You can't stop ALL car crashes, so we should get rid of seat belts? You can't stop all birth defects, so lets stop funding pre-natal care too. Your argument is asinine.
We can cut our emissions a lot with already known technologies. Many of these are already starting to flourish despite decades of being beaten down, and it will take time to build them out. If we simply stopped all the petroleum subsidies (including foreign adventures to secure them, which is still a subsidy in my book) and shoved that same amount into energy storage, solar, and wind we could put a big dent in CO2 emissions. Put an extra carbon tax on gasoline and use that to keep and increase electric car subsidies would help too.
Our suburban societies need to be made more compact to allow walking and biking like you find in Europe (where CO2 emissions are half that of the US). Currently new construction in most places is very car-centric, and it creates a hostile biking/walking environment. Many new schools are not designed with sidewalks leading to them, and kids are not allowed to walk to/from school. Once built these awful situations will live on with high carbon use for decades. Dense city centers make for low carbon use, and those savings last for decades as well.
In the end we could greatly bend the curve if we actually focused on improving carbon emissions rather than throwing out hand up, buying us many further decades to continue to innovate.
Frankly there is TOO much competition in academia. Writing grant proposals in themselves does nothing for the scientific community, but takes a huge amount of time. As it has gotten harder to keep things funded, the ratio of grant writing to actual science has become ever more lopsided, so much of the grant money gets used to pay a researcher while he shops around for yet another round of funding.
In part we need to have more well paid lecturer positions, taking good teachers out off the research treadmill to concentrate on students. I have a couple of my best professors fail to get tenure and leave teaching, while one I saw as a poor teacher managed to stretch his BS repetitive atmospheric measurements into dozen of papers (written by grad students) and a department head position.
The skills needed to inspire students and really do a good job teaching the undergrad level stuff is undervalued, and often at odds with the skills needed to really focus on research. Being a full time lecturer is usually a poorly paid crap job that is poison on your resume, even though that is what I believe generates the most academic value at most mid level universities.
Have you ever had a kid? Mine is not quite reading, and if he was left to bake a cake (something he HAS helped with several times) you are likely to get a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, both being nearly identical looking white grainy substances. You might also get corn starch or baking soda instead of flour. The frosting might get made with unsweetened chocolate instead of semi-sweet.
I can rant at Leviton all do long and they can do nothing to brick my light bulbs and dumb switches. House functionality should not be subject to remote temper tantrums.
Won't buy anything that relies on an app for full functionality. These fly by night startups have a good chance of either going out of business or abandoning old models within a year or two. Stuff for my house needs to last 10 years bare minimum, ideally with zero fiddling, re-configuring, firmware upgrading, or other jack-assery.
Light switches fit that bill just great, so far apps don't have anything remotely close to that functionality to maintenance ratio.
Seems like a really pathetic response to Ryzen's debut. More cores with nearly equal performance per core for less $$$ is hard to argue with, so they spew this marketing blather.
The 10-20% per year performance increase Intel has been offering is just sad and pathetic. More cores should have been the next step, but they have been slapping huge markups on anything with >4 cores for years. At least now there is some actual competition and they might wake up and start trying again.
And if you have ever read the required job posting for an H1B it is hilarious. The requirements get written by taking the desired candidate's resume and adding "Requires" in front of each line. So instead of "11 years experience coding widgets" you get "Requires 11 years coding widgets". It is shameful to see how the HR department craft the job description such that literally only one person in the work can 100% meet the requirements, even for bog standard jobs.
The only hope here is that a few government drones will be willing to cause a few extra rounds of justification such that recruiting from Bangalor becomes a little less desirable.
A minimum $150k salary should be instituted as well, if not higher.
Walking Dead is really a metaphor for the minimum wage zombies an unemployed who cannot afford to pay rent and eat. The 1% better watch their brains...
Yes. Rubber center with plastic over mold. Most are literally just 2 components. The secret sauce is in the rubber center and quality control to make consistent balls. My wild guess is that the patents are in relation to either rubber composition, or manufacturing methods.
Still, the bigger point raised is that something so simple that has been around for ages and ages really should be a commodity item that competes on price and performance, not in the court of law.
We are well past the optimum point to society where patents reward the inventors and society maximizes the benefits of new inventions against the monopoly that is granted in return, and instead only the lawyers and mega-corps who can afford them actually profit.
It is in low earth orbit, basically barely above the atmosphere. Energy-wise it is about 20% of the way where compared to escaping earth's gravity (which the Moon more or less is beyond for these purposes). So strap a crap-ton of rockets on it and shove away.
