My Kindle, purchased second-hand, cost way less than a cheap second-hand bike. Hell, if I bought it new, it would still have cost less than the price of a second-hand bike in a major city.
The idea that bicycles are super cheap is a fantasy found only in the minds of non-bicyclists.
Or in the minds of those that are willing to shop at garage sales -- I bought my commute bike at a garage sale for $20.
Someone can enjoy a Kindle rain or shine, day or night. A bicycle, not so much. If I can get the same words on a Kindle as going to the library then I'm really just riding the bicycle for the sake of riding the bicycle, no? That might be enough reason to go for a bike ride for many but some might rather spend the time they'd be riding the bike reading instead.
You've obviously never relied on a bike as transportation, you can (and people do) ride a bike in the rain and at night, with the big difference between a bike and a kindle being that a bike can get you to work.
There aren't fewer office buildings or stores, and they don't use less power on HVAC and lights because someone isn't there.
Correlation does not imply causation.
My office turns off the lights when people aren't there (and you have to stand up and wave your arms every hour so the motion sensor keeps the lights on). Just last year our building announced that they weren't going to turn on HVAC on weekends due to lack of use. And they already turned off HVAC off from 9pm-6am. For a fee, after hours HVAC can be arranged, but as far as I know, no one has asked for it.
A cheap bicycle costs $50+ and there's nothing to do at the park except talking to old people and judgmental moms who look at you like you're about to eat their baby.
...
Why do that when you have a Kindle or project Gutenberg? You're just wasting gas money.
You can't afford a cheap bike or gas money, but you have a Kindle?
a lot less of sitting around waiting for the bear to show up, absolutely no risk of being mauled, and if you want to go with a group, you don't need a bunch of well-off friends with a lot of time to spare.
While I've never hunted bear, part of the fun of hunting is the tracking and anticipation -- hunting would not be nearly as interesting if I could press a button and a deer would walk right in front of me. Even being cold and uncomfortable in the rain makes for a good experience. While deer hunting is not particularly dangerous (just don't mix guns & alcohol), the little danger there is also ads to the experience - who cares if someone 'shoots' me with a bazooka in an online game, I know I'll still be going downstairs for dinner in an hour. But walking down a trail and seeing a mountain lion perched on a rock above the trail ahead is a real thrill, even if you have a hunting rifle. You've clearly never gone hunting if you think that hunters are all well off. Given what people spend on gaming rigs and the games itself, you can't say that gaming is cheaper than hunting -- you can get a hunting rifle for a few hundred dollars and a deer license for $25.
Virtual reality may be the future for some people, others will seek real life experiences, just like some people would rather stay home and read a book than go out for a hike.
L1011 vs. DC-10 Beta vs. VHS Apple (before the iBullshit) vs. PC Independent vs. republican/democrat mine vs. yours
This is why the world suffers.
Beta may have had better specs, but it was also more expensive - players were more expensive, tapes were more expensive and early betamax units were limited to 1 hour recording time (versus VHS's 2 hours), meaning a movie required a tape change in the middle. And VHS was licensed to a number of manufacturers, while Sony wanted to lock in Betamax as their own format.
It takes more than better specs to declare a product "better", and the results showed that VHS was actually the better product when all factors were taken into account.
Little things like this, the only difference is scale...
The only difference between "smart luggage" and a large scale grid storage plant is scale? Really, that's the only difference? A 100MW battery bank is pretty much the same as thousands of roller bags?
I'd take a guess and say they're too complex and dangerous compared to nickel-iron.
Sources?
You can't compare a single nickel-iron battery to a 100MWh installation and declare that nickel iron is less complex and safer for this purpose -- if it won't do the job, then it's not a fair comparison. You may as well say that rubber chickens are less complex and safer than batteries, which may be true, but they aren't going to do the job. And note that Tesla installed this plant in under 60 days, so it seems that they aren't all that complex.
Point to a large grid-storage nickel-iron battery installation. Most seem to use lead-acid, Li-ion, or a few other technologies.
Nickel-iron has one weakness that makes it less suitable for a battery that needs to quickly absorb or provide megawatts of power:
While the slow formation of iron crystals preserves the electrodes, it also limits the high rate performance: these cells charge slowly, and are only able to discharge slowly
Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.
Brownouts can destroy equipment, and severe shortages can also lead to blackouts. Both of those things can literally kill people. Let's prioritize keeping the power on. There's no better/cheaper/more effective device for grid stabilization than battery storage, today.
