I worked in advertising in the 1990s and we replaced Apple parts constantly. Even the Apple replacement parts were duds, our vendor got into the habit of sending two motherboards because about 1/10 would be literally missing components -- bare spots on the board.
IMHO, the legend of Apple reliability is just a legend. The Scully era Macs were awful and prone to freezing -- whether that was hardware or software didn't really matter, but we always suspected hardware because it would happen on absolutely clean installs.
The return-of-Jobs-era G3s & G4s were probably an improvement, but I'm sure that was about changes in management as much as some magical engineering prowess.
I can have a comfortable chair because it doesn't have to conform to HR's ranking of who gets what kind of chair based on whether one is a manager or not (even to the point of whether it should be floral or plaid).
I think this taps into the subtle psychology that often opposes remote work.
I think part of the psychological value of being a "manager" is elevated status and power over people. That status is reinforced by the physical space controlled by a manager, the public display of differentiation in status (bigger office, better furniture) and social display of authority and the fealty received by inferiors.
What would "being a manager" be like if you were in charge of a team of workers who were all remote? It would be a lot of paper work and report generation and none of the status and power benefits.
My wife managed a national sales team (maybe 10 employees) who, 9 of whom, by nature of their positions, were remote. She traveled constantly to meet with them. I had a conversation with her about why she had to meet with them personally so often, and while some of this travel was tied to customer relationships (ie, meet with customer and sales person) a lot of it just seemed to have a physical manager presence occasionally.
My sense was that maybe a good 1/3 of her trips weren't really necessary but that they happened simply because of an expectation of having a first person management experience. And I think there was an institutional philosophy as well, as on an annual basis the excess trips had to amount to thousands of dollars in expenses.
To be remotely fair, gun shows can be a great place for people who are collectors to find items for their collections, just like any other flea market type sales event with a specific focus.
Although, IMHO, like collections of anything else the internet has kind of reduced the usefulness of gun shows -- web sites like Gunbroker make it far easier to find very specific models a collector may want.
I've read that criticism with regard to police shootings -- there's so many police forces and so many of them are small, use of force training has no chance of being uniform across all departments nor does the quantity and quality of training have a chance of being the same.
In the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area there are maybe three dozen suburbs plus the core cities, almost all with their own police departments not to mention 3-4 county sheriff departments (depending on how far out you want to measure the metro area). In theory a criminal could operate in a corner where 3 jurisdictions abut and no or low quality information sharing could hurt police efforts to combat crime as well.
It sure makes sense and leads one to believe there should be a single police force.
Although I can think of a couple of issues -- policing in downtown Minneapolis is a different ball game than policing in suburban St. Louis Park, so do separate departments adapt better to local environments better?
Then there's a kind of freedom argument -- does a panoply of law enforcement enhance freedom by diffusing authority and making it more accountable to local populations? Multiple organizations tend to make for a thinner layer of middle management as well. And the limits of scale to any one department would seem to serve as a limit on creating "intelligence" branches that focus on running stingrays and other surveillance systems.
I'm in sure in some ways it may be worse as well, a burglary in Minneapolis doesn't get much in terms of investigation while one in wealthy Edina may get more attention.
In some ways, I think a metro-area police department makes sense from a logistical perspective. Yet I suspect that it would possibly devolve into something not much different than we have now -- politics would dictate that a metro area force have individual precincts that generally followed existing geographic boundaries, essentially re-creating the same structure only less accountable and with more overhead.
From what I can figure, a 50 inch monitor is the point.
I'm probably going to pull the string on a 40 or 43" 4K TV as a monitor replacement because it will be useful at 100% scaling at that size screen and 4k resolution.
1920x1080 is like Fisher Price dot pitch on a large screen and approaching less useful on anything over 24".
I suspect it varies in the US with state law, but this is the same thing I've always been told by HR people in the United States when I've approached them about firing low performing employees or even employees with real problems like not showing up.
I had a technician that worked for me who began making a habit of using his vacation time on an ad-hoc basis -- he would leave me a voicemail at 8:29 AM telling me he was going to take a vacation day. When he was back in the office the following day I told him not to do it, and he did it again two weeks later. I sent him an email that time and told him it wasn't appropriate and not to do it anymore. After the third time not long after I talked to our HR assistant director and she told me I had to write a formal letter on company letterhead and then document (with followup letters) three more incidents, noting that termination would result if it continued to be able to fire him for cause.