Look at an intel errata list some time. There are huge numbers of bugs in all CPU's in recent times. Bios patches trap the errant instructions and use a work around. Nothing really to see here. I've had several intel instabilities get resolved with a bios flash. It is yet another reminder to always wait a few months after major revisions for the dust to settle unless your goal is to actually be an early adopter for the hell of it.
Macs were outdated by time their did their last refresh. Mac Pro is a farce at this point. Mini is a severely overpriced 2 core puck. Years old mobile guts in fancy packaging at Gucci prices.
Itunes got mangled beyond recognition to integrate it with Apple Music. hard to search without getting a big screen full of stuff to buy instead of stuff in my library.
iPhone is the only thing getting any love, and it has become a me-too follower of Samsung (though less fire and bribery prone).
For a company that has expanded greatly over the recent years they seem to be doing a lot less. Well, a lot less products and a lot more ego stroking anyway. What the hell are all those people doing? Spinning the motherboard yearly to keep everything up to date should be a baseline expectation, and nothing viewed as even innovative, just doing their job.
It is the logical result of legal paranoia. In the companies mind they don't want to get sued for royalties from an employee who claims that the big thing he implemented belonged to him due to it being developed prior to joining the company, so you get prior ownership. Similarly companies don't want folks leaving when an idea they are having is just getting interesting and starting their own company by regurgitating the ideas and claiming they own it, hence the post ownership.
As an employee you are a cog. You are not a person. You are part of the machine to make money for the shareholders (well, to line the CEO's pockets to be more honest). Your best interests are not on the top ten list of company concerns, unless it affects shareholder value in a big way.
When every company has about the same agreement you are stuck, and at this point all companies copy each other's HR/legal framework. Either start your own business, or sign on dotted line. Some are worse, and enforcement varies widely, but I have yet to work at a place without such boiler plate policy.
I am a hardware guy. My approach is spend a little spare time finding old expired patents and publications that are close enough to my idea to convince my management it is not an invention, but just solid engineering. Sometimes I stretch that and get away with it due to only semi-technical managers... I have no patents, and want to keep it that way. I've had a few ideas I'd like to keep in my toolbox, sadly none have had direct applicability, but I have preserved my option to due so.
the problem is that seat sizes are only a major issue for about 10-20% of the population. It is more profitable to ignore the comfort and well being of those people, but they still need to fly. I see no need to regulate seat size, but rather to require that all passengers be acommodated with at least 2" of spare knee space if they choose not to follow a minimum size. Leave it to airlines to have to provide first class upgrades or whatever if they choose to cattle car everyone.
In general flying has become so crummy that I avoid it as much as possible, and I am only 5'9". I can only imagine how awful a couple hour flight is for someone over 6'.
Hulu has ads even at the ad-free tier for some shows due to "streaming rights". They also dropped daily show. As soon as I can ween my wife off her last couple shows I am dropping it. Lousy BS.
How did they 3D extrude the wiring and meet code? I'd love to hear more!
Concrete is a good insulator for russian winters, right? Amazing! How good was the R-value? How was the rebar extruded?
Love how the paint was 3D printed too!
I could go on. The frame of most houses is NOT where the majority of the expense is. I hate seeing these wild claims about 3D printing, which wile cool are disingenuous and skip over so many important details that turn out to be real buzz kills.
This. Amazon is convenient, but their prices have bloated since prime such that most of the time it is worth my while to find a promotion elsewhere and get free shipping. Prime basically keeps me from becoming irate at Xmas time when my wife would otherwise just be ordering stuff without heeding how much shipping is going to be at the last minute for the cheap garbage her relatives want for Xmas. Between Prime BS and their search algorithm that mostly ignores my search terms I am really close to being done with Amazon.
I can only see a niche need for data in a car. Frankly I want my dash simplified down to the basics again. I don't want menus, I want a few key knobs and tactile buttons I can feel without taking my eye off the road. Give me a car without all this BS. Most of it will be obsolete long before the car is worn out, which is a major problem.
+1. Bay area is a a terribly unaffordable place. People are battling it out with dual incomes just to scrape by. Local culture guilts folks into keeping new-ish cars, putting their kids in tons of extra curriculars, etc. Insane stuff, stay out.
We lived in Sunnyvale about a decade ago and got the hell out of dodge once we got married. The identical next door 1970's town house sold for almost 600k. It was really crappy. We could not afford it on dual income (over 4x salary at the time). So we bailed out. It was a the right thing to do on all sorts of levels.
Slashdot Mirror
For more durable transport and easier handling you could even offer options for putting it in cartons or jugs. Where's my $120M now?
What's VR?
I had the same thought. If half the stuff was scary enough not to want to admit to, I am sure it was pretty awful.
You can't stop ALL car crashes, so we should get rid of seat belts? You can't stop all birth defects, so lets stop funding pre-natal care too. Your argument is asinine.
