by making government work for him, rather than by fretting about its heavy hand. Must be a hobby, I suppose.
It also ignores the (not exactly minor) problem that, as their owners can attest, a boat is a hole in the water into which one pours money.
There are some commercially viable things done on boats (fishing, offshore drilling, etc.) and some recreational ones; but few things done on land get cheaper when done on water; unless you have in mind some straw man comparison between costs in some ultra high end urban center and the scungiest refurbed cargo ship you can get your hands on.
They are welcome to try, of course, it's their money; but I've yet to see a 'seasteading' plan that doesn't appear to be a fairly uncomfortable yacht club.
The harvesting and storage of naturally occurring ice was so successful that, for a somewhat surprising amount of time, it made manufactured ice uneconomic and, for an even longer period, on-site refrigeration hardware a very niche item(even after ice manufactured on large scale ammonia based systems replaced harvested ice, it still fed the same local market of that natural ice deliveries had).
If memory serves, the scale and efficiency of the industry was such that Australia ended up with the first adoption of a refrigeration system on a commercial scale because it was one of the few places that had the necessary technology but lacked a frozen pond without about a zillion miles. The thermodynamics and the necessary hardware were more or less familiar to any region with an enthusiasm for steam power; but the economics just didn't work out.
Well kid, I'll try to put this in terms that you understand: Imagine that this rock here is your 'build plate', except that it already has some hardened gunk on it from where the filament had a bubble in it and your last project kind of got fucked up while you weren't watching it.
Now, this other rock, hold it in your hand and move your arm stiffly, like it's controlled by a couple of cheap servos. That's going to be your 'extruder'; but imagine for a minute that this extruder is like a 'negative extruder' that subtracts material by, um, extruding antifilament or something.
Ok, now just start mumbling g-code under your breath really fast and bash the 'extruder' into the 'build plate' until all the hardened gunk covering the shape you wanted has been removed from the extruder. That's pretty much all there is to it...
It's repulsive the sort of tactics that commie chinamen will stoop to, putting backdoors into their products like that. Why, here in America, those are 'features' that you consent to by opening the package, as documented on page 46 of the EULA, as interpreted in mandatory binding arbitration by the company's legal team! It must suck to live in such a benighted, unfree, country, where your cellphone is probably spying on you and may well come preloaded with malware...
Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...
That's actually one of the impressive things about the brain: despite its complexity it is resilient enough that the medical literature is full of (sometimes literal) banging on the brain with a hammer that ends up being nonlethal and having some sort of interesting effect.
It's definitely a consideration, the question is whether it's a giant downside, or the absurdly amazing upside:
If your neurology-fu is good enough, you should be able to produce a stimulus of essentially unimaginable desirability. After all, while we (currently) have to do various things in order to experience pleasure, 'pleasure' is something that the brain does, not something we absorb from a wife, 2.5 children, and a golden retriever in the suburbs.
If you could bring to bear all the available apparatus devoted to the experience of 'pleasure' you could skip all the grind and go right to the reward.
Aside from the practical problems of getting people to work when they could be experiencing timeless ultimate bliss, I suspect that this prospect will strike many as somehow creepy or dishonest.
On the other hand, what innovation could possibly contribute more to the happiness of mankind than a direct supply of dis-intermediated happiness, delivered fresh and pure right to the brain?
If you are going to directly stimulate the brain, why bother with the 'entertainment'? We bother with that because our direct means of stimulating the appropriate brain regions are not exactly ready for prime time on health and safety grounds.
There might be some affect states that we can't reach without both electrical and chemical stimuli; but if you are even approaching that level you certainly won't be paying much attention to your environment.
So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.
That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed.
Surely there is some analog to 'extradition' for search warrants, isn't there?
The idea that any nation you happen to have a presence in can demand something you have in any other nation seems like an obviously dangerous shortcut to most-abusive-common-denominator law; but being able to black-hole anything just by shifting the VM across the border presents its own problems.
Is there actually no such instrument, and this sort of thing somehow hasn't come up enough to be settled, or did the Fed prosecutors just demand first and try tact later because they aren't exactly lacking for arrogance(or, in fairness, lacking for reasons to be arrogant, given how often they get away with it)?
True, I was assuming a copy of Visual Studio and the various other windows dev trimmings included in "exactly as MS would have recommended". You can make do with less than that; but it won't make your life any easier. In any event, doing an OS-level port is going to be somewhere between brutal and impossible, so either going native with your win32 skills, or going 'native' by using the device as an SSH/VNC display mechanism is the option of preference.