IIRC, she said anything less and we got dinged for unemployment insurance by the state and/or were vulnerable to some kind of lawsuit (on what grounds a no-show white male in his late 20s could sue a white manager only 12 years his senior, I don't know).
And that was for obvious malfeasance. It was *worse* with an African American employee. He was hired in a support role bursting greenbar reports that ran overnight from a mainframe application. When that application went away, he got a new job title of PC support technician for which he was completely unqualified and which he performed terribly. We were literally doing double work for every ticket he worked.
HR said he couldn't be fired without basically being videotaped committing a felony. Because he got a new job title given to him, we were on the hook for his inability to do the job because it was the company's responsibility to vet his ability to do the job he was assigned (he got reclassed because he had some personal relationship with the controller and she pulled strings). And because he was black and like 2 other people in a company of 500 were black, pretty much any termination could be construed as discriminatory. The only way to fire him was to provide and pay for training for the job he was classed as and then give him months of letters and warnings and performance improvement plans with color glossy 8x10 photos with circles and arrows proving he couldn't do the job. Anything less than that and we might as well have written a check for $250k.
Ultimately we created a make-work project for which he was "leader" just to get him out of the way. He ended up quitting a few months later for a job as a youth sports coordinator. I ran into him a couple of years later and he actually acknowledged he knew he was terrible at the job.
Several chimps and gorillas have been taught ASL. One thing they do NOT do, is teach that language to their offspring. They do not pass on the knowledge.
If you had a group of 5 apes where two had sign language taught to them and three who did not and the apes who signed were rewarded for signing, would the non-signing apes begin to mimic sign language to try to obtain rewards?
If this was true, I wonder if apes could be induced to teach sign language to their offspring by rewarding them if they try to sign to their offspring or their offspring mimics signing.
I'm kind of inclined to believe no -- however apes communicate internally would be their native language, and sign language like a second language. If you speak a second language, you usually use your native language when raising your children and this is what they learn. You probably wouldn't teach them the second language unless there was some external reason to do so (ie, you lived in a multilingual community).
My brother and his wife are deaf and use ASL, and their kids, who aren't deaf, all learned ASL before spoken English.
Get the Obama/Democratic White House behind this idea.
Not only will it enable another freebie giveaway, but left-leaning Zuckerberg will also be supplying an ideologically curated platform of left wing messages to the unwashed masses, ensuring that Democratic ideology remains front and center.
In-game bots may be operating on a limited view, but they're operating on actual hard data in basically machine-usable form. What's impressive about this is that it learns from what's on the screen -- distances, obstacles, paths, its location are all learned from visual input.
What I'm curious about is how adaptable their visual learning system is or whether it's extremely Doom specific. I'd also be curious at how long it took to learn to play. I'd also be curious what the learning curve was -- linear, non-linear, flat, steep or what.
If they were real lucky, they could have tossed it out and hit a refueling truck. With any luck they would have gotten enough of a fire going to knock out a couple of planes and maybe destroy a terminal wing in the process.
I do kind of wonder if maybe planes shouldn't have a containment vessel on the plane, some kind of portable cylinder that something dangerous could be thrown into that could be sealed tight.
I don't know what you'd make it out of, maybe some kind of steel cylinder with a ceramic liner. It'd probably be nice if it could be made explosion resistant to something like hand grenade levels to boot.
IMO, Apple's engineers need to stop kidding themselves by pretending that users care more about thin than about reliability.
Apple's engineers probably don't get to decide about this, they're just told it has to be thinner by a group of rich, effete old men who pretend that making really thin products is somehow good artistic design and that it means they are still relevant and virile.
That the camera lens is a bulbous protrusion since the iPhone 6 is probably an item of massive conflict between engineering and the "designers". Improving camera performance has been a design, marketing and engineering goal and one case where marketing and engineering are trumping the "design" goal of thinness. You simply can't get the performance required out of the camera and make is as generally thin as the rest of the phone...even if you remove the headphone jack.
Call me ignorant (and maybe somebody will), but my running impression of Indonesia is that of a semi-authoritarian government with a lot of laws controlling political speech and behavior in addition to probably enshrining majority religious beliefs in law.
In this context, the law seems entirely expected. The political hegemony wants to control them because they pose a political control risk, the religious leadership is probably eager to back anything that reinforces the ability to enforce religious power via civil law enforcement, and possibly a few sane, liberal/democracy minded people support it as a way to tamp down on political bosses using meme-speech to whip the unwashed mobs into a frenzy.
In the end, the forces of authoritarianism will have one more justification for going after speech contrary to the political goals of the authorities.
