What's the point of buying these devices? It's terribly trivial to buy an Amazon FireTV Stick and install Kodi on it. I did it to play with it as a frontend for my MythTV system, but setting it up for pirate streaming can't be any more difficult. It's not like it requires rooting the device or anything like that.
Even though you don't trust the FCC, file an FCC complaint. That will get the attention of the cable company in a way that you otherwise can't get as an individual.
If people typically charge their cars at their workplaces, then yes, daytime usage and commercial usage will both see a jump over the next few years. But I don't think that's going to be terribly prevalent. I think most people will charge at home at night. The push for workplace charging has been mainly due to the short range of EVs--most have been around 60-80 miles, which means charging at work makes a huge difference. As we move to the 200+ mile range with the Bolt, 2018 Leaf (in September--range yet to be announced), and Tesla Model 3, the need for workplace charging decreases.
In general, workplace charging will be important for people who can't charge at home (typically renters or condo owners). That will remain an issue for something like five years, more or less, depending on the rate of EV adoption, until apartment managers find they need to add convenient car charging to compete.
Full self driving changes everything in chaotic ways that are hard to accurately predict.
I can play MP3 files in both my cars, my phone, our iPad, you name it. It's natively supported by everything out there. Ogg, not so much.
Even in cases where Ogg might work, I know MP3 works, so why bother checking? Why should I rip my CDs to a format that might not work everywhere?
Is it better? Sure, there are technical aspects that are better, but should I care? Storage is so cheap, so a 320kbps MP3 is as good as the original for me. Where's the motivation to even see if another format works?
There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics, artwork, and whatever other information the artist thinks is interesting. That would be one advantage to buying digital music in the first place instead of buying CDs and ripping them (which many prefer to do).
I suspect part of the problem is the container formats not supporting synchronized lyrics and such. With MP3, as I understand it, the tagging was an afterthought and is a bit of a hack. It works well enough for tags, but has some significant limitations. I'm not an expert on music formats, so I can't say whether this is a general problem, or if the purveyors of digital music just aren't bothering to do anything beyond simply ripping the CD.
What's this idling he's talking about? The switch to smart intersections will be slower than the switch to electric vehicles, so stopped cars won't be using nearly that much power. True, they may be running heat/AC and such, so it's not zero, but it's not the big deal that it was. Even hybrids shut off their engines at stop lights, and now some gas-only cars have added that technology.
But that's just a nitpick. Obviously there's a lot we can do to improve intersections, and this idea is nothing new.
I've been running Courier IMAPd since 2003 for just my personal email. I think I picked it because it was simple to configure. It's been running just fine ever since. If I were providing email service to a large group of users, I would want to evaluate different options, but it's been rock solid for my use.
No, that's backwords. You're describing text-to-speech, not speech-to-text. I'm talking about walking up to my computer and saying something like, "Computer, launch Thunderbird." I'm not necessarily looking for a vocal response (though that might be nice for some things).
When Concord Street was extended in my town, the new portion was named "Concord Street Extension." That makes addresses ugly, but it solves the problem. Of course, Concord Street is one of those crazy streets where you come to a four-way intersection, and you turn left to stay on Concord Street, or you go straight for Concord Street Extension, or you turn right for another street where you then have to turn left at the next intersection to stay on that street. At the other end at another four-way intersection, you go straight or left for Fountain Street and right for Front Street.
I think it's time to rename and renumber some streets to clean up this mess.
How about a do-it-yourself system with local speech to text? Are there good libraries for that? What about something that it at least good enough to set up an activation and then pass things through to Google? I would love to have voice activation for my computer, provided I can control how and what it does.
It depends on where you are. In my town, house numbers start in the single digits. This causes a problem if the street is extended in the wrong direction, as happens from time to time. In the town I grew up on, the streets are numbered as if they extended to the center of town, so houses between 1st and 2nd streets are in the 100s, but streets ten miles away have five-digit addresses (it's a large city). That works well, as you can often tell about where something is by the street number even if you've never heard of the street.
It's not that the money is banked overseas. It's that the money isn't help by Apple directly, but by overseas wholly owned subsidiaries. I don't see why Apple Ireland (for example) couldn't invest its money in the United States just the same as any foreign company. What would be particularly interesting is if Apple Ireland decided to invest it's money in Apple stock. You could get almost all the advantages of a stock buy-back without having to repatriate the money. Am I missing anything, or would that work?
Aren't the Slashboxes you can configure on the right column of Slashdot powered by RSS feeds? I use those daily. (Unfortunately, the "Sci-Fi News" box is stuck with data from over a year ago.)
It's been a while since I've touched COBOL, but it should be possible to develop a program that parses COBOL and outputs the equivalent in a modern language, even preserving the comments.
Since financial institutions seem to be completely unaware that programmers can quickly adapt to different languages, it would seem like an automatic conversion program could be quite profitable.
With climate change, there's more energy in the atmosphere than before, so pulling a tiny amount out with wind turbines will help, not hurt. That said, the sort of wind power being installed now can't be taking more than a fraction of a rounding error of energy out of the atmosphere so it's only theoretical.
I'll have to check when flying if they list what they block before you pay. I would think they would need to, but probably not.
The most likely candidate to work would be Signal, but I think that only handles calls between people using that app. It's all encrypted, so unless they block the app entirely, it should be good.
Unless they block ssh, you could use any VoIP with a tunnel, but that's not something the common person is going to be able to set up.
So they're not enabling cellular service, but you can usually pay their extortion price for WiFi and then make all the VoIP calls you want. If you use Google Voice, it's just like any other call. You can also use Signal, Skype, or whatever.
But for the other 95% who aren't clueful with the technology, it keeps them quiet. In time that might change. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, most people only use data on their devices, regardless of whether they're making a call, sending a text, or browsing a web site.
Nonsense. If you look at what Tesla would be making if they weren't investing in the future, they would be making a handsome profit on the Model S and X. The difference in capital spending between Tesla and GM is that Tesla is expanding, while GM is spending on maintaining their business. Tesla is spending to become a much larger company, while GM is spending to try to stay the same size.
I've twice signed up for airline credit cards when traveling with my family because they offer to waive the baggage fee (at least for the first bag per ticket). Even if I hadn't canceled the card before having to pay the annual fee after one year, I still would have come out ahead.
Though the last time we flew, I went to Walmart and bought some carry-on bags that were cheaper than the checked baggage fee. Still, when flying with a family with connecting flights, checking baggage is nice.
The price isn't completely insane. If you figure that GM sells 10 million cars a year, but has very narrow profit margins. Tesla is looking for a production rate of 0.5 million cars by the end of next year and 1 million cars a few years after that. But Tesla has a much higher margin on its cars than GM. So if you look at the projected profits of Tesla selling 1m cars vs. GM selling 10m cars, Tesla comes out on top.
Of course, when Tesla is selling 1m cars per year, they'll likely still be expanding, so the profits will be lower, but Wall Street generally likes to see companies use their margin to fuel growth instead of using their margin for profits--it's always about the future.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. I've seen several studies that show that that accounts for some of the gap, but by no means all of it. Another related factor is that women often need more flexible work hours to manage families, which impacts pay in many fields. Still, even after accounting for factors like that, women earn less than men.
Tesla doesn't sell cars at wholesale prices, so any reseller would have to buy them at retail and mark them up from there. Also, I think it would be tracked as a sale, so technically they would be buying new cars and selling them used; I'm not sure about that.
In any case, Tesla isn't making deals with dealers, so if you want to open an independent Tesla dealership, your best bet is to sell used Teslas, which you can buy at various car auctions like any used car. If I weren't stuck in a satisfying well-paying job, I've thought I might want to start an electric-only used car business.
If the product really behaves as what it's being sold as, it's a counterfeit. If it doesn't, it's an outright fake. I once bought a micro SD card that turned out to be fake (it failed, and then the company said the serial number wasn't valid). When buying phone batteries on eBay, I expect them to be counterfeit. They've always worked, though I don't have any good way of telling if the mAh ratings were real.
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What's the point of buying these devices? It's terribly trivial to buy an Amazon FireTV Stick and install Kodi on it. I did it to play with it as a frontend for my MythTV system, but setting it up for pirate streaming can't be any more difficult. It's not like it requires rooting the device or anything like that.
