I switched from AT&T to ting.com several years ago, and haven't had to put up with any contractual BS from them at all. They use a straightforward only-pay-for-what-you-use-each-month model with no contract or "plan" required (you do need to bring your own phone though). With my usage patterns, I end up paying about half what I used to pay to AT&T each month.
(disclaimer: I have no relation with ting.com, other than being a satisfied customer)
But I agree that fuel cells are not a practical option at the moment, but then neither were electric cars until quite recently.
Fuel cells can and maybe will be developed to the point of practicality, but at the rate things are going it will be too little, too late. By the time fuel cells are cheap enough for mass production AND a significant hydrogen-generation-and-distribution infrastructure is built out, battery-powered cars will be so cheap, high-performing, and ubiquitous that nobody will be interested in buying a fuel-cell-based car that offers no competitive advantages.
Selling fuel-cell cars in the 2020's will be like selling high-definition VHS tapes in the 2010's -- you could certainly do it, but the world has already moved on to something better.
An extension cord that reaches as far as a Tesla can range on a charge would weigh a hell of a lot more
One way to avoid that problem would be to make the extension cord static and allow multiple cars to share it.
Note that the cars could still contain batteries if desired, to allow for "off-grid" driving, but the batteries could be much smaller if the car is able to recharge while it is driving.
What difference does it make if I crowdfund the lock before it's made or after its on a shelf.
If you don't mind taking a gamble with your crowdfunding money, perhaps it doesn't make a difference.
If you do want some guarantee of value in exchange for your cash, OTOH, buying a product that's on the shelf gives you the option to research the product's quality before you part with your money, and also (usually) the option to return the product for a replacement or a refund if it turns out not the be suitable for purpose.
One off-the-wall idea: make the plane's wings and fuselage out of batteries/energy-storing material. The batteries will still be heavy, but then at least you get the rest of the airplane "for free".
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if that is even remotely practical)
People won't make or deploy killer robots "by accident". If a robot goes on a killing spree, it will be because somebody deliberately programmed it to go on a killing spree.
Are people perverse enough to make a machine that will deliberately kill other people, either based on specific entry-conditions or even just randomly? The existence and widespread use of land mines and car bombs demonstrates that the answer is yes.
So really we know the answer; we're only arguing about an implementation detail: exactly how sophisticated people will allow their automated killing machines' triggering-mechanisms to be.
Bitcoin has no value. It is just smoke and mirrors.
Also, Justin Beiber has no value, because I can't stand his music or his personality.
Also, Windows 10 has no value, because I don't like Microsoft and only use MacOS and Linux.
Also, stating that "X has no value" has no value, since that's really just a statement of your personal opinion of X's value to you. X obviously has some value, at least to the people who are using X, otherwise they would not be willing to pay money for X. It's a buyer's willingness to pay for X that defines X's value -- at least for that buyer. You can disagree with the buyer's estimate, but doing so is no more useful than disagreeing with their taste in music, or anything else.
"..an unbearable mental load" - a language is a tool, ffs, it has issues; so learn them and use it if you have to or become a florist.
Part of being an effective developer is choosing the right tool(s) for the job. If you choose poorly, you end up spending too much of your time fighting the mismatched tools rather than getting your program working, and you end up with a poor-performing/buggy/hard-to-maintain program that took a long time to develop and may have to be thrown out anyway.
Even a florist would know better than to use a jackhammer to trim bouquets.
The number of bugs in CPUs is an order of magnitude less than in most software. It has to be, because recalling a million CPUs is economically unfeasible. âoeRecallingâ a million software installs (via auto-update), OTOH, is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
You've never met Kudzu. Go ahead. Pull it up and come back a month later. The vine may be 30 feet long by the time you get back. It grows so fast, it's dangerous to sleep with your windows open.
If the robot needs to come back and pull the weed again the next day, it can do so. If it needs to come back every single day for the entire season to pull it again, it can do so. Robot's got nothing but time.
