On one hand, you can look at this and wonder why anyone would want to undertake the incredible expense of a sub oceanic tunnel across the Bering Strait. What, with Anchorage already housing one of the world's busiest international airports, particularly for cargo aircraft.
However, completion of such a tunnel would have profound, long-reaching consequences, both negative and positive:
Chinese manufactured goods would presumably have shipping time cut in half. Even given the considerable distances, a 2km long freight train maintaining 110 km/h is a wee bit faster than a stacked & loaded Maersk container ship wallowing across the girth of the Pacific at a leisurely 20 km/h, and those trains can be run back to back separated only by a few km with basic logistics tools.
Rail and Trucking distribution arteries from Alaska down to the lower 48 would become among the busiest in the world.
American manufacturing jobs would be murdered. Already bled nearly to death, the ability to Skype an engineer in Guangdong, email schematics and have 14 boxcars of finished goods on your back dock in less than 2 weeks would be a deathblow to a lot of American jobs.
The economies of the U.S. and China would become increasingly tightly woven together, possibly creating a stabilizing effect diminishing the possibility of armed conflict - essentially the draft purpose of the European Union, after Germany went out on two world tours. The U.S. would be the loser in this scenario, as Chinas ascendancy would only continue on the world stage, while the U.S. ability to project and maintain power would suffer in the face of a diminished economy.
Americas incredible military would become unaffordable, and go through many rounds of contractions, until the U.S ends up a peer to countries like Russia or combined UK, FR and Germany - regionally powerful, globally insignificant.
So essentially this tunnel represents another step in a trade arrangement largely favoring only one partner, leading the other to contract, economy foundering, military eventually becoming unsustainable at current levels, heading into France-like levels of global insignificance excepting cultural impact.
The bathroom. So you can browse while you download.
For years we've had snobbish hipster tech journalists gleefully informing us that we are now in the "Post-PC era", that our watt-hungry desktop dinosaurs are on the way out, that they are being replaced by a constellation of sexy, small gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Except it isn't happening.
Every one of those goddamned articles was written on a laptop or desktop computer. You, fair reader, do your job or schoolwork on a laptop or desktop PC. The many limitations of tablets makes the idea of performing any meaningful work on them downright laughable.
I have an iPad Air and Zagg keyboard case for it. Toys. Both of them, toys. Poor keyboard experience meets poor word processing experience (unless having Lou Ferrigno sized deltoids from constant arm extension is your thing) meets horrendously poor multitasking meets a giant bucket of buyers remorse.
If I didn't really enjoy playing Hearthstone on my iPad Air, I would have eBayed it weeks ago. I rarely use it for anything else.
With factory refurb'd Macbook Airs popping up on Apple's "Special Deals" page now at $599 (when in stock), the argument for buying a $500 iPad Toy to play Angry Birds on the toilet and watch "Sherlock" on that flight to Denver to visit your in-laws just.. doesn't make good sense anymore, when for $100 more you can get a real computer.
So my operating theory is - Not only are people holding on to the tablets they already own, softening sales of new models, but they have also already discovered they're horrible to type on, make overweight poor quality e-readers, have games that you tire of after 1 hour and you feel no urgent need to run out and drop $500 on a new one that will only continue to do all those things poorly, but is a tiny bit thinner.
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Carbon Monoxide. The cost is negligible and the effect inarguable. You feel drowsy, you fall asleep, and you die.
It's so sneaky and lethal, the CDC estimates it killed > 16,000 people in the U.S. in a five year time period alone. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
That's cute - you think rules apply to the government?
"National Security."
Just utter those two words, and brush everything aside. "In The Interest / Not In The Interest of __National Security___. "
I have a friend - who is quite possibly reading this, Hi, Beavis - who has Top Secret security clearance and a tidy officers' rank in the U.S. military. Many years ago, while undergoing the personal reference interview portion of his background check, I had a man from the Department of Defense come to my house. The guy arrived about 15 minutes late. He apologized, saying he had just come from an interview in Cleveland.
"That part of Cleveland is an hour away - did you really leave the appointment 40 minutes ago??" I asked, incredulously, working the mental math that he would must have driven 90-100+ MPH down Route 77 South - Posted 65 MPH at the time - to arrive when he did.
"Weren't you worried about the police?" I asked naively.
"Oh..." he said, with a soft smile - "they have no authority over me." I processed that slowly as he settled onto the sofa and began opening his briefcase. Seeing the confusion on my face, he winked and said
"... National Security. Now, tell me, how long have you known Mr. __________ ? "
I suspect the current arrangement with the Russians providing lift tickets to the ISS performs a similar function to the intelligence treaties we signed in the 90s allowing the U.S. and Russia to perform overflights of each others' countries to verify ICBM numbers and troop movements, plus the CIAs fanatical attention to assist the Russians in tracking and controlling any and all nuclear materials to keep it from wandering off in the hands of men like Viktor Bout, "Lord of War" arms dealer.
By subsidising the Russian space program with this sweetheart no-bid contract, we, the U.S., help ensure that dozens of very highly skilled engineers and scientists with the ability to lead a team interested in designing and building short, medium, or long-range rockets - for whatever purpose - are kept "on payroll" and reasonably content safely and securely inside Russia. Exactly where we want them. Instead of helping a potential aggressor nation like Iran, North Korea, or theocratic / military dictatorship Du Jour develop accurate, long range weapons for suitcases full of cash, women, mansions and national hero-worship.
The current deal also forces a certain level of cooperation between the space agencies, governments, and builds political good will on both sides. Good Will that Putin is destroying at the moment, but will return providing he doesn't go all Poland '39 on the remainder of Ukraine.
