Other devices you have to pay by KILOBYTE Iphone had the first data plan where they didn't meter you
Apple got extremely lucky that their device was the trendy, up-and-coming smart phone *JUST* before 3G came out. 2G data was painfully slow, incredibly expensive, and just worthless for browsing the web.
If the iPhone came out a few years earlier, the hype would have died down as people realized their flashy and expensive Apple product wasn't very useful with slow and expensive data. If another company had been debuting their new, revolutionary smart phone at the time, instead of Apple, the world would look quite different.
What was sorely needed though, was a phone that did mobile web browsing and didn't suck. Internet Explorer Mobile sucked, horridly. Every attempt it made to lay out a page on a 320x240 screen was basically an exercise in shuffling cards - it never, ever worked right...but miraculously, even it was a step up from the Blackberry browser, which couldn't do anything right. Showing a full website and pinching in and out to navigate it? That really was incredible for the time.
Opera did mobile browsing right, many years before the iPhone came out, and it was available on multiple platforms.
"The first version of Opera Mobile Classic was released in 2000 for the Psion Series 7 and NetBook, with a port to the Windows Mobile platform coming in 2004. One of Opera Mobile Classic's major features is the ability to dynamically reformat web pages to better fit the handheld's display using small screen rendering technology. Alternatively, the user may use page zooming for a closer or broader look." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.
That's not really how supply and demand works at this level. Show me the warehouses full of $1 CompactFlash cards, now that TF/SD have replaced them.
There's no guarantee prices will drop at all. If Tesla only gradually reduces orders, then suppliers will slowly reduce their workforce in tandem and all will remain basically equal. Tesla is a big enough customer that they might have contracts to buy cells below market rate, and the loss of that volume could even push suppliers to demand higher prices for the lower volume of sales to satisfy operating costs. And closing down a line (reducing supply, increasing prices slightly) when demand falls is also an option.
You're an order of magnitude off there, chief. That would be a hearing-aid battery. They're actually making 21700 cells. Tesla sometimes calls them "'21-70", but omitting the dash and concatenating the numbers makes no sense.
No big deal, I suppose, just a little typo... I still look forward to buying a $350,000 (3350 eur) Tesla Model 3, with its impressive 21 mile (3460km) range and 1550 mph (25kph) top-speed.
Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane?
You were doing pretty well up to here, but now you're being incredibly stupid...
PV solar panels are FAR more efficient at converting solar radiance into usable energy than photosynthesis is. In addition, LEDs can be monochromatic if desired, giving plants JUST the spectrum of light they can effectively utilize.
The PV route is certainly NOT cost effective at current prices for PV panels and LEDs, and won't be as long as there's lots of cheap farmland out there, and inexpensive long distance transit (i.e. freight trains) to get it from the cheap land to the expensive cities, but apply the equivalent of Moore's Law to PV panels and/or LEDs, and you don't have to go even an generation into the future before it starts to sound like an economically viable option, at least for certain edge cases.
Don't believe it? Tell me where all the legal (in several states) marijuana plants are being grown in the US, today... And when it happens with other crops, it could make all manner of strange farming methods viable... Sky-scrapers growing crops? Stationary harvester equipment (robots) on each floor instead of hordes of migrant farm-hands. The future of farming has the potential to look very weird, indeed.
This is what I taught my kids: everything good you experience through your body; everything you hope to accomplish in life is accomplished through your body.
I'm sure due to your positive influence, your children will become highly successful prostitutes/gigolos...
(Sorry, but I just had to... You set-up the joke so very well.)
Am I the only one who thinks all 'secure' networks should be on a isolated protocol e.g. email be only text with no public network dependent information. user systems with no access to the internet, and no user level login on public devices including your phone.
That only moves the bar slightly. Information still needs to get in and out. If it's not done via the internet, then it'll be network shares, USB Flash drives, or similar, and that's where the malware will develop. The data it collects will eventually make its way off-site, too. Maybe making its way to a system that does have wider network access, or just sneaking out big databases on one of those USB thumb drives, some fool plugs into his home PC.
I so look forward to the day if the National Popular Vote legislation gets enacted... of a Republican winning the popular vote and all those Democrats having to vote for the Republican....
Before the Republicans went absolutely insane, "Blue" states voted for Republican presidential candidates plenty of times.
The Republicans are the ones desperately trying to hang-on to power. They're the ones passing all those voter ID laws, which courts keep striking down. They're the former home of Jim Crow laws. They're the ones gerrymandering voting districts, which is the only reason the GOP is able to keep their House numbers up, even though the population is mostly Republican. It's a Republican governor and senate in North Carolina stripping the powers of the incoming Democratic governor. Lets be clear which party the facts show are desperately trying to corrupt the democratic process to hang on to power...