Is this the local-chamber-of-commerce estimate for 'job creation', to be totted out when whoring for subsidies, or the actually shows up in the 'help wanted' section number?
I have nothing against SpaceX in particular; but it is not exactly a secret that "Will create(or, sometimes, if you are a horrible human being 'grow') eleventy-zillion jobs!!!" is the earliest and most ubiquitous claim for any and all plans looking for tax breaks and zoning variances. Hell, when assorted professional sports teams are demanding that taxpayers build their stadiums because, um, reasons, they invariably manage to produce numbers alleging that a few janitorial and hot-dog seller positions will somehow be god's gift to the local economy, and totally worth the several hundred million dollars.
Unfortunately, while such devices are undeniably cool(and I don't covet several or anything), they are a minority among 'Pocket PC' devices. The questioner mentions Windows Mobile 5/6, which (while they do support x86, see HP's thin client lines among numerous other embedded uses) are late enough that ARM and the occasional other non-x86 had pretty much entirely annihilated the DOS/x86-based minature PCs.
Now, a 3-600MHz ARM might be as fast, if a DOSbox port is available, as the HP you mention; but that style of 'Pocket PC' died some years before what TFA is about. Sadly.
Oh, I'd be the last to argue for Putin being a nice guy, or not having KGB-filled visions of a rebuilt Soviet Empire; my point was just about the economic/intelligence strategy at play, though.
As best I can see, the treatment of foreign web companies is a somewhat less polished version of the Chinese one(and, given how closely tied the economy and state budget are to oil prices, probably something they'd be wise to turn into a more polished version of the Chinese model sooner rather than later).
In military terms, Russia is more saber and less rattle than China(China does have some questionably-acquired territories and disputed islands and things; but all are either old enough that only idealistic college students still talk about them, or new; but haven't gone hot), with a greater willingness to actively invade nearbye former soviet republics; but somewhat less enthusiasm for tech demos of mysteriously-similar-but-cheaper-and-possibly-actually-on-time next-gen weapons systems.
He'll never be employed to engage in shady illegal practices after throwing his employer under the bus like this.
It's a good day.
He's just lucky that he's on this side of the pond. That kind of disloyalty to The Company might cause you to commit an unfortunate suicide over at Foxconn...
Man, a Micro Drive. Cheap flash has made those irrelevant; but I still admire their sheer beauty. All the 'I can't believe this possibly works, especially when they let it out of a lab and let an idiot like me bump it around' value of a mechanical HDD with a head floating on a cushion of air so thin that a speck of dust could ruin it; but on the scale of a nice mechanical watch movement, all crammed into a power envelope that a device expecting an normal CF card wouldn't choke on.
I'd be hard pressed to find a use for one these days; but damn, those things are impressive.
A device from 8 years ago is ancient. Just let it go. If you want to play with it for a sense of nostalgia, don't let me stop you, but don't foist that trash on anyone else.
Pocket PCs happen to be a fairly bad case; but some old gear actually ages quite well, for certain purposes. I absolutely loved my Visor Edge with Weasel Reader and I can't even count how many books I read on that thing before Kindles were available, and back when they still cost a small fortune. Nice and portable, too.
Also, you can have my '92 Model M when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands, assuming you brought enough backup to keep me from bludgeoning you to death with it.
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I suspect that it's a combination of two things: In Ye Distante Past, the 140 character limit was hard and fast because SMS is inflexible like that. Since that time, any SMS-related limitations have become somewhere between effectively obsolete and laughably irrelevant; but (given the absolute profusion of make-noise-on-the-internet services with which they compete) Twitter is loath to do anything that makes them less distinctive, and their somewhat tenuous claim to survivability, much less value, that much less evident.
Had twitter been designed from the ground up as a fully capable platform; but with a 'brevity is the soul of wit' house rule, it might well be as you suggest(at least until some agonizing trend of using metadata stuffing to produce paragraph-length word soup tweets hit the system); but it wasn't. It was designed as just plain less capable, to interact with a just plain less capable technology, and has since had surprisingly good luck with how much people like the (now architecturally irrelevant) limits.
Shhh. Don't let the secret out. Our entire 'digital economy' consists of re-implementing concepts from 1975-1995(approximately) either on mobile phones, in HTML/JS, or both, and then snorting the VC money. We can't let them know that.
So, according to the story, 'every employee' receives the cards, for distribution to 'any customer with cable or internet trouble'. Do remind me, then, of what advantage these cards have over the ordinary support apparatus (allegedly) handling customers who are having issues?
