If the US Government was directing a ton of money to a space based internet system run by SpaceX or Amazon, one would imagine/. community would go crazy with people yelling about unfair subsidies. But somehow if the same money gets dropped in AT&T/Verizon's lap it's ok?
Well, if we're being fair here, we'd have to say that it's either OK in both cases, or in neither case.
I don't know that's fair. I think it's reasonable to feel differently about those things. Musk actually delivers on his government contracts. The telcos, on the other hand...
I'm not saying that usable satellite internet is impossible, but I am saying that it's probably not as easy or as close to rollout as some might think.
The existing GEO satellite internet is perfectly usable for ordinary purposes. You can stream SD video, you can download things quickly... granted, some crappy websites that do a lot of back and forth chatter between site and browser are painfully slow, and realtime interactive gaming is right out, but satellite internet isn't horrible.
You can make some no-true-scottsman arguments about EIT but the reality UBI has been tried and more or less exists now
EITC and UBI are fundamentally different as you get UBI whether or not you earn anything.
Hmm capitalism has proven it can support a larger population than economic system in place before it ever has.
Agreed.
Every single claim population bomb, chicken little sky is falling prediction has been wrong; why should this time be different?
Every one before has been the same. This one is fundamentally different because it attacks the class of jobs that the people who've lost their jobs traditionally defected to.
Otherwise, we need something other than capitalism, or we're gonna have to kill off a whole lot of people.
Nope Nope and Nope. The birthrate in the most capitalistic parts of the world is already below the replacement rate.
You don't understand the argument. If people don't have jobs, and they don't have UBI, then they're just going to be problems to be disposed of.
As I tell my Python-enamored son every day: "Python is just Perl with the curly bits rubbed off". What I don't say is Perl just a universal scripting language and little better than Shell Scripts on any system.
No way. Perl is grossly better than shell scripts, at least where the job is better done with perl. Some very simple jobs are still best done with a shell script. If you have to do anything complicated, though, perl is going to use a lot less resources because you're not having to construct complex pipes to do simple things.
Perl only ever made sense where there was a lot of string handling to do. Alas, people used it for other things as well because they understood perl, but not the languages they should have been using (Mostly C or C++, in Perl's heyday.)
Outside of Europe he was a horrible person and very nearly himself a war criminal.
So, like both Bushes, or like Obama? Or Trump, of course, drone strikes have actually increased under Trump, to a secret extent. Obama promised the most transparent administration in history, and delivered the least; Trump's is even more opaque.
Housing costs are up in some markets due to the return to normal interest rates thanks to the thriving economy and very low unemployment rate.
Inflation means bad things for wage earners, because the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in decades, and because all wages are related to the minimum wage.
The unemployment rate is low because it doesn't account for people who are underemployed, that is, they are working one or more jobs and still can't pay all their bills, so they are simply going further and further into debt in order to survive. It also doesn't account for people who have given up looking for full-time employment, or people who have been unemployed long enough that they no longer quality for unemployment insurance. You are looking at the U-3 rate; you should be looking at the U-6 rate. It accounts for more of these people. Even it is a lie, real unemployment is much higher, but at least it is in the ballpark.
Of course there will be a recession at some point in the future, just no signs of one today.
Many economists disagree. There absolutely are signs of one today. Whether that means there will be one this year or next is another question, but there are indisputably common signs of a recession occurring right now.
Economics 101, if you aren't growing you are dying
It is because of absurd statements like this that I do not take seriously economists.
Like most statements of this nature, it is grossly misunderstood.
An individual company is dying if it's not growing, because sooner or later someone with greater economies of scale will show up to eat its lunch.
The total market doesn't have to grow for individual companies to grow. Others only have to fail.
With that said, we could have endless growth if only we had kept the space program going after winning the space race, instead of stopping when the USSR went bankrupt. Space is the only place where [effectively] endless growth is possible. Sadly, if climate change becomes severe enough, no species might ever make it off of this mudball. Can't reasonably reach the point of refining aluminum without going through an iron age, and can't have another iron age if all the trivially mined iron has rusted away to oxides.