You are factually incorrect. Go watch Twitch.TV and favorite some of the worlds' top Hearthstone players, like TrumpSC, who
1, has ~ 20,000 live viewers at any given point in time 2, has an engineering degree but plays games on Twitch all day for a living 3, was a world top-ranked StarCraft tournament player..and most importantly - 4, often plays ranked games using only Free To Play cards that any player can unlock with only a couple hours of game play, and has a ~77% win ratio.
Hearthstone is one of the most balanced, NON "pay to win" Free To Play games in existence.
Disclaimer: I have an iPad Air, and the Zagg keyboard case for it.
So, if you look at my comment history from way back when the original iPad was released (which I also owned) I was wildly disappointed, as I felt it was just a 10" iPod Touch with limited usefulness.
My opinion remains largely unchanged.
Had Blizzard not released Hearthstone for the iPad - with me being a Hearthstone addict - I would have eBayed it by now. Yep. Stood in line Black Friday to buy it, and already bored of it / barely using it.
I told myself I would use it to read eBooks from my Kindle / Google Play Books / iBooks library. Nope. Even with its reduced weight, it's still too heavy and awkward to hold comfortably for hours. It's a much poorer experience than a Kindle Paperwhite.
I told myself I would use it to work on. I bought the $100 Zagg keyboard case for it. What a wretched experience. Poor quality keyboard meets the horrible user experience of stretching your arm for constant tap-tap cut/copy/paste editing. Do you use Excel at work? Let me introduce you to Numbers, a tool made for fourth graders. Getting files on or out of the device to work with is a nightmare due to Apple's ecosystem lock in. The closest glimpse of freedom comes from installing DropBox to move files out, open them on computer. Or vice-versa.
"But Wait! iOS 7 has 'AirDrop' " , you say. Sure it does, and it *STILL* won't allow you to copy files between iOS and OSX devices. Only iOS iOS, and then only certain file types. Because Apple knows you want to copy mp3s, video files, and other stuff between your phone and your Mac, and Apple wants to keep your ass locked firmly into iTunes.
So yeah, I have buyers remorse. I spent $500 on something I sometimes use to read Slashdot in the bathroom.
Do you remember those rumors a couple months ago that Apple was making a 12" iPad? They aren't. Those are probably the new panels being made for the new MacBook Air that will be announced this summer. But what would really intrigue me would be if the new MacBook Air was running iOS 8, with the new A8 processor, came with a full keyboard and trackpad ala existing form factor MacBook Airs, & came with full iWork suite free. Apple has been watching people for the past several years buying clunky third-party keyboard cases for their iPads in a desperate bid to turn them into light, portable cheap laptops. Why not just make one?
My Ex's sister - Yes, Sister, you can break out your "Flashdance" jokes now - was a master welder in Europe. She worked contract assignments all over Germany, Sweden - wherever steel was going up. She was doing very, very well for herself.
She went back to university and completed a long-abanded degree. When asked why she was quitting her welding career, she said simply that being on a job site at 6 in the morning when it's below freezing and you have to crouch over a piece of frozen steel for 11 hours, it's not much fun. It's like military interrogation "stress positioning" for a living. She also indicated that there was some recent (mid 2000s) research in Europe that the gasses released during the welding process were suspected as having a causal relationship with highly increased odds of developing Parkinsons disease.
She crushed university and got a lower paying but still comfortable professional job riding an office chair 8-5.
I have an old friend in Ohio who's brother in-law owns a successful machine shop. He told me over dinner a few months ago that some of his competitors will order large project pieces from China. It's literally cheaper to have men fabricate a large part - A 25' long, 3' diameter steel stack for example - truck the thing to a dock, ship it across the pacific ocean, truck it to Northeast Ohio, then have one or two of their guys fix nearly ALL the fucked up Chinese welds, THEN deliver the part to the customer - than it is to fabricate and weld the damn thing on site.
This WSJ article is full of smoke written by a journalist who's probably never pulled a splinter out of his hand, swung a hammer or broken a sweat without wearing fluorescent trainers on his feet.
As I see it, both parties are missing incredible opportunities.
Let's Judo-flip this conversation.
Broadcasters earn revenue from advertising. Aero is faithfully streaming content including all advertising to their customers. Clearly what is needed is a partnership for Aero to report viewer demographics back to broadcasters, who can pad onto their numbers when selling ads.
Aero is charging too little for their service. Their model is stupid. They are trying to counter cable carriers charging $50, 60, 100+/mo with a service that's $8 and $12. Aero should charge $29 and kick $15 per customer per month to the cable carrier(s) in the market in which each customer resides. Aero is then in the infrastructure business. The cable companies get build out absolutely free, without having to sink billions of dollars into last mile wiring of neighborhoods, and Aero gets massive revenue stream in a highly symbiotic relationship. For Aero customers, the cable company is is the content licensing and resale business - and the best part - they don't have to service & support those customers, Aero does.
Addtionally, if Aero has such a wonderful idea, there is nothing stopping Comcast from doing exactly the same thing. What is more expensive - the cost of bandwidth, or the cost of pulling copper, telephony or fiber to every house * N tens of millions of customers? Bandwidth is down for a few cents per gigabyte streamed now. How much does a nationwide fiber buildout cost?
This case is really about constipated thinking and reactionary fear in the face of changing climate.
Right, because aside from cross country skiing, downhill, snowboarding, snowmobiling, hunting, sledding, playing outside with your kids, snuggling up with the fireplace (which is still far from ecologically incorrect in the midwest) with some good movies, there is absolutely nothing to do in the midwest during the winter.