Either the story is BS, and the cards are in fact better than being stuck in phone-drone hell; or the cards are BS, and nothing more than an informational tool to see what comcast employee ended up referring you to the same quagmire that everyone wanders through. Decisions, decisions.
If you pick your location right, the same is true of various terrestrial locations ( if you know how to work the 'development incentives' game your tax rate can easily approach zero, and insure vs. self-insure is mostly a question of cost effectiveness for everyone except those who simply couldn't afford the latter.) That's honestly why it's a bit surprising to see Thiel hanging out with these guys.
If you have interests in some industry with brutal externalities(extraction industries, some chemical synthesis and heavy industrial processes, certain types of power generation, among others) there's a strong pragmatic logic to being a 'libertarian' at least where the EPA is concerned. If you are basically small-time, and don't have access to most of the best just-not-actually-paying-many-taxes strategies, there's a certain ideological and pragmatic attraction to libertarianism. Somebody playing at Thiel's level, though, could likely do better by making government work for him, rather than by fretting about its heavy hand. Must be a hobby, I suppose.
The blame?
The guy who tripped over the modem's power cord? There can't be that much blame to go around when a network that size drops dead.
It also ignores the (not exactly minor) problem that, as their owners can attest, a boat is a hole in the water into which one pours money.
There are some commercially viable things done on boats (fishing, offshore drilling, etc.) and some recreational ones; but few things done on land get cheaper when done on water; unless you have in mind some straw man comparison between costs in some ultra high end urban center and the scungiest refurbed cargo ship you can get your hands on.
They are welcome to try, of course, it's their money; but I've yet to see a 'seasteading' plan that doesn't appear to be a fairly uncomfortable yacht club.
The harvesting and storage of naturally occurring ice was so successful that, for a somewhat surprising amount of time, it made manufactured ice uneconomic and, for an even longer period, on-site refrigeration hardware a very niche item(even after ice manufactured on large scale ammonia based systems replaced harvested ice, it still fed the same local market of that natural ice deliveries had).
If memory serves, the scale and efficiency of the industry was such that Australia ended up with the first adoption of a refrigeration system on a commercial scale because it was one of the few places that had the necessary technology but lacked a frozen pond without about a zillion miles. The thermodynamics and the necessary hardware were more or less familiar to any region with an enthusiasm for steam power; but the economics just didn't work out.
Well kid, I'll try to put this in terms that you understand: Imagine that this rock here is your 'build plate', except that it already has some hardened gunk on it from where the filament had a bubble in it and your last project kind of got fucked up while you weren't watching it.
Now, this other rock, hold it in your hand and move your arm stiffly, like it's controlled by a couple of cheap servos. That's going to be your 'extruder'; but imagine for a minute that this extruder is like a 'negative extruder' that subtracts material by, um, extruding antifilament or something.
Ok, now just start mumbling g-code under your breath really fast and bash the 'extruder' into the 'build plate' until all the hardened gunk covering the shape you wanted has been removed from the extruder. That's pretty much all there is to it...
It's repulsive the sort of tactics that commie chinamen will stoop to, putting backdoors into their products like that. Why, here in America, those are 'features' that you consent to by opening the package, as documented on page 46 of the EULA, as interpreted in mandatory binding arbitration by the company's legal team! It must suck to live in such a benighted, unfree, country, where your cellphone is probably spying on you and may well come preloaded with malware...
Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...
That's actually one of the impressive things about the brain: despite its complexity it is resilient enough that the medical literature is full of (sometimes literal) banging on the brain with a hammer that ends up being nonlethal and having some sort of interesting effect.
It's definitely a consideration, the question is whether it's a giant downside, or the absurdly amazing upside:
If your neurology-fu is good enough, you should be able to produce a stimulus of essentially unimaginable desirability. After all, while we (currently) have to do various things in order to experience pleasure, 'pleasure' is something that the brain does, not something we absorb from a wife, 2.5 children, and a golden retriever in the suburbs.
If you could bring to bear all the available apparatus devoted to the experience of 'pleasure' you could skip all the grind and go right to the reward.
Aside from the practical problems of getting people to work when they could be experiencing timeless ultimate bliss, I suspect that this prospect will strike many as somehow creepy or dishonest.
On the other hand, what innovation could possibly contribute more to the happiness of mankind than a direct supply of dis-intermediated happiness, delivered fresh and pure right to the brain?
Huh, growing crops in a desert is not such a great idea, isn't it?
At the prices the people growing the crops pay for that water, you bet it is. Now, about how those prices are made...
Be sure to put your EOL directives in order: an awful lot of people die in their own shit; but with substantially less happy expressions, as it is.
