An unattainable ideal, at least in a large publicly traded company. What starts as a defensive patent portfolio turn into a resource from which the investors are expecting the company to "extract value", therefore forcing the company to use them offensively to try to collect licensing fees.
The original post states "So the Tesla would pay for itself, assuming the owner never drove it or used it for anything other than mining Ethereum"; WHY? Drawing 2.4KW is like running the heater full blast, the car is capable of significantly more than that. There is absolutely no reason why you'd need to leave the car parked to mine. You simply just need to charge an extra 60KWh per day to sustain the 24/7 mining. Whether you do it once a day, or on multiple stops, it doesn't matter as long as you never know run the battery to 0%. Charging multiple times a day would actually result in less time spent charging as Tesla's can supercharge at 120KW when battery is low, but slows down as the battery gets fuller.
Of course, the whole idea is still silly. Where I live 60KWh costs $6 at home. There are places where it costs as low as $3. $3-$6 per day is not worth an hour or longer per day spent going to a supercharger. Yes, I know the article states $23 profit, but if you can plug it in at home for $3, then the Tesla only makes $3 per day, the rest can be made without the Tesla at home.
Ok, but if the casino simply deposited $0.01 into your account per $1 spent, then it would be a direct payment and then it wouldn't be gambling? Another way to think about out, what if instead of a lottery someone starts a "lootery", where instead tickets customers purchase virtual loot boxes, say for $2 each with a guaranteed win of $0.01 for each, but could also win up to a $1,000,000 (1:14,000,000 chance) Is that gambling from a legal point of view? Not according to ESRB's argument.
If ESRB's argument holds, I'm thinking online lootery and other legally non-gambling enterprises, say online poker - as long as you win something each bet, even if useless, say for each bet made you your level goes up by 1 - level being just a number displayed next to your username so you can boast how many bets you played.
Any purchase of a consumable item has a negative average return, it doesn't make it gambling. I think your definition doesn't work here, to the loot boxes in games, or any in game purchases.
Well, if the ESRB's reasoning of "if you receive a reward, even if useless, then it's not gambling" than any business that is considered and regulated under gambling laws can simply provide their players with rewards points which can be redeemed for prizes (even if useless). Most if not all casino's have rewards programs, I guess they'll be able to claim exemption from gambling laws for any players who collect rewards not based on chance (i.e. if you gamble for $1000, you get a free complementary drink).
So this is going to be like all the "...known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects." warnings which are present of every hotel, store, and most products sold in California. While warning about data breaches may be a good sounding idea, in practice this will turn into "this is a brand new company" indicator, i.e. "no warning about data breach means they are brand new to the internet"
A better idea would be to provide details about time, size and handling of every known breach (how quick were customers notified, what remedy was offered, etc).
Except that they are not proposing complete deregulation. The government continues to protect the Telco's from competition by giving them rights you cannot get as a new company, so even if you wanted to compete with Comcast, they get the right to hang their cables on public utility polls, your new company doesn't. They get easement rights to bury their wires and fibers through public AND private properly rent free, new company doesn't. If it were a true deregulation, the Comcasts of the world would have to negotiate and pay property owners rent for laying cables there. I would offer Comcast the same deal as they offer their customers, low price for 6 months, then back to ever increasing regular rates.
Is this government removing other related regulations, like the land easements that allow Telco's to plow through my property and lay they fiber there rent free? It is my understanding that they were granted those because they were a public utility, therefore regulated for the benefit of the public.If the FCC and the current political party get they wants want to deregulate the Telcos, great, let the Comcasts of the world negotiate with each individual property owner how much rent they want for running cables through their land. They want to charge more to carry traffic from EFF, no problem, I want to charge them unregulated rent for their fibers going through my property, or come dig it out and take it with you (it's only $10 per month for the first 6 months, regular rates apply after that, subject to change without notice).
I suspect than unfortunately that is no the case here. The government will deregulate what traffic the telcos carry and how much they charge, but they will continue to protect the Telco effective monopoly with regulation forcing me to allow them to use my land for their business. Oh yes, legally it's not a monopoly because there is more than one Telco, so I guess my argument is not legally sound.
Define the logistics of "deserve". If someone " "deserves" more than they can produce, whose productivity output should you take it away from? There is nothing for free in the world, someone has to bake the bread the "deserving" person will eat, and if you give it to them for free, you now robbed the baker of a good he or she has produced. I what if that baker then decided he deserves stuff for free too, then what, slave labor to force people to work to their full ability?
Pay structure too complex to figure out by an average person is not new nor unique to today's economy. I've had a job since I was 15 and was never afraid to try things, so back in early 90's I signed up to sell vacuums door to door. On first day of training I did a back of the napkin calculation that I'll be working for less than $2/hr plus I have to provide my own car and insurance (I included the cost of gas in the wage calculations). After asking the trainer whether I miscalculated, I was shown some poster guy somewhere who managed to made good money. I was then politely escorted out of the training during a break and asked to never come back.
Another example that comes to mind was when I helped my sister figure out how she makes less than minimum wage in cold call telemarketing selling picture packages for a photographer.
So yes this is a real problem, however how is it different from people paying $50 to cash their $500 check so they can go out on a Friday night, or paying huge interest and penalties on credit cards, car loans, etc. It's a society tax on not being able to do math and/or make rational financial decisions in life.
Back when internet hit mainstream, we had a Dot-Com boom. Anyone could start a website in their basement, grab a cleaver domain name, raise money, spend it like it's raining cash, go IPO and collect money from naive buyers who invested purely because they wanted to get on the bandwagon. Not everyone succeeded in the end, but a large number of people did burn through a ton of cash, and some people did make millions before the bubble burst in 2001, when the world ran out of suckers to offload the dot-com stocks to at an even more inflated price.
So is this a new cryptocurrency bubble in progress now? Anyone can fork existing cryptocurrencies, or create new ones (harder to do but not impossible), call it something that inspires trust in unsuspecting buyers who feel like they want to get a piece of the action, take the money and run? How long before that bursts and there are hundreds if not thousands worthless crypto-currencies, like dot-coms after 2001?
There is a difference between creating an cloud account and hosting email with a company. For example. slashdot is not hosting your email even though they do require you to login to post:-)
As for local account, absolutely a good option. If you ever have to administer a few Windows machine, even better is to setup a home server, such as Windows SBS - it allows you to centrally managed passwords, remotely backup all PC's to server, monitor all PC's health and deployment of updates, provide a shared network drive for all, provide a simple to use VPN server for all users (to which you can connect using Mac, Linux, PC or phones too), etc. If you ever become a family IT guy, it simplifies things, even more so if you have remote family members like parents of grandparents you help (that's when automatic VPN is very helpful) - once setup, most of your work is to look at a daily email report so see if everyone is patched up to date, if everyone is backed up, if they had any malware or other troubles detected - takes 5 seconds every morning to look to make sure everything is "green".
Microsoft will try to convince you to get a hotmail account to use your machine. This isn't necessary, but I don't recall how to avoid it. Play around on that screen to keep your accