I wonder how they get away with stealing items from luggage at all.
Your typical baggage handler has too much work to do to spend a lot of time rifling luggage, and presumably opening passenger bags would raise questions with the other baggage employees.
I would guess the worst offenders were probably post-9/11 TSA baggage inspectors who were poorly supervised and had a reason (and some time) to open luggage at random. Small items that could be pocketed quickly and invisibly would be prime targets.
Locking those bags so they can't easily get into them is probably a decent deterrent -- even they have a schedule to keep up with, and an obviously jimmied and mangled bag is going to reduce down to a small number of possible culprits.
At this point, I would expect it to be pretty hard -- video surveillance is ubiquitous, employment screening even in heavily old-school unionized airports is probably a lot better than it used to be, so you filter out the obvious criminal element up front.
Yeah, the circle is mandatory for getting any precision in most Windows (or any mouse-driven UI).
It's not that the Jump app was badly written or non-functional -- it's fairly genius how they adapted IOS touch to be useful for RDP sessions (hell, MS should have bought them just for the circle, and Win8 touch may not have been such a flop).
It's that touch is only so useful with a non-touch, mouse-centric UI. Constantly having to reach up and touch the screen for GUI interaction is so clumsy by itself, plus the amount of dragging and zooming to get smaller UI elements is tedious, and mouse tasks like dragging and so forth are clumsy with touch.
I've used Jump on iPhone and iPad to connect to Windows PCs.
It was kind of a toy with the iPhone, occasionally useful to restart a service or something trivial, but the screen size mismatches alone made it crazy to try to actually do anything that wasn't simple.
I was super enthusiastic about doing RDP with an iPad and a BT keyboard, but in the end it turned out to be super annoying. Touch is just not compatible with a typical mouse-driven interface.
I was really kind of surprised (and disappointed) they were going to continue to refuse to allow a mouse profile to be paired to the iPad. The iPad Pro with an LTE connection would be a pretty nice tablet-that-does-RDP if you could use a mouse, and if you could there's lots of travel/meeting/mobility situations where it would be the perfect substitute for a larger laptop and let you accomplish some real work remotely.
I can see where they might allow the device yet still retain whatever "vision" that prevents them from allowing it to be used. They could allow pairing but not equate mouse and touch events for the UI, and have the mouse only be useful in apps written to handle mouse events -- the home screen, apple apps, etc, could still be touch only while third party apps that wanted to use the mouse could, like RDP apps, maybe some editors, spreadsheets, etc.
I kind of get why they have never allowed pairing of mice -- it forces all developers to work within the touch paradigm and prevents the touch-orient UI from being subverted by people using mice. But at the same time, touch doesn't really ever "scale up" to a mouse in terms of precision or ease of use. Text selection is clumsy with touch and touch kind of works against high DPI displays because it lacks the precision of a mouse, forcing UI elements to not shrink below a certain size.
Is there a mechanical engineer who designs gasoline engines who would actually agree with that statement? I'm surprised there's never been litigation on the topic and/or some kind of EPA regulation that says "no, it's not normal"?
And what exactly is the fix, total engine replacement?
And you overcapacity is only available for short periods of time, you can ramp up a fuel production facility for just a few hours a day, not operate it on cloudy days, etc. Its just going to sit there unused over 80% of the time.
Yeah, but when you take into account the amount of solar available that remaining 20% becomes useful. The US produced 8.3 billion kwh of solar power in 2013. Using wikipedia worst-case efficiencies for electricity to methane says that's an annual production of nearly 29 million therms of gas.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be gas you use spare capacity for. What about making potable water from seawater or some other source?
Here's what I don't understand -- what is "massive overcapacity" in renewables? Due to the variable generation they seem to trend towards a built-in overcapacity if there's any sane planning for average output.
Further, who or what is doing the overall systemic capacity planning for the entire grid? Nobody, really. Power utilities can capacity plan for their customer base and infrastructure, but they have no control over third party installations (at least for direct consumption).
Nobody but academic modelers and maybe utilities are looking solar buildout capacities from a CO2 offset perspective, and with utilities the math is even more complex because they have to look at baseload and peak load, too, for which CO2 offset number may make more sense with natural gas over coal.
