So Amazon is doing all of this for free? If not, how are they not also just another third-party broker that charges a commission?
I think the difference would be that Amazon could leverage their existing software and hardware assets to provide this service at an extremely low cost relative to the costs incurred by the existing (and presumably less efficient) brokers.
It might be so low-cost to Amazon that they actually could afford to offer the service without charging any commission (and perhaps justify it by the fact that it decreases the costs of the materials they ship as part of their main business). At the very least it would allow them to charge a significantly lower commission than 15%, without taking a loss.
I suspect Amazon's primary motivation here is not to maximize profit from the lucrative trucker-industry (ha ha) but rather to streamline the movement of goods to/from their warehouses and distribution centers. If, as a side effect of that, they also streamline other trucking traffic, then so much the better.
Uber is at present running all of their autonomous vehicle tests with a driver in place. Now, which is easier to believe, that a professional driver in an instrumented test would run a red light, or that Uber would lie about which system was in control of the car at the time of the incident?
Does it matter what you consider "easier to believe"? All you are measuring is your own level of cynicism.
Is it possible for a self-driving car to malfunction and run a red light? Sure.
Is it possible for a human driver to malfunction and run a red light? Sure.
Does it make sense to decide "what really happened" based on our gut instinct that Uber must be always be lying? No, because we are rational adults who are able to admit our own ignorance of the facts and withhold judgement until we have something to base them on other than appeals to prejudice. Aren't we?
I'd prefer the President not line up the CEO of every large company in the land to come by and personally kiss his ass. It looks too much like thinly veiled coercion.
Or it could quote you a range: time remaining with light load, and time remaining with heavy load.
Or better yet, a line graph, with battery-percentage-left on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, with accurate logged information up to the present moment, and speculative prediction into the future (the line getting progressively wider as it proceeds to the right side of the graph, to indicate the greater likely margin of error). You could even use statistics or a neural network to dynamically adjust the speculative algorithm based on past behavior to make it become more accurate over time.
That would be a pretty cool Linux-style solution; but this is Apple; they prefer to make things simpler, not more elaborate, whenever possible.
News flash: people say things in "private" emails that they would know better to say in public.
You can bet that the various Republican counterparts to Podesta have written much, much worse in their own email records; the only reason you don't know for sure is because it suits Russia's purpose to withhold that information from you for the time being.
Since the RNC was also hacked, we have to assume that Putin is sitting on lots of juicy tidbits from the Trump campaign and other RNC officials, and will make use of that information to apply leverage/blackmail as it sees fit. If you're wondering why Trump is so improbably and vocally pro-Putin, consider the possibility that Putin has pictures of Trump having party sex with underage models (or something else that is similarly compromising), and has made Trump aware that he has them and will send them to Wikileaks (or wherever) if Trump displeases him.
So if during the next four years it seems as if Putin is running the Executive Branch by proxy; well, maybe he is.
Technology is failing if it falls on individuals to remember rules like this. They won't. Instead, services like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. should detect when emails contain fake links to login pages for email accounts or financial institutions, and warn the user that they are about to do something dumb.
Agreed, they should -- but even then it won't be sufficient, since the clever scammers will constantly be putting up new fake pages that Gmail/Yahoo/etc won't necessarily be able to detect. Gmail/Yahoo/etc can only do so much to protect users, short of a wholesale replacement of email with a more secure communications mechanism.
I think if there is one silver lining to this whole fiasco, it's that government and politicians might finally start taking seriously the need for proper online security measures. In particular for people in sensitive positions (like Podesta), some mandatory security training and mandatory use of two-factor authentication, dedicated authentication hardware, etc, would go a long way.
No, this is a poor cover story from someone who fucked up massively.
First rule of politics: never voluntarily admit to any wrongdoing, because everyone will immediately assume that your admission is actually a coverup for something worse, whether it is or not.
In this case, though, it's hard for me to imagine what could be worse. What do you think the actual mistake was?
Light work naturally will show more time left than playing a video game.
Well that's just it, isn't it? The time-remaining figure, even if calculated accurately based on what you're currently doing still likely bears little resemblance to the actual time you have left before your battery runs out.
Say I'm editing my source code in a text editor -- zero CPU / disk / network usage, very light load, and so my time-remaining figure is 9 hours.
Then I decide it's time to do a fresh compile, and my "make clean; make -j4" drives all cores to 100% and exercises the internal drive for several minutes. Now my time-remaining figure is 2 hours.
