I'm guessing maybe not even a short distance relationship.
I dated a woman in another city and can remember spending hours on the phone with her and occasionally even watching a TV program with her all while on the phone (and this was 25+ years ago when long distance actually cost money).
For what it's worth, it might be kind of fun to have this kind of real-time social component with Netflix streamed movies, either with people you knew or with other people who liked the same shows or movies.
Maybe you could use the same process used to create quartz countertops but with a mould with your data in it that could be debossed into the surface as its made.
Probably bonus points if you use the process to deboss your main info into the quartz along with instructions for optically decoding a message optically encoded into the surface.
You'd have to keep it out of the sun to avoid UV discoloration of the resin binders, but I'd guess that wouldn't effect the debossed info.
A lawyer friend of mine once said "if you have to go to trial, you have already lost" because you have failed at every other level of persuasion and leverage and the only thing left is the variable outcome of a trial.
Maybe only helicopters with a straight-line propulsion method?
"A craft, that travels through the air, by means of lift generated through the passage of relative airflow across a curved wing section known as the aerofoil, and of sustained airflow by means of propulsion caused by the action/reaction of a propulsion unit, which propels the craft forward against drag caused by the craft's passage through the air."
You might make an argument that the "patent" describes a straight-line (forward) propulsion method. A helicopter that relies on its rotors doesn't use a forward propulsion unit.
Yeah, but what community with a datacenter actually supplies the replacement servers? Maybe Taipei and Shenzhen?
I think the "community economic value" varies greatly by the size of the community.
Small communities only have so much value add but this can work against the datacenter because now everything has to be brought in, especially people, and that gets expensive.
I would think a large datacenter would end up with a lot of ancillary jobs for electrical, HVAC, technicians to work with customer equipment, delivery guys to get the stuff there and so on. Even the best large single company data centers have all manner of stuff that needs fixing.
Which highlights the complexity of enforcing "driving while stoned." The ability to detect THC weeks after consumption makes it hard for simple tests like those that exist for alcohol to have any relevance.
What it does seem to demonstrate is that detecting THC has nothing to do with driving safety, although I would imagine there are a ton of "tough on crime" types who would like to use THC to "prove" intoxication, most likely as a cynical way to restrict its use by holding the risk of DUI prosecution over anyone who uses marijuana even if they are responsible and don't drive stoned.
I'm not sure I understand how billions more poor people are an imagination resource if they are underfed, uneducated and enthralled with religious superstition unless the imagination product is just day to day survival skills as poor, hungry, ignorant serf in a theologically dominated environment.
I don't really see how this is "disruptive" to cellular carriers. Couldn't they at some point just start transitioning over to a VoIP service that was data based and as long as the handset had the software capabilities they could just be VoIP whether it was over LTE or loca wifi?
In theory they could open up a lot of new features this way such as multiple presentation so you could treat any data connected device with a mic and speaker as a phone. I know a lot of modern PBXs can do this now and some VoIP providers provide variants on this now, like smartphone and pc apps for making calls that can traverse whatever ip network you're connected to.
The Audi A8 diesel has a range of nearly 800 miles.
You could argue that 590 miles is a reasonable target for even for most people who drive long distance trips. It's roughly 8 hours in the car and for a lot of people (families, etc) they don't want to be in the car that much more in a single day.
It's probably also the longest distance most people would want to drive to a specific destination. Trips longer than this tend to be impractical in a car and even with the hassles air travel becomes a significant time saver at 500+ miles.
Ranges beyond 500+ miles per day become really corner cases.
Affordable is a relative term. Affordable to whom? Everyone in the world, or people in the segment where the vehicle is targeted?
And what does "physically comparable" mean? Same rough size and door count or do you get down to powertrain specifics, interiors, etc?
And I would argue whatever Tesla's affordable model is it will not be physically comparable to what you can buy for $18K USD. It will very likely have a far more luxurious trim, more bells and whistles and better performance.
You could make an argument based on fact that high speed internet has gotten cheaper and better in constant dollars.