If I put 15kw of solar on my property to offset my 15kw use, it's technically overcapacity from day 1 from an overall grid capacity because the grid already had capacity to meet my consumption. It's not overcapacity for me because only at magic moments is it actually outputting 15kw and even then I'm at net zero or optimal capacity.
Power companies are already fighting back against large "solar gardens" here in Minnesota. Pick your explanation, but they more or less all boil down to "systemic cost" -- the cost to maintain fixed generation facilities, adapt the grid to new multi megawatt power sources, etc.
I wonder if the "enterprise" drives aren't just tuned for performance advantages when used in specific controller or SAN configurations. MTBF may be improved not because of specific advantages in actual mechanical reliability but in fault reporting schemes that allow the controller to better evaluate whether the drive has truly failed and to adapt to smaller scale faults versus failing the entire drive.
"Consumer" drives may have firmware which flags some errors more easily because common use cases can't adapt to some kinds of faults intelligently, so the only sane thing is to just fail the drive outright.
It would certainly be in third-party Enterprise vendor interests to be able to keep using failed drives. I had a customer who was losing SAN drives about every four months for about a year. The SAN vendor issued a drive firmware update and since then only one drive has failed in 2-3 years.
The whole MTBF/TCO question makes me wonder why we aren't seeing big flash arrays using modern consumer SSDs. The write endurance tests that appeared on Slashdot showed even older generations surviving extremely high numbers of writes and drives like the Samsung Pro series I believe have 10 year warranties.
If I was a Samsung I'd be paying someone to put together arrays using my consumer drives to see how viable they were in enterprise SAN configurations.
I think most sane electrolysis projects target methane as the ultimate product because it can be injected into the natural gas distribution network and is much easier to handle than bulk hydrogen.
Just stick with electricity. It's what you start with, it's what you want to end with... it's stupid to convert forms. (Okay, technically, storing in a battery is conversion to chemical energy, but it's extremely efficient in doing so - at least with modern forms like li-ion).
The thing is, if you're using solar and have no grid use for the generated power at the time of generation, does it really matter how efficient your conversion is? You're using energy that would otherwise go unused. It's free input energy and the output (if you target methane) is a form of storable and transportable energy for which we already have a storage and transportation infrastructure.
I think for a while at least they were using their money to more or less invest in suppliers, building the factory the supplier needed to crank out some new kind of part in exchange for getting all of the output from the factory for a year or something, basically allowing them to monopolize the supply of some new feature.
The funny thing is, management of that much cash becomes a headache and I think banks were starting to charge negative interest rates in some cases.
I like to look at this as something of an economics issue, with sex being an economic good (or service).
Women oppose sex bots (and prostitution) because women function as something of a cartel that wants to establish a minimum price for sex. Historically, the price has been marriage but over the last 40 years or so the cartel has been willing to lower the price as the economic value of men has dropped -- women have vastly more economic opportunities and no longer see socially and legally enforced relationships with men as economically rewarding or necessary as they used to be.
They haven't completely reduced the price to free, though, as for the most part the cartel still generally demands a price that men engage in forms of courtship and relationship engagement in exchange for sex.
Women oppose prostitution and sex bots because they effectively break the cartel's monopoly. A sex bot (at least a reasonably realistic one) lowers the price below the cartel's general minimum price. They also have the economic efficiency of reducing the transaction costs below the cartel's and even below illegal prostitution and with fewer externalities, too. The cartel's price has an inherently high transaction cost and a lot of inefficiencies, although to some extent the cartel has been able to leverage technology to reduce transaction costs and efficiencies somewhat.
I'm not sure about that. The Cayenne is kind of a big SUV and for a lot of people the SUV is their "long drive" car, not just a metro runabout.
Plus, it is a Porsche and has a performance cachet to it that the Model X won't have outside of the torque of an electric motor.
The SUVs that will be in its crosshairs, though, will be stuff like BMW X1/X3, and maybe the Mercedes ML350, which seem to be more focused on daily drivers. Maybe Acura MDX/RDX as well.
I doubt the Tesla is eating into sales of the Cayenne, it's a SUV. The Panamera, maybe, but it's a much better handling car and has more top end and all wheel drive -- plus, much more expensive than Tesla. 911 is iconic -- nobody is buying a Tesla who wants a 911. They're not even in the same ballpark.