If I'm following you correctly, the problem isn't serialization per se but rather the fact that the deserialization is being done by the Java runtime (which has no way to validate the resulting objects against the application's requirements, since its deserialization code is application-independent, and also has the power to instantiate any kind of object, even those that are totally irrelevant to the task at hand), rather than by the application itself.
A user-supplied deserialization-routine, OTOH, has at least a chance of being secure in the face of invalid source data, since it can check to make sure that its constraints are correctly satisfied and reject the data if they aren't.
Of course, avoiding making every application developer write his own application-specific serialization/deserialization routines was largely the point of this Java feature, but in hindsight it appears that was a bad decision.
If you're a member of the class, you get $20 to $280, which is supposed to recompense you for the $5K you spent for the useless software...
You get $20 to $280 as compensation for having had to go without that useful software, right up until the time that you downloaded an over-the-air upgrade and got to start using useful software.
Whether or not that's a fair level of compensation, I don't know, but let's not pretend that software isn't easy to upgrade, or that Tesla hasn't been putting out regular upgrades to their software, or won't continue to do so in the future.
Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?
Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.
I suspect it's the product of some naive, young, male programmers, who have spent too much time alone, dealing with other people only as vague online constructs, and thus never developed much empathy or understanding regarding how their words and actions can affect other people. When everything and everyone is nothing more than pixels on a screen, nothing matters, so why not make a game about mass shootings?
Uber's system detected the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact. Fine. It them determined, 1.3 seconds before impact the the pedestrian was going to get hit if it did nothing.
What happened to the "swerve to avoid a collision" option? Maybe they were planning that for the v2.0 release?
Why didn't the Uber car have some similar sort of mechanism to detect a non-responsive "driver"?
Uber has always been a "let's just try something now and worry about the what-ifs later" kind of company. That they jumped into the self-driving car business without adequately thinking things through doesn't surprise me at all. I imagine we'll be witnessing a few more fiascos, if/when they make good on their plan to start flying people around in oversized drones.
The solution is simple: A well-informed electorate.
Okay, but that's begging the question -- how do you gain (or maintain) a well-informed electorate when the forgeries have become so realistic that distinguishing between a forgery and an authentic piece of information takes more skill than most people possess? Simply demanding that people become exponentially smarter isn't going to make them so, no matter how severely we chastise them.
Usually when people realize they don't have the skill to make a reliable determination about something for themselves, they look to a knowledgeable expert (or at least, a trustworthy authority figure) to help them make the right determination... but here again we now run into the same problem -- who is actually a valid expert or a trustworthy authority figure, and who is faking it? And even if the person in question is valid and trustworthy, how does the average person verify that what they are hearing that person say are things that person actually said, and not clever forgeries designed to mislead people?
How about -- in 10 years time nobody will be able to believe anything they read, hear, or see, at which point democracy becomes unworkable. As Jefferson famously said, a properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate -- but it's nearly impossible for anyone to be well-informed when every valid piece of information is competing with a cloud of equally-plausible forgeries, and even people operating in good faith can no longer discern what is or isn't real.
We are already seeing this occurring, with segments of society breaking off into their own enclosed media-bubbles, the walls of which become increasingly impermeable to inconvenient facts or reasoning, as any evidence that would traditionally cause them to adjust their worldview now simply gets dismissed as 'fake'. I see no reason to think it won't get worse over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Still no official explanation. ae911truth org
Does it really have to be spelled out for you?
Okay, fine: who do you know who lives in the UK, is frequently seen on the BBC, and has the ability to send information backwards through time?
I switched from AT&T to ting.com several years ago, and haven't had to put up with any contractual BS from them at all. They use a straightforward only-pay-for-what-you-use-each-month model with no contract or "plan" required (you do need to bring your own phone though). With my usage patterns, I end up paying about half what I used to pay to AT&T each month.
(disclaimer: I have no relation with ting.com, other than being a satisfied customer)
But I agree that fuel cells are not a practical option at the moment, but then neither were electric cars until quite recently.