In 2000, I paid something like $123/month ($90 then) for 768Kbps and one static IP.
In 2015, I pay for $85/month for 18Mbps and a/29.
In absolute terms, it's $5 cheaper for 20 times faster service with much greater flexibility (more static IPs). In constant-dollar terms, it's 30% cheaper.
Now, I'm not defending cable. I think the content providers saw that cable companies could jack up rates at will and demanded their cut in terms of increased carriage fees and the cable companies just went along with it, raising rates further to pass on the cost. They then saw cheaper streaming eating into their programming monopoly and bandwidth consumption as a risk to their infrastructure carrying capacity.
Let's say I go to work for a retail store as a manager. The store makes an average profit margin. As a manager, I have control over pricing. I decide to raise prices regularly and at a multiple of the rate of increase of my suppliers. I cut spending on store operations, like training, store facilities, etc, so the shopping experience gets less pleasant. I start requiring shoppers to buy my bags for their purchases.
Eventually such tactics will piss off my consumers so much that they will seek alternatives. Proposals are circulated to build a better store that will offer products I can't because I haven't invested in mine. When I need to seek regulatory approval for necessary changes, the regulatory bodies greatly scrutinize my actions because the consumers are pissed off and there is a belief my changes are only about seeking ways to charge even more.
Won't the owners eventually see that I have damaged what was once a profitable business? Alienated my customers, brought on regulatory scrutiny that risks the flexibility to run the business?
Sure, as a corporation, Comcast has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be profitable and find ways to increase profits. But there's a point at which monopolist behaviors seem to violate that fiduciary duty because they're reckless to the business model.
I don't understand why they can't be happy with the annuity-like return on providing a utility service.
They could have been probably making better than average utility profits with no regulatory risk if they had backed off at some point in the past and quit jacking up the price of cable television, the cost of which pushed many people towards streaming in the first place and played fair with IP network management instead of gouging customers and content providers over phony congestion.
Instead they just had to keep pushing the rent-seeking, monopolist path and trying desperately to hold onto the TV business. Now the entire enterprise is at risk. People stream what they want cheaply instead of paying for shit channels at high prices, there's increasing regulatory pressure and entire cities are making an effort to supplant their true remaining value, high speed internet with a vastly superior replacement that only underscores their lack of investment and inferior product.
It's the same problem Microsoft faced in many ways. Relentless rent-seeking that only led people to seek other alternatives. Had Microsoft let up a little they could have probably put off the search for alternatives forever and been seen as a benign market giant like Google instead of as the evil empire.
5 years sounds like discouragement pricing. Long enough that they might turn the entire deal down.
But it's also long enough that if they DID take the deal they couldn't drag their feet so long that it never was effectively available.
And it may be long enough that the investment required on their part might be financially unpalatable to just walk away from at the 5 year mark, plus there's the chance that as the five year mark approached there might be all kinds of difficulty in actually stopping it, either from a disentangling networks perspective or from all kinds of protests and lawsuits that prevent them from stopping.
And who knows, maybe after five years of doing it their genius MBAs might just figure out that even though the margin on it is small, the revenue is like an annuity and has some kind of balance sheet value that they WANT to keep it going.
That sounds reasonable, but think of the engineering the Romans pulled off. It's often said we didn't really understand how they did some of those things and I'd wager that some of them may have been difficult to duplicate in say 1800 even with the vastly superior technology of that era.
There's been a lot of experts (people who legitimately seem to know something, AFAICT) linking diets high in sugars and other simple carbohydrates to Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
A lot of the people who have "eaten right" over the last 40 years have equated eating right with limits on fat and cholesterol which almost always results in significant increases in carbohydrate consumption, especially when you consider the ingredient components of "low-fat" products and the general tendency of most processed foods to have a lot of added sugar.
As for smokers, I've read before that at least when it comes to pensions, smokers were a gift. Pensions are usually structured around average lifespans and people who die earlier than average basically are like free money to the pension system.
Far as I can tell, the real problem is that the anti-smoking nazis are really the new generation of prohibitionists - if someone enjoys something that they don't, it must be evil, therefore vaping is evil....