But there's still a cost-benefit decision to be made, even when lives are at stake. Money is a finite resource, and if the more you spend on brownout protection, the less you have to spend elsewhere that may save more lives.
As far as these batteries go. They're too complex and dangerous (they should use nickel-iron for stationary stuff),
Too complex and dangerous based on what? This 129MWh installation suggests that they aren't too complex or dangerous, though admittedly it's still early in its lifetime.
I'd like to think that the guy hired to kill me would need a lot more than $2800 to double-cross the guy that hired him to kill me. How little did I piss someone off for it to only be worth $2800 to call off the killing?
WOW! So to be clear, what does Geico do again? Does it fix this situation or cause it?
That's not the purpose of the ad -- it assumes some familiarity with Geico.
I'm genuinely confused as to why I should download Geico.
No wonder, since you apparently live in a cave and have never heard of Geico or even know why your might use a company's mobile app. If you were a Geico customer then it's pretty clear what the mobile app does.
What was shown in the advertisement seemed to be a horrible experience with no indication that the app would change that at all.
I'm not being funny here. That advert told me nothing about the product other than associate it with a really annoying scenario. Is it a replacement for Skype? Does it invoke a sense of dread without needing to attend a meeting? What did it win an award for? Whoever came up with this should honestly not be in marketing.
The ad wasn't meant to solve your video conferencing needs, it was meant to be an entertaining video to raise awareness of the mobile app, and maybe get some people to share it. And hey it worked -- you found the video on Slashdot and you don't even know what Geico is and you know they have a mobile app. I'm a Geico customer and didn't know they had a mobile app until I saw that video.
Another annoying ad is the Geico ad where the gecko is hosting a meeting in a conference room, and a call-in attendee is speaking at the same time he is. It's annoying when it happens in real life - We don't need to see it in a commercial.
I hadn't seen that one - I thought it was funny *because* that exact scenario happens in real life.
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds
Microseconds? You're off by a factor of 1000.
I took a 1024x640 TIFF photograph I had laying around and converted it to a 50KB jpg with moderate compression and a 500KB PNG and uploaded them to a well connected web server (10Gbit interface to the internet)
Then loaded them both in my home computer's browser. The jpg file took 86msec (that's milliseconds, not microseconds) to load, and the PNG file took 796msec (average of 5 tries). My home internet connection is 100mbit, pretty decent by American standards, if not by world standards.
I don't know about you, but I can definitely notice the difference between 800 msec and 80 msec.
"Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people"
You say that as if you were making a valid point?
When one class of people makes another class of people feel unwelcome, then what do you do? You can't please all the people all the time, but you *can* fire the biggest assholes and keep them from making women feel like they don't belong there.
This is pretty much why I just dumped my Echo. The fact that I literally have no idea what it's transmitting at any given time makes me nervous. I love the idea of a voice driven assistant, but I also don't love the idea that MS/Amazon/Google could know anything I say to anyone.... I work from home and discussing sensitive business information within earshot of an always-on microphone makes me twitch.
Did you ditch your cell phone too? You're more likely to have it infected by malware and recording your conversations than to have Amazon or Google decide to break their promise that their devices only listen after the wake word.
A mechanical switch is prone to failure so will need to be tested regularly, and runs the risk of being tested with the system in "live-fire" mode. The switch output is going to be converted to a software signal anyway, so it makes the system more complicated for no real benefit. There's no reason why a software trigger can't be protected with a confirmation dialog, like "You are about to send a live missile alert, type 'YES' to continue"
Perhaps I'm a simpleton, but isn't high-speed service, regardless of the means by which it is transmitted (copper, fiber, radio, whatever), still high speed service?
Depend on your definition of "service", do you include usage caps in that?
My household uses about 200GB/month of data.
I can useually get 10 - 20mbit/sec from LTE so it's good enough for streaming but at the same level of usage, I'd hit my 5GB usage cap after the first day.
So yeah, I'd have high speed service for one day, and 128kbit/second for the 29 days after that.
Do most people use it for shopping? I tried it a couple times, but seems inconvenient since I rarely re-order the same item twice, so I can't say "Alexa, re-order toothpaste" -- I generally want to browse around and read reviews and look at prices from non-prime shippers.
The only thing I use my Echo for is listening to music, turning the lights off, and sometimes the weather. Oh and and a kitchen timer.