Yeah, here's the other thing. Detroit is like many cities in the U.S. - the horrible parts of town get 100% of the media attention. What doesn't is the fact that like every city in history, there is always a nice part of town, and nice suburbs ringing the city that are where all the upper middle and upper income folks live. They live in a world so far removed from the horrors of the failing part of down town it may as well be on another planet.
$800-1000/mo for a 2 bedroom apartment with full kitchen, living room, dining area and your own garage vs. San Francisco's $2000/mo to share a house with 3 or 4 other people. Then the cost of living factors in.
I don't even live in Detroit, let alone Michigan, but some of the claims being made in this thread are absurd. A good job is a good job, and there are very nice parts of Detroit far removed from the problem areas, and if you live in/below your means your money will go a hell of a lot further in the midwest than on the coasts. A lot of millionaires are being made among the Dave Ramsey crowd.
There is a reason Marissa Mayer is cozying up to Apple in a bid to replace Bing as the default search engine on iDevices. Instant, incredible spike in search engine traffic and advertising revenue.
Apple appears to be highly interested in dis-aligning itself from companies it views as peer or near-peer competitors, or reducing entanglement as much as possible. Google's privacy issues, Nexus devices and cozy relationship with Samsung (and other premium Android flagship makers) leaves a bad taste in Cupertino. And Bing is.. well.. Bing. But Yahoo! was early to the party, doesn't particularly carry negative baggage with it as far as consumers are concerned, and isn't competing against Apple in any market space, so why not.
Apple has placed itself in a delicate position. They have become like a premium fashion design house in Paris or Milan. They manufacture next to nothing- they design, then send patterns off to an army of contract manufacturers in Asia to get the Spring line, Summer line, Fall line, Winter line into stores. And then those manufacturing partners produce higher and higher quality knockoffs or competing designs inspired by the the originals, which they are paid to produce. It must gall Apple to be so reliant on Samsung to fab their A7 (and A8) processors, LG to make their iPhone 5/C/S displays, all while those companies position their own premium Android flagships to compete against Apple.
Apple will most likely switch to Yahoo! for default search results, and it will lift Yahoo's stock - and public image - dramatically.
Thanks John McAfee, for making my Monday slightly less boring with your stories. Truth or exaggerations, we'll never be certain, but entertaining none the less.
Harkening back to the days of half insane envelope pushing entrepreneurs like John DuPont & Howard Hughes. Time to start stockpiling Mason jars!
Silly readers, lawmakers expect deferential treatment. They think they're special. From the almost total inability of local police to pull them over or ticket for speeding or DUI to the number of actual hours/days worked in a year, the aides, assistants, staffers to fetch the coffees or arrange the plane tickets and the endless meetings with minions from Fortune 500, power elite groveling at their feet for legislation to protect their interests and so on.
You are sheep, they are the shepherds, and when they create rules, they think not of themselves, but of you.
So, data centers are going to realize a > 8x increase in speed. Awesome. Do you think Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and every regional carrier along the way are going to cheerfully provision more bandwidth to their customers? Or will their pencil pushers continue to view bandwidth as a scarce resource to be jealously guarded and sold for a kings' ransom?
We've had cable and DSL modems out in customers' basements for years now that are capable of > 10-20 megabit speed, yet according to a recent NetFlix study, the average U.S. household is actually getting something closer to 2. http://ispspeedindex.netflix.c...
Hurray to the boffins at Intel for devising a way for Pixar to allow their server farm to render Woody & Buzz's left butt cheeks 6x faster, university to run earthquake simulators at record speed and the NSA to read your grandmas sexts to Grandpa over at Shady Pines in real time, but someone please find a way to to put speed increases in the hands of consumers without affecting price.
I, and at least one friend I am aware of, have reported this when it was discovered over a year ago. The hospital is still being displayed in the wrong location.
Apple got my money when I bought the phone. I don't think they care. Their cloud services are as laughably award as Microsoft's mobile hardware.
Disclaimer: Lifelong Android user, fully moved to iOS with purchase of iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and use rMBP as main computer.
Apple Maps continues to give inaccurate directions with implications ranging from incredible inconvenience to downright life threatening danger.
A lifelong Google Maps user, I bought an iPhone 5S on launch day. I switched to Apple Maps largely due to the tighter integration and full screen mode. I wanted to give it a fair shake. Let me share a few brief observations.
A large regional hospital in my home town closed down several years ago, and moved into a new building nearly ten miles away in a different city. The original facility was purchased by the city, and converted into a high school. Apple Maps continues to list the old location - now a high school - as the location of THE HOSPITAL, despite it having moved YEARS AGO. That is the kind of error that could quite possibly KILL SOMEONE.
I continue to receive weird route selections and inaccurate directions that would add miles and several minutes to my drive. Incorrect or inefficient exits. Favoring 55 MPH state routes full of small towns & numerous stop lights over interstate 80 running fully parallel a mile away with 70 MPH speed limit and traffic moving smoothly. Head scratching, bizarre route choices without the deep options available in Google Maps to correct it.
I think this is the problem - Google's army of of > 6,000 contractors endlessly driving & mapping the roads of America vs. Apple's flyover algorithmic mapping. http://www.businessinsider.com...
I still use Apple Maps, but largely only to keep track of distance driven/remaining and ETA on routes I'm already familiar with. It is, overall in my estimation, about as accurate as Waze - which is to say both products are damn far sight worse than Google Maps.