Then the compile ends, and the time-remaining figure is back to 8 hours.
Which of those figures was correct? Answer: none of them was. The only way to get a correct figure would be to predict how many times I'm going to recompile in the future. So why bother making up a number that clearly is not going to be correct anyway? It only confuses the issue.
The same thing is true of USB ports- only if all of them break is there a problem. And they're interchangeable too.
Agreed; that is one big advantage of a single port type that does everything, over multiple single-purpose ports. Now Apple wants to take that further by standardizing on a single flavor of USB that can handle all types of peripherals (even high-bandwidth ones like video cards and high-speed storage) rather than just the low-to-medium-bandwidth ones. They may or may not be acting prematurely there, but I can see their motivation in doing it.
Sure, but this is true if one or more of the ports on your MBP breaks too, no?
It's true only if all of them break. If only one of them breaks, then I can use one the other ones, since they are all 100% interchangeable. (I can even connect a USB hub, if need be, to add more ports, should the need arise)
It just seems that a lot of Apple users will go to any length to justify whatever Apple forces them do and avoid having to say anything negative about Apple hardware. They also seem to get very cranky (like SuperKendall, for example) if anyone dares to disagree or says they don't like something about Apple hardware. It's seems like cognitive dissonance to me.
That's also true -- the people who are 100% pro-Apple are just as off-base as the people who are 100%-anti-Apple. The correct (IMHO) way to view the situation is that Apple is doing its usual "sacrifice the present to better fit the future" thing, which has both its pluses and its minuses. Some people feel the minuses more acutely than others, depending on their work environment. My feeling is, buy a Mac if you like what Apple's doing; don't buy a Mac if you don't like it; there's no need to get emotional either way. But in two or three years (if all goes according to Apple's plan, anyway), all this controversy will be forgotten and people will simply take USB-C's ubiquity for granted, much the way we take USB-A for granted now.
True, but irrelevant, since the level of computing performance I realistically can make use of doesn't grow significantly from one year to the next. Once computers became "fast enough", (let's say, around 2010, software-bloat issues notwithstanding), they remain "fast enough", and the fact that people with greater needs (or enthusiasm) still have the option of paying more to get additional computing power doesn't effect me one way or the other.
If you lose your dongle or it dies or breaks, you're dead in the water. On any other laptop this isn't a problem, but on the MBP it's a make-or-break kind of situation.
Dead in the water until you procure another $10 dongle, true.
On any other laptop, OTOH, if your HDMI or VGA or Ethernet or (insert your favorite purpose-specific port type here) port breaks, you're dead in the water until you send the laptop in to get the port repaired, or replace the laptop entirely.
I find the removal of USB ports to be a blatantly user-hostile design choice; there's no possible excuse for it except to drive the sale of dongles.
Yes, $10 dongles are definitely the profit center that makes Apple rich and drives all of their decision-making. I heard they are going to kill off all of their other product lines and make only dongles in the future:)
Okay, sarcasm generator off: Actually Apple is trying to force people to upgrade to USB-C everything, the way that they forced people to upgrade from serial mice to USB-A mice back in the day. Whether you consider that "user-hostile" or not depends on how you evaluate the trade-off between the short-term pain (from having to use dongles and/or having to upgrade) vs the long-term convenience of having literally all of your devices use a single type of port that (allegedly) has enough bandwidth and capacity for anything you could want to plug in to it.
Also, at one time, Bill Gates also thought Santa Claus was real. Who cares? What's important is whether he is having a beneficial effect now, or likely will in the future.
This is a great initiative and I applaud Bill Gates and the rest for spearheading this, but I can't help but feel like this is giving government and industry and an easy way out of doing what they should have been doing themselves already.
Well, probably -- but it doesn't seem likely that they were going to do the right thing anyway.
If you can imagine The Donald reading this article and saying "Great! Thanks to Bill Gates, I'm now off the hook and no longer have to worry about climate change", you've got a better imagination than I do. He was already off the hook, by virtue of Not Giving a F*ck.
Would it be terribly inconsiderate of me to point out that by the standards of even a decade ago, my home computer is very reliable, very affordable, and extremely high performance?
There's no reason energy sources can't eventually check all of the boxes either; it's just a matter of time and effort to get there.
Traditionally more profit is correlated to having more customers, but if/when it becomes the case that these companies have to choose between more customers and more profit, they are going to choose the latter.
Ha! We thought of that. That's why we have the meta-NSA, whose job is to spy on the NSA and try to figure out what they are up to. But you didn't hear that from me.