If you are going to directly stimulate the brain, why bother with the 'entertainment'? We bother with that because our direct means of stimulating the appropriate brain regions are not exactly ready for prime time on health and safety grounds.
There might be some affect states that we can't reach without both electrical and chemical stimuli; but if you are even approaching that level you certainly won't be paying much attention to your environment.
So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.
That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed.
Surely there is some analog to 'extradition' for search warrants, isn't there?
The idea that any nation you happen to have a presence in can demand something you have in any other nation seems like an obviously dangerous shortcut to most-abusive-common-denominator law; but being able to black-hole anything just by shifting the VM across the border presents its own problems.
Is there actually no such instrument, and this sort of thing somehow hasn't come up enough to be settled, or did the Fed prosecutors just demand first and try tact later because they aren't exactly lacking for arrogance(or, in fairness, lacking for reasons to be arrogant, given how often they get away with it)?
Why get your hands dirty with that sort of thing when there are so many contractors in the world?
True, I was assuming a copy of Visual Studio and the various other windows dev trimmings included in "exactly as MS would have recommended". You can make do with less than that; but it won't make your life any easier. In any event, doing an OS-level port is going to be somewhere between brutal and impossible, so either going native with your win32 skills, or going 'native' by using the device as an SSH/VNC display mechanism is the option of preference.
Is this the local-chamber-of-commerce estimate for 'job creation', to be totted out when whoring for subsidies, or the actually shows up in the 'help wanted' section number?
I have nothing against SpaceX in particular; but it is not exactly a secret that "Will create(or, sometimes, if you are a horrible human being 'grow') eleventy-zillion jobs!!!" is the earliest and most ubiquitous claim for any and all plans looking for tax breaks and zoning variances. Hell, when assorted professional sports teams are demanding that taxpayers build their stadiums because, um, reasons, they invariably manage to produce numbers alleging that a few janitorial and hot-dog seller positions will somehow be god's gift to the local economy, and totally worth the several hundred million dollars.
Unfortunately, while such devices are undeniably cool(and I don't covet several or anything), they are a minority among 'Pocket PC' devices. The questioner mentions Windows Mobile 5/6, which (while they do support x86, see HP's thin client lines among numerous other embedded uses) are late enough that ARM and the occasional other non-x86 had pretty much entirely annihilated the DOS/x86-based minature PCs.
Now, a 3-600MHz ARM might be as fast, if a DOSbox port is available, as the HP you mention; but that style of 'Pocket PC' died some years before what TFA is about. Sadly.
Oh, I'd be the last to argue for Putin being a nice guy, or not having KGB-filled visions of a rebuilt Soviet Empire; my point was just about the economic/intelligence strategy at play, though.
As best I can see, the treatment of foreign web companies is a somewhat less polished version of the Chinese one(and, given how closely tied the economy and state budget are to oil prices, probably something they'd be wise to turn into a more polished version of the Chinese model sooner rather than later).
In military terms, Russia is more saber and less rattle than China(China does have some questionably-acquired territories and disputed islands and things; but all are either old enough that only idealistic college students still talk about them, or new; but haven't gone hot), with a greater willingness to actively invade nearbye former soviet republics; but somewhat less enthusiasm for tech demos of mysteriously-similar-but-cheaper-and-possibly-actually-on-time next-gen weapons systems.
He'll never be employed to engage in shady illegal practices after throwing his employer under the bus like this.
It's a good day.
He's just lucky that he's on this side of the pond. That kind of disloyalty to The Company might cause you to commit an unfortunate suicide over at Foxconn...
Man, a Micro Drive. Cheap flash has made those irrelevant; but I still admire their sheer beauty. All the 'I can't believe this possibly works, especially when they let it out of a lab and let an idiot like me bump it around' value of a mechanical HDD with a head floating on a cushion of air so thin that a speck of dust could ruin it; but on the scale of a nice mechanical watch movement, all crammed into a power envelope that a device expecting an normal CF card wouldn't choke on.
I'd be hard pressed to find a use for one these days; but damn, those things are impressive.
A device from 8 years ago is ancient. Just let it go. If you want to play with it for a sense of nostalgia, don't let me stop you, but don't foist that trash on anyone else.
Pocket PCs happen to be a fairly bad case; but some old gear actually ages quite well, for certain purposes. I absolutely loved my Visor Edge with Weasel Reader and I can't even count how many books I read on that thing before Kindles were available, and back when they still cost a small fortune. Nice and portable, too.
Also, you can have my '92 Model M when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands, assuming you brought enough backup to keep me from bludgeoning you to death with it.