Yeah, I got that. Hence the mention that that family vs. stranger is irrelevant. This is about people being allowed to make decisions for themselves. As long as they enter into an employment contract fully informed, where's the unfairness?
No it isn't. You can't "volunteer" anyone else to do anything. Besides, it doesn't matter whether the people involved are family or strangers.
Again an actual argument for your position would be appreciated, but if you have no salient points to make I see no reason to continue this discussion.
I read that first link when you posted it earlier. The second is a propaganda piece so I didn't watch the video, but I have read a few articles about the conditions in some of the factories in China. Conditions there may be deplorable by western standards, but remember that the factories in the west were similarly bad at the same stage of economic development. That doesn't make it acceptable to us now, but it is a transition stage that must occur before things like OSHA can be put into place. Ultimately, it will take the people themselves demanding safer work environments for developing countries to catch up to western standards. We can only help persuade them.
By the way, the Foxcon issue is one of the many reasons I don't buy Apple products. But there's a difference between exposing workers to dangerous chemicals and safety hazards without informing them vs. just low pay (by your standard). The first is immoral, but the second isn't as long as the employer does not monopolize the job pool or use coercive tactics to prevent employees from moving up into a higher payed talent pool. As far as I can tell, Amazon is not doing either of those, thus my decision not to boycott them. Of course, I'm always looking for new information and will revise that if I see something that is truly a violation of labor laws or human rights (and how they handle the situation when one of those stories shows up).
Of course Amazon wants a major piece of the mobile phone market. That's not news. What would be news is if they make a phone that plays nice outside of Amazon's ecosystem and isn't locked down like the rest of the kindle family of products.
How exactly are Amazon warehouse workers he oppressed? They entered into a an employment contract of their own free will and are free to end that at any time. Are the employer and employee on equal footing in negotiations? Of course not, but that's just the reality of how the job market works, not exploitation.
The problem with your way of thinking is that if you had your way and everyone was given a comfortable wage (whether or not their job produced value greater than that). For one, why would a company keep that person employed, if they represent a net loss? They wouldn't and those jobs would no longer exist and more people would be pushed out of the workforce. That's one of the reasons that the labor force participation rate is the lowest it has been in my lifetime. Instead I'd rather the people at the bottom were given the tools and opportunity to become productive members of society. That way the whole economy grows and everyone is better off. If this makes me "heartless", then fine I'll gladly accept that title.
What I'm saying here is that the labor market decides the pay of each job based on the availability of qualified applicants and what pay level those applicants will accept. If the pay were really unsatisfactory to the people in those low level warehouse positions, they would leave and find another that pays better. If there are no better paying positions available to them, they can continue working there while learning a skill that has more value to employers than unskilled manual labor. If they are unwilling* to learn that new skill, it means they are satisfied with where they are in life and don't want to improve their situation.
*I say "unwilling" because short of a severe mental handicap (which is an exceptional case) everyone can learn to do something. There are a vast number of free resources available and all one needs to do is show up and make use of them.
No, I read and comprehended. That doesn't mean that I must agree with the author's position.
If you have some specific point you think I'm not weighing heavily enough or want to expand on your argument, please elaborate. Otherwise, do me a favor and recognize that someone may be informed and intelligent and still disagree with your conclusions.
That doesn't really make me want to boycott Amazon as a whole. His arguments against avoiding Kindle and other digital "purchases" through Amazon are sound, but otherwise his criticisms are mostly just politically motivated disagreements. Although, some of the criticisms relating to anti-competitive practices may gain more weight if Amazon does eventually become an effective monopoly in book sales.
Since regulation of the practice of engineering is performed by the individual states in the U.S., areas of engineering involved in interstate commerce are essentially unregulated. These areas include much of mechanical, aerospace and chemical engineering—and may be specifically exempted from regulation under an "industrial exemption." An industrial exemption covers engineers who design products such as automobiles that are sold (or have the potential to be sold) outside the state where they are produced, as well as the equipment used to produce the product
Did I say there was no use at all? Of course not. I'm sure someone really wants one of the these cameras. The question is whether there are enough of those people to commit to a full commercial production run. The Kickstarter was a test to see if there was enough demand at the $200-250 price point to make large scale production worthwhile. As it turned out, there isn't. I didn't decide this, the market did.
If you have something useful to add, like the obvious use case to which you implicitly refer (which I asked for already), please enlighten me. Otherwise, you're welcome to take your ad hominem attacks elsewhere.
True, action cams seem to be what they're promoting. If it's durable and has a high enough frame rate, that seems possible. Although my personal opinion is that market may already be near fully captured by GoPro and the added feature of full panoramas is only needed by a subset of it.
A few sibling posts suggested they'd be useful as dash-cams. This seems unlikely since placement on the dash would capture video of the occupants, which (while potentially entertaining for everyone else) is counter to the purpose of reducing personal liability of the driver. That problem could be solved by mounting it externally, but it would likely need a separate enclosure to protect it from the elements (it's only "splash-proof").
Am I missing an obvious need for full 360 panorama cameras? Maybe some small businesses or tourist destinations would want one to stream a panorama of their location on a website or something. But what would the general populous do with it that justifies a $250 price tag? Maybe use it as a home security cam?
Also, why is it a bad thing that a Kickstarter like this failed? The team invested a relatively small sum of money to find out if there was a wider market for their product and as it turns out, there isn't. That's far better than the other option of paying (most likely more than what Kickstarter cost them) for market studies and then still having to find investors (or lenders) to front the costs of a full production run.
I missed where the GP said that you (or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to drive manually. Actually, it looks to me like he's doing exactly what you suggested and preempting the problem by wanting to have a car without manual controls so that he doesn't risk the safety of himself or others (or their property).
There are plenty of options for syncing arbitrary data between devices out there, many of which are free (I agree it can be somewhat less convenient and some time must be invested to set it up). Although, the most commonly shared things like email and calendar information are already server based. Software licensing costs should be essentially the same, as updates can be automatic and are generally free on android/iOS tablets and you'd pay the same for whatever software you want on the desktop/laptop.
You do have a point on the competition from laptops/ultraboooks. I hadn't looked around at the pricing and specs for those in a while and I had assumed they kept pace with things like the Surface. It seems, at least at the ~$800 price point, there isn't really anything available that's comparable which strikes me as a bit strange. How is it that MS is able to cram better components with longer battery life into the more space constrained slab form factor at a lower price? Are they selling at or below cost, or is there something distorting the laptop market?
Your point on pretty much any computer being good enough for most uses is a good one too, but I'd argue that's true of the 4-5 year old desktop or laptop that basically everyone already has as well. Then the choice isn't between a new desktop/laptop + tablet vs. the Surface, instead it's just a new tablet vs. the Surface.
And I can see how a Surface would be a good option for businesses in place of some laptops. Most of the time, they're already going to spring for the dock a monitor (or two) back-up drive and other peripherals, so those costs are the same and as long as the user doesn't need more CPU, onboard storage space or graphics capability, it's a viable option. Based on that, it seems reasonable that someone who would otherwise have to buy their own tablet for personal use would probably opt for a Surface.
Still, I think the desktop + tablet combination is a better value for most people's personal use, especially for families. Two devices means that two people can use them simultaneously and can share the cost between them. That and I think most households probably have at least one member who would want to use a computer for something the Surface wouldn't be well suited to (heavy photo editing and/or archival, video games, video editing, music composition, etc.)
I didn't watch the video (blocked by the network filter).
True, if everything functions as planned, standard passenger car brakes are probably all that's really necessary here, possibly with a design or material change to handle the higher RPM. Although, I do see one reason to test the brakes at high speeds. If they can survive that test, that means they may last long enough to stop the car in case any of the aero-braking system components fail.