This, a thousand times, this!
The level of moral crusading against vaping is astonishing.
I don't know what the real risks are of vaping -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were some, perhaps mostly tied to certain kinds of flavorings, sub-ohm/high-wattage vaping setups that produce hotter vaping temperatures or some atomizer materials.
But the risks relative to inhaling actual smoke are so much smaller and, given the actual experiences of people who switched from long-term cigarette smoking habits to vaping, appear to be pretty trivial.
Yet the anti-smoking crusaders treat vaping as if it was identical to smoking in terms of byproducts and health risk. This can only be the result of seeing moral turpitude in vaping.
I remember when one of the big selling features of a PC was you could put all your recipes in a database -- no more the mad collection of photocopied recipes, newspaper clippings, notecards from grandma, hand-scrawled copies of recipes, etc.
Except that it seemed to turn out that it was like 10 times the work to bullshit around with a computer versus a folder or even a little box with notecards if you were super motivated.
Smarthomes just seem like the same thing in many ways. 10 times the work for the same effort and way simpler solutions exist that do niche tasks just as well (eg, digital wall timers).
I've heard it said that at the extremes, the left and the right are differentiated mostly by their choices in fashion and style, not by ideology. Political ideology often seems better described as a circular, not linear, scale.
The one time I sampled an Alex Jones show even he went through some mental gymnastics trying to explain his general support for Republicans despite agreeing with the far left on a bunch of issues.
I'm sure social scientists have some kind of way of identifying systems of beliefs based on clusters of belief which transcends the usual linear spectrum of ideology.
Only place this seems to make any sense is for one-way broad/multicast in a large area where you can reasonably expect to illuminate a large number of receivers.
The example I'm thinking of is like maybe a sports stadium or other similar kind of facility where you have a lot of potential receivers with clear line of sight to overhead illumination.
Average temperature Dec-Feb for Helsinki was 32F and the minimum low was -5F.
I wouldn't drive over that much sea water unless the average high was -5F for at least a month. It gets a lot colder than Helsinki around here in MN and cars go through the fresh water lakes every year, loads recently despite having a week of subzero F highs.
What if the storage tank levels and their consumption rates were aggregated and reported to distributors or refiners, and these demand indicators helped set local wholesale prices by some kind of automated system?
I'm guessing gas prices are mostly "set" by the price of a barrel of oil (or some regional crude oil price), but even if retail inventory wasn't used for calculating price it may be used to influence regional refinery production which could influence price (ie, demand appears slack, refinery output is cut and stockpiles are drawn down, meanwhile demand is actually high and then price goes up to reflect real lack of inventory).
I must be as old as your dad, as I don't care for gambling (losing money, really, the games are fun) but I see buying 2-3 PowerBall tickets per year (when the jackpot is big) about like your dad does.
I'm not buying a chance to win, I'm buying a chance to seriously dream about what I would do with all that money.
I occasionally enhance it by plugging the expected winnings into a spreadsheet I built that lets me actually "spend" the money to see just how fabulously I could live. My spreadsheet is ridiculously overcomplicated and includes investment and investment returns, inflation, and reinvestment of My most recent iteration has a "spend to zero" page where I figure out the maximum I can spend annually to hit zero by age 95. It's probably greatly inaccurate math, but still sort of informative.
I mostly made that page to figure out the smallest winnings that would let me live very well without ever working, which required spend-down of the principal over time. I think the threshold was about $10 million lump sum after taxes with the money invested in tax free munis with a 3% average return. Of course depending on how you want to live and invest, this could be different for other people but I think I was targeting a pretty high annual spending ($500k or something).
One thing that surprised me the first time I just "spent" the money is how even huge jackpots can be quickly spent if you're serious about it. Even large PowerBall winnings don't really mean you can own a Gulfstream intercontinental-capable jet (at least for very long). Owning a few luxury homes and equipping them with goodies burns through it fast.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing maybe not even a short distance relationship.