If it starts playing ads for any of those uses, I'll stop using it.
the police WERE TOLD THAT they were rolling on a murder and hostage situation (hostage in danger of murder as well)
Fixed that for you.
The problem began with the bad intel. While the police bear some of the blame due to their over-aggressive response, your characterization removes blame entirely from the original intel source - the prankster.
The call apparently didn't go to a 911 dispatch center, which is already suspicious. Swatting is well known, so the police should have taken a little time to confirm that the call was even genuine -- for example, did they try even calling the home while they were in-route? I assume the police and/or 911 dispatch still have criss-cross directories that would let them look up the phone number (if there is any in these days of dwindling landlines) of a specific address.
Even the police realized that the call was suspicious (though they were careful not to call it "suspicious", instead it was "peculiar"):
“This call was little peculiar for us,” Livingston said. “(The call) went to a substation first, then it was relayed to dispatch, then dispatch gave it to us. We have a lot of information to go through.”
How many people in hostage situations would call a local substation rather than calling 911 directly?
My dad used to have a remote monitor for his pacemaker that sent data over the internet to his doctor. Without the remote monitoring, he'd have to make regular trips to the doctor for monitoring (and having an elderly man driving on snowy roads is a risk of its own)
The internet is becoming a utility, and it should be regulated as such - the power company can't turn off your power just because they think you're using electricity to grow marijuana. They can, however, tip off the police about the suspected grow house, but they can't turn off your power.
From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.
About 22% of California's imported power comes from renewables
Those rates assume 2000KWh of energy use/month - which is 6 months of my power usage in California since the climate is mild enough to need little heating or cooling.
Plus they don't include TDSP delivery charges (which vary between 3.6 and 7.6 cents/KWh (plus $3.50 - $10/month)) depending on your energy provider. So the true cost is somewhere between 12.3 - 16.3 cents/KWh.
and power from PG&E for the Paso Robles area (central coast) start at $0.199 per kWh and go up.
Those prices don't include any credits, the true cost ends up being around 15.6 cents/KWh
Though if you're going to look at prices for living on California's central coast, you ought to pick a town that's actually on the coast, not 45 minutes inland.
Slashdot Mirror
My Kindle, purchased second-hand, cost way less than a cheap second-hand bike. Hell, if I bought it new, it would still have cost less than the price of a second-hand bike in a major city.
The idea that bicycles are super cheap is a fantasy found only in the minds of non-bicyclists.
Or in the minds of those that are willing to shop at garage sales -- I bought my commute bike at a garage sale for $20.
Someone can enjoy a Kindle rain or shine, day or night. A bicycle, not so much. If I can get the same words on a Kindle as going to the library then I'm really just riding the bicycle for the sake of riding the bicycle, no? That might be enough reason to go for a bike ride for many but some might rather spend the time they'd be riding the bike reading instead.
You've obviously never relied on a bike as transportation, you can (and people do) ride a bike in the rain and at night, with the big difference between a bike and a kindle being that a bike can get you to work.
There aren't fewer office buildings or stores, and they don't use less power on HVAC and lights because someone isn't there.
Correlation does not imply causation.
My office turns off the lights when people aren't there (and you have to stand up and wave your arms every hour so the motion sensor keeps the lights on). Just last year our building announced that they weren't going to turn on HVAC on weekends due to lack of use. And they already turned off HVAC off from 9pm-6am. For a fee, after hours HVAC can be arranged, but as far as I know, no one has asked for it.
A cheap bicycle costs $50+ and there's nothing to do at the park except talking to old people and judgmental moms who look at you like you're about to eat their baby.
Why do that when you have a Kindle or project Gutenberg? You're just wasting gas money.
You can't afford a cheap bike or gas money, but you have a Kindle?
a lot less of sitting around waiting for the bear to show up, absolutely no risk of being mauled, and if you want to go with a group, you don't need a bunch of well-off friends with a lot of time to spare.
While I've never hunted bear, part of the fun of hunting is the tracking and anticipation -- hunting would not be nearly as interesting if I could press a button and a deer would walk right in front of me. Even being cold and uncomfortable in the rain makes for a good experience. While deer hunting is not particularly dangerous (just don't mix guns & alcohol), the little danger there is also ads to the experience - who cares if someone 'shoots' me with a bazooka in an online game, I know I'll still be going downstairs for dinner in an hour. But walking down a trail and seeing a mountain lion perched on a rock above the trail ahead is a real thrill, even if you have a hunting rifle. You've clearly never gone hunting if you think that hunters are all well off. Given what people spend on gaming rigs and the games itself, you can't say that gaming is cheaper than hunting -- you can get a hunting rifle for a few hundred dollars and a deer license for $25.