It's not news anymore than a report that it rained again in the rain forest.
The existing standards are fragmented and primitive. Home automation now isn't that much less complex than industrial automation and no single vendor sells everything or has enough reach into unintelligent devices to offer a comprehensive solution that literally does everything and does it easily.
This leaves room for big vendors like Apple or Google to roll in with their own take on the entire stack, complete with walled implementations that ignore other existing standards because those standards they can't license and control.
Then there's the adoption problems associated with home automation in existing homes. I doubt there's more than 10% of the population willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into serious automation like temperature sensors, adding HVAC dampers, power controls, replacing outlets and light switches and so on. People still have 4 remote controls on the coffee table.
More RAM would be useful for switching between apps so the app and its state stay in RAM, avoiding a swap out penalty for those that save their state, a swap in penalty for reloading that state, and worse, going to the network when the state isn't saved completely, or worse yet, those that just reset to a "just launched" mode whenever they get swapped out.
I bought what ended up being knockoff Anderson PowePole battery connectors off Amazon. They were so bad I couldn't even get continuity on one leg.
It was annoying but to Amazon's credit, they accepted the return despite the crimp pins being crimped with a stub of my battery cable still in them. Of course it cost me an inch and half of my cable.
Stupidly, the real product from a company web site who distributes actual Anderson connectors ended up being cheaper, but the site wasn't easy to find.
The real victim of course is Anderson whose products are being knocked off and sold by Amazon. My guess is the real fix for this is for the real maker to go after Amazon for selling shitty knockoffs.
I completely agree that bluetooth is feature poor.
Receivers should be able to mix multiple senders, and senders should be able to handle multiple receivers. How complex you want to make the mix controls would be up to the maker -- tiny headphones, straight up equal mix of all paired devices. A phone or larger device with a user interface? Custom levels, balance, mute, etc.
Bluetooth now is primitive. I suppose I should categorize it as a miracle technology and be glad it works at all but really it's clunky and clumsy to use.
I think the skeptics are onto something, but I figure if a group of people want to spend money on ways to do it, let 'em try and see what happens.
It's maybe too wishful thinking, but I like the idea.
My biggest objection to solar roadways is to what end the power is generated. Maybe in a residential neighborhood it's practical to drop it into the grid, but there's a lot of roadways where it's too rural or would never be practical to feed it anywhere. But there's a ton of parking lots that sit empty 90% of the time, and solar parking lots could be cheaper that elevated panels over of the parking lot.
I think the materials engineering could be developed to make solar panels that can be driven on. They make flexible panels already and I can see them as part of some flexible laminate sheet with a glass layer on top comprised of small tiles, like a sheet of bathroom tiles, with some kind of articulating joint in between tiles.
It would take a lot of engineering to make it work well, but I don't think it's impossible. Impossibly expensive to develop and possibly make, sure.
What I wonder, though, is what it might do for roads to essentially have a tough engineered surface like this. Asphalt and concrete have their own problems and if solar roads wore better because they were designed to be driven on and wear well, maybe it's real value will be as a better road surface and the power generation will just be a decent bonus.
That was basically his line in the first primary debate. He said politicians were for sale and that he had given several people sharing the stage with him checks. I guess I interpreted him as saying as a rich person he knew the system was corrupt first hand and that he wanted to reform it.
I think he could have communicated this a lot better but I think as the campaign has moved on his reform-centric direction has shifted.
Frankly I'm not surprised he used accounting wizardry to cut his tax burden. I'm sure all rich people do. What would be surprising would be a multimillionaire who had basically paid ordinary taxes without any tax avoidance strategy. I suspect if you don't use every tax dodge there is you will eventually get bled dry by taxes.
They could have done a million things to improve credit card security, but fraud is down their list of things to worry about. The credit card system (VISA/MC/AMEX, banks, etc) is designed to promote easy transactions, not security.
VISA just gets paid, they don't have any real liability. Issuing banks eat some fraud but they charge a lot of it back to merchants and make them carry the burden. And consumers eat some of it, though most of the time they can dispute credit charges with all the usual disclaimers about if they notice it, etc.
Fraud is only a problem to the credit card system when it represents an existential risk to the system. Other than that, as long as somebody else pays, there's a tolerable limit they just don't care about.
More security means, ultimately, fewer charges, and when you're getting paid a percentage of the charges, including fraudulent ones, you benefit most by reducing the transaction friction.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but I think that's why US card issuers don't change card numbers regularly -- they've been lobbied by their actual customers, merchants, to only change card numbers if absolutely necessary to stop ongoing fraud.