He's the only candidate promoting the only realistic patch on capitalism. If you want capitalism to continue supporting our population, we're gonna need UBI. Otherwise, we need something other than capitalism, or we're gonna have to kill off a whole lot of people. And the targets are gonna be you and me, since we're not part of the 1%.
If you've ever had your car rumble sitting next to a semi idling at a light, you know the answer to that question. There's a ton of wasted energy there for urban areas.
Auto start-stop doesn't require a PHEV, though. A mild hybrid will do just fine.
Freeway long haul? Well, there are efficiencies at 65mph too.....my prius goes into electric silent mode every time I go downhill no matter how fast I'm going.
Diesels are very good about not wasting fuel. But there's regen...
Sure, if you're driving a 12 mpg truck, getting a new hybrid with 40 mpg will be better, but it had to be made first.
Hybrid systems don't have good trip mileage, they have good in-town mileage. At low speeds drag doesn't play a sizable part in energy consumption, but regenerative braking does. Hybrids only make sense for making mostly short trips. For making only short trips, EVs make more sense. For making only long trips, diesels are best. Gasoline is useful for motorsport, and string trimmers, but we could use ethanol for that stuff.
The real question has to do with miles traveled daily, and drive cycle. Hybrids save the most fuel in stop-and-go traffic. Hybrids (or even full EVs) make sense for school buses or garbage trucks, but not so much for long haul. The particular place they could shine, though, is in port drayage. There are also additional considerations in particular locations. Some states (California in particular) prohibit idling, so you have to use an expensive and typically failure-prone APU to provide power for climate control while stationary.
Q2 Tesla deliveries are going to be even worse, with Jaguar and Mercedes offering luxury electric vehicles that actually go through some form of QC before they're sold to the public.
I know jack about Jags, but Mercedes is just another car. Has been ever since the 1990s. 1991 is the last time they overbuilt a car. Unless you're buying a UNIMOG, a Mercedes isn't any more reliable than anything else.
For cars and cell phones, energy density matters a lot. For stationary home and industrial scale installations, it matters much less. Are lithium ion batteries still the best choice for such applications?
It depends on how you measure. If your primary consideration is TCO then yes. Otherwise, LiFePo4 is currently the best battery chemistry you can buy. It holds almost as much as LiPo, but it's as stable as NiMH, and it has as many charge cycles as Li-Ion. Unfortunately, it costs about twice as much as Li-Ion.
I keep wondering how light passenger cars got the hybrid treatment first and long-haul trucks still haven't
Trains didn't have batteries until recently. Instead of regenerative braking, diesel-electric locomotives used a carbon pile beneath the engine to dissipate the motor braking energy. Cars went hybrid first because it was easier to build them, because they didn't have such large power-handling requirements.
Obviously the first applications should be self driving Buses, Long Haul 18 wheelers, Garbage Trucks, etc. etc.
Ford is a minor player in heavy trucks. The biggest trucks they make are class 7. Hotel buses, airport shuttles, dump trucks, box trucks, school buses (I don't think anyone is still making a Ford or GMC school bus, but I could be wrong), etc. The big players in heavy trucks in the US are Freightliner (Mercedes), Peterbilt and Kenworth (both owned by Paccar), International-Navistar, Volvo (Geely), and Mack (also Volvo/Geely). Ford worked with what they had, which is to say minivans (Transit). Autonomous minivans have the potential to absolutely destroy the city bus, as well as completely dominate medical and disabled transport. But as Ford has figured out, Class 5 AVs are still some way off.
Daimler, the world's largest truck manufacturer, is doing the long-haul trucking research, and has been. They have level 2 trucks now, and are working their way up. I predict that they'll be at level 3 for a long time, but I suppose that remains to be seen.
The real problems are that there is an entire industry based on pushing Windows, training people to use Windows, writing books about Windows, etc. etc.
I use both Windows and Linux. Time was I spent more time in Linux. I had an environment I really enjoyed. GNOME 2, Emerald, Compiz, avant-window-navigator, all my hardware well-supported. Great performance. But now most of that stuff doesn't work right (if it can even be built) and I'm back in Windows 7. It has its own stupid quirks, some of them by design, but in general it's got user-friendliness on its side. Most things can be accomplished either from the command line or the GUI. It runs my software. I can boot into it from Linux or boot my Linux disk from it using vmware player. I actually paid my own cash money for Windows 7 pro on purpose because I wanted to run Windows software. I spend my time in it on purpose because it's a nice place to be. It looks pretty nice, there's boatloads of software for it (including ye olde GNU userland in the form of cygwin) and these days it generally works.
For my part, I will go where the software is. I had a free M.2 slot so I got a cheap SSD and put Devuan on it. If I have a problem with Windows, I've got a whole other operating system to fall back on. I boot it up in vmware occasionally and run my updates. It's there if I need Linux to run something, but I seldom do.
Do you have Home? 64 or 32? Professional? Game? Ultimate? Server? SP1,2, 3 or 4? Do you have WinXP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10? For some windows programs, are you licensed for the 4 core 2 processor system? What cores/processor do you HAVE?!?!?!?
Since Vista, none of that stuff has been very relevant. For the most part, you just clicky clicky and you get the right thing. Websites detect whether you're using 32 or 64 bit and offer you the 64 bit download only if it looks like you can handle it. Microsoft hassles you to upgrade. Very little software requires Windows later than Vista. Windows since Vista supports all your cores.
The difference to most (even pretty technical users) is that when you're done with the install, Windows will give you a modern OS* capable of running apps many (not all) people really need, and providing capabilities no Linux system really can (pen, touch, dials, etc. for CAD, design, visualization, etc.)
All of that stuff happened for me when I installed Ubuntu on a T900. Everything worked right away, including the wacom pen/touch. But as you say, the apps aren't there. So the system is still running Windows 7.
I think we need to redefine what an "average" computer user is these days. I am not even sure what that would be.
People who spend 99% of their time in either the browser, or an app that came from an app store, or an app in the browser that came from the browser app store. The median user spends 100% of their time in one of these ways. Only an infinitesimal percentage of "computer users" are doing anything else. In some ways this is a clear victory, because computing has become so ubiquitous. But it remains to be seen what computing's future looks like, and it may include even less general purpose computing devices.
I have plenty of complaints with MS, but they actually do a pretty good job on backwards compatibility.
Backwards compatibility is a two (or more) edged sword. It increases attack surface. Microsoft's security problems surely result from a combination of incompetence and the fact that they're doing a very difficult job. These days, it's generally smartest to run an old version of the OS in a VM to get backwards compatibility. It's much easier, the performance is very good in most cases, and desktop machines have so much more RAM and so many more cores now than they used to that the VM hardly takes up any notable system resources. It makes many things much easier. The only things that really still need to run on the bare metal are graphics-intensive applications, and even many of those do okay with modern VM graphics drivers.
the fact that updates are a big deal on Windows machines makes people aware of them. They are aware when one exists and if they haven't done it.
Why wouldn't you want it to just happen? Oh right, because an update from Microsoft is more likely than most to require a reboot, to perform said reboot without asking, and also to cause the system to not boot. All of that stuff has happened on Linux systems before, no doubt, but in general they are polite and accommodating. That Windows has to make a big deal about successful updates is a sign of how often they go wrong.
A linux distro with a security CLippy would give people more confidence something was out there keeping them safe and healthy
Possibly they should include a widget which displays system news in the corner of the desktop. But then someone has to come up with some nice comprehensible news for the users. In general, I'd prefer not to hear about it unless I need to do something.
Slashdot Mirror
if you really need a cop on every corner or a gun to feel safe do your family a favour and move to a safe country.
Name a safe country.
Hint: There is no such thing
If the US Government was directing a ton of money to a space based internet system run by SpaceX or Amazon, one would imagine /. community would go crazy with people yelling about unfair subsidies. But somehow if the same money gets dropped in AT&T/Verizon's lap it's ok?