The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers.
That's complete bullshit. The EC only happens to just slightly amplify the vote of just the very tiniest of states. It's not a significant effect, and certainly doesn't make candidates pay any more attention to Wyoming.
While it is true that states like Florida, California, and New York have very large populations and therefore more electoral votes, the voice of those states alone cannot dictate the course of the country.
Except Florida is a swing state, so yes, they DO single-handedly decide the election, and roll right over all the small states (some years). Ditto for Ohio. This year it was mostly Pennsylvania that swung the election...
Anybody noticing these are NOT small states? The electoral college makes small states EVEN MORE IRRELEVANT than they would be on a pure popular-vote basis. It makes big states with nearly even partisan divides incredibly valuable, and every one else's vote is practically worthless.
That's probably why even SMALL STATES have enacted National Popular Vote legislation, as well as large ones. We're 2/3rds of the way to eliminating the electoral college... Just a few more states joining on will make it a reality.
The electoral college only makes sense as a way for slave-holding states to use their slave population numbers (at least three-fifths of them) to multiply the value of the white population's votes. Obviously this was important for ensuring more populous states couldn't out-vote them and push to eliminate slavery. Today, it's a nuisance we don't need.
Without the Electoral College, would politicians even bother courting anyone except cities with Population Density Disorder?
The popular vote this time around was decided by just 3 million votes... It only takes a couple smaller states to put together 3 million votes.
The electoral college does NOT give small states a big voice... It gives a hand-full of swing states a big voice (and most of them are big like Florida, Ohio, etc), and leaves small states even MORE IRRELEVANT than they would have been just based on 1-person, 1-vote. At least candidates would be spending some money on TV and radio ads in small states trying to turn around a few thousand votes that were predicted to go against them.
That's probably why even SMALL STATES have enacted National Popular Vote legislation, as well as large ones. We're 2/3rds of the way to eliminating the electoral college... Just a few more states joining on will make it a reality.
The electoral college only makes sense as a way for slave-holding states to use their slave population numbers (at least three-fifths of them) to multiply the value of the white population's votes. Obviously this was important for ensuring more populous states couldn't out-vote them and push to eliminate slavery. Today, it's a nuisance we don't need.
There are some very good low temperature heat pumps out there, and have been for several years now. Of course there's still cheap ones, too, which ice up in the cold and resort to heating coils only putting out 1/3rd as much heat.
It would take decades to recover the cost of installing a heat pump system vs 150w from a PC.
The cheapest heat pumps are little $300 8000 BTU units you can install, yourself. Either through a wall like a window AC, with a small hole and duct like portable ACs, or mini-split systems where a handy homeowner can do everything but the final electrical and coolant line hook-ups.
The top-tier residential electric rate according to California Edison is $0.29/KWH.
If we reduce your 150W PC by 100W, and run it 24/7, that's a savings of $255/yr. So break-even point is well-under 2 years, not "decades" at all. And this is with just ONE computer... A household might have multiple computers.
For the past few months, the vast majority of my utility bill has been heating. Electronics (that I already manage power settings on, thank-you-very-much) giving off heat is a side benefit to me at least half the year - maybe more.
You could get 3-4 times as much heat out of that same amount of electricity, if put into a low-temperature air-source heat pump. Much more heat out of a geothermal heat pump. Similiar savings if you spent the money on natural gas instead of electricity for your heating needs.
And double the savings, since you just said you only benefit from the heat 6 months out of the year.
And that's for low density occupancy common in homes. Office buildings commonly need to run their air conditioners even through winter, because of all the heat from bodies and also electronics like office computers, screens, printers, etc.
So you're okay with someone waiting outside your door, at all times, with a video camera, waiting to follow you around and record everything you ever say and do in public, for your entire life? Correct?
Anyone in a city can order a taxi and they know what they are getting. With an Uber you may get one you may not, they may be surge pricing they may not.
Before you hail an Uber or Lyft, you know exactly how much the fare will be. Try telling me, before you step into a taxi, the exact price. In fact there are many areas where taxis bill based on "zones", and many people get screwed by the higher prices, when they could have walked a block and saved a lot of cash, but of course, they didn't know, and taxi companies don't want them to know.
When I have caught a taxi I walk to the nearest hotel and there are always several outside.
You need to get out of your bubble once in a while. In many places, you couldn't find a taxi if your life depended on it.
Except it isn't a zero-sum game. It's the public at large that really gets screwed over by your "protecting" the corrupt industry and their employees, in this case.