No.. No, WindBourne I think you're confused. Here - let me clarify:
GM & Chrysler have fully repaid their TARP "bailout" money. http://spellchek.wordpress.com... Ford never took TARP money - they did line of credit prior to TARP's existence.
I also think you are confused about the point I was making with the Ford F-150 pickup truck. Let me make it clearer for you: I am not comparing the F150 to the Model S, or any other Tesla vehicle. What I was doing was demonstrating that Tesla is, and shall remain a small "boutique" automaker. Even if Tesla sells the 350,000 cars you claim they hope to in 2017, that number still come remotely close to the nearly 600,000 Ford F150 pickups that sold in 2013. That is just one vehicle, for one automaker. That does not include all the other cars & trucks Ford manufactures, nor does it include General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Range Rover, or others.
Tesla does not exist in a vacuum. Their only growth opportunity is to erode market share amongst wealthy buyers who were already in the market for a $70,000 + luxury vehicle, and would not have considered a cheaper car by a domestic, Japanese or Korean automaker. The problem is that there is a very small number of those buyers with six figure incomes to purchase them.
The average household income in the United States in 2013 was $51,017 with over 15% of Americans - 46.5 million people - living in poverty. http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/1...
I assure you the 90+ percent of American earning those salaries are not lining up to buy $70,000 ++ Tesla electric cars. They ARE however gobbling up Honda Civics by the metric fuckton.
The only question left will be mainstream acceptance??
No, the only question left will be economic. Cars costing > $ 70,000 are not for middle income families. Middle (and low) income families make up the vast majority of the U.S. population.
Tesla offers unique differentiators in their product that may or may not be superior to competitor technologies but command a premium price - not unlike many Apple products.
Loaded out Lenovo or HP laptop? low to mid $1000 range. Comparable specs on a 15" Retina MacBook Pro? Mid $2000's. Differentiators - OSX, higher resolution IPS display, gorgeous unibody aluminum construction, tighter ecosystem between computer & mobile device, unparalleled retail sales & support experience through apple stores, SSD faster than spinny hard drive, better battery life. I unashamedly own one. I occasionally ask myself why.
The $1300 Lenovo with 16gb ram, Nvidia 750 discreet video, quad core i7 cpu, and Windows 8.1 will do everything you need in a laptop and 5x more. You just aren't getting those rMBP differentiators. If they are worth an additional $1000, go for it.
A completely loaded Chevy Malibu gets you a four door sedan with turbocharged engine, full leather interior and tons of options for under $31,000. It will comfortably carry you back and forth to work for less than half the cost of the Tesla, it has more than twice the range, refilling it with energy takes five minutes, and while it is using petrochemical fuel, the Teslas - lets not kid ourselves here - are using electricity overwhelmingly generated by dirty coal fired electric plants.
No one is pretending the Lenovo Y510P laptop is a loaded rMBP, or the Chevy Malibu is the equivalent of a Tesla Model S. But the point is this - the high end Apple laptop & 27" desktop products, along with Tesla's vehicles, are - so long as they occupy their current pricing strata - going to be luxury items that a very narrow percentage of the U.S. market can afford. They will accordingly occupy a small percentage of market share.
Apple and Tesla are both destined to exist as luxury brands that will always be around, always appeal to a certain well-heeled discriminating consumer, but are fated to occupy very narrow market share. Like Rolex, Gucci, Coach hand bags, those red-soled Louboutin heels your wife / girlfriend / both have had their eyes on - they are priced outside the realm of sanity for all but enthusiasts, the foolhardy, or the very well heeled.
If Elon can scale manufacturing to produce a vehicle similar to the Nissan Leaf, improve range to 200+ miles between charges, ++ plus the quality and options a little, and get the price down into the $25-35k range while still making an acceptable profit, Tesla might have something to talk about. Until such time, Teslas sales are going to exist in a range that to companies like Ford, GM, and whatever Chrysler/Fiat is calling themselves this week - is a rounding error on just one of their models' annual sales.
Tesla sold 20some thousands Model S sedans last year? Ford sold, on average, over 50,000 F-150 pickups PER MONTH in 2013. ONE manufacturer. ONE MODEL.
I love Tesla, I admire Elon, but the numbers are just wrong for most of America.
History has proven repeatedly that the only thing that matters is shaping & controlling the message and swift and effective damage control./. is full of technophiles who are willing to examine the numbers and make buying decisions accordingly. Joe Lunchbucket seeing "another Tesla on fire on the 6 o'clock news" isn't. "THEM ELECTRIC CARS CATCH FIRE!" is the only message that sticks.
.. staying relevant, supporting his ex-stripper bride and not going totally broke.
Seriously though, I love this guy. Who needs "Bering Sea Gold Dredgers", "Duck Dynasty" or "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" when Johnny Mac is out there, popping up in my news feeds like the lovably insane, Hunter S. Thompson-ish "tech Uncle" for us to slowly laugh at before going back to work?
.. In order to get past the "yuck!" factor, what is most likely going to transpire is that food insects will be processed in a way that leaves consumers unaware that they are consuming insects. A ground, pleasantly colored, slightly nutty flavored paste to smear on crackers, for example.
I don't see grandma shoveling handfuls of giant Madagascar cockroaches in her mouth during Sunday night football - not anytime soon.
I purchased Lightning to USB cables on Dealyup.com last week during a sale for a whopping $2 each, and guess what - as of right now, even after the latest update, they work fine for both charging and syncing.
If Apple is on the warpath about anything, it's the actual wall charger. The woman that was electrocuted in China three weeks ago was killed by a shoddily made third party wall charger that exposed her to full outlet current - not 5 volt USB.
Slashdot Mirror
On one hand, you can look at this and wonder why anyone would want to undertake the incredible expense of a sub oceanic tunnel across the Bering Strait. What, with Anchorage already housing one of the world's busiest international airports, particularly for cargo aircraft.
However, completion of such a tunnel would have profound, long-reaching consequences, both negative and positive:
Chinese manufactured goods would presumably have shipping time cut in half. Even given the considerable distances, a 2km long freight train maintaining 110 km/h is a wee bit faster than a stacked & loaded Maersk container ship wallowing across the girth of the Pacific at a leisurely 20 km/h, and those trains can be run back to back separated only by a few km with basic logistics tools.
Rail and Trucking distribution arteries from Alaska down to the lower 48 would become among the busiest in the world.
American manufacturing jobs would be murdered. Already bled nearly to death, the ability to Skype an engineer in Guangdong, email schematics and have 14 boxcars of finished goods on your back dock in less than 2 weeks would be a deathblow to a lot of American jobs.
The economies of the U.S. and China would become increasingly tightly woven together, possibly creating a stabilizing effect diminishing the possibility of armed conflict - essentially the draft purpose of the European Union, after Germany went out on two world tours. The U.S. would be the loser in this scenario, as Chinas ascendancy would only continue on the world stage, while the U.S. ability to project and maintain power would suffer in the face of a diminished economy.
Americas incredible military would become unaffordable, and go through many rounds of contractions, until the U.S ends up a peer to countries like Russia or combined UK, FR and Germany - regionally powerful, globally insignificant.
So essentially this tunnel represents another step in a trade arrangement largely favoring only one partner, leading the other to contract, economy foundering, military eventually becoming unsustainable at current levels, heading into France-like levels of global insignificance excepting cultural impact.
Rome 2.0
Wait, wha.. OH! For a second I thought this was another zany article about John.
"Figuring Out the iPad's Place" ?
The bathroom. So you can browse while you download.
For years we've had snobbish hipster tech journalists gleefully informing us that we are now in the "Post-PC era", that our watt-hungry desktop dinosaurs are on the way out, that they are being replaced by a constellation of sexy, small gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Except it isn't happening.
Every one of those goddamned articles was written on a laptop or desktop computer. You, fair reader, do your job or schoolwork on a laptop or desktop PC. The many limitations of tablets makes the idea of performing any meaningful work on them downright laughable.
I have an iPad Air and Zagg keyboard case for it. Toys. Both of them, toys. Poor keyboard experience meets poor word processing experience (unless having Lou Ferrigno sized deltoids from constant arm extension is your thing) meets horrendously poor multitasking meets a giant bucket of buyers remorse.
If I didn't really enjoy playing Hearthstone on my iPad Air, I would have eBayed it weeks ago. I rarely use it for anything else.
With factory refurb'd Macbook Airs popping up on Apple's "Special Deals" page now at $599 (when in stock), the argument for buying a $500 iPad Toy to play Angry Birds on the toilet and watch "Sherlock" on that flight to Denver to visit your in-laws just.. doesn't make good sense anymore, when for $100 more you can get a real computer.
So my operating theory is - Not only are people holding on to the tablets they already own, softening sales of new models, but they have also already discovered they're horrible to type on, make overweight poor quality e-readers, have games that you tire of after 1 hour and you feel no urgent need to run out and drop $500 on a new one that will only continue to do all those things poorly, but is a tiny bit thinner.
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Carbon Monoxide. The cost is negligible and the effect inarguable. You feel drowsy, you fall asleep, and you die.
It's so sneaky and lethal, the CDC estimates it killed > 16,000 people in the U.S. in a five year time period alone.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
That's cute - you think rules apply to the government?
"National Security."
Just utter those two words, and brush everything aside. "In The Interest / Not In The Interest of __National Security___. "
I have a friend - who is quite possibly reading this, Hi, Beavis - who has Top Secret security clearance and a tidy officers' rank in the U.S. military. Many years ago, while undergoing the personal reference interview portion of his background check, I had a man from the Department of Defense come to my house. The guy arrived about 15 minutes late. He apologized, saying he had just come from an interview in Cleveland.
"That part of Cleveland is an hour away - did you really leave the appointment 40 minutes ago??" I asked, incredulously, working the mental math that he would must have driven 90-100+ MPH down Route 77 South - Posted 65 MPH at the time - to arrive when he did.
"Weren't you worried about the police?" I asked naively.
"Oh..." he said, with a soft smile - "they have no authority over me." I processed that slowly as he settled onto the sofa and began opening his briefcase. Seeing the confusion on my face, he winked and said
" ... National Security. Now, tell me, how long have you known Mr. __________ ? "
I suspect the current arrangement with the Russians providing lift tickets to the ISS performs a similar function to the intelligence treaties we signed in the 90s allowing the U.S. and Russia to perform overflights of each others' countries to verify ICBM numbers and troop movements, plus the CIAs fanatical attention to assist the Russians in tracking and controlling any and all nuclear materials to keep it from wandering off in the hands of men like Viktor Bout, "Lord of War" arms dealer.
By subsidising the Russian space program with this sweetheart no-bid contract, we, the U.S., help ensure that dozens of very highly skilled engineers and scientists with the ability to lead a team interested in designing and building short, medium, or long-range rockets - for whatever purpose - are kept "on payroll" and reasonably content safely and securely inside Russia. Exactly where we want them. Instead of helping a potential aggressor nation like Iran, North Korea, or theocratic / military dictatorship Du Jour develop accurate, long range weapons for suitcases full of cash, women, mansions and national hero-worship.
The current deal also forces a certain level of cooperation between the space agencies, governments, and builds political good will on both sides. Good Will that Putin is destroying at the moment, but will return providing he doesn't go all Poland '39 on the remainder of Ukraine.
Sir,
You are factually incorrect. Go watch Twitch.TV and favorite some of the worlds' top Hearthstone players, like TrumpSC, who
1, has ~ 20,000 live viewers at any given point in time ..and most importantly -
2, has an engineering degree but plays games on Twitch all day for a living
3, was a world top-ranked StarCraft tournament player
4, often plays ranked games using only Free To Play cards that any player can unlock with only a couple hours of game play, and has a ~77% win ratio.
Hearthstone is one of the most balanced, NON "pay to win" Free To Play games in existence.
Disclaimer: I have an iPad Air, and the Zagg keyboard case for it.
So, if you look at my comment history from way back when the original iPad was released (which I also owned) I was wildly disappointed, as I felt it was just a 10" iPod Touch with limited usefulness.
My opinion remains largely unchanged.
Had Blizzard not released Hearthstone for the iPad - with me being a Hearthstone addict - I would have eBayed it by now. Yep. Stood in line Black Friday to buy it, and already bored of it / barely using it.
I told myself I would use it to read eBooks from my Kindle / Google Play Books / iBooks library. Nope. Even with its reduced weight, it's still too heavy and awkward to hold comfortably for hours. It's a much poorer experience than a Kindle Paperwhite.
I told myself I would use it to work on. I bought the $100 Zagg keyboard case for it. What a wretched experience. Poor quality keyboard meets the horrible user experience of stretching your arm for constant tap-tap cut/copy/paste editing. Do you use Excel at work? Let me introduce you to Numbers, a tool made for fourth graders. Getting files on or out of the device to work with is a nightmare due to Apple's ecosystem lock in. The closest glimpse of freedom comes from installing DropBox to move files out, open them on computer. Or vice-versa.
"But Wait! iOS 7 has 'AirDrop' " , you say. Sure it does, and it *STILL* won't allow you to copy files between iOS and OSX devices. Only iOS iOS, and then only certain file types. Because Apple knows you want to copy mp3s, video files, and other stuff between your phone and your Mac, and Apple wants to keep your ass locked firmly into iTunes.
So yeah, I have buyers remorse. I spent $500 on something I sometimes use to read Slashdot in the bathroom.
Do you remember those rumors a couple months ago that Apple was making a 12" iPad? They aren't. Those are probably the new panels being made for the new MacBook Air that will be announced this summer. But what would really intrigue me would be if the new MacBook Air was running iOS 8, with the new A8 processor, came with a full keyboard and trackpad ala existing form factor MacBook Airs, & came with full iWork suite free. Apple has been watching people for the past several years buying clunky third-party keyboard cases for their iPads in a desperate bid to turn them into light, portable cheap laptops. Why not just make one?
My Ex's sister - Yes, Sister, you can break out your "Flashdance" jokes now - was a master welder in Europe. She worked contract assignments all over Germany, Sweden - wherever steel was going up. She was doing very, very well for herself.
She went back to university and completed a long-abanded degree. When asked why she was quitting her welding career, she said simply that being on a job site at 6 in the morning when it's below freezing and you have to crouch over a piece of frozen steel for 11 hours, it's not much fun. It's like military interrogation "stress positioning" for a living. She also indicated that there was some recent (mid 2000s) research in Europe that the gasses released during the welding process were suspected as having a causal relationship with highly increased odds of developing Parkinsons disease.
She crushed university and got a lower paying but still comfortable professional job riding an office chair 8-5.
I have an old friend in Ohio who's brother in-law owns a successful machine shop. He told me over dinner a few months ago that some of his competitors will order large project pieces from China. It's literally cheaper to have men fabricate a large part - A 25' long, 3' diameter steel stack for example - truck the thing to a dock, ship it across the pacific ocean, truck it to Northeast Ohio, then have one or two of their guys fix nearly ALL the fucked up Chinese welds, THEN deliver the part to the customer - than it is to fabricate and weld the damn thing on site.
This WSJ article is full of smoke written by a journalist who's probably never pulled a splinter out of his hand, swung a hammer or broken a sweat without wearing fluorescent trainers on his feet.
As I see it, both parties are missing incredible opportunities.
Let's Judo-flip this conversation.
Broadcasters earn revenue from advertising. Aero is faithfully streaming content including all advertising to their customers. Clearly what is needed is a partnership for Aero to report viewer demographics back to broadcasters, who can pad onto their numbers when selling ads.
Aero is charging too little for their service. Their model is stupid. They are trying to counter cable carriers charging $50, 60, 100+/mo with a service that's $8 and $12. Aero should charge $29 and kick $15 per customer per month to the cable carrier(s) in the market in which each customer resides. Aero is then in the infrastructure business. The cable companies get build out absolutely free, without having to sink billions of dollars into last mile wiring of neighborhoods, and Aero gets massive revenue stream in a highly symbiotic relationship. For Aero customers, the cable company is is the content licensing and resale business - and the best part - they don't have to service & support those customers, Aero does.
Addtionally, if Aero has such a wonderful idea, there is nothing stopping Comcast from doing exactly the same thing. What is more expensive - the cost of bandwidth, or the cost of pulling copper, telephony or fiber to every house * N tens of millions of customers? Bandwidth is down for a few cents per gigabyte streamed now. How much does a nationwide fiber buildout cost?
This case is really about constipated thinking and reactionary fear in the face of changing climate.
Right, because aside from cross country skiing, downhill, snowboarding, snowmobiling, hunting, sledding, playing outside with your kids, snuggling up with the fireplace (which is still far from ecologically incorrect in the midwest) with some good movies, there is absolutely nothing to do in the midwest during the winter.
Yeah, here's the other thing. Detroit is like many cities in the U.S. - the horrible parts of town get 100% of the media attention. What doesn't is the fact that like every city in history, there is always a nice part of town, and nice suburbs ringing the city that are where all the upper middle and upper income folks live. They live in a world so far removed from the horrors of the failing part of down town it may as well be on another planet.
$800-1000 /mo for a 2 bedroom apartment with full kitchen, living room, dining area and your own garage vs. San Francisco's $2000/mo to share a house with 3 or 4 other people. Then the cost of living factors in.
I don't even live in Detroit, let alone Michigan, but some of the claims being made in this thread are absurd. A good job is a good job, and there are very nice parts of Detroit far removed from the problem areas, and if you live in/below your means your money will go a hell of a lot further in the midwest than on the coasts. A lot of millionaires are being made among the Dave Ramsey crowd.
There is a reason Marissa Mayer is cozying up to Apple in a bid to replace Bing as the default search engine on iDevices. Instant, incredible spike in search engine traffic and advertising revenue.
Apple appears to be highly interested in dis-aligning itself from companies it views as peer or near-peer competitors, or reducing entanglement as much as possible. Google's privacy issues, Nexus devices and cozy relationship with Samsung (and other premium Android flagship makers) leaves a bad taste in Cupertino. And Bing is .. well.. Bing. But Yahoo! was early to the party, doesn't particularly carry negative baggage with it as far as consumers are concerned, and isn't competing against Apple in any market space, so why not.
Apple has placed itself in a delicate position. They have become like a premium fashion design house in Paris or Milan. They manufacture next to nothing- they design, then send patterns off to an army of contract manufacturers in Asia to get the Spring line, Summer line, Fall line, Winter line into stores. And then those manufacturing partners produce higher and higher quality knockoffs or competing designs inspired by the the originals, which they are paid to produce. It must gall Apple to be so reliant on Samsung to fab their A7 (and A8) processors, LG to make their iPhone 5/C/S displays, all while those companies position their own premium Android flagships to compete against Apple.
Apple will most likely switch to Yahoo! for default search results, and it will lift Yahoo's stock - and public image - dramatically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think that explains it.
Thanks John McAfee, for making my Monday slightly less boring with your stories. Truth or exaggerations, we'll never be certain, but entertaining none the less.
Harkening back to the days of half insane envelope pushing entrepreneurs like John DuPont & Howard Hughes. Time to start stockpiling Mason jars!
Silly readers, lawmakers expect deferential treatment. They think they're special. From the almost total inability of local police to pull them over or ticket for speeding or DUI to the number of actual hours/days worked in a year, the aides, assistants, staffers to fetch the coffees or arrange the plane tickets and the endless meetings with minions from Fortune 500, power elite groveling at their feet for legislation to protect their interests and so on.
You are sheep, they are the shepherds, and when they create rules, they think not of themselves, but of you.
So, data centers are going to realize a > 8x increase in speed. Awesome. Do you think Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and every regional carrier along the way are going to cheerfully provision more bandwidth to their customers? Or will their pencil pushers continue to view bandwidth as a scarce resource to be jealously guarded and sold for a kings' ransom?
We've had cable and DSL modems out in customers' basements for years now that are capable of > 10-20 megabit speed, yet according to a recent NetFlix study, the average U.S. household is actually getting something closer to 2.
http://ispspeedindex.netflix.c...
Hurray to the boffins at Intel for devising a way for Pixar to allow their server farm to render Woody & Buzz's left butt cheeks 6x faster, university to run earthquake simulators at record speed and the NSA to read your grandmas sexts to Grandpa over at Shady Pines in real time, but someone please find a way to to put speed increases in the hands of consumers without affecting price.
I, and at least one friend I am aware of, have reported this when it was discovered over a year ago. The hospital is still being displayed in the wrong location.
Apple got my money when I bought the phone. I don't think they care. Their cloud services are as laughably award as Microsoft's mobile hardware.
Disclaimer: Lifelong Android user, fully moved to iOS with purchase of iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and use rMBP as main computer.
Apple Maps continues to give inaccurate directions with implications ranging from incredible inconvenience to downright life threatening danger.
A lifelong Google Maps user, I bought an iPhone 5S on launch day. I switched to Apple Maps largely due to the tighter integration and full screen mode. I wanted to give it a fair shake. Let me share a few brief observations.
A large regional hospital in my home town closed down several years ago, and moved into a new building nearly ten miles away in a different city. The original facility was purchased by the city, and converted into a high school. Apple Maps continues to list the old location - now a high school - as the location of THE HOSPITAL, despite it having moved YEARS AGO. That is the kind of error that could quite possibly KILL SOMEONE.
I continue to receive weird route selections and inaccurate directions that would add miles and several minutes to my drive. Incorrect or inefficient exits. Favoring 55 MPH state routes full of small towns & numerous stop lights over interstate 80 running fully parallel a mile away with 70 MPH speed limit and traffic moving smoothly. Head scratching, bizarre route choices without the deep options available in Google Maps to correct it.
I think this is the problem - Google's army of of > 6,000 contractors endlessly driving & mapping the roads of America vs. Apple's flyover algorithmic mapping.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
I still use Apple Maps, but largely only to keep track of distance driven/remaining and ETA on routes I'm already familiar with. It is, overall in my estimation, about as accurate as Waze - which is to say both products are damn far sight worse than Google Maps.