Even though you don't trust the FCC, file an FCC complaint. That will get the attention of the cable company in a way that you otherwise can't get as an individual.
No, I think you're making a flawed assumption.
If people typically charge their cars at their workplaces, then yes, daytime usage and commercial usage will both see a jump over the next few years. But I don't think that's going to be terribly prevalent. I think most people will charge at home at night. The push for workplace charging has been mainly due to the short range of EVs--most have been around 60-80 miles, which means charging at work makes a huge difference. As we move to the 200+ mile range with the Bolt, 2018 Leaf (in September--range yet to be announced), and Tesla Model 3, the need for workplace charging decreases.
In general, workplace charging will be important for people who can't charge at home (typically renters or condo owners). That will remain an issue for something like five years, more or less, depending on the rate of EV adoption, until apartment managers find they need to add convenient car charging to compete.
Full self driving changes everything in chaotic ways that are hard to accurately predict.
Yup. That's shockingly low resolution. Amazon is cutting corners to go cheap. Other obvious shortcuts include:
2MP rear camera and VGA front camera--that's a front camera that's even lower resolution than the screen!
RAM is only 1GB. That's very limiting these days.
Still, at $50, it's not a horrible device for kids.
Compatibility.
I can play MP3 files in both my cars, my phone, our iPad, you name it. It's natively supported by everything out there. Ogg, not so much.
Even in cases where Ogg might work, I know MP3 works, so why bother checking? Why should I rip my CDs to a format that might not work everywhere?
Is it better? Sure, there are technical aspects that are better, but should I care? Storage is so cheap, so a 320kbps MP3 is as good as the original for me. Where's the motivation to even see if another format works?
Hear! Hear!
There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics, artwork, and whatever other information the artist thinks is interesting. That would be one advantage to buying digital music in the first place instead of buying CDs and ripping them (which many prefer to do).
I suspect part of the problem is the container formats not supporting synchronized lyrics and such. With MP3, as I understand it, the tagging was an afterthought and is a bit of a hack. It works well enough for tags, but has some significant limitations. I'm not an expert on music formats, so I can't say whether this is a general problem, or if the purveyors of digital music just aren't bothering to do anything beyond simply ripping the CD.
The big catch here is that you aren't allowed to check li-ion batteries. So you can't bring a laptop from Europe to the USA at all.
What's this idling he's talking about? The switch to smart intersections will be slower than the switch to electric vehicles, so stopped cars won't be using nearly that much power. True, they may be running heat/AC and such, so it's not zero, but it's not the big deal that it was. Even hybrids shut off their engines at stop lights, and now some gas-only cars have added that technology.
But that's just a nitpick. Obviously there's a lot we can do to improve intersections, and this idea is nothing new.
I've been running Courier IMAPd since 2003 for just my personal email. I think I picked it because it was simple to configure. It's been running just fine ever since. If I were providing email service to a large group of users, I would want to evaluate different options, but it's been rock solid for my use.
No, that's backwords. You're describing text-to-speech, not speech-to-text. I'm talking about walking up to my computer and saying something like, "Computer, launch Thunderbird." I'm not necessarily looking for a vocal response (though that might be nice for some things).
When Concord Street was extended in my town, the new portion was named "Concord Street Extension." That makes addresses ugly, but it solves the problem. Of course, Concord Street is one of those crazy streets where you come to a four-way intersection, and you turn left to stay on Concord Street, or you go straight for Concord Street Extension, or you turn right for another street where you then have to turn left at the next intersection to stay on that street. At the other end at another four-way intersection, you go straight or left for Fountain Street and right for Front Street.
I think it's time to rename and renumber some streets to clean up this mess.
How about a do-it-yourself system with local speech to text? Are there good libraries for that? What about something that it at least good enough to set up an activation and then pass things through to Google? I would love to have voice activation for my computer, provided I can control how and what it does.
It depends on where you are. In my town, house numbers start in the single digits. This causes a problem if the street is extended in the wrong direction, as happens from time to time. In the town I grew up on, the streets are numbered as if they extended to the center of town, so houses between 1st and 2nd streets are in the 100s, but streets ten miles away have five-digit addresses (it's a large city). That works well, as you can often tell about where something is by the street number even if you've never heard of the street.
It's not that the money is banked overseas. It's that the money isn't help by Apple directly, but by overseas wholly owned subsidiaries. I don't see why Apple Ireland (for example) couldn't invest its money in the United States just the same as any foreign company. What would be particularly interesting is if Apple Ireland decided to invest it's money in Apple stock. You could get almost all the advantages of a stock buy-back without having to repatriate the money. Am I missing anything, or would that work?
Aren't the Slashboxes you can configure on the right column of Slashdot powered by RSS feeds? I use those daily. (Unfortunately, the "Sci-Fi News" box is stuck with data from over a year ago.)
It's been a while since I've touched COBOL, but it should be possible to develop a program that parses COBOL and outputs the equivalent in a modern language, even preserving the comments.
Since financial institutions seem to be completely unaware that programmers can quickly adapt to different languages, it would seem like an automatic conversion program could be quite profitable.
With climate change, there's more energy in the atmosphere than before, so pulling a tiny amount out with wind turbines will help, not hurt. That said, the sort of wind power being installed now can't be taking more than a fraction of a rounding error of energy out of the atmosphere so it's only theoretical.
I'll have to check when flying if they list what they block before you pay. I would think they would need to, but probably not.
The most likely candidate to work would be Signal, but I think that only handles calls between people using that app. It's all encrypted, so unless they block the app entirely, it should be good.
Unless they block ssh, you could use any VoIP with a tunnel, but that's not something the common person is going to be able to set up.
So they're not enabling cellular service, but you can usually pay their extortion price for WiFi and then make all the VoIP calls you want. If you use Google Voice, it's just like any other call. You can also use Signal, Skype, or whatever.
But for the other 95% who aren't clueful with the technology, it keeps them quiet. In time that might change. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, most people only use data on their devices, regardless of whether they're making a call, sending a text, or browsing a web site.
Nonsense. If you look at what Tesla would be making if they weren't investing in the future, they would be making a handsome profit on the Model S and X. The difference in capital spending between Tesla and GM is that Tesla is expanding, while GM is spending on maintaining their business. Tesla is spending to become a much larger company, while GM is spending to try to stay the same size.
I've twice signed up for airline credit cards when traveling with my family because they offer to waive the baggage fee (at least for the first bag per ticket). Even if I hadn't canceled the card before having to pay the annual fee after one year, I still would have come out ahead.
Though the last time we flew, I went to Walmart and bought some carry-on bags that were cheaper than the checked baggage fee. Still, when flying with a family with connecting flights, checking baggage is nice.
The price isn't completely insane. If you figure that GM sells 10 million cars a year, but has very narrow profit margins. Tesla is looking for a production rate of 0.5 million cars by the end of next year and 1 million cars a few years after that. But Tesla has a much higher margin on its cars than GM. So if you look at the projected profits of Tesla selling 1m cars vs. GM selling 10m cars, Tesla comes out on top.
Of course, when Tesla is selling 1m cars per year, they'll likely still be expanding, so the profits will be lower, but Wall Street generally likes to see companies use their margin to fuel growth instead of using their margin for profits--it's always about the future.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. I've seen several studies that show that that accounts for some of the gap, but by no means all of it. Another related factor is that women often need more flexible work hours to manage families, which impacts pay in many fields. Still, even after accounting for factors like that, women earn less than men.
Tesla doesn't sell cars at wholesale prices, so any reseller would have to buy them at retail and mark them up from there. Also, I think it would be tracked as a sale, so technically they would be buying new cars and selling them used; I'm not sure about that.
In any case, Tesla isn't making deals with dealers, so if you want to open an independent Tesla dealership, your best bet is to sell used Teslas, which you can buy at various car auctions like any used car. If I weren't stuck in a satisfying well-paying job, I've thought I might want to start an electric-only used car business.
If the product really behaves as what it's being sold as, it's a counterfeit. If it doesn't, it's an outright fake. I once bought a micro SD card that turned out to be fake (it failed, and then the company said the serial number wasn't valid). When buying phone batteries on eBay, I expect them to be counterfeit. They've always worked, though I don't have any good way of telling if the mAh ratings were real.