Correction: Aluminum melts at ~1200F rather than the 900F value I stated above, but the point still stands since the strength at that temp is so low that it would no longer function as a brake disk.
AAAAH!!! So much wrongness!!! (okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system:) )
To preface: I'm an aerospace engineer and I have significant experience with the differences in capabilities of metal alloys.
I think a lot of the confusion comes from the overlap of engineering terminology and the general popular usage of the same words. In engineering strength (or more precisely, ultimate tensile strength) is defined as the load per unit sectional area at which a material will fracture, regardless of how far it has stretched (which is called ductility. The general usage of "strength" is rather ill-defined, but I think it most closely correlates to the material property called toughness, which is a combination of tensile strength and ductility and is calculated as the area under the stress-strain curve.
In the case of supersonic car brake disks aluminum isn't even option. Its melting point is only ~900F and even the brakes in a normal car can get above that occasionally. That leaves steel and carbon composite of the options discussed, both of which are actually entire categories of materials with vast ranges of properties within each. Although, a few of the main differences are that; carbon composites are almost all brittle (very low ductility, which means they snap rather than bend or stretch) while steels tend to have at least some ductility, thermal conductivity is generally higher in metals than carbon composites, and carbon composites tend to expand less as they heat up than steels. Strength probably isn't the limiting factor in this case have high enough strength to keep from tearing themselves apart at 10k rpm. What was probably the most critical factor in the failure of the carbon brakes was how rapidly they heat up and that they got to much higher peak temperatures because they can't conduct the heat away. This is called thermal shock which some steels may be better able to withstand because the increased thermal conductivity and higher ductility compensates for the higher thermal expansion.
One other thing to consider is the failure mode. A steel in this sort of scenario will soften as it overheats, reducing braking force gradually until it can no longer support the loads. Carbon composite, on the other hand, will shatter causing a sudden complete loss of brake force giving the driver far less time to notice and react to the problem.
How so? I've heard this claimed a few times, but there never seems to be any substance to back it up. Searching for "Obama Reagan policy comparison" just turns up a bunch of blog posts with obvious biases (of all types) and poor arguments backed up with cherry picked anecdotes and intentionally misleading data.
You could use it as a desktop replacement assuming you're not using it for anything that's computationally expensive, hook it up to a decent size monitor and add a keyboard/mouse. Although, if you're willing to do that, you could get a better spec desktop for ~$500 and still have $300 to spend on a separate tablet. There are advantages to each setup, but the former is a "one size fits all" solution, whereas the latter can be customized to the specific needs of the user.
My personal opinion is that the Surface makes too many compromises trying to be everything to everyone and it ends up being a poor value as a desktop replacement and is rather clunky as a tablet. That means that the market is limited to people who highly value both size/portability and not having multiple devices and there's significant competition in that market from small laptops.
I wasn't trying to discuss whether the death penalty should be used or not, just whether it is being fairly implemented. And it appears that historically it has not been. That does raise the question of whether that problem continues today. If unfair sentencing is continuing or getting worse, we probably should suspend all executions until we can resolve the issue. But the data only indicates a historic issue, not necessarily a current, worsening, one.
I think this is one of the key disagreements:
I doubt that the country is significantly less racist than it was 30 years ago
In my opinion, societal attitudes toward race have changed a lot in the last 30 yrs. And those changes likely have some impact on the apparent racial discrimination in the application of capital punishment. To what extent? I have no idea, I can't find any data to (in)validate that hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I got that. Hence the mention that that family vs. stranger is irrelevant. This is about people being allowed to make decisions for themselves. As long as they enter into an employment contract fully informed, where's the unfairness?
Since when are three objects considered a swarm? If that's acceptable it should be appended to the list.
No it isn't. You can't "volunteer" anyone else to do anything. Besides, it doesn't matter whether the people involved are family or strangers.
Again an actual argument for your position would be appreciated, but if you have no salient points to make I see no reason to continue this discussion.
That's not an argument. Please defend your position with a substantive point.
Amazon's margins are in the low single digits right now. The razor thin margins of the mobile handset market will only be an improvement.
I read that first link when you posted it earlier. The second is a propaganda piece so I didn't watch the video, but I have read a few articles about the conditions in some of the factories in China. Conditions there may be deplorable by western standards, but remember that the factories in the west were similarly bad at the same stage of economic development. That doesn't make it acceptable to us now, but it is a transition stage that must occur before things like OSHA can be put into place. Ultimately, it will take the people themselves demanding safer work environments for developing countries to catch up to western standards. We can only help persuade them.
By the way, the Foxcon issue is one of the many reasons I don't buy Apple products. But there's a difference between exposing workers to dangerous chemicals and safety hazards without informing them vs. just low pay (by your standard). The first is immoral, but the second isn't as long as the employer does not monopolize the job pool or use coercive tactics to prevent employees from moving up into a higher payed talent pool. As far as I can tell, Amazon is not doing either of those, thus my decision not to boycott them. Of course, I'm always looking for new information and will revise that if I see something that is truly a violation of labor laws or human rights (and how they handle the situation when one of those stories shows up).
I want to win the lottery.
Of course Amazon wants a major piece of the mobile phone market. That's not news. What would be news is if they make a phone that plays nice outside of Amazon's ecosystem and isn't locked down like the rest of the kindle family of products.
How exactly are Amazon warehouse workers he oppressed? They entered into a an employment contract of their own free will and are free to end that at any time. Are the employer and employee on equal footing in negotiations? Of course not, but that's just the reality of how the job market works, not exploitation.
The problem with your way of thinking is that if you had your way and everyone was given a comfortable wage (whether or not their job produced value greater than that). For one, why would a company keep that person employed, if they represent a net loss? They wouldn't and those jobs would no longer exist and more people would be pushed out of the workforce. That's one of the reasons that the labor force participation rate is the lowest it has been in my lifetime. Instead I'd rather the people at the bottom were given the tools and opportunity to become productive members of society. That way the whole economy grows and everyone is better off. If this makes me "heartless", then fine I'll gladly accept that title.
Okay, I think I might apply for this position: Senior Product Design Engineer
What I'm saying here is that the labor market decides the pay of each job based on the availability of qualified applicants and what pay level those applicants will accept. If the pay were really unsatisfactory to the people in those low level warehouse positions, they would leave and find another that pays better. If there are no better paying positions available to them, they can continue working there while learning a skill that has more value to employers than unskilled manual labor. If they are unwilling* to learn that new skill, it means they are satisfied with where they are in life and don't want to improve their situation.
*I say "unwilling" because short of a severe mental handicap (which is an exceptional case) everyone can learn to do something. There are a vast number of free resources available and all one needs to do is show up and make use of them.
No, I read and comprehended. That doesn't mean that I must agree with the author's position.
If you have some specific point you think I'm not weighing heavily enough or want to expand on your argument, please elaborate. Otherwise, do me a favor and recognize that someone may be informed and intelligent and still disagree with your conclusions.
That doesn't really make me want to boycott Amazon as a whole. His arguments against avoiding Kindle and other digital "purchases" through Amazon are sound, but otherwise his criticisms are mostly just politically motivated disagreements. Although, some of the criticisms relating to anti-competitive practices may gain more weight if Amazon does eventually become an effective monopoly in book sales.
Actually, there's no regulation that requires a PE sign off on products like automobiles.
From Wikipedia:
Since regulation of the practice of engineering is performed by the individual states in the U.S., areas of engineering involved in interstate commerce are essentially unregulated. These areas include much of mechanical, aerospace and chemical engineering—and may be specifically exempted from regulation under an "industrial exemption." An industrial exemption covers engineers who design products such as automobiles that are sold (or have the potential to be sold) outside the state where they are produced, as well as the equipment used to produce the product
Did I say there was no use at all? Of course not. I'm sure someone really wants one of the these cameras. The question is whether there are enough of those people to commit to a full commercial production run. The Kickstarter was a test to see if there was enough demand at the $200-250 price point to make large scale production worthwhile. As it turned out, there isn't. I didn't decide this, the market did.
If you have something useful to add, like the obvious use case to which you implicitly refer (which I asked for already), please enlighten me. Otherwise, you're welcome to take your ad hominem attacks elsewhere.
True, action cams seem to be what they're promoting. If it's durable and has a high enough frame rate, that seems possible. Although my personal opinion is that market may already be near fully captured by GoPro and the added feature of full panoramas is only needed by a subset of it.
A few sibling posts suggested they'd be useful as dash-cams. This seems unlikely since placement on the dash would capture video of the occupants, which (while potentially entertaining for everyone else) is counter to the purpose of reducing personal liability of the driver. That problem could be solved by mounting it externally, but it would likely need a separate enclosure to protect it from the elements (it's only "splash-proof").
Am I missing an obvious need for full 360 panorama cameras? Maybe some small businesses or tourist destinations would want one to stream a panorama of their location on a website or something. But what would the general populous do with it that justifies a $250 price tag? Maybe use it as a home security cam?
Also, why is it a bad thing that a Kickstarter like this failed? The team invested a relatively small sum of money to find out if there was a wider market for their product and as it turns out, there isn't. That's far better than the other option of paying (most likely more than what Kickstarter cost them) for market studies and then still having to find investors (or lenders) to front the costs of a full production run.
I missed where the GP said that you (or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to drive manually. Actually, it looks to me like he's doing exactly what you suggested and preempting the problem by wanting to have a car without manual controls so that he doesn't risk the safety of himself or others (or their property).
There are plenty of options for syncing arbitrary data between devices out there, many of which are free (I agree it can be somewhat less convenient and some time must be invested to set it up). Although, the most commonly shared things like email and calendar information are already server based. Software licensing costs should be essentially the same, as updates can be automatic and are generally free on android/iOS tablets and you'd pay the same for whatever software you want on the desktop/laptop.
You do have a point on the competition from laptops/ultraboooks. I hadn't looked around at the pricing and specs for those in a while and I had assumed they kept pace with things like the Surface. It seems, at least at the ~$800 price point, there isn't really anything available that's comparable which strikes me as a bit strange. How is it that MS is able to cram better components with longer battery life into the more space constrained slab form factor at a lower price? Are they selling at or below cost, or is there something distorting the laptop market?
Your point on pretty much any computer being good enough for most uses is a good one too, but I'd argue that's true of the 4-5 year old desktop or laptop that basically everyone already has as well. Then the choice isn't between a new desktop/laptop + tablet vs. the Surface, instead it's just a new tablet vs. the Surface.
And I can see how a Surface would be a good option for businesses in place of some laptops. Most of the time, they're already going to spring for the dock a monitor (or two) back-up drive and other peripherals, so those costs are the same and as long as the user doesn't need more CPU, onboard storage space or graphics capability, it's a viable option. Based on that, it seems reasonable that someone who would otherwise have to buy their own tablet for personal use would probably opt for a Surface.
Still, I think the desktop + tablet combination is a better value for most people's personal use, especially for families. Two devices means that two people can use them simultaneously and can share the cost between them. That and I think most households probably have at least one member who would want to use a computer for something the Surface wouldn't be well suited to (heavy photo editing and/or archival, video games, video editing, music composition, etc.)
I didn't watch the video (blocked by the network filter).
True, if everything functions as planned, standard passenger car brakes are probably all that's really necessary here, possibly with a design or material change to handle the higher RPM. Although, I do see one reason to test the brakes at high speeds. If they can survive that test, that means they may last long enough to stop the car in case any of the aero-braking system components fail.
Correction: Aluminum melts at ~1200F rather than the 900F value I stated above, but the point still stands since the strength at that temp is so low that it would no longer function as a brake disk.
AAAAH!!! So much wrongness!!! (okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system :) )
To preface: I'm an aerospace engineer and I have significant experience with the differences in capabilities of metal alloys.
I think a lot of the confusion comes from the overlap of engineering terminology and the general popular usage of the same words. In engineering strength (or more precisely, ultimate tensile strength) is defined as the load per unit sectional area at which a material will fracture, regardless of how far it has stretched (which is called ductility. The general usage of "strength" is rather ill-defined, but I think it most closely correlates to the material property called toughness, which is a combination of tensile strength and ductility and is calculated as the area under the stress-strain curve.
In the case of supersonic car brake disks aluminum isn't even option. Its melting point is only ~900F and even the brakes in a normal car can get above that occasionally. That leaves steel and carbon composite of the options discussed, both of which are actually entire categories of materials with vast ranges of properties within each. Although, a few of the main differences are that; carbon composites are almost all brittle (very low ductility, which means they snap rather than bend or stretch) while steels tend to have at least some ductility, thermal conductivity is generally higher in metals than carbon composites, and carbon composites tend to expand less as they heat up than steels. Strength probably isn't the limiting factor in this case have high enough strength to keep from tearing themselves apart at 10k rpm. What was probably the most critical factor in the failure of the carbon brakes was how rapidly they heat up and that they got to much higher peak temperatures because they can't conduct the heat away. This is called thermal shock which some steels may be better able to withstand because the increased thermal conductivity and higher ductility compensates for the higher thermal expansion.
One other thing to consider is the failure mode. A steel in this sort of scenario will soften as it overheats, reducing braking force gradually until it can no longer support the loads. Carbon composite, on the other hand, will shatter causing a sudden complete loss of brake force giving the driver far less time to notice and react to the problem.
How so? I've heard this claimed a few times, but there never seems to be any substance to back it up. Searching for "Obama Reagan policy comparison" just turns up a bunch of blog posts with obvious biases (of all types) and poor arguments backed up with cherry picked anecdotes and intentionally misleading data.
Why would the House cave to the White House?
How about because the President would veto the bill without the changes and there aren't enough votes to pass it with a 2/3 majority as-is?
You could use it as a desktop replacement assuming you're not using it for anything that's computationally expensive, hook it up to a decent size monitor and add a keyboard/mouse. Although, if you're willing to do that, you could get a better spec desktop for ~$500 and still have $300 to spend on a separate tablet. There are advantages to each setup, but the former is a "one size fits all" solution, whereas the latter can be customized to the specific needs of the user.
My personal opinion is that the Surface makes too many compromises trying to be everything to everyone and it ends up being a poor value as a desktop replacement and is rather clunky as a tablet. That means that the market is limited to people who highly value both size/portability and not having multiple devices and there's significant competition in that market from small laptops.
The aft main wheel includes an electric motor with 6kW power, which provides taxiing and acceleration up to 60km/h during the take-off
This may give the "plane on a treadmill" problem a bit more traction.
I wasn't trying to discuss whether the death penalty should be used or not, just whether it is being fairly implemented. And it appears that historically it has not been. That does raise the question of whether that problem continues today. If unfair sentencing is continuing or getting worse, we probably should suspend all executions until we can resolve the issue. But the data only indicates a historic issue, not necessarily a current, worsening, one.
I think this is one of the key disagreements:
I doubt that the country is significantly less racist than it was 30 years ago
In my opinion, societal attitudes toward race have changed a lot in the last 30 yrs. And those changes likely have some impact on the apparent racial discrimination in the application of capital punishment. To what extent? I have no idea, I can't find any data to (in)validate that hypothesis.