Entirely disabling javascript from ibtimes.co.uk works nicely as well. That's always step-1 when a site is complaining about your ad blocker. Meta redirects may need to be disabled on other sites, as well. Only rarely does it help to disable style sheets on a site.
a cop can stand there and listen to what you say, even record it if they want. It's a public place.
The difference is that it used to take some effort to track what one person was saying in those public places. With technology making it nearly free, we're all facing every public moment of our entire lives being stored forever in some law enforcement database.
I'm fine with the local police getting copies of business' surveillance tapes, interviewing people, and checking telco logs to piece together my actions, AFTER there has been some credible accusation that I've committed a felony. But doing it all day, every day, in minute detail, storing it forever, etc., is massively crossing a line into police-state territory.
Your argument is akin to peeping toms protesting their innocence because you don't have an expectation of privacy when absolutely anybody could have been standing on a ladder, with a high-powered scope, taking pictures through the crack between the curtains, so it's all your fault, not theirs.
No one sat down and said they wantd to make taxis more expensive 'just because'. There are reasons for that extra cost that protect the public
There's certainly some of that, but all too much of it is rent-seeking, lack of modern technology, and hanging onto depreciated business models.
The insane price of NYC taxi medallions for example. Technology allowing drivers to rate passengers, therefore allowing expensive trouble passengers to be left without a lift. Technology allowing passengers to get prices and comparison shop rather than being locked-in to the rates of whichever taxi pulls up, and depending on the route they take. Better utilization by telling drivers where passengers are. Technology that forces passengers to pay without cab drivers needing to tackle cheats. etc.
I have no love for Uber / Lyft abusing their employees, skirting innumerable laws, and throwing money around to try and get themselves exemptions, but it's easy to make the case that the traditional taxi system was incredibly inefficient and rather corrupt, for no good reason.
Allow service vehicles, public transportation, cabs and bicycles, and everyone will be happy.
Okay, sure. Just as soon as I figure out how to get my SUV registered as a "service vehicle"...
Don't even try to tell me it won't happen... There's widespread fraud just in handicapped placards, because parking a few feet away is too much hassle for some people. You think the ultra-wealthy will resign themselves to riding the bus with the peasants? Not a chance, they'll find any means to maintain their status, privilege and convenience.
The paywalled sites are monetizing the news, and that almost always makes for biased reporting.
Just the opposite. Breitbart is not only non-paywalled, but they're one of relatively few sites who still offers full-text RSS feeds. Paywalled sites are trying to pay for their unbiased reporting, rather than taking funds from partisan sources who will be happy with endless financial losses to further their agenda.
it must also be annoying to know that when they for example do show movies, between the commercials, then it has been cut to fit the time slots. So you can never expect to see a full movie on TV.
Longer movies aren't always better. Plenty of cases where the TV version cuts out the tedium and really improves the film over the original version (Pluto Nash comes to mind). Plenty of examples where the added material to the "Director's Cut" slows down and basically ruins a decent movie, rather than improving it (Dumb and Dumber, Chronicles of Riddick, etc, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple got extremely lucky that their device was the trendy, up-and-coming smart phone *JUST* before 3G came out. 2G data was painfully slow, incredibly expensive, and just worthless for browsing the web.
If the iPhone came out a few years earlier, the hype would have died down as people realized their flashy and expensive Apple product wasn't very useful with slow and expensive data. If another company had been debuting their new, revolutionary smart phone at the time, instead of Apple, the world would look quite different.
Opera did mobile browsing right, many years before the iPhone came out, and it was available on multiple platforms.
"The first version of Opera Mobile Classic was released in 2000 for the Psion Series 7 and NetBook, with a port to the Windows Mobile platform coming in 2004. One of Opera Mobile Classic's major features is the ability to dynamically reformat web pages to better fit the handheld's display using small screen rendering technology. Alternatively, the user may use page zooming for a closer or broader look." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Entirely in-ear hearing-aids are a fairly new invention, and absolutely have NOT entirely replaced the traditional, larger units.
That's not really how supply and demand works at this level. Show me the warehouses full of $1 CompactFlash cards, now that TF/SD have replaced them.
There's no guarantee prices will drop at all. If Tesla only gradually reduces orders, then suppliers will slowly reduce their workforce in tandem and all will remain basically equal. Tesla is a big enough customer that they might have contracts to buy cells below market rate, and the loss of that volume could even push suppliers to demand higher prices for the lower volume of sales to satisfy operating costs. And closing down a line (reducing supply, increasing prices slightly) when demand falls is also an option.