I dated a woman in another city and can remember spending hours on the phone with her and occasionally even watching a TV program with her all while on the phone (and this was 25+ years ago when long distance actually cost money).
For what it's worth, it might be kind of fun to have this kind of real-time social component with Netflix streamed movies, either with people you knew or with other people who liked the same shows or movies.
Maybe you could use the same process used to create quartz countertops but with a mould with your data in it that could be debossed into the surface as its made.
Probably bonus points if you use the process to deboss your main info into the quartz along with instructions for optically decoding a message optically encoded into the surface.
You'd have to keep it out of the sun to avoid UV discoloration of the resin binders, but I'd guess that wouldn't effect the debossed info.
A lawyer friend of mine once said "if you have to go to trial, you have already lost" because you have failed at every other level of persuasion and leverage and the only thing left is the variable outcome of a trial.
Maybe only helicopters with a straight-line propulsion method?
"A craft, that travels through the air, by means of lift generated through the passage of relative airflow across a curved wing section known as the aerofoil, and of sustained airflow by means of propulsion caused by the action/reaction of a propulsion unit, which propels the craft forward against drag caused by the craft's passage through the air."
You might make an argument that the "patent" describes a straight-line (forward) propulsion method. A helicopter that relies on its rotors doesn't use a forward propulsion unit.
Yeah, but what community with a datacenter actually supplies the replacement servers? Maybe Taipei and Shenzhen?
I think the "community economic value" varies greatly by the size of the community.
Small communities only have so much value add but this can work against the datacenter because now everything has to be brought in, especially people, and that gets expensive.
I would think a large datacenter would end up with a lot of ancillary jobs for electrical, HVAC, technicians to work with customer equipment, delivery guys to get the stuff there and so on. Even the best large single company data centers have all manner of stuff that needs fixing.
Which highlights the complexity of enforcing "driving while stoned." The ability to detect THC weeks after consumption makes it hard for simple tests like those that exist for alcohol to have any relevance.
What it does seem to demonstrate is that detecting THC has nothing to do with driving safety, although I would imagine there are a ton of "tough on crime" types who would like to use THC to "prove" intoxication, most likely as a cynical way to restrict its use by holding the risk of DUI prosecution over anyone who uses marijuana even if they are responsible and don't drive stoned.
I'm not sure I understand how billions more poor people are an imagination resource if they are underfed, uneducated and enthralled with religious superstition unless the imagination product is just day to day survival skills as poor, hungry, ignorant serf in a theologically dominated environment.
I don't really see how this is "disruptive" to cellular carriers. Couldn't they at some point just start transitioning over to a VoIP service that was data based and as long as the handset had the software capabilities they could just be VoIP whether it was over LTE or loca wifi?
In theory they could open up a lot of new features this way such as multiple presentation so you could treat any data connected device with a mic and speaker as a phone. I know a lot of modern PBXs can do this now and some VoIP providers provide variants on this now, like smartphone and pc apps for making calls that can traverse whatever ip network you're connected to.
The Audi A8 diesel has a range of nearly 800 miles.
You could argue that 590 miles is a reasonable target for even for most people who drive long distance trips. It's roughly 8 hours in the car and for a lot of people (families, etc) they don't want to be in the car that much more in a single day.
It's probably also the longest distance most people would want to drive to a specific destination. Trips longer than this tend to be impractical in a car and even with the hassles air travel becomes a significant time saver at 500+ miles.
Ranges beyond 500+ miles per day become really corner cases.
Affordable is a relative term. Affordable to whom? Everyone in the world, or people in the segment where the vehicle is targeted?
And what does "physically comparable" mean? Same rough size and door count or do you get down to powertrain specifics, interiors, etc?
And I would argue whatever Tesla's affordable model is it will not be physically comparable to what you can buy for $18K USD. It will very likely have a far more luxurious trim, more bells and whistles and better performance.
You could make an argument based on fact that high speed internet has gotten cheaper and better in constant dollars.
In 2000, I paid something like $123/month ($90 then) for 768Kbps and one static IP.
In 2015, I pay for $85/month for 18Mbps and a /29.