The concept of "offsetting" your bad behavior by purchasing carbon credits or investing in "green energy" is complete bullshit. It is the same concept that sociopaths use to justify their behavior. You can't buy your way to being good.
You know how to lose weight? By exercising. Even if you weigh 500 lbs and can only barely walk around the block once, by doing that pathetically inadequate one-block walk that you set up the conditions so that next week you can walk around the block twice, and next month you can walk several miles. Next year maybe you weigh only 300 lbs and can jog, and the year after that you've dropped to 180 lbs and can run a marathon.
Similarly, neither Apple nor any other industrial giant is going to be able to transition to 100% clean energy on day one. But they can start the transition, one small step at a time, and someday they'll get there, judgmental naysayers notwithstanding.
I think you are underestimating the role that consumers play in their own downfall.
Cigarettes are bad for you, and everybody knows this, but millions of smokers buy them anyway. Nobody (outside of their own addiction) is forcing them to do so.
HCFS is bad for you, but it makes food taste better -- or at least, it makes people more likely to buy the food. So when company A adds HCFS, its sales increase, and if company B refuses to, it loses market share and might go out of business. Again, nobody is forcing consumers to buy foods with more HCFS, rather it turns out they do so on their own when given the choice.
I'm sure there are people in government (as well as in industry) who value maximizing profit over maximizing health, but they aren't the only bad actors here. There are many areas where people knowingly make health-negative decisions for themselves, simply because they value the short-term enjoyment more than the long-term health benefits.
I don't have any good solution to propose for that problem, but I think any workable solution will have to take that into account rather than just blaming all bad outcomes solely on the supply side.
Is the fact that people do this kind of really clever shit for more or less ordinary income, is it proof that the economy is in some way broken?
The economy undoubtedly is broken in many ways, but I think exploits like this are less about the economy and more about programmers getting bored and wanting to show off how clever they are; and if they can also make some money doing it, so much the better.
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So Amazon is doing all of this for free? If not, how are they not also just another third-party broker that charges a commission?
I think the difference would be that Amazon could leverage their existing software and hardware assets to provide this service at an extremely low cost relative to the costs incurred by the existing (and presumably less efficient) brokers.
It might be so low-cost to Amazon that they actually could afford to offer the service without charging any commission (and perhaps justify it by the fact that it decreases the costs of the materials they ship as part of their main business). At the very least it would allow them to charge a significantly lower commission than 15%, without taking a loss.
I suspect Amazon's primary motivation here is not to maximize profit from the lucrative trucker-industry (ha ha) but rather to streamline the movement of goods to/from their warehouses and distribution centers. If, as a side effect of that, they also streamline other trucking traffic, then so much the better.
My sister bought an Apple laptop because "the Windows one got viruses". Here daughters would click on anything.
So, has the Apple laptop got viruses yet?
Uber is at present running all of their autonomous vehicle tests with a driver in place. Now, which is easier to believe, that a professional driver in an instrumented test would run a red light, or that Uber would lie about which system was in control of the car at the time of the incident?
Does it matter what you consider "easier to believe"? All you are measuring is your own level of cynicism.
Is it possible for a self-driving car to malfunction and run a red light? Sure.
Is it possible for a human driver to malfunction and run a red light? Sure.
Does it make sense to decide "what really happened" based on our gut instinct that Uber must be always be lying? No, because we are rational adults who are able to admit our own ignorance of the facts and withhold judgement until we have something to base them on other than appeals to prejudice. Aren't we?
I'd prefer the President not line up the CEO of every large company in the land to come by and personally kiss his ass. It looks too much like thinly veiled coercion.
Or it could quote you a range: time remaining with light load, and time remaining with heavy load.
Or better yet, a line graph, with battery-percentage-left on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, with accurate logged information up to the present moment, and speculative prediction into the future (the line getting progressively wider as it proceeds to the right side of the graph, to indicate the greater likely margin of error). You could even use statistics or a neural network to dynamically adjust the speculative algorithm based on past behavior to make it become more accurate over time.
That would be a pretty cool Linux-style solution; but this is Apple; they prefer to make things simpler, not more elaborate, whenever possible.
News flash: people say things in "private" emails that they would know better to say in public.
You can bet that the various Republican counterparts to Podesta have written much, much worse in their own email records; the only reason you don't know for sure is because it suits Russia's purpose to withhold that information from you for the time being.