You're an order of magnitude off there, chief. That would be a hearing-aid battery. They're actually making 21700 cells. Tesla sometimes calls them "'21-70", but omitting the dash and concatenating the numbers makes no sense.
No big deal, I suppose, just a little typo... I still look forward to buying a $350,000 (3350 eur) Tesla Model 3, with its impressive 21 mile (3460km) range and 1550 mph (25kph) top-speed.
The British air force in WWI had a very difficult time taking down German Zeppelins that were bombing their cities with impunity for two and a half years. It was only the invention of the incendiary round, combined with the use of hydrogen as the lifting gas, which eventually made them vulnerable targets. If Germany had adequate supplies of helium, the Zeppelins might be remembered as invulnerable terror weapons like the V2 rockets are.
You were doing pretty well up to here, but now you're being incredibly stupid...
PV solar panels are FAR more efficient at converting solar radiance into usable energy than photosynthesis is. In addition, LEDs can be monochromatic if desired, giving plants JUST the spectrum of light they can effectively utilize.
The PV route is certainly NOT cost effective at current prices for PV panels and LEDs, and won't be as long as there's lots of cheap farmland out there, and inexpensive long distance transit (i.e. freight trains) to get it from the cheap land to the expensive cities, but apply the equivalent of Moore's Law to PV panels and/or LEDs, and you don't have to go even an generation into the future before it starts to sound like an economically viable option, at least for certain edge cases.
Don't believe it? Tell me where all the legal (in several states) marijuana plants are being grown in the US, today... And when it happens with other crops, it could make all manner of strange farming methods viable... Sky-scrapers growing crops? Stationary harvester equipment (robots) on each floor instead of hordes of migrant farm-hands. The future of farming has the potential to look very weird, indeed.
I'm sure due to your positive influence, your children will become highly successful prostitutes/gigolos...
(Sorry, but I just had to... You set-up the joke so very well.)
That only moves the bar slightly. Information still needs to get in and out. If it's not done via the internet, then it'll be network shares, USB Flash drives, or similar, and that's where the malware will develop. The data it collects will eventually make its way off-site, too. Maybe making its way to a system that does have wider network access, or just sneaking out big databases on one of those USB thumb drives, some fool plugs into his home PC.
Before the Republicans went absolutely insane, "Blue" states voted for Republican presidential candidates plenty of times.
The Republicans are the ones desperately trying to hang-on to power. They're the ones passing all those voter ID laws, which courts keep striking down. They're the former home of Jim Crow laws. They're the ones gerrymandering voting districts, which is the only reason the GOP is able to keep their House numbers up, even though the population is mostly Republican. It's a Republican governor and senate in North Carolina stripping the powers of the incoming Democratic governor. Lets be clear which party the facts show are desperately trying to corrupt the democratic process to hang on to power...
That's complete bullshit. The EC only happens to just slightly amplify the vote of just the very tiniest of states. It's not a significant effect, and certainly doesn't make candidates pay any more attention to Wyoming.
Except Florida is a swing state, so yes, they DO single-handedly decide the election, and roll right over all the small states (some years). Ditto for Ohio. This year it was mostly Pennsylvania that swung the election...
Anybody noticing these are NOT small states? The electoral college makes small states EVEN MORE IRRELEVANT than they would be on a pure popular-vote basis. It makes big states with nearly even partisan divides incredibly valuable, and every one else's vote is practically worthless.
That's probably why even SMALL STATES have enacted National Popular Vote legislation, as well as large ones. We're 2/3rds of the way to eliminating the electoral college... Just a few more states joining on will make it a reality.
The electoral college only makes sense as a way for slave-holding states to use their slave population numbers (at least three-fifths of them) to multiply the value of the white population's votes. Obviously this was important for ensuring more populous states couldn't out-vote them and push to eliminate slavery. Today, it's a nuisance we don't need.
The popular vote this time around was decided by just 3 million votes... It only takes a couple smaller states to put together 3 million votes.
The electoral college does NOT give small states a big voice... It gives a hand-full of swing states a big voice (and most of them are big like Florida, Ohio, etc), and leaves small states even MORE IRRELEVANT than they would have been just based on 1-person, 1-vote. At least candidates would be spending some money on TV and radio ads in small states trying to turn around a few thousand votes that were predicted to go against them.
That's probably why even SMALL STATES have enacted National Popular Vote legislation, as well as large ones. We're 2/3rds of the way to eliminating the electoral college... Just a few more states joining on will make it a reality.
The electoral college only makes sense as a way for slave-holding states to use their slave population numbers (at least three-fifths of them) to multiply the value of the white population's votes. Obviously this was important for ensuring more populous states couldn't out-vote them and push to eliminate slavery. Today, it's a nuisance we don't need.