In absolute terms, it's $5 cheaper for 20 times faster service with much greater flexibility (more static IPs). In constant-dollar terms, it's 30% cheaper.
Now, I'm not defending cable. I think the content providers saw that cable companies could jack up rates at will and demanded their cut in terms of increased carriage fees and the cable companies just went along with it, raising rates further to pass on the cost. They then saw cheaper streaming eating into their programming monopoly and bandwidth consumption as a risk to their infrastructure carrying capacity.
OK, I do, but then again I don't.
Let's say I go to work for a retail store as a manager. The store makes an average profit margin. As a manager, I have control over pricing. I decide to raise prices regularly and at a multiple of the rate of increase of my suppliers. I cut spending on store operations, like training, store facilities, etc, so the shopping experience gets less pleasant. I start requiring shoppers to buy my bags for their purchases.
Eventually such tactics will piss off my consumers so much that they will seek alternatives. Proposals are circulated to build a better store that will offer products I can't because I haven't invested in mine. When I need to seek regulatory approval for necessary changes, the regulatory bodies greatly scrutinize my actions because the consumers are pissed off and there is a belief my changes are only about seeking ways to charge even more.
Won't the owners eventually see that I have damaged what was once a profitable business? Alienated my customers, brought on regulatory scrutiny that risks the flexibility to run the business?
Sure, as a corporation, Comcast has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be profitable and find ways to increase profits. But there's a point at which monopolist behaviors seem to violate that fiduciary duty because they're reckless to the business model.
I don't understand why they can't be happy with the annuity-like return on providing a utility service.
They could have been probably making better than average utility profits with no regulatory risk if they had backed off at some point in the past and quit jacking up the price of cable television, the cost of which pushed many people towards streaming in the first place and played fair with IP network management instead of gouging customers and content providers over phony congestion.
Instead they just had to keep pushing the rent-seeking, monopolist path and trying desperately to hold onto the TV business. Now the entire enterprise is at risk. People stream what they want cheaply instead of paying for shit channels at high prices, there's increasing regulatory pressure and entire cities are making an effort to supplant their true remaining value, high speed internet with a vastly superior replacement that only underscores their lack of investment and inferior product.
It's the same problem Microsoft faced in many ways. Relentless rent-seeking that only led people to seek other alternatives. Had Microsoft let up a little they could have probably put off the search for alternatives forever and been seen as a benign market giant like Google instead of as the evil empire.
5 years sounds like discouragement pricing. Long enough that they might turn the entire deal down.
But it's also long enough that if they DID take the deal they couldn't drag their feet so long that it never was effectively available.
And it may be long enough that the investment required on their part might be financially unpalatable to just walk away from at the 5 year mark, plus there's the chance that as the five year mark approached there might be all kinds of difficulty in actually stopping it, either from a disentangling networks perspective or from all kinds of protests and lawsuits that prevent them from stopping.
And who knows, maybe after five years of doing it their genius MBAs might just figure out that even though the margin on it is small, the revenue is like an annuity and has some kind of balance sheet value that they WANT to keep it going.
That sounds reasonable, but think of the engineering the Romans pulled off. It's often said we didn't really understand how they did some of those things and I'd wager that some of them may have been difficult to duplicate in say 1800 even with the vastly superior technology of that era.
There's been a lot of experts (people who legitimately seem to know something, AFAICT) linking diets high in sugars and other simple carbohydrates to Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
A lot of the people who have "eaten right" over the last 40 years have equated eating right with limits on fat and cholesterol which almost always results in significant increases in carbohydrate consumption, especially when you consider the ingredient components of "low-fat" products and the general tendency of most processed foods to have a lot of added sugar.
As for smokers, I've read before that at least when it comes to pensions, smokers were a gift. Pensions are usually structured around average lifespans and people who die earlier than average basically are like free money to the pension system.
Far as I can tell, the real problem is that the anti-smoking nazis are really the new generation of prohibitionists - if someone enjoys something that they don't, it must be evil, therefore vaping is evil....
This, a thousand times, this!