Well, if we're being fair here, we'd have to say that it's either OK in both cases, or in neither case.
I don't know that's fair. I think it's reasonable to feel differently about those things. Musk actually delivers on his government contracts. The telcos, on the other hand...
I'm not saying that usable satellite internet is impossible, but I am saying that it's probably not as easy or as close to rollout as some might think.
The existing GEO satellite internet is perfectly usable for ordinary purposes. You can stream SD video, you can download things quickly... granted, some crappy websites that do a lot of back and forth chatter between site and browser are painfully slow, and realtime interactive gaming is right out, but satellite internet isn't horrible.
You can make some no-true-scottsman arguments about EIT but the reality UBI has been tried and more or less exists now
EITC and UBI are fundamentally different as you get UBI whether or not you earn anything.
Hmm capitalism has proven it can support a larger population than economic system in place before it ever has.
Agreed.
Every single claim population bomb, chicken little sky is falling prediction has been wrong; why should this time be different?
Every one before has been the same. This one is fundamentally different because it attacks the class of jobs that the people who've lost their jobs traditionally defected to.
Otherwise, we need something other than capitalism, or we're gonna have to kill off a whole lot of people.
Nope Nope and Nope. The birthrate in the most capitalistic parts of the world is already below the replacement rate.
You don't understand the argument. If people don't have jobs, and they don't have UBI, then they're just going to be problems to be disposed of.
Cool. In that case, effectively endless growth is possible pretty much anywhere. Space isn't special.
Space is special because there's space there, and you can throw things away. On a planet, space is much more limited, and there is no "away".
"Space is the only place where [effectively] endless growth is possible."
It's not though, assuming you mean exponential growth, which almost everyone does.
For your convenience (and that of others) I have said what I meant.
As I tell my Python-enamored son every day: "Python is just Perl with the curly bits rubbed off". What I don't say is Perl just a universal scripting language and little better than Shell Scripts on any system.
No way. Perl is grossly better than shell scripts, at least where the job is better done with perl. Some very simple jobs are still best done with a shell script. If you have to do anything complicated, though, perl is going to use a lot less resources because you're not having to construct complex pipes to do simple things.
Perl only ever made sense where there was a lot of string handling to do. Alas, people used it for other things as well because they understood perl, but not the languages they should have been using (Mostly C or C++, in Perl's heyday.)
Outside of Europe he was a horrible person and very nearly himself a war criminal.
So, like both Bushes, or like Obama? Or Trump, of course, drone strikes have actually increased under Trump, to a secret extent. Obama promised the most transparent administration in history, and delivered the least; Trump's is even more opaque.
Housing costs are up in some markets due to the return to normal interest rates thanks to the thriving economy and very low unemployment rate.
Inflation means bad things for wage earners, because the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in decades, and because all wages are related to the minimum wage.
The unemployment rate is low because it doesn't account for people who are underemployed, that is, they are working one or more jobs and still can't pay all their bills, so they are simply going further and further into debt in order to survive. It also doesn't account for people who have given up looking for full-time employment, or people who have been unemployed long enough that they no longer quality for unemployment insurance. You are looking at the U-3 rate; you should be looking at the U-6 rate. It accounts for more of these people. Even it is a lie, real unemployment is much higher, but at least it is in the ballpark.
Of course there will be a recession at some point in the future, just no signs of one today.
Many economists disagree. There absolutely are signs of one today. Whether that means there will be one this year or next is another question, but there are indisputably common signs of a recession occurring right now.
Economics 101, if you aren't growing you are dying
It is because of absurd statements like this that I do not take seriously economists.
Like most statements of this nature, it is grossly misunderstood.
An individual company is dying if it's not growing, because sooner or later someone with greater economies of scale will show up to eat its lunch.
The total market doesn't have to grow for individual companies to grow. Others only have to fail.