Fuel cells can and maybe will be developed to the point of practicality, but at the rate things are going it will be too little, too late. By the time fuel cells are cheap enough for mass production AND a significant hydrogen-generation-and-distribution infrastructure is built out, battery-powered cars will be so cheap, high-performing, and ubiquitous that nobody will be interested in buying a fuel-cell-based car that offers no competitive advantages.
Selling fuel-cell cars in the 2020's will be like selling high-definition VHS tapes in the 2010's -- you could certainly do it, but the world has already moved on to something better.
An extension cord that reaches as far as a Tesla can range on a charge would weigh a hell of a lot more
One way to avoid that problem would be to make the extension cord static and allow multiple cars to share it.
Note that the cars could still contain batteries if desired, to allow for "off-grid" driving, but the batteries could be much smaller if the car is able to recharge while it is driving.
In a world without patents our PCs would be running 8086 chips made on 4nm fabs sold at 1$ a dozen.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster made out of those!
The West invested fully and China simply took the tech for free.
And what did we get in return? Mountains of affordable consumer goods at every big-box store.
Was it worth the trade? That's an undecidable matter of opinion, but let's not pretend the benefits only went in one direction.
Why shut down the entire country's internet, when you can just wrap the testing location in wire?
Of course, anyone with an electronic device could still just have his cheat-sheet cached on it locally...
It's worth noting that the Unreal Engine-powered simulation software was relatively new
Hmm, turns out the real world is different than the Unreal world. :/
What difference does it make if I crowdfund the lock before it's made or after its on a shelf.
If you don't mind taking a gamble with your crowdfunding money, perhaps it doesn't make a difference.
If you do want some guarantee of value in exchange for your cash, OTOH, buying a product that's on the shelf gives you the option to research the product's quality before you part with your money, and also (usually) the option to return the product for a replacement or a refund if it turns out not the be suitable for purpose.
One off-the-wall idea: make the plane's wings and fuselage out of batteries/energy-storing material. The batteries will still be heavy, but then at least you get the rest of the airplane "for free".
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if that is even remotely practical)
People won't make or deploy killer robots "by accident". If a robot goes on a killing spree, it will be because somebody deliberately programmed it to go on a killing spree.
Are people perverse enough to make a machine that will deliberately kill other people, either based on specific entry-conditions or even just randomly? The existence and widespread use of land mines and car bombs demonstrates that the answer is yes.
So really we know the answer; we're only arguing about an implementation detail: exactly how sophisticated people will allow their automated killing machines' triggering-mechanisms to be.
Bitcoin has no value. It is just smoke and mirrors.
Also, Justin Beiber has no value, because I can't stand his music or his personality.
Also, Windows 10 has no value, because I don't like Microsoft and only use MacOS and Linux.
Also, stating that "X has no value" has no value, since that's really just a statement of your personal opinion of X's value to you. X obviously has some value, at least to the people who are using X, otherwise they would not be willing to pay money for X. It's a buyer's willingness to pay for X that defines X's value -- at least for that buyer. You can disagree with the buyer's estimate, but doing so is no more useful than disagreeing with their taste in music, or anything else.
"..an unbearable mental load" - a language is a tool, ffs, it has issues; so learn them and use it if you have to or become a florist.
Part of being an effective developer is choosing the right tool(s) for the job. If you choose poorly, you end up spending too much of your time fighting the mismatched tools rather than getting your program working, and you end up with a poor-performing/buggy/hard-to-maintain program that took a long time to develop and may have to be thrown out anyway.
Even a florist would know better than to use a jackhammer to trim bouquets.
The number of bugs in CPUs is an order of magnitude less than in most software. It has to be, because recalling a million CPUs is economically unfeasible. âoeRecallingâ a million software installs (via auto-update), OTOH, is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
You've never met Kudzu. Go ahead. Pull it up and come back a month later. The vine may be 30 feet long by the time you get back. It grows so fast, it's dangerous to sleep with your windows open.