Since the RNC was also hacked, we have to assume that Putin is sitting on lots of juicy tidbits from the Trump campaign and other RNC officials, and will make use of that information to apply leverage/blackmail as it sees fit. If you're wondering why Trump is so improbably and vocally pro-Putin, consider the possibility that Putin has pictures of Trump having party sex with underage models (or something else that is similarly compromising), and has made Trump aware that he has them and will send them to Wikileaks (or wherever) if Trump displeases him.
So if during the next four years it seems as if Putin is running the Executive Branch by proxy; well, maybe he is.
Technology is failing if it falls on individuals to remember rules like this. They won't. Instead, services like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. should detect when emails contain fake links to login pages for email accounts or financial institutions, and warn the user that they are about to do something dumb.
Agreed, they should -- but even then it won't be sufficient, since the clever scammers will constantly be putting up new fake pages that Gmail/Yahoo/etc won't necessarily be able to detect. Gmail/Yahoo/etc can only do so much to protect users, short of a wholesale replacement of email with a more secure communications mechanism.
I think if there is one silver lining to this whole fiasco, it's that government and politicians might finally start taking seriously the need for proper online security measures. In particular for people in sensitive positions (like Podesta), some mandatory security training and mandatory use of two-factor authentication, dedicated authentication hardware, etc, would go a long way.
No, this is a poor cover story from someone who fucked up massively.
First rule of politics: never voluntarily admit to any wrongdoing, because everyone will immediately assume that your admission is actually a coverup for something worse, whether it is or not.
In this case, though, it's hard for me to imagine what could be worse. What do you think the actual mistake was?
Light work naturally will show more time left than playing a video game.
Well that's just it, isn't it? The time-remaining figure, even if calculated accurately based on what you're currently doing still likely bears little resemblance to the actual time you have left before your battery runs out.
Say I'm editing my source code in a text editor -- zero CPU / disk / network usage, very light load, and so my time-remaining figure is 9 hours.
Then I decide it's time to do a fresh compile, and my "make clean; make -j4" drives all cores to 100% and exercises the internal drive for several minutes. Now my time-remaining figure is 2 hours.
Then the compile ends, and the time-remaining figure is back to 8 hours.
Which of those figures was correct? Answer: none of them was. The only way to get a correct figure would be to predict how many times I'm going to recompile in the future. So why bother making up a number that clearly is not going to be correct anyway? It only confuses the issue.
The same thing is true of USB ports- only if all of them break is there a problem. And they're interchangeable too.
Agreed; that is one big advantage of a single port type that does everything, over multiple single-purpose ports. Now Apple wants to take that further by standardizing on a single flavor of USB that can handle all types of peripherals (even high-bandwidth ones like video cards and high-speed storage) rather than just the low-to-medium-bandwidth ones. They may or may not be acting prematurely there, but I can see their motivation in doing it.
Sure, but this is true if one or more of the ports on your MBP breaks too, no?
It's true only if all of them break. If only one of them breaks, then I can use one the other ones, since they are all 100% interchangeable. (I can even connect a USB hub, if need be, to add more ports, should the need arise)
It just seems that a lot of Apple users will go to any length to justify whatever Apple forces them do and avoid having to say anything negative about Apple hardware. They also seem to get very cranky (like SuperKendall, for example) if anyone dares to disagree or says they don't like something about Apple hardware. It's seems like cognitive dissonance to me.
That's also true -- the people who are 100% pro-Apple are just as off-base as the people who are 100%-anti-Apple. The correct (IMHO) way to view the situation is that Apple is doing its usual "sacrifice the present to better fit the future" thing, which has both its pluses and its minuses. Some people feel the minuses more acutely than others, depending on their work environment. My feeling is, buy a Mac if you like what Apple's doing; don't buy a Mac if you don't like it; there's no need to get emotional either way. But in two or three years (if all goes according to Apple's plan, anyway), all this controversy will be forgotten and people will simply take USB-C's ubiquity for granted, much the way we take USB-A for granted now.
True, but irrelevant, since the level of computing performance I realistically can make use of doesn't grow significantly from one year to the next. Once computers became "fast enough", (let's say, around 2010, software-bloat issues notwithstanding), they remain "fast enough", and the fact that people with greater needs (or enthusiasm) still have the option of paying more to get additional computing power doesn't effect me one way or the other.
If you lose your dongle or it dies or breaks, you're dead in the water. On any other laptop this isn't a problem, but on the MBP it's a make-or-break kind of situation.
Dead in the water until you procure another $10 dongle, true.