With that said, we could have endless growth if only we had kept the space program going after winning the space race, instead of stopping when the USSR went bankrupt. Space is the only place where [effectively] endless growth is possible. Sadly, if climate change becomes severe enough, no species might ever make it off of this mudball. Can't reasonably reach the point of refining aluminum without going through an iron age, and can't have another iron age if all the trivially mined iron has rusted away to oxides.
He's the only candidate promoting the only realistic patch on capitalism. If you want capitalism to continue supporting our population, we're gonna need UBI. Otherwise, we need something other than capitalism, or we're gonna have to kill off a whole lot of people. And the targets are gonna be you and me, since we're not part of the 1%.
Forget Star Wars. The Simpsons alone will draw people in numbers.
If you've ever had your car rumble sitting next to a semi idling at a light, you know the answer to that question. There's a ton of wasted energy there for urban areas.
Auto start-stop doesn't require a PHEV, though. A mild hybrid will do just fine.
Freeway long haul? Well, there are efficiencies at 65mph too.....my prius goes into electric silent mode every time I go downhill no matter how fast I'm going.
Diesels are very good about not wasting fuel. But there's regen...
Sure, if you're driving a 12 mpg truck, getting a new hybrid with 40 mpg will be better, but it had to be made first.
Hybrid systems don't have good trip mileage, they have good in-town mileage. At low speeds drag doesn't play a sizable part in energy consumption, but regenerative braking does. Hybrids only make sense for making mostly short trips. For making only short trips, EVs make more sense. For making only long trips, diesels are best. Gasoline is useful for motorsport, and string trimmers, but we could use ethanol for that stuff.
The real question has to do with miles traveled daily, and drive cycle. Hybrids save the most fuel in stop-and-go traffic. Hybrids (or even full EVs) make sense for school buses or garbage trucks, but not so much for long haul. The particular place they could shine, though, is in port drayage. There are also additional considerations in particular locations. Some states (California in particular) prohibit idling, so you have to use an expensive and typically failure-prone APU to provide power for climate control while stationary.
Q2 Tesla deliveries are going to be even worse, with Jaguar and Mercedes offering luxury electric vehicles that actually go through some form of QC before they're sold to the public.
I know jack about Jags, but Mercedes is just another car. Has been ever since the 1990s. 1991 is the last time they overbuilt a car. Unless you're buying a UNIMOG, a Mercedes isn't any more reliable than anything else.
For cars and cell phones, energy density matters a lot. For stationary home and industrial scale installations, it matters much less. Are lithium ion batteries still the best choice for such applications?
It depends on how you measure. If your primary consideration is TCO then yes. Otherwise, LiFePo4 is currently the best battery chemistry you can buy. It holds almost as much as LiPo, but it's as stable as NiMH, and it has as many charge cycles as Li-Ion. Unfortunately, it costs about twice as much as Li-Ion.
I keep wondering how light passenger cars got the hybrid treatment first and long-haul trucks still haven't
Trains didn't have batteries until recently. Instead of regenerative braking, diesel-electric locomotives used a carbon pile beneath the engine to dissipate the motor braking energy. Cars went hybrid first because it was easier to build them, because they didn't have such large power-handling requirements.
Obviously the first applications should be self driving Buses, Long Haul 18 wheelers, Garbage Trucks, etc. etc.
Ford is a minor player in heavy trucks. The biggest trucks they make are class 7. Hotel buses, airport shuttles, dump trucks, box trucks, school buses (I don't think anyone is still making a Ford or GMC school bus, but I could be wrong), etc. The big players in heavy trucks in the US are Freightliner (Mercedes), Peterbilt and Kenworth (both owned by Paccar), International-Navistar, Volvo (Geely), and Mack (also Volvo/Geely). Ford worked with what they had, which is to say minivans (Transit). Autonomous minivans have the potential to absolutely destroy the city bus, as well as completely dominate medical and disabled transport. But as Ford has figured out, Class 5 AVs are still some way off.
Daimler, the world's largest truck manufacturer, is doing the long-haul trucking research, and has been. They have level 2 trucks now, and are working their way up. I predict that they'll be at level 3 for a long time, but I suppose that remains to be seen.