The people who are probably worrying about the Tesla are Mercedes and BMW. The S550 is still a big deal, but it's not hard to see buyers switching from that to Tesla, same with the BMW 7 series, too. I think the Tesla's too expensive for wannabes who lease E350s or 530s, but perhaps some of those people have switched.
Most homeopathic "medicines" are unpatented herbal potions of inexpensive origin and most homeopathic hands-on therapies involve nothing much more expensive than marginally trained hands using extremely low-tech facilities and tools.
It's not hard to see politicians endorsing their use, both as a purely political way of not offending people who believe in them and as a diversion from more expensive, real medical care.
And maybe there's some practical value to it, too. If some portion of the population is prone to overconsumption of medical care -- seeking doctor visits, tests and medicines for ephemeral conditions for which there are no clear cures or definitive treatments -- then maybe cheap and relatively harmless homeopathic treatments aren't bad policy. They keep people who aren't really sick from using expensive medical care.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the actual value in homeopathic "medicine" wasn't biochemical or even specifically placebo, but psychological -- having someone listen to their ill-defined concerns in a sympathetic manner and tell them they have a therapy which will address them.
All this head-scratching about what users "need" bothers me. It's focusing on the minimum. Which seems to imply that broadband providers can focus on some minimal level of service and then stop investing in infrastructure or really get away with throttling and caps under the guise of limiting you to "what you need".
IMHO, providers should be focusing on some (ultimately arbitrary, yes) number that better represents the growth curve of usage and speeds. Infrastructure investment in networks should be continual until actual consumption trends show a flat line and throttling and capping looks like a wasted investment because it doesn't return any value because the network has the headspace to accommodate what everyone wants to do.
Some may come pretty close. I drive a 2007 Volvo S80 with adaptive cruise control -- a radar panel keeps track of what's in front of you, and slows down to keep distance with the car in front and speeds up to the cruise set point if the car up front speeds up.
My model is good to 20 mph, and about 15 mph it will cut out. It will slow way down but not quite come to a complete stop (I've tested this exiting a freeway ramp)
The last time I was at the dealership reading the BS about newer models, it sounds like they've updated the adaptive cruise because the marketing literature says that it works in stop and go traffic, which would seem to imply you could turn it on and only really steer in rush hour.
I use mine pretty much everywhere I don't expect to stop too often. One of the downsides in congested driving is that adaptive cruise does the math on safe driving distances (it's adjustable, but being a Volvo I expect even the closest distance is considered safe) which leaves the ideal gap for asshat drivers to cut you off.
It's always struck me that autonomous vehicles will always be incremental. For one, it lets the engineers develop the systems for semi-autonomous driving a little at a time and refine them over time to increase their capabilities. Plus, it gives everyone a chance to become accustomed to autonomous driving technology incrementally. Each additional step in autonomous driving won't seem as radical as a leap to total autonomy, which might stave off paranoia, regulations and other BS. You boil a frog by turning the heat up a little bit at a time, so to speak.
So you move to a shitty neighborhood. You drop $5k on miscellaneous security stuff -- locks, alarms, door upgrades, etc. You still get nicked to the tune of $1k per year in out of pocket costs plus extras like door or window repair. And the continual aggravation and paranoia. Plus you drive out of your neighborhood for everything, since shitty neighborhoods have shitty stores and restaurants.
So you commute instead. The extra driving is a continual hassle and costs extra money for fuel and wear and tear. But this is balanced by no paranoia or break in hassles. You spend the security money on a better car or a more efficient car. You drive less overall since the stuff you want is close by.
Building a fortress in enemy territory is kind of appealing in a post-apocalyptic way but only if you're there all the time.
Who would israel use nukes against? Only a fool would nuke your neighbors, even if they hate you.
The unofficial story I've always heard is that Israel has a standing threat to nuke all Arab capitals, Tehran, Mecca and probably a few other major regional cities in the event of a chemical attack, nuclear attack and/or as a result of being overrun by conventional troops.
They beat back the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War, but there were moments where it was touch and go, and the Soviets were none to happy with the sinking of one of their merchant ships and were mobilizing to intervene if the Israelis didn't back off and observe the cease fire.
The threat as I've had it explained to me is that the nuclear reprisal was planned to be all-out -- everybody gets hit, there's no fact checking or consideration as to who was responsible. Everybody takes one.
Hard to know if it's true or not. It seems a bit apocryphal, but some of the older guys have unfortunate tattoos from the 1940s and maybe figured that even if it didn't end well, they know what worse endings look like from personal experience.
It might explain why the Iranians are so eager to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, because there's no end game where use or a serious threat of nuclear weapon against the United States doesn't result in Persia joining the scrap heap of lost civilizations. The Iranians just might figure they can win a nuclear exchange with the Israelis on the basis of population and geography, at least in the long term.
It might also explain why after nearly winning in '73 the Arabs never made a serious run at the Israelis again.
Trust was a terrible word choice in the headline -- as if there was some kind of community standard for a good game consoles, and making a bad one was a violation of that standard. Trust is also a two-way street, meaning you have to buy one up front before it's known whether it's good, participating in the trust relationship instead of participating in a fact-based decision.
I think the reality will be that the Apple TV will mostly be what it is now, a media consumption device. Apple is making some effort to extend their app ecosystem to AppleTV and extend its usefulness. Creative developers and games that merge the usefulness of the controller and the platform may actually create some successful games.
But it's not meant to principally be a game console, so expecting to to be competitive with PS and Xbox is ridiculous.
I work for a SMB consultancy and we had this debate concerning mileage reimbursement. None of the engineers had an office presence at our small office -- we worked from home or at client locations. I started when the company was quite small and the owners were willing to pay for ALL mileage (except from home to office and back trips), partly because many customers were required to pay a trip charge of $25 so the owner was already making a profit on trips under about 50 miles.
At some point as they became more sophisticated and were worried they were running into a tax liability for mileage reimbursements not covered by IRS rules. They wanted to cut any reimbursements involving trips to/from home and client locations.
Since we didn't have any choice involving customers and a significant minority were distant (ie, round trips of 70 miles), I made a stink about it. I argued that tax liability wasn't the issue -- whether or not they were able to deduct our mileage reimbursement as a tax deduction wasn't my concern.
The business model was on site IT support. Asking me to bear 100% of the cost of supporting their business model isn't remotely equitable -- they need to provide compensation for the use my capital (car) in their business model. The alternative is they provide me with a car to fulfill their business model, which I guarantee will be more expensive than a mileage reimbursement. Plus, they are getting trip charges from the customer, so it's not like they're not already exceeding their cost to me in travel compensation.
Surprisingly, they bought this argument, at least for me as a long-serving worker who had basically received this compensation for several years.
Stolen laptops, jewelry and other luggage content miscellanea ranges from forgetful fliers who lost their belongings elsewhere, insurance fraud by a flier or petty larceny by airport employees. These items pocket easy and walk out easy. You don't even know it's gone until you unpack your stuff, hours later. Call your insurance company, read our baggage disclaimer. Shit happens.
Stealing an entire locked piece of luggage is harder. A bag containing a firearms that doesn't make it to its destination will be flagged the second the baggage carousel stops turning. An immediate report will be made.
Stealing firearms in interstate commerce is a serious Federal felony. It's already proven and noted that the flier checked a firearm, so flier fraud isn't even a question. The chain of custody is established. He had it, the airline took it into their possession.
Anybody involved in the luggage chain at both airports is going to be scrutinized. Airport police, TSA and maybe even BATFE will perk up. Hard questions will be asked. Employees walking out with entire pieces of luggage will be remembered. Surveillance video will be reviewed. Searching will take place.
And the airlines won't like, it, either. People who travel legally with guns tend to be stand-up citizens with money to spend who know their rights, maybe with lawyers on speed dial. Cages will be rattled, PR will be in play. "We don't care if your earrings got stolen" plays bad already, "We let your gun get stolen" plays worse.
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I wonder how they get away with stealing items from luggage at all.
Your typical baggage handler has too much work to do to spend a lot of time rifling luggage, and presumably opening passenger bags would raise questions with the other baggage employees.
I would guess the worst offenders were probably post-9/11 TSA baggage inspectors who were poorly supervised and had a reason (and some time) to open luggage at random. Small items that could be pocketed quickly and invisibly would be prime targets.