Merchants love recurring charges. I'd wager for many businesses some non-trivial amount of their revenue comes from *unwanted* recurring charges that people just never canceled the service. Maybe they see the $9.95 and think "fuck, I have to cancel that" but don't and then forget about it until they see it again 3 months later.
I think credit card issuers *should* change your card number every year. It would have a slightly PITA quality to if you had a ton of automatic charges, but it would also mean the number would expire sooner rather than later and increase the chances that if the number were harvested somehow it wouldn't have a long life.
I'm sure VISA/MC/AMEX have min-maxed this idea to death and figured out that it would cost THEM more than it would gain THEM, even if it did reduce the level of fraud, but issuing banks would have more support work, more mailing costs, and the merchants don't want it because they want to keep enjoying free revenue.
I think sailboats are an option, but only at the very primitive end of a "marine bunker" because of the size/weight of deep battery capacity and the complexity of sailing a larger one with a very small crew.
A water maker would be an intrinsic part of this and I think one of the big advantages of a marine bunker -- a supply of useful fresh water is key for any survival situation. Most serious recreational cruises have water makers and they are indeed power hogs.
In my mind, the kind of thing I'm thinking of in a big picture sense is largely a floating solar and wind platform where the panels and wind generation can be folded up for mobility or weather hazards.
If you had fold-out panels on each side of roughly 50' x 10' and a couple of wind turbines, you could be looking at close to 10kW output in the day, enough to charge a lot of battery and run periodic heavy loads like a water maker or refrigeration.
The general idea is that the boat gives you mobility -- move away from hazardous areas. Isolation -- in any kind of "bunker" scenario, your largest threats come on foot or in wheeled vehicles, and anchored in 100' of water in a remote location you've but an extremely difficult physical barrier between you and threats. You gain limitless access to water, access to a natural food sources.
You can do this in a physical bunker, but the isolation part is harder and the structural hardening is more intense. You need a fortress.
The political and bureaucratic processes, let alone the other branches of government and the actual required cooperation of individuals required for truly destructive behavior by Trump largely mitigate the existential doom he's painted with. He's one man and can't really burn anything down on his own.
Hillary to me actually represents corporate authoritarianism, mostly because she's so invested in corporate power. The kinds of people she represents are the privileged apparatchiks of corporate authoritarianism -- the degreed professionals, lawyers, MBAs, bankers, CPAs and people with a literal stake in the preservation of the status quo.
Worse yet, she has managed to somehow synthesize their interests and the interests of the identity politics of the left, to where she is Janus-faced, at once a champion of Blacks, women, LGBTs and the status quo power structure. It's actually quite amazing she manages to hold high standing with both when traditionally such political bases represented antagonistic positions towards each other.
That she manages this leads me to believe she doesn't really represent either of them, and only represents her own will to power. The ideology of Hillary is the ideology of Hillary's political power, not any coherent representation of a political world view.
I'm 50 years old and have owned 3.5mm jack devices for about 40 of those years, starting with a Radio Shack pocket AM/FM radio, a good half dozen or more Walkman-style cassette players, most iPhone models, 3 iPods, and various PCs and laptops. Possibly 2 dozen devices added up.
I think I've had problems with 1-2 of the cassette Walkman devices and the headphone jacks getting static problems, but the others have been fine and never developed problems. The Walkmans mostly likely became problems because they just got used hard, jammed into pockets with stress on the jacks.
But I also wouldn't write off general improvements in construction of the jacks since then. We call it the 3.5mm jack like it hasn't changed, but over time everything about it has probably improved. Superior metallurgy means superior contacts with more durable spring force, more resistance to corrosion, engineering improvements in mounting such as tighter, closer tolerance mounting resulting in strain transferred to the housing and not the PCB.
IMHO, Bluetooth hasn't improved at all other than perhaps slightly on the audio quality side. Pairing is still a PITA, source devices are prone to wandering and shifting to other devices -- I've lost connections on my phone when the headphones in my car were still on, causing my phone to shift to my car headset despite me actively using a headset in the house.
Then there's Bluetooth's general limitations -- I've yet to see simultaneous pairing with a BT headset where you can get simultaneous mixed audio from two devices -- ie, why can't I pair my PC and phone at the same time and get audio from both in my headphones at the same time? Why do I have to fuck around disabling BT on one to shift the device to the other?
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When was this ever true? Apple ][+?
I worked in advertising in the 1990s and we replaced Apple parts constantly. Even the Apple replacement parts were duds, our vendor got into the habit of sending two motherboards because about 1/10 would be literally missing components -- bare spots on the board.