We can cut our emissions a lot with already known technologies. Many of these are already starting to flourish despite decades of being beaten down, and it will take time to build them out. If we simply stopped all the petroleum subsidies (including foreign adventures to secure them, which is still a subsidy in my book) and shoved that same amount into energy storage, solar, and wind we could put a big dent in CO2 emissions. Put an extra carbon tax on gasoline and use that to keep and increase electric car subsidies would help too.
Our suburban societies need to be made more compact to allow walking and biking like you find in Europe (where CO2 emissions are half that of the US). Currently new construction in most places is very car-centric, and it creates a hostile biking/walking environment. Many new schools are not designed with sidewalks leading to them, and kids are not allowed to walk to/from school. Once built these awful situations will live on with high carbon use for decades. Dense city centers make for low carbon use, and those savings last for decades as well.
In the end we could greatly bend the curve if we actually focused on improving carbon emissions rather than throwing out hand up, buying us many further decades to continue to innovate.
Frankly there is TOO much competition in academia. Writing grant proposals in themselves does nothing for the scientific community, but takes a huge amount of time. As it has gotten harder to keep things funded, the ratio of grant writing to actual science has become ever more lopsided, so much of the grant money gets used to pay a researcher while he shops around for yet another round of funding.
In part we need to have more well paid lecturer positions, taking good teachers out off the research treadmill to concentrate on students. I have a couple of my best professors fail to get tenure and leave teaching, while one I saw as a poor teacher managed to stretch his BS repetitive atmospheric measurements into dozen of papers (written by grad students) and a department head position.
The skills needed to inspire students and really do a good job teaching the undergrad level stuff is undervalued, and often at odds with the skills needed to really focus on research. Being a full time lecturer is usually a poorly paid crap job that is poison on your resume, even though that is what I believe generates the most academic value at most mid level universities.
Have you ever had a kid? Mine is not quite reading, and if he was left to bake a cake (something he HAS helped with several times) you are likely to get a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, both being nearly identical looking white grainy substances. You might also get corn starch or baking soda instead of flour. The frosting might get made with unsweetened chocolate instead of semi-sweet.
I can rant at Leviton all do long and they can do nothing to brick my light bulbs and dumb switches. House functionality should not be subject to remote temper tantrums.
Won't buy anything that relies on an app for full functionality. These fly by night startups have a good chance of either going out of business or abandoning old models within a year or two. Stuff for my house needs to last 10 years bare minimum, ideally with zero fiddling, re-configuring, firmware upgrading, or other jack-assery.
Light switches fit that bill just great, so far apps don't have anything remotely close to that functionality to maintenance ratio.
Seems like a really pathetic response to Ryzen's debut. More cores with nearly equal performance per core for less $$$ is hard to argue with, so they spew this marketing blather.
The 10-20% per year performance increase Intel has been offering is just sad and pathetic. More cores should have been the next step, but they have been slapping huge markups on anything with >4 cores for years. At least now there is some actual competition and they might wake up and start trying again.
Make education great again!
Academia has a lot of issues, as does the college funding model. So much could be done to make schools cheaper and better.
And if you have ever read the required job posting for an H1B it is hilarious. The requirements get written by taking the desired candidate's resume and adding "Requires" in front of each line. So instead of "11 years experience coding widgets" you get "Requires 11 years coding widgets". It is shameful to see how the HR department craft the job description such that literally only one person in the work can 100% meet the requirements, even for bog standard jobs.
The only hope here is that a few government drones will be willing to cause a few extra rounds of justification such that recruiting from Bangalor becomes a little less desirable.
A minimum $150k salary should be instituted as well, if not higher.
UBI is paying hungry people not to eat the rich.
Walking Dead is really a metaphor for the minimum wage zombies an unemployed who cannot afford to pay rent and eat. The 1% better watch their brains...
Yes. Rubber center with plastic over mold. Most are literally just 2 components. The secret sauce is in the rubber center and quality control to make consistent balls. My wild guess is that the patents are in relation to either rubber composition, or manufacturing methods.
Still, the bigger point raised is that something so simple that has been around for ages and ages really should be a commodity item that competes on price and performance, not in the court of law.
We are well past the optimum point to society where patents reward the inventors and society maximizes the benefits of new inventions against the monopoly that is granted in return, and instead only the lawyers and mega-corps who can afford them actually profit.
It is in low earth orbit, basically barely above the atmosphere. Energy-wise it is about 20% of the way where compared to escaping earth's gravity (which the Moon more or less is beyond for these purposes). So strap a crap-ton of rockets on it and shove away.