The real problems are that there is an entire industry based on pushing Windows, training people to use Windows, writing books about Windows, etc. etc.
I use both Windows and Linux. Time was I spent more time in Linux. I had an environment I really enjoyed. GNOME 2, Emerald, Compiz, avant-window-navigator, all my hardware well-supported. Great performance. But now most of that stuff doesn't work right (if it can even be built) and I'm back in Windows 7. It has its own stupid quirks, some of them by design, but in general it's got user-friendliness on its side. Most things can be accomplished either from the command line or the GUI. It runs my software. I can boot into it from Linux or boot my Linux disk from it using vmware player. I actually paid my own cash money for Windows 7 pro on purpose because I wanted to run Windows software. I spend my time in it on purpose because it's a nice place to be. It looks pretty nice, there's boatloads of software for it (including ye olde GNU userland in the form of cygwin) and these days it generally works.
For my part, I will go where the software is. I had a free M.2 slot so I got a cheap SSD and put Devuan on it. If I have a problem with Windows, I've got a whole other operating system to fall back on. I boot it up in vmware occasionally and run my updates. It's there if I need Linux to run something, but I seldom do.
Do you have Home? 64 or 32? Professional? Game? Ultimate? Server? SP1,2, 3 or 4? Do you have WinXP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10? For some windows programs, are you licensed for the 4 core 2 processor system? What cores/processor do you HAVE?!?!?!?
Since Vista, none of that stuff has been very relevant. For the most part, you just clicky clicky and you get the right thing. Websites detect whether you're using 32 or 64 bit and offer you the 64 bit download only if it looks like you can handle it. Microsoft hassles you to upgrade. Very little software requires Windows later than Vista. Windows since Vista supports all your cores.
The difference to most (even pretty technical users) is that when you're done with the install, Windows will give you a modern OS* capable of running apps many (not all) people really need, and providing capabilities no Linux system really can (pen, touch, dials, etc. for CAD, design, visualization, etc.)
All of that stuff happened for me when I installed Ubuntu on a T900. Everything worked right away, including the wacom pen/touch. But as you say, the apps aren't there. So the system is still running Windows 7.
I think we need to redefine what an "average" computer user is these days. I am not even sure what that would be.
People who spend 99% of their time in either the browser, or an app that came from an app store, or an app in the browser that came from the browser app store. The median user spends 100% of their time in one of these ways. Only an infinitesimal percentage of "computer users" are doing anything else. In some ways this is a clear victory, because computing has become so ubiquitous. But it remains to be seen what computing's future looks like, and it may include even less general purpose computing devices.
I have plenty of complaints with MS, but they actually do a pretty good job on backwards compatibility.
Backwards compatibility is a two (or more) edged sword. It increases attack surface. Microsoft's security problems surely result from a combination of incompetence and the fact that they're doing a very difficult job. These days, it's generally smartest to run an old version of the OS in a VM to get backwards compatibility. It's much easier, the performance is very good in most cases, and desktop machines have so much more RAM and so many more cores now than they used to that the VM hardly takes up any notable system resources. It makes many things much easier. The only things that really still need to run on the bare metal are graphics-intensive applications, and even many of those do okay with modern VM graphics drivers.
the fact that updates are a big deal on Windows machines makes people aware of them. They are aware when one exists and if they haven't done it.
Why wouldn't you want it to just happen? Oh right, because an update from Microsoft is more likely than most to require a reboot, to perform said reboot without asking, and also to cause the system to not boot. All of that stuff has happened on Linux systems before, no doubt, but in general they are polite and accommodating. That Windows has to make a big deal about successful updates is a sign of how often they go wrong.
A linux distro with a security CLippy would give people more confidence something was out there keeping them safe and healthy
Possibly they should include a widget which displays system news in the corner of the desktop. But then someone has to come up with some nice comprehensible news for the users. In general, I'd prefer not to hear about it unless I need to do something.