Locking those bags so they can't easily get into them is probably a decent deterrent -- even they have a schedule to keep up with, and an obviously jimmied and mangled bag is going to reduce down to a small number of possible culprits.
At this point, I would expect it to be pretty hard -- video surveillance is ubiquitous, employment screening even in heavily old-school unionized airports is probably a lot better than it used to be, so you filter out the obvious criminal element up front.
Yeah, the circle is mandatory for getting any precision in most Windows (or any mouse-driven UI).
It's not that the Jump app was badly written or non-functional -- it's fairly genius how they adapted IOS touch to be useful for RDP sessions (hell, MS should have bought them just for the circle, and Win8 touch may not have been such a flop).
It's that touch is only so useful with a non-touch, mouse-centric UI. Constantly having to reach up and touch the screen for GUI interaction is so clumsy by itself, plus the amount of dragging and zooming to get smaller UI elements is tedious, and mouse tasks like dragging and so forth are clumsy with touch.
I've used Jump on iPhone and iPad to connect to Windows PCs.
It was kind of a toy with the iPhone, occasionally useful to restart a service or something trivial, but the screen size mismatches alone made it crazy to try to actually do anything that wasn't simple.
I was super enthusiastic about doing RDP with an iPad and a BT keyboard, but in the end it turned out to be super annoying. Touch is just not compatible with a typical mouse-driven interface.
I was really kind of surprised (and disappointed) they were going to continue to refuse to allow a mouse profile to be paired to the iPad. The iPad Pro with an LTE connection would be a pretty nice tablet-that-does-RDP if you could use a mouse, and if you could there's lots of travel/meeting/mobility situations where it would be the perfect substitute for a larger laptop and let you accomplish some real work remotely.
I can see where they might allow the device yet still retain whatever "vision" that prevents them from allowing it to be used. They could allow pairing but not equate mouse and touch events for the UI, and have the mouse only be useful in apps written to handle mouse events -- the home screen, apple apps, etc, could still be touch only while third party apps that wanted to use the mouse could, like RDP apps, maybe some editors, spreadsheets, etc.
I kind of get why they have never allowed pairing of mice -- it forces all developers to work within the touch paradigm and prevents the touch-orient UI from being subverted by people using mice. But at the same time, touch doesn't really ever "scale up" to a mouse in terms of precision or ease of use. Text selection is clumsy with touch and touch kind of works against high DPI displays because it lacks the precision of a mouse, forcing UI elements to not shrink below a certain size.
Wow, that sucks.
Is there a mechanical engineer who designs gasoline engines who would actually agree with that statement? I'm surprised there's never been litigation on the topic and/or some kind of EPA regulation that says "no, it's not normal"?
And what exactly is the fix, total engine replacement?
The last person I knew who bought a VW was told by the dealership that it was normal for a modern gasoline engine to burn a quart of oil every month.
I knew that shitcanning anyone who didn't drink the kool-aid was the right thing to do. No fucking malcontents on my watch.
And you overcapacity is only available for short periods of time, you can ramp up a fuel production facility for just a few hours a day, not operate it on cloudy days, etc. Its just going to sit there unused over 80% of the time.
Yeah, but when you take into account the amount of solar available that remaining 20% becomes useful. The US produced 8.3 billion kwh of solar power in 2013. Using wikipedia worst-case efficiencies for electricity to methane says that's an annual production of nearly 29 million therms of gas.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be gas you use spare capacity for. What about making potable water from seawater or some other source?
Here's what I don't understand -- what is "massive overcapacity" in renewables? Due to the variable generation they seem to trend towards a built-in overcapacity if there's any sane planning for average output.
Further, who or what is doing the overall systemic capacity planning for the entire grid? Nobody, really. Power utilities can capacity plan for their customer base and infrastructure, but they have no control over third party installations (at least for direct consumption).
Nobody but academic modelers and maybe utilities are looking solar buildout capacities from a CO2 offset perspective, and with utilities the math is even more complex because they have to look at baseload and peak load, too, for which CO2 offset number may make more sense with natural gas over coal.
If I put 15kw of solar on my property to offset my 15kw use, it's technically overcapacity from day 1 from an overall grid capacity because the grid already had capacity to meet my consumption. It's not overcapacity for me because only at magic moments is it actually outputting 15kw and even then I'm at net zero or optimal capacity.
Power companies are already fighting back against large "solar gardens" here in Minnesota. Pick your explanation, but they more or less all boil down to "systemic cost" -- the cost to maintain fixed generation facilities, adapt the grid to new multi megawatt power sources, etc.
I wonder if the "enterprise" drives aren't just tuned for performance advantages when used in specific controller or SAN configurations. MTBF may be improved not because of specific advantages in actual mechanical reliability but in fault reporting schemes that allow the controller to better evaluate whether the drive has truly failed and to adapt to smaller scale faults versus failing the entire drive.
"Consumer" drives may have firmware which flags some errors more easily because common use cases can't adapt to some kinds of faults intelligently, so the only sane thing is to just fail the drive outright.
It would certainly be in third-party Enterprise vendor interests to be able to keep using failed drives. I had a customer who was losing SAN drives about every four months for about a year. The SAN vendor issued a drive firmware update and since then only one drive has failed in 2-3 years.
The whole MTBF/TCO question makes me wonder why we aren't seeing big flash arrays using modern consumer SSDs. The write endurance tests that appeared on Slashdot showed even older generations surviving extremely high numbers of writes and drives like the Samsung Pro series I believe have 10 year warranties.
If I was a Samsung I'd be paying someone to put together arrays using my consumer drives to see how viable they were in enterprise SAN configurations.
I think most sane electrolysis projects target methane as the ultimate product because it can be injected into the natural gas distribution network and is much easier to handle than bulk hydrogen.
Just stick with electricity. It's what you start with, it's what you want to end with... it's stupid to convert forms. (Okay, technically, storing in a battery is conversion to chemical energy, but it's extremely efficient in doing so - at least with modern forms like li-ion).
The thing is, if you're using solar and have no grid use for the generated power at the time of generation, does it really matter how efficient your conversion is? You're using energy that would otherwise go unused. It's free input energy and the output (if you target methane) is a form of storable and transportable energy for which we already have a storage and transportation infrastructure.
I think for a while at least they were using their money to more or less invest in suppliers, building the factory the supplier needed to crank out some new kind of part in exchange for getting all of the output from the factory for a year or something, basically allowing them to monopolize the supply of some new feature.
The funny thing is, management of that much cash becomes a headache and I think banks were starting to charge negative interest rates in some cases.
They are competition. Even a $1000 prostitute is lower priced than a lifetime support commitment of a marriage.
I like to look at this as something of an economics issue, with sex being an economic good (or service).
Women oppose sex bots (and prostitution) because women function as something of a cartel that wants to establish a minimum price for sex. Historically, the price has been marriage but over the last 40 years or so the cartel has been willing to lower the price as the economic value of men has dropped -- women have vastly more economic opportunities and no longer see socially and legally enforced relationships with men as economically rewarding or necessary as they used to be.
They haven't completely reduced the price to free, though, as for the most part the cartel still generally demands a price that men engage in forms of courtship and relationship engagement in exchange for sex.
Women oppose prostitution and sex bots because they effectively break the cartel's monopoly. A sex bot (at least a reasonably realistic one) lowers the price below the cartel's general minimum price. They also have the economic efficiency of reducing the transaction costs below the cartel's and even below illegal prostitution and with fewer externalities, too. The cartel's price has an inherently high transaction cost and a lot of inefficiencies, although to some extent the cartel has been able to leverage technology to reduce transaction costs and efficiencies somewhat.
I'm not sure about that. The Cayenne is kind of a big SUV and for a lot of people the SUV is their "long drive" car, not just a metro runabout.
Plus, it is a Porsche and has a performance cachet to it that the Model X won't have outside of the torque of an electric motor.
The SUVs that will be in its crosshairs, though, will be stuff like BMW X1/X3, and maybe the Mercedes ML350, which seem to be more focused on daily drivers. Maybe Acura MDX/RDX as well.
I doubt the Tesla is eating into sales of the Cayenne, it's a SUV. The Panamera, maybe, but it's a much better handling car and has more top end and all wheel drive -- plus, much more expensive than Tesla. 911 is iconic -- nobody is buying a Tesla who wants a 911. They're not even in the same ballpark.