The level of moral crusading against vaping is astonishing.
I don't know what the real risks are of vaping -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were some, perhaps mostly tied to certain kinds of flavorings, sub-ohm/high-wattage vaping setups that produce hotter vaping temperatures or some atomizer materials.
But the risks relative to inhaling actual smoke are so much smaller and, given the actual experiences of people who switched from long-term cigarette smoking habits to vaping, appear to be pretty trivial.
Yet the anti-smoking crusaders treat vaping as if it was identical to smoking in terms of byproducts and health risk. This can only be the result of seeing moral turpitude in vaping.
I remember when one of the big selling features of a PC was you could put all your recipes in a database -- no more the mad collection of photocopied recipes, newspaper clippings, notecards from grandma, hand-scrawled copies of recipes, etc.
Except that it seemed to turn out that it was like 10 times the work to bullshit around with a computer versus a folder or even a little box with notecards if you were super motivated.
Smarthomes just seem like the same thing in many ways. 10 times the work for the same effort and way simpler solutions exist that do niche tasks just as well (eg, digital wall timers).
Wasn't there a fertility drug widely used in the 1960s that turned out to cause awful birth defects, including underdeveloped limbs?
What you're describing seems to go beyond just atrophy from paralysis.
I've heard it said that at the extremes, the left and the right are differentiated mostly by their choices in fashion and style, not by ideology. Political ideology often seems better described as a circular, not linear, scale.
The one time I sampled an Alex Jones show even he went through some mental gymnastics trying to explain his general support for Republicans despite agreeing with the far left on a bunch of issues.
I'm sure social scientists have some kind of way of identifying systems of beliefs based on clusters of belief which transcends the usual linear spectrum of ideology.
Only place this seems to make any sense is for one-way broad/multicast in a large area where you can reasonably expect to illuminate a large number of receivers.
The example I'm thinking of is like maybe a sports stadium or other similar kind of facility where you have a lot of potential receivers with clear line of sight to overhead illumination.
Average temperature Dec-Feb for Helsinki was 32F and the minimum low was -5F.
I wouldn't drive over that much sea water unless the average high was -5F for at least a month. It gets a lot colder than Helsinki around here in MN and cars go through the fresh water lakes every year, loads recently despite having a week of subzero F highs.
What if the storage tank levels and their consumption rates were aggregated and reported to distributors or refiners, and these demand indicators helped set local wholesale prices by some kind of automated system?
I'm guessing gas prices are mostly "set" by the price of a barrel of oil (or some regional crude oil price), but even if retail inventory wasn't used for calculating price it may be used to influence regional refinery production which could influence price (ie, demand appears slack, refinery output is cut and stockpiles are drawn down, meanwhile demand is actually high and then price goes up to reflect real lack of inventory).
I must be as old as your dad, as I don't care for gambling (losing money, really, the games are fun) but I see buying 2-3 PowerBall tickets per year (when the jackpot is big) about like your dad does.
I'm not buying a chance to win, I'm buying a chance to seriously dream about what I would do with all that money.
I occasionally enhance it by plugging the expected winnings into a spreadsheet I built that lets me actually "spend" the money to see just how fabulously I could live. My spreadsheet is ridiculously overcomplicated and includes investment and investment returns, inflation, and reinvestment of My most recent iteration has a "spend to zero" page where I figure out the maximum I can spend annually to hit zero by age 95. It's probably greatly inaccurate math, but still sort of informative.
I mostly made that page to figure out the smallest winnings that would let me live very well without ever working, which required spend-down of the principal over time. I think the threshold was about $10 million lump sum after taxes with the money invested in tax free munis with a 3% average return. Of course depending on how you want to live and invest, this could be different for other people but I think I was targeting a pretty high annual spending ($500k or something).
One thing that surprised me the first time I just "spent" the money is how even huge jackpots can be quickly spent if you're serious about it. Even large PowerBall winnings don't really mean you can own a Gulfstream intercontinental-capable jet (at least for very long). Owning a few luxury homes and equipping them with goodies burns through it fast.