On any other laptop, OTOH, if your HDMI or VGA or Ethernet or (insert your favorite purpose-specific port type here) port breaks, you're dead in the water until you send the laptop in to get the port repaired, or replace the laptop entirely.
I find the removal of USB ports to be a blatantly user-hostile design choice; there's no possible excuse for it except to drive the sale of dongles.
Yes, $10 dongles are definitely the profit center that makes Apple rich and drives all of their decision-making. I heard they are going to kill off all of their other product lines and make only dongles in the future :)
Okay, sarcasm generator off: Actually Apple is trying to force people to upgrade to USB-C everything, the way that they forced people to upgrade from serial mice to USB-A mice back in the day. Whether you consider that "user-hostile" or not depends on how you evaluate the trade-off between the short-term pain (from having to use dongles and/or having to upgrade) vs the long-term convenience of having literally all of your devices use a single type of port that (allegedly) has enough bandwidth and capacity for anything you could want to plug in to it.
Also, at one time, Bill Gates also thought Santa Claus was real. Who cares? What's important is whether he is having a beneficial effect now, or likely will in the future.
This is a great initiative and I applaud Bill Gates and the rest for spearheading this, but I can't help but feel like this is giving government and industry and an easy way out of doing what they should have been doing themselves already.
Well, probably -- but it doesn't seem likely that they were going to do the right thing anyway.
If you can imagine The Donald reading this article and saying "Great! Thanks to Bill Gates, I'm now off the hook and no longer have to worry about climate change", you've got a better imagination than I do. He was already off the hook, by virtue of Not Giving a F*ck.
Would it be terribly inconsiderate of me to point out that by the standards of even a decade ago, my home computer is very reliable, very affordable, and extremely high performance?
There's no reason energy sources can't eventually check all of the boxes either; it's just a matter of time and effort to get there.
Not "sperm donor".
I'm not sure that counts as a job. i.e. Working an 8-hour shift, 5 days a week would be difficult for most.
wrong, no one want human interaction with restaurant staff.
AFAICT the only reason to go to a restaurant like "Hooters" is the interaction with the restaurant staff.
Most companies want MORE customers, not less.
Well, they want more profit, not less.
Traditionally more profit is correlated to having more customers, but if/when it becomes the case that these companies have to choose between more customers and more profit, they are going to choose the latter.
But who protects us from the NSA?
Ha! We thought of that. That's why we have the meta-NSA, whose job is to spy on the NSA and try to figure out what they are up to. But you didn't hear that from me.
The concept of "offsetting" your bad behavior by purchasing carbon credits or investing in "green energy" is complete bullshit. It is the same concept that sociopaths use to justify their behavior. You can't buy your way to being good.
You know how to lose weight? By exercising. Even if you weigh 500 lbs and can only barely walk around the block once, by doing that pathetically inadequate one-block walk that you set up the conditions so that next week you can walk around the block twice, and next month you can walk several miles. Next year maybe you weigh only 300 lbs and can jog, and the year after that you've dropped to 180 lbs and can run a marathon.
Similarly, neither Apple nor any other industrial giant is going to be able to transition to 100% clean energy on day one. But they can start the transition, one small step at a time, and someday they'll get there, judgmental naysayers notwithstanding.
Where did you get the idea that we're going to kill people?
I think you are underestimating the role that consumers play in their own downfall.
Cigarettes are bad for you, and everybody knows this, but millions of smokers buy them anyway. Nobody (outside of their own addiction) is forcing them to do so.
HCFS is bad for you, but it makes food taste better -- or at least, it makes people more likely to buy the food. So when company A adds HCFS, its sales increase, and if company B refuses to, it loses market share and might go out of business. Again, nobody is forcing consumers to buy foods with more HCFS, rather it turns out they do so on their own when given the choice.
I'm sure there are people in government (as well as in industry) who value maximizing profit over maximizing health, but they aren't the only bad actors here. There are many areas where people knowingly make health-negative decisions for themselves, simply because they value the short-term enjoyment more than the long-term health benefits.
I don't have any good solution to propose for that problem, but I think any workable solution will have to take that into account rather than just blaming all bad outcomes solely on the supply side.
Is the fact that people do this kind of really clever shit for more or less ordinary income, is it proof that the economy is in some way broken?
The economy undoubtedly is broken in many ways, but I think exploits like this are less about the economy and more about programmers getting bored and wanting to show off how clever they are; and if they can also make some money doing it, so much the better.
Not my fault their business model is not profitable.
Not their fault your web browser is insecure?