The people who are probably worrying about the Tesla are Mercedes and BMW. The S550 is still a big deal, but it's not hard to see buyers switching from that to Tesla, same with the BMW 7 series, too. I think the Tesla's too expensive for wannabes who lease E350s or 530s, but perhaps some of those people have switched.
And the balance between those are best found using market mechanisms.
That's awesome, now when do we escape the rent-seeking monopolies and actually get some kind of market mechanisms?
So it's even cheaper from a material perspective and even more psychological in its benefit.
I don't think this is that far off the mark.
Most homeopathic "medicines" are unpatented herbal potions of inexpensive origin and most homeopathic hands-on therapies involve nothing much more expensive than marginally trained hands using extremely low-tech facilities and tools.
It's not hard to see politicians endorsing their use, both as a purely political way of not offending people who believe in them and as a diversion from more expensive, real medical care.
And maybe there's some practical value to it, too. If some portion of the population is prone to overconsumption of medical care -- seeking doctor visits, tests and medicines for ephemeral conditions for which there are no clear cures or definitive treatments -- then maybe cheap and relatively harmless homeopathic treatments aren't bad policy. They keep people who aren't really sick from using expensive medical care.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the actual value in homeopathic "medicine" wasn't biochemical or even specifically placebo, but psychological -- having someone listen to their ill-defined concerns in a sympathetic manner and tell them they have a therapy which will address them.
All this head-scratching about what users "need" bothers me. It's focusing on the minimum. Which seems to imply that broadband providers can focus on some minimal level of service and then stop investing in infrastructure or really get away with throttling and caps under the guise of limiting you to "what you need".
IMHO, providers should be focusing on some (ultimately arbitrary, yes) number that better represents the growth curve of usage and speeds. Infrastructure investment in networks should be continual until actual consumption trends show a flat line and throttling and capping looks like a wasted investment because it doesn't return any value because the network has the headspace to accommodate what everyone wants to do.
Some may come pretty close. I drive a 2007 Volvo S80 with adaptive cruise control -- a radar panel keeps track of what's in front of you, and slows down to keep distance with the car in front and speeds up to the cruise set point if the car up front speeds up.
My model is good to 20 mph, and about 15 mph it will cut out. It will slow way down but not quite come to a complete stop (I've tested this exiting a freeway ramp)
The last time I was at the dealership reading the BS about newer models, it sounds like they've updated the adaptive cruise because the marketing literature says that it works in stop and go traffic, which would seem to imply you could turn it on and only really steer in rush hour.
I use mine pretty much everywhere I don't expect to stop too often. One of the downsides in congested driving is that adaptive cruise does the math on safe driving distances (it's adjustable, but being a Volvo I expect even the closest distance is considered safe) which leaves the ideal gap for asshat drivers to cut you off.
It's always struck me that autonomous vehicles will always be incremental. For one, it lets the engineers develop the systems for semi-autonomous driving a little at a time and refine them over time to increase their capabilities. Plus, it gives everyone a chance to become accustomed to autonomous driving technology incrementally. Each additional step in autonomous driving won't seem as radical as a leap to total autonomy, which might stave off paranoia, regulations and other BS. You boil a frog by turning the heat up a little bit at a time, so to speak.
So you move to a shitty neighborhood. You drop $5k on miscellaneous security stuff -- locks, alarms, door upgrades, etc. You still get nicked to the tune of $1k per year in out of pocket costs plus extras like door or window repair. And the continual aggravation and paranoia. Plus you drive out of your neighborhood for everything, since shitty neighborhoods have shitty stores and restaurants.
So you commute instead. The extra driving is a continual hassle and costs extra money for fuel and wear and tear. But this is balanced by no paranoia or break in hassles. You spend the security money on a better car or a more efficient car. You drive less overall since the stuff you want is close by.
Building a fortress in enemy territory is kind of appealing in a post-apocalyptic way but only if you're there all the time.
Who would israel use nukes against? Only a fool would nuke your neighbors, even if they hate you.
The unofficial story I've always heard is that Israel has a standing threat to nuke all Arab capitals, Tehran, Mecca and probably a few other major regional cities in the event of a chemical attack, nuclear attack and/or as a result of being overrun by conventional troops.