Virtual reality may be the future for some people, others will seek real life experiences, just like some people would rather stay home and read a book than go out for a hike.
The best ideas often sell poorly.
L1011 vs. DC-10
Beta vs. VHS
Apple (before the iBullshit) vs. PC
Independent vs. republican/democrat
mine vs. yours
This is why the world suffers.
Beta may have had better specs, but it was also more expensive - players were more expensive, tapes were more expensive and early betamax units were limited to 1 hour recording time (versus VHS's 2 hours), meaning a movie required a tape change in the middle. And VHS was licensed to a number of manufacturers, while Sony wanted to lock in Betamax as their own format.
It takes more than better specs to declare a product "better", and the results showed that VHS was actually the better product when all factors were taken into account.
Too complex and dangerous based on what?
Little things like this, the only difference is scale...
The only difference between "smart luggage" and a large scale grid storage plant is scale? Really, that's the only difference? A 100MW battery bank is pretty much the same as thousands of roller bags?
I'd take a guess and say they're too complex and dangerous compared to nickel-iron.
Sources?
You can't compare a single nickel-iron battery to a 100MWh installation and declare that nickel iron is less complex and safer for this purpose -- if it won't do the job, then it's not a fair comparison. You may as well say that rubber chickens are less complex and safer than batteries, which may be true, but they aren't going to do the job. And note that Tesla installed this plant in under 60 days, so it seems that they aren't all that complex.
Point to a large grid-storage nickel-iron battery installation. Most seem to use lead-acid, Li-ion, or a few other technologies.
Nickel-iron has one weakness that makes it less suitable for a battery that needs to quickly absorb or provide megawatts of power:
While the slow formation of iron crystals preserves the electrodes, it also limits the high rate performance: these cells charge slowly, and are only able to discharge slowly
Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.
Brownouts can destroy equipment, and severe shortages can also lead to blackouts. Both of those things can literally kill people. Let's prioritize keeping the power on. There's no better/cheaper/more effective device for grid stabilization than battery storage, today.
But there's still a cost-benefit decision to be made, even when lives are at stake. Money is a finite resource, and if the more you spend on brownout protection, the less you have to spend elsewhere that may save more lives.
As far as these batteries go. They're too complex and dangerous (they should use nickel-iron for stationary stuff),
Too complex and dangerous based on what? This 129MWh installation suggests that they aren't too complex or dangerous, though admittedly it's still early in its lifetime.
I'd like to think that the guy hired to kill me would need a lot more than $2800 to double-cross the guy that hired him to kill me. How little did I piss someone off for it to only be worth $2800 to call off the killing?
WOW! So to be clear, what does Geico do again? Does it fix this situation or cause it?
That's not the purpose of the ad -- it assumes some familiarity with Geico.
I'm genuinely confused as to why I should download Geico.
No wonder, since you apparently live in a cave and have never heard of Geico or even know why your might use a company's mobile app. If you were a Geico customer then it's pretty clear what the mobile app does.
What was shown in the advertisement seemed to be a horrible experience with no indication that the app would change that at all.
I'm not being funny here. That advert told me nothing about the product other than associate it with a really annoying scenario. Is it a replacement for Skype? Does it invoke a sense of dread without needing to attend a meeting? What did it win an award for? Whoever came up with this should honestly not be in marketing.
The ad wasn't meant to solve your video conferencing needs, it was meant to be an entertaining video to raise awareness of the mobile app, and maybe get some people to share it. And hey it worked -- you found the video on Slashdot and you don't even know what Geico is and you know they have a mobile app. I'm a Geico customer and didn't know they had a mobile app until I saw that video.
Another annoying ad is the Geico ad where the gecko is hosting a meeting in a conference room, and a call-in attendee is speaking at the same time he is. It's annoying when it happens in real life - We don't need to see it in a commercial.
I hadn't seen that one - I thought it was funny *because* that exact scenario happens in real life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Real geeks don't look at pictures.
That's all I look at. Downstairs in my parents basement. In the dark. With a large bottle of hand lotion at my side.
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds
Microseconds? You're off by a factor of 1000.