There are some very good low temperature heat pumps out there, and have been for several years now. Of course there's still cheap ones, too, which ice up in the cold and resort to heating coils only putting out 1/3rd as much heat.
The cheapest heat pumps are little $300 8000 BTU units you can install, yourself. Either through a wall like a window AC, with a small hole and duct like portable ACs, or mini-split systems where a handy homeowner can do everything but the final electrical and coolant line hook-ups.
The top-tier residential electric rate according to California Edison is $0.29/KWH.
If we reduce your 150W PC by 100W, and run it 24/7, that's a savings of $255/yr. So break-even point is well-under 2 years, not "decades" at all. And this is with just ONE computer... A household might have multiple computers.
You could get 3-4 times as much heat out of that same amount of electricity, if put into a low-temperature air-source heat pump. Much more heat out of a geothermal heat pump. Similiar savings if you spent the money on natural gas instead of electricity for your heating needs.
And double the savings, since you just said you only benefit from the heat 6 months out of the year.
And that's for low density occupancy common in homes. Office buildings commonly need to run their air conditioners even through winter, because of all the heat from bodies and also electronics like office computers, screens, printers, etc.
So you're okay with someone waiting outside your door, at all times, with a video camera, waiting to follow you around and record everything you ever say and do in public, for your entire life? Correct?
Before you hail an Uber or Lyft, you know exactly how much the fare will be. Try telling me, before you step into a taxi, the exact price. In fact there are many areas where taxis bill based on "zones", and many people get screwed by the higher prices, when they could have walked a block and saved a lot of cash, but of course, they didn't know, and taxi companies don't want them to know.
You need to get out of your bubble once in a while. In many places, you couldn't find a taxi if your life depended on it.
Except it isn't a zero-sum game. It's the public at large that really gets screwed over by your "protecting" the corrupt industry and their employees, in this case.
Entirely disabling javascript from ibtimes.co.uk works nicely as well. That's always step-1 when a site is complaining about your ad blocker. Meta redirects may need to be disabled on other sites, as well. Only rarely does it help to disable style sheets on a site.
The difference is that it used to take some effort to track what one person was saying in those public places. With technology making it nearly free, we're all facing every public moment of our entire lives being stored forever in some law enforcement database.
I'm fine with the local police getting copies of business' surveillance tapes, interviewing people, and checking telco logs to piece together my actions, AFTER there has been some credible accusation that I've committed a felony. But doing it all day, every day, in minute detail, storing it forever, etc., is massively crossing a line into police-state territory.
Your argument is akin to peeping toms protesting their innocence because you don't have an expectation of privacy when absolutely anybody could have been standing on a ladder, with a high-powered scope, taking pictures through the crack between the curtains, so it's all your fault, not theirs.
The word "state" appears EIGHT times in the title and summary. You can read it quite carelessly, and it's still difficult to miss the context.
There's plenty of problems to complain about, here... This is not one of them.
There's certainly some of that, but all too much of it is rent-seeking, lack of modern technology, and hanging onto depreciated business models.
The insane price of NYC taxi medallions for example. Technology allowing drivers to rate passengers, therefore allowing expensive trouble passengers to be left without a lift. Technology allowing passengers to get prices and comparison shop rather than being locked-in to the rates of whichever taxi pulls up, and depending on the route they take. Better utilization by telling drivers where passengers are. Technology that forces passengers to pay without cab drivers needing to tackle cheats. etc.
I have no love for Uber / Lyft abusing their employees, skirting innumerable laws, and throwing money around to try and get themselves exemptions, but it's easy to make the case that the traditional taxi system was incredibly inefficient and rather corrupt, for no good reason.
Okay, sure. Just as soon as I figure out how to get my SUV registered as a "service vehicle"...
Don't even try to tell me it won't happen... There's widespread fraud just in handicapped placards, because parking a few feet away is too much hassle for some people. You think the ultra-wealthy will resign themselves to riding the bus with the peasants? Not a chance, they'll find any means to maintain their status, privilege and convenience.
Just the opposite. Breitbart is not only non-paywalled, but they're one of relatively few sites who still offers full-text RSS feeds. Paywalled sites are trying to pay for their unbiased reporting, rather than taking funds from partisan sources who will be happy with endless financial losses to further their agenda.
Longer movies aren't always better. Plenty of cases where the TV version cuts out the tedium and really improves the film over the original version (Pluto Nash comes to mind). Plenty of examples where the added material to the "Director's Cut" slows down and basically ruins a decent movie, rather than improving it (Dumb and Dumber, Chronicles of Riddick, etc, etc.)