No.. No, WindBourne I think you're confused. Here - let me clarify:
GM & Chrysler have fully repaid their TARP "bailout" money.
http://spellchek.wordpress.com...
Ford never took TARP money - they did line of credit prior to TARP's existence.
I also think you are confused about the point I was making with the Ford F-150 pickup truck. Let me make it clearer for you:
I am not comparing the F150 to the Model S, or any other Tesla vehicle. What I was doing was demonstrating that Tesla is, and shall remain a small "boutique" automaker. Even if Tesla sells the 350,000 cars you claim they hope to in 2017, that number still come remotely close to the nearly 600,000 Ford F150 pickups that sold in 2013. That is just one vehicle, for one automaker. That does not include all the other cars & trucks Ford manufactures, nor does it include General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Range Rover, or others.
Tesla does not exist in a vacuum. Their only growth opportunity is to erode market share amongst wealthy buyers who were already in the market for a $70,000 + luxury vehicle, and would not have considered a cheaper car by a domestic, Japanese or Korean automaker. The problem is that there is a very small number of those buyers with six figure incomes to purchase them.
The average household income in the United States in 2013 was $51,017 with over 15% of Americans - 46.5 million people - living in poverty.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/1...
I assure you the 90+ percent of American earning those salaries are not lining up to buy $70,000 ++ Tesla electric cars. They ARE however gobbling up Honda Civics by the metric fuckton.
I hope this made my point clearer.
The only question left will be mainstream acceptance??
No, the only question left will be economic. Cars costing > $ 70,000 are not for middle income families. Middle (and low) income families make up the vast majority of the U.S. population.
Tesla offers unique differentiators in their product that may or may not be superior to competitor technologies but command a premium price - not unlike many Apple products.
Loaded out Lenovo or HP laptop? low to mid $1000 range. Comparable specs on a 15" Retina MacBook Pro? Mid $2000's. Differentiators - OSX, higher resolution IPS display, gorgeous unibody aluminum construction, tighter ecosystem between computer & mobile device, unparalleled retail sales & support experience through apple stores, SSD faster than spinny hard drive, better battery life. I unashamedly own one. I occasionally ask myself why.
The $1300 Lenovo with 16gb ram, Nvidia 750 discreet video, quad core i7 cpu, and Windows 8.1 will do everything you need in a laptop and 5x more. You just aren't getting those rMBP differentiators. If they are worth an additional $1000, go for it.
A completely loaded Chevy Malibu gets you a four door sedan with turbocharged engine, full leather interior and tons of options for under $31,000. It will comfortably carry you back and forth to work for less than half the cost of the Tesla, it has more than twice the range, refilling it with energy takes five minutes, and while it is using petrochemical fuel, the Teslas - lets not kid ourselves here - are using electricity overwhelmingly generated by dirty coal fired electric plants.
No one is pretending the Lenovo Y510P laptop is a loaded rMBP, or the Chevy Malibu is the equivalent of a Tesla Model S. But the point is this - the high end Apple laptop & 27" desktop products, along with Tesla's vehicles, are - so long as they occupy their current pricing strata - going to be luxury items that a very narrow percentage of the U.S. market can afford. They will accordingly occupy a small percentage of market share.
Apple and Tesla are both destined to exist as luxury brands that will always be around, always appeal to a certain well-heeled discriminating consumer, but are fated to occupy very narrow market share. Like Rolex, Gucci, Coach hand bags, those red-soled Louboutin heels your wife / girlfriend / both have had their eyes on - they are priced outside the realm of sanity for all but enthusiasts, the foolhardy, or the very well heeled.
If Elon can scale manufacturing to produce a vehicle similar to the Nissan Leaf, improve range to 200+ miles between charges, ++ plus the quality and options a little, and get the price down into the $25-35k range while still making an acceptable profit, Tesla might have something to talk about. Until such time, Teslas sales are going to exist in a range that to companies like Ford, GM, and whatever Chrysler/Fiat is calling themselves this week - is a rounding error on just one of their models' annual sales.
Tesla sold 20some thousands Model S sedans last year? Ford sold, on average, over 50,000 F-150 pickups PER MONTH in 2013. ONE manufacturer. ONE MODEL.
I love Tesla, I admire Elon, but the numbers are just wrong for most of America.
History has proven repeatedly that the only thing that matters is shaping & controlling the message and swift and effective damage control. /. is full of technophiles who are willing to examine the numbers and make buying decisions accordingly. Joe Lunchbucket seeing "another Tesla on fire on the 6 o'clock news" isn't. "THEM ELECTRIC CARS CATCH FIRE!" is the only message that sticks.
.. staying relevant, supporting his ex-stripper bride and not going totally broke.
Seriously though, I love this guy. Who needs "Bering Sea Gold Dredgers", "Duck Dynasty" or "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" when Johnny Mac is out there, popping up in my news feeds like the lovably insane, Hunter S. Thompson-ish "tech Uncle" for us to slowly laugh at before going back to work?
I don't see grandma shoveling handfuls of giant Madagascar cockroaches in her mouth during Sunday night football - not anytime soon.
.. so I can score 4% commission on the $19,999 fully loaded model the Versa Note banner on my blog links to. ; ]
I purchased Lightning to USB cables on Dealyup.com last week during a sale for a whopping $2 each, and guess what - as of right now, even after the latest update, they work fine for both charging and syncing.
If Apple is on the warpath about anything, it's the actual wall charger. The woman that was electrocuted in China three weeks ago was killed by a shoddily made third party wall charger that exposed her to full outlet current - not 5 volt USB.