Look at an intel errata list some time. There are huge numbers of bugs in all CPU's in recent times. Bios patches trap the errant instructions and use a work around. Nothing really to see here. I've had several intel instabilities get resolved with a bios flash. It is yet another reminder to always wait a few months after major revisions for the dust to settle unless your goal is to actually be an early adopter for the hell of it.
Yep, giant "M'eh".
Macs were outdated by time their did their last refresh. Mac Pro is a farce at this point. Mini is a severely overpriced 2 core puck. Years old mobile guts in fancy packaging at Gucci prices.
Itunes got mangled beyond recognition to integrate it with Apple Music. hard to search without getting a big screen full of stuff to buy instead of stuff in my library.
iPhone is the only thing getting any love, and it has become a me-too follower of Samsung (though less fire and bribery prone).
For a company that has expanded greatly over the recent years they seem to be doing a lot less. Well, a lot less products and a lot more ego stroking anyway. What the hell are all those people doing? Spinning the motherboard yearly to keep everything up to date should be a baseline expectation, and nothing viewed as even innovative, just doing their job.
Sigh.
It is the logical result of legal paranoia. In the companies mind they don't want to get sued for royalties from an employee who claims that the big thing he implemented belonged to him due to it being developed prior to joining the company, so you get prior ownership. Similarly companies don't want folks leaving when an idea they are having is just getting interesting and starting their own company by regurgitating the ideas and claiming they own it, hence the post ownership.
As an employee you are a cog. You are not a person. You are part of the machine to make money for the shareholders (well, to line the CEO's pockets to be more honest). Your best interests are not on the top ten list of company concerns, unless it affects shareholder value in a big way.
When every company has about the same agreement you are stuck, and at this point all companies copy each other's HR/legal framework. Either start your own business, or sign on dotted line. Some are worse, and enforcement varies widely, but I have yet to work at a place without such boiler plate policy.
I am a hardware guy. My approach is spend a little spare time finding old expired patents and publications that are close enough to my idea to convince my management it is not an invention, but just solid engineering. Sometimes I stretch that and get away with it due to only semi-technical managers... I have no patents, and want to keep it that way. I've had a few ideas I'd like to keep in my toolbox, sadly none have had direct applicability, but I have preserved my option to due so.
the problem is that seat sizes are only a major issue for about 10-20% of the population. It is more profitable to ignore the comfort and well being of those people, but they still need to fly. I see no need to regulate seat size, but rather to require that all passengers be acommodated with at least 2" of spare knee space if they choose not to follow a minimum size. Leave it to airlines to have to provide first class upgrades or whatever if they choose to cattle car everyone.
In general flying has become so crummy that I avoid it as much as possible, and I am only 5'9". I can only imagine how awful a couple hour flight is for someone over 6'.
Quantum of Solice was one giant Ford ad. Made me hate both.
Hulu has ads even at the ad-free tier for some shows due to "streaming rights". They also dropped daily show. As soon as I can ween my wife off her last couple shows I am dropping it. Lousy BS.
That wood flooring was 3D printed?! Cool!
How did they 3D extrude the wiring and meet code? I'd love to hear more!
Concrete is a good insulator for russian winters, right? Amazing! How good was the R-value? How was the rebar extruded?
Love how the paint was 3D printed too!
I could go on. The frame of most houses is NOT where the majority of the expense is. I hate seeing these wild claims about 3D printing, which wile cool are disingenuous and skip over so many important details that turn out to be real buzz kills.
This. Amazon is convenient, but their prices have bloated since prime such that most of the time it is worth my while to find a promotion elsewhere and get free shipping. Prime basically keeps me from becoming irate at Xmas time when my wife would otherwise just be ordering stuff without heeding how much shipping is going to be at the last minute for the cheap garbage her relatives want for Xmas. Between Prime BS and their search algorithm that mostly ignores my search terms I am really close to being done with Amazon.
I can only see a niche need for data in a car. Frankly I want my dash simplified down to the basics again. I don't want menus, I want a few key knobs and tactile buttons I can feel without taking my eye off the road. Give me a car without all this BS. Most of it will be obsolete long before the car is worn out, which is a major problem.
Exactly, I want to extrude it myself, once. Pre-extruded "chicken", however tasty, is still a disturbing notion.
Plenty of these franken-foods must be cooked in their frozen form, or they quite literally turn to mush when thawed.
+1. Bay area is a a terribly unaffordable place. People are battling it out with dual incomes just to scrape by. Local culture guilts folks into keeping new-ish cars, putting their kids in tons of extra curriculars, etc. Insane stuff, stay out.
We lived in Sunnyvale about a decade ago and got the hell out of dodge once we got married. The identical next door 1970's town house sold for almost 600k. It was really crappy. We could not afford it on dual income (over 4x salary at the time). So we bailed out. It was a the right thing to do on all sorts of levels.