IMHO, the legend of Apple reliability is just a legend. The Scully era Macs were awful and prone to freezing -- whether that was hardware or software didn't really matter, but we always suspected hardware because it would happen on absolutely clean installs.
The return-of-Jobs-era G3s & G4s were probably an improvement, but I'm sure that was about changes in management as much as some magical engineering prowess.
I can have a comfortable chair because it doesn't have to conform to HR's ranking of who gets what kind of chair based on whether one is a manager or not (even to the point of whether it should be floral or plaid).
I think this taps into the subtle psychology that often opposes remote work.
I think part of the psychological value of being a "manager" is elevated status and power over people. That status is reinforced by the physical space controlled by a manager, the public display of differentiation in status (bigger office, better furniture) and social display of authority and the fealty received by inferiors.
What would "being a manager" be like if you were in charge of a team of workers who were all remote? It would be a lot of paper work and report generation and none of the status and power benefits.
My wife managed a national sales team (maybe 10 employees) who, 9 of whom, by nature of their positions, were remote. She traveled constantly to meet with them. I had a conversation with her about why she had to meet with them personally so often, and while some of this travel was tied to customer relationships (ie, meet with customer and sales person) a lot of it just seemed to have a physical manager presence occasionally.
My sense was that maybe a good 1/3 of her trips weren't really necessary but that they happened simply because of an expectation of having a first person management experience. And I think there was an institutional philosophy as well, as on an annual basis the excess trips had to amount to thousands of dollars in expenses.
To be remotely fair, gun shows can be a great place for people who are collectors to find items for their collections, just like any other flea market type sales event with a specific focus.
Although, IMHO, like collections of anything else the internet has kind of reduced the usefulness of gun shows -- web sites like Gunbroker make it far easier to find very specific models a collector may want.
I've read that criticism with regard to police shootings -- there's so many police forces and so many of them are small, use of force training has no chance of being uniform across all departments nor does the quantity and quality of training have a chance of being the same.
In the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area there are maybe three dozen suburbs plus the core cities, almost all with their own police departments not to mention 3-4 county sheriff departments (depending on how far out you want to measure the metro area). In theory a criminal could operate in a corner where 3 jurisdictions abut and no or low quality information sharing could hurt police efforts to combat crime as well.
It sure makes sense and leads one to believe there should be a single police force.
Although I can think of a couple of issues -- policing in downtown Minneapolis is a different ball game than policing in suburban St. Louis Park, so do separate departments adapt better to local environments better?
Then there's a kind of freedom argument -- does a panoply of law enforcement enhance freedom by diffusing authority and making it more accountable to local populations? Multiple organizations tend to make for a thinner layer of middle management as well. And the limits of scale to any one department would seem to serve as a limit on creating "intelligence" branches that focus on running stingrays and other surveillance systems.
I'm in sure in some ways it may be worse as well, a burglary in Minneapolis doesn't get much in terms of investigation while one in wealthy Edina may get more attention.
In some ways, I think a metro-area police department makes sense from a logistical perspective. Yet I suspect that it would possibly devolve into something not much different than we have now -- politics would dictate that a metro area force have individual precincts that generally followed existing geographic boundaries, essentially re-creating the same structure only less accountable and with more overhead.
From what I can figure, a 50 inch monitor is the point.
I'm probably going to pull the string on a 40 or 43" 4K TV as a monitor replacement because it will be useful at 100% scaling at that size screen and 4k resolution.
1920x1080 is like Fisher Price dot pitch on a large screen and approaching less useful on anything over 24".
I suspect it varies in the US with state law, but this is the same thing I've always been told by HR people in the United States when I've approached them about firing low performing employees or even employees with real problems like not showing up.
I had a technician that worked for me who began making a habit of using his vacation time on an ad-hoc basis -- he would leave me a voicemail at 8:29 AM telling me he was going to take a vacation day. When he was back in the office the following day I told him not to do it, and he did it again two weeks later. I sent him an email that time and told him it wasn't appropriate and not to do it anymore. After the third time not long after I talked to our HR assistant director and she told me I had to write a formal letter on company letterhead and then document (with followup letters) three more incidents, noting that termination would result if it continued to be able to fire him for cause.
IIRC, she said anything less and we got dinged for unemployment insurance by the state and/or were vulnerable to some kind of lawsuit (on what grounds a no-show white male in his late 20s could sue a white manager only 12 years his senior, I don't know).