They beat back the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War, but there were moments where it was touch and go, and the Soviets were none to happy with the sinking of one of their merchant ships and were mobilizing to intervene if the Israelis didn't back off and observe the cease fire.
The threat as I've had it explained to me is that the nuclear reprisal was planned to be all-out -- everybody gets hit, there's no fact checking or consideration as to who was responsible. Everybody takes one.
Hard to know if it's true or not. It seems a bit apocryphal, but some of the older guys have unfortunate tattoos from the 1940s and maybe figured that even if it didn't end well, they know what worse endings look like from personal experience.
It might explain why the Iranians are so eager to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, because there's no end game where use or a serious threat of nuclear weapon against the United States doesn't result in Persia joining the scrap heap of lost civilizations. The Iranians just might figure they can win a nuclear exchange with the Israelis on the basis of population and geography, at least in the long term.
It might also explain why after nearly winning in '73 the Arabs never made a serious run at the Israelis again.
Trust was a terrible word choice in the headline -- as if there was some kind of community standard for a good game consoles, and making a bad one was a violation of that standard. Trust is also a two-way street, meaning you have to buy one up front before it's known whether it's good, participating in the trust relationship instead of participating in a fact-based decision.
I think the reality will be that the Apple TV will mostly be what it is now, a media consumption device. Apple is making some effort to extend their app ecosystem to AppleTV and extend its usefulness. Creative developers and games that merge the usefulness of the controller and the platform may actually create some successful games.
But it's not meant to principally be a game console, so expecting to to be competitive with PS and Xbox is ridiculous.
I work for a SMB consultancy and we had this debate concerning mileage reimbursement. None of the engineers had an office presence at our small office -- we worked from home or at client locations. I started when the company was quite small and the owners were willing to pay for ALL mileage (except from home to office and back trips), partly because many customers were required to pay a trip charge of $25 so the owner was already making a profit on trips under about 50 miles.
At some point as they became more sophisticated and were worried they were running into a tax liability for mileage reimbursements not covered by IRS rules. They wanted to cut any reimbursements involving trips to/from home and client locations.
Since we didn't have any choice involving customers and a significant minority were distant (ie, round trips of 70 miles), I made a stink about it. I argued that tax liability wasn't the issue -- whether or not they were able to deduct our mileage reimbursement as a tax deduction wasn't my concern.
The business model was on site IT support. Asking me to bear 100% of the cost of supporting their business model isn't remotely equitable -- they need to provide compensation for the use my capital (car) in their business model. The alternative is they provide me with a car to fulfill their business model, which I guarantee will be more expensive than a mileage reimbursement. Plus, they are getting trip charges from the customer, so it's not like they're not already exceeding their cost to me in travel compensation.
Surprisingly, they bought this argument, at least for me as a long-serving worker who had basically received this compensation for several years.
Maybe, but it significantly ups the risk ante.
Stolen laptops, jewelry and other luggage content miscellanea ranges from forgetful fliers who lost their belongings elsewhere, insurance fraud by a flier or petty larceny by airport employees. These items pocket easy and walk out easy. You don't even know it's gone until you unpack your stuff, hours later. Call your insurance company, read our baggage disclaimer. Shit happens.
Stealing an entire locked piece of luggage is harder. A bag containing a firearms that doesn't make it to its destination will be flagged the second the baggage carousel stops turning. An immediate report will be made.
Stealing firearms in interstate commerce is a serious Federal felony. It's already proven and noted that the flier checked a firearm, so flier fraud isn't even a question. The chain of custody is established. He had it, the airline took it into their possession.
Anybody involved in the luggage chain at both airports is going to be scrutinized. Airport police, TSA and maybe even BATFE will perk up. Hard questions will be asked. Employees walking out with entire pieces of luggage will be remembered. Surveillance video will be reviewed. Searching will take place.
And the airlines won't like, it, either. People who travel legally with guns tend to be stand-up citizens with money to spend who know their rights, maybe with lawyers on speed dial. Cages will be rattled, PR will be in play. "We don't care if your earrings got stolen" plays bad already, "We let your gun get stolen" plays worse.