If the robot needs to come back and pull the weed again the next day, it can do so. If it needs to come back every single day for the entire season to pull it again, it can do so. Robot's got nothing but time.
If I'm following you correctly, the problem isn't serialization per se but rather the fact that the deserialization is being done by the Java runtime (which has no way to validate the resulting objects against the application's requirements, since its deserialization code is application-independent, and also has the power to instantiate any kind of object, even those that are totally irrelevant to the task at hand), rather than by the application itself.
A user-supplied deserialization-routine, OTOH, has at least a chance of being secure in the face of invalid source data, since it can check to make sure that its constraints are correctly satisfied and reject the data if they aren't.
Of course, avoiding making every application developer write his own application-specific serialization/deserialization routines was largely the point of this Java feature, but in hindsight it appears that was a bad decision.
If you're a member of the class, you get $20 to $280, which is supposed to recompense you for the $5K you spent for the useless software...
You get $20 to $280 as compensation for having had to go without that useful software, right up until the time that you downloaded an over-the-air upgrade and got to start using useful software.
Whether or not that's a fair level of compensation, I don't know, but let's not pretend that software isn't easy to upgrade, or that Tesla hasn't been putting out regular upgrades to their software, or won't continue to do so in the future.
Of course, because it couldn't be some naive, young, female programmers. Girls can't do anything wrong, after all.
Of course it could be -- anything is theoretically possible -- but in practice, it never is, is it?
Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?
Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.
I suspect it's the product of some naive, young, male programmers, who have spent too much time alone, dealing with other people only as vague online constructs, and thus never developed much empathy or understanding regarding how their words and actions can affect other people. When everything and everyone is nothing more than pixels on a screen, nothing matters, so why not make a game about mass shootings?
Uber's system detected the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact. Fine.
It them determined, 1.3 seconds before impact the the pedestrian was going to get hit if it did nothing.
What happened to the "swerve to avoid a collision" option? Maybe they were planning that for the v2.0 release?
Why didn't the Uber car have some similar sort of mechanism to detect a non-responsive "driver"?
Uber has always been a "let's just try something now and worry about the what-ifs later" kind of company. That they jumped into the self-driving car business without adequately thinking things through doesn't surprise me at all. I imagine we'll be witnessing a few more fiascos, if/when they make good on their plan to start flying people around in oversized drones.
He's only in his second year in office, man. Give him some time; he'll get around to it.
It is. Trump now has the upper hand. Kim needs the US a lot more than the US needs him.
Really? What does Kim need the US for?
The solution is simple: A well-informed electorate.
Okay, but that's begging the question -- how do you gain (or maintain) a well-informed electorate when the forgeries have become so realistic that distinguishing between a forgery and an authentic piece of information takes more skill than most people possess? Simply demanding that people become exponentially smarter isn't going to make them so, no matter how severely we chastise them.
Usually when people realize they don't have the skill to make a reliable determination about something for themselves, they look to a knowledgeable expert (or at least, a trustworthy authority figure) to help them make the right determination... but here again we now run into the same problem -- who is actually a valid expert or a trustworthy authority figure, and who is faking it? And even if the person in question is valid and trustworthy, how does the average person verify that what they are hearing that person say are things that person actually said, and not clever forgeries designed to mislead people?
How about -- in 10 years time nobody will be able to believe anything they read, hear, or see, at which point democracy becomes unworkable. As Jefferson famously said, a properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate -- but it's nearly impossible for anyone to be well-informed when every valid piece of information is competing with a cloud of equally-plausible forgeries, and even people operating in good faith can no longer discern what is or isn't real.
We are already seeing this occurring, with segments of society breaking off into their own enclosed media-bubbles, the walls of which become increasingly impermeable to inconvenient facts or reasoning, as any evidence that would traditionally cause them to adjust their worldview now simply gets dismissed as 'fake'. I see no reason to think it won't get worse over time.