I took a 1024x640 TIFF photograph I had laying around and converted it to a 50KB jpg with moderate compression and a 500KB PNG and uploaded them to a well connected web server (10Gbit interface to the internet)
Then loaded them both in my home computer's browser. The jpg file took 86msec (that's milliseconds, not microseconds) to load, and the PNG file took 796msec (average of 5 tries). My home internet connection is 100mbit, pretty decent by American standards, if not by world standards.
I don't know about you, but I can definitely notice the difference between 800 msec and 80 msec.
"Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people"
You say that as if you were making a valid point?
When one class of people makes another class of people feel unwelcome, then what do you do? You can't please all the people all the time, but you *can* fire the biggest assholes and keep them from making women feel like they don't belong there.
This is pretty much why I just dumped my Echo. The fact that I literally have no idea what it's transmitting at any given time makes me nervous. I love the idea of a voice driven assistant, but I also don't love the idea that MS/Amazon/Google could know anything I say to anyone.... I work from home and discussing sensitive business information within earshot of an always-on microphone makes me twitch.
Did you ditch your cell phone too? You're more likely to have it infected by malware and recording your conversations than to have Amazon or Google decide to break their promise that their devices only listen after the wake word.
A mechanical switch is prone to failure so will need to be tested regularly, and runs the risk of being tested with the system in "live-fire" mode. The switch output is going to be converted to a software signal anyway, so it makes the system more complicated for no real benefit. There's no reason why a software trigger can't be protected with a confirmation dialog, like "You are about to send a live missile alert, type 'YES' to continue"
Perhaps I'm a simpleton, but isn't high-speed service, regardless of the means by which it is transmitted (copper, fiber, radio, whatever), still high speed service?
Depend on your definition of "service", do you include usage caps in that?
My household uses about 200GB/month of data.
I can useually get 10 - 20mbit/sec from LTE so it's good enough for streaming but at the same level of usage, I'd hit my 5GB usage cap after the first day.
So yeah, I'd have high speed service for one day, and 128kbit/second for the 29 days after that.
Of course humans can also be distracted by certain things:
http://97x.com/a-naked-woman-s...
Do most people use it for shopping? I tried it a couple times, but seems inconvenient since I rarely re-order the same item twice, so I can't say "Alexa, re-order toothpaste" -- I generally want to browse around and read reviews and look at prices from non-prime shippers.
The only thing I use my Echo for is listening to music, turning the lights off, and sometimes the weather. Oh and and a kitchen timer.
If it starts playing ads for any of those uses, I'll stop using it.
Fixed that for you.
The problem began with the bad intel. While the police bear some of the blame due to their over-aggressive response, your characterization removes blame entirely from the original intel source - the prankster.
The call apparently didn't go to a 911 dispatch center, which is already suspicious. Swatting is well known, so the police should have taken a little time to confirm that the call was even genuine -- for example, did they try even calling the home while they were in-route? I assume the police and/or 911 dispatch still have criss-cross directories that would let them look up the phone number (if there is any in these days of dwindling landlines) of a specific address.
Even the police realized that the call was suspicious (though they were careful not to call it "suspicious", instead it was "peculiar"):
“This call was little peculiar for us,” Livingston said. “(The call) went to a substation first, then it was relayed to dispatch, then dispatch gave it to us. We have a lot of information to go through.”
How many people in hostage situations would call a local substation rather than calling 911 directly?
My dad used to have a remote monitor for his pacemaker that sent data over the internet to his doctor. Without the remote monitoring, he'd have to make regular trips to the doctor for monitoring (and having an elderly man driving on snowy roads is a risk of its own)
The internet is becoming a utility, and it should be regulated as such - the power company can't turn off your power just because they think you're using electricity to grow marijuana. They can, however, tip off the police about the suspected grow house, but they can't turn off your power.
From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.
About 22% of California's imported power comes from renewables
I call BS. Houston power starts at $0.087 per kWh.
Those rates assume 2000KWh of energy use/month - which is 6 months of my power usage in California since the climate is mild enough to need little heating or cooling.
Plus they don't include TDSP delivery charges (which vary between 3.6 and 7.6 cents/KWh (plus $3.50 - $10/month)) depending on your energy provider. So the true cost is somewhere between 12.3 - 16.3 cents/KWh.
and power from PG&E for the Paso Robles area (central coast) start at $0.199 per kWh and go up.
Those prices don't include any credits, the true cost ends up being around 15.6 cents/KWh
Though if you're going to look at prices for living on California's central coast, you ought to pick a town that's actually on the coast, not 45 minutes inland.