And that was for obvious malfeasance. It was *worse* with an African American employee. He was hired in a support role bursting greenbar reports that ran overnight from a mainframe application. When that application went away, he got a new job title of PC support technician for which he was completely unqualified and which he performed terribly. We were literally doing double work for every ticket he worked.
HR said he couldn't be fired without basically being videotaped committing a felony. Because he got a new job title given to him, we were on the hook for his inability to do the job because it was the company's responsibility to vet his ability to do the job he was assigned (he got reclassed because he had some personal relationship with the controller and she pulled strings). And because he was black and like 2 other people in a company of 500 were black, pretty much any termination could be construed as discriminatory. The only way to fire him was to provide and pay for training for the job he was classed as and then give him months of letters and warnings and performance improvement plans with color glossy 8x10 photos with circles and arrows proving he couldn't do the job. Anything less than that and we might as well have written a check for $250k.
Ultimately we created a make-work project for which he was "leader" just to get him out of the way. He ended up quitting a few months later for a job as a youth sports coordinator. I ran into him a couple of years later and he actually acknowledged he knew he was terrible at the job.
Several chimps and gorillas have been taught ASL. One thing they do NOT do, is teach that language to their offspring. They do not pass on the knowledge.
If you had a group of 5 apes where two had sign language taught to them and three who did not and the apes who signed were rewarded for signing, would the non-signing apes begin to mimic sign language to try to obtain rewards?
If this was true, I wonder if apes could be induced to teach sign language to their offspring by rewarding them if they try to sign to their offspring or their offspring mimics signing.
I'm kind of inclined to believe no -- however apes communicate internally would be their native language, and sign language like a second language. If you speak a second language, you usually use your native language when raising your children and this is what they learn. You probably wouldn't teach them the second language unless there was some external reason to do so (ie, you lived in a multilingual community).
My brother and his wife are deaf and use ASL, and their kids, who aren't deaf, all learned ASL before spoken English.
Batty would have died anyway even if he didn't die at the end of Blade Runner.
I would think the death of Dr. Tyrell, and possibly Sebastian, would have been a problem for further development of replicants.
Get the Obama/Democratic White House behind this idea.
Not only will it enable another freebie giveaway, but left-leaning Zuckerberg will also be supplying an ideologically curated platform of left wing messages to the unwashed masses, ensuring that Democratic ideology remains front and center.
In-game bots may be operating on a limited view, but they're operating on actual hard data in basically machine-usable form. What's impressive about this is that it learns from what's on the screen -- distances, obstacles, paths, its location are all learned from visual input.
What I'm curious about is how adaptable their visual learning system is or whether it's extremely Doom specific. I'd also be curious at how long it took to learn to play. I'd also be curious what the learning curve was -- linear, non-linear, flat, steep or what.
If they were real lucky, they could have tossed it out and hit a refueling truck. With any luck they would have gotten enough of a fire going to knock out a couple of planes and maybe destroy a terminal wing in the process.
I do kind of wonder if maybe planes shouldn't have a containment vessel on the plane, some kind of portable cylinder that something dangerous could be thrown into that could be sealed tight.
I don't know what you'd make it out of, maybe some kind of steel cylinder with a ceramic liner. It'd probably be nice if it could be made explosion resistant to something like hand grenade levels to boot.
IMO, Apple's engineers need to stop kidding themselves by pretending that users care more about thin than about reliability.
Apple's engineers probably don't get to decide about this, they're just told it has to be thinner by a group of rich, effete old men who pretend that making really thin products is somehow good artistic design and that it means they are still relevant and virile.
That the camera lens is a bulbous protrusion since the iPhone 6 is probably an item of massive conflict between engineering and the "designers". Improving camera performance has been a design, marketing and engineering goal and one case where marketing and engineering are trumping the "design" goal of thinness. You simply can't get the performance required out of the camera and make is as generally thin as the rest of the phone...even if you remove the headphone jack.
Call me ignorant (and maybe somebody will), but my running impression of Indonesia is that of a semi-authoritarian government with a lot of laws controlling political speech and behavior in addition to probably enshrining majority religious beliefs in law.
In this context, the law seems entirely expected. The political hegemony wants to control them because they pose a political control risk, the religious leadership is probably eager to back anything that reinforces the ability to enforce religious power via civil law enforcement, and possibly a few sane, liberal/democracy minded people support it as a way to tamp down on political bosses using meme-speech to whip the unwashed mobs into a frenzy.
In the end, the forces of authoritarianism will have one more justification for going after speech contrary to the political goals of the authorities.
It's not news anymore than a report that it rained again in the rain forest.
The existing standards are fragmented and primitive. Home automation now isn't that much less complex than industrial automation and no single vendor sells everything or has enough reach into unintelligent devices to offer a comprehensive solution that literally does everything and does it easily.
This leaves room for big vendors like Apple or Google to roll in with their own take on the entire stack, complete with walled implementations that ignore other existing standards because those standards they can't license and control.
Then there's the adoption problems associated with home automation in existing homes. I doubt there's more than 10% of the population willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into serious automation like temperature sensors, adding HVAC dampers, power controls, replacing outlets and light switches and so on. People still have 4 remote controls on the coffee table.
More RAM would be useful for switching between apps so the app and its state stay in RAM, avoiding a swap out penalty for those that save their state, a swap in penalty for reloading that state, and worse, going to the network when the state isn't saved completely, or worse yet, those that just reset to a "just launched" mode whenever they get swapped out.
I bought what ended up being knockoff Anderson PowePole battery connectors off Amazon. They were so bad I couldn't even get continuity on one leg.
It was annoying but to Amazon's credit, they accepted the return despite the crimp pins being crimped with a stub of my battery cable still in them. Of course it cost me an inch and half of my cable.
Stupidly, the real product from a company web site who distributes actual Anderson connectors ended up being cheaper, but the site wasn't easy to find.
The real victim of course is Anderson whose products are being knocked off and sold by Amazon. My guess is the real fix for this is for the real maker to go after Amazon for selling shitty knockoffs.
I completely agree that bluetooth is feature poor.
Receivers should be able to mix multiple senders, and senders should be able to handle multiple receivers. How complex you want to make the mix controls would be up to the maker -- tiny headphones, straight up equal mix of all paired devices. A phone or larger device with a user interface? Custom levels, balance, mute, etc.
Bluetooth now is primitive. I suppose I should categorize it as a miracle technology and be glad it works at all but really it's clunky and clumsy to use.
I think the skeptics are onto something, but I figure if a group of people want to spend money on ways to do it, let 'em try and see what happens.
It's maybe too wishful thinking, but I like the idea.
My biggest objection to solar roadways is to what end the power is generated. Maybe in a residential neighborhood it's practical to drop it into the grid, but there's a lot of roadways where it's too rural or would never be practical to feed it anywhere. But there's a ton of parking lots that sit empty 90% of the time, and solar parking lots could be cheaper that elevated panels over of the parking lot.
I think the materials engineering could be developed to make solar panels that can be driven on. They make flexible panels already and I can see them as part of some flexible laminate sheet with a glass layer on top comprised of small tiles, like a sheet of bathroom tiles, with some kind of articulating joint in between tiles.
It would take a lot of engineering to make it work well, but I don't think it's impossible. Impossibly expensive to develop and possibly make, sure.
What I wonder, though, is what it might do for roads to essentially have a tough engineered surface like this. Asphalt and concrete have their own problems and if solar roads wore better because they were designed to be driven on and wear well, maybe it's real value will be as a better road surface and the power generation will just be a decent bonus.
That was basically his line in the first primary debate. He said politicians were for sale and that he had given several people sharing the stage with him checks. I guess I interpreted him as saying as a rich person he knew the system was corrupt first hand and that he wanted to reform it.
I think he could have communicated this a lot better but I think as the campaign has moved on his reform-centric direction has shifted.
Frankly I'm not surprised he used accounting wizardry to cut his tax burden. I'm sure all rich people do. What would be surprising would be a multimillionaire who had basically paid ordinary taxes without any tax avoidance strategy. I suspect if you don't use every tax dodge there is you will eventually get bled dry by taxes.
I guess I'll have to take my lumps and alternate between Visa and Amex.
Why not just make the fucking card an RSA token?
They could have done a million things to improve credit card security, but fraud is down their list of things to worry about. The credit card system (VISA/MC/AMEX, banks, etc) is designed to promote easy transactions, not security.
VISA just gets paid, they don't have any real liability. Issuing banks eat some fraud but they charge a lot of it back to merchants and make them carry the burden. And consumers eat some of it, though most of the time they can dispute credit charges with all the usual disclaimers about if they notice it, etc.
Fraud is only a problem to the credit card system when it represents an existential risk to the system. Other than that, as long as somebody else pays, there's a tolerable limit they just don't care about.
More security means, ultimately, fewer charges, and when you're getting paid a percentage of the charges, including fraudulent ones, you benefit most by reducing the transaction friction.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but I think that's why US card issuers don't change card numbers regularly -- they've been lobbied by their actual customers, merchants, to only change card numbers if absolutely necessary to stop ongoing fraud.
Merchants love recurring charges. I'd wager for many businesses some non-trivial amount of their revenue comes from *unwanted* recurring charges that people just never canceled the service. Maybe they see the $9.95 and think "fuck, I have to cancel that" but don't and then forget about it until they see it again 3 months later.
I think credit card issuers *should* change your card number every year. It would have a slightly PITA quality to if you had a ton of automatic charges, but it would also mean the number would expire sooner rather than later and increase the chances that if the number were harvested somehow it wouldn't have a long life.
I'm sure VISA/MC/AMEX have min-maxed this idea to death and figured out that it would cost THEM more than it would gain THEM, even if it did reduce the level of fraud, but issuing banks would have more support work, more mailing costs, and the merchants don't want it because they want to keep enjoying free revenue.
I think sailboats are an option, but only at the very primitive end of a "marine bunker" because of the size/weight of deep battery capacity and the complexity of sailing a larger one with a very small crew.
A water maker would be an intrinsic part of this and I think one of the big advantages of a marine bunker -- a supply of useful fresh water is key for any survival situation. Most serious recreational cruises have water makers and they are indeed power hogs.
In my mind, the kind of thing I'm thinking of in a big picture sense is largely a floating solar and wind platform where the panels and wind generation can be folded up for mobility or weather hazards.
If you had fold-out panels on each side of roughly 50' x 10' and a couple of wind turbines, you could be looking at close to 10kW output in the day, enough to charge a lot of battery and run periodic heavy loads like a water maker or refrigeration.
The general idea is that the boat gives you mobility -- move away from hazardous areas. Isolation -- in any kind of "bunker" scenario, your largest threats come on foot or in wheeled vehicles, and anchored in 100' of water in a remote location you've but an extremely difficult physical barrier between you and threats. You gain limitless access to water, access to a natural food sources.
You can do this in a physical bunker, but the isolation part is harder and the structural hardening is more intense. You need a fortress.
The political and bureaucratic processes, let alone the other branches of government and the actual required cooperation of individuals required for truly destructive behavior by Trump largely mitigate the existential doom he's painted with. He's one man and can't really burn anything down on his own.
Hillary to me actually represents corporate authoritarianism, mostly because she's so invested in corporate power. The kinds of people she represents are the privileged apparatchiks of corporate authoritarianism -- the degreed professionals, lawyers, MBAs, bankers, CPAs and people with a literal stake in the preservation of the status quo.
Worse yet, she has managed to somehow synthesize their interests and the interests of the identity politics of the left, to where she is Janus-faced, at once a champion of Blacks, women, LGBTs and the status quo power structure. It's actually quite amazing she manages to hold high standing with both when traditionally such political bases represented antagonistic positions towards each other.
That she manages this leads me to believe she doesn't really represent either of them, and only represents her own will to power. The ideology of Hillary is the ideology of Hillary's political power, not any coherent representation of a political world view.
I'm 50 years old and have owned 3.5mm jack devices for about 40 of those years, starting with a Radio Shack pocket AM/FM radio, a good half dozen or more Walkman-style cassette players, most iPhone models, 3 iPods, and various PCs and laptops. Possibly 2 dozen devices added up.
I think I've had problems with 1-2 of the cassette Walkman devices and the headphone jacks getting static problems, but the others have been fine and never developed problems. The Walkmans mostly likely became problems because they just got used hard, jammed into pockets with stress on the jacks.
But I also wouldn't write off general improvements in construction of the jacks since then. We call it the 3.5mm jack like it hasn't changed, but over time everything about it has probably improved. Superior metallurgy means superior contacts with more durable spring force, more resistance to corrosion, engineering improvements in mounting such as tighter, closer tolerance mounting resulting in strain transferred to the housing and not the PCB.
IMHO, Bluetooth hasn't improved at all other than perhaps slightly on the audio quality side. Pairing is still a PITA, source devices are prone to wandering and shifting to other devices -- I've lost connections on my phone when the headphones in my car were still on, causing my phone to shift to my car headset despite me actively using a headset in the house.
Then there's Bluetooth's general limitations -- I've yet to see simultaneous pairing with a BT headset where you can get simultaneous mixed audio from two devices -- ie, why can't I pair my PC and phone at the same time and get audio from both in my headphones at the same time? Why do I have to fuck around disabling BT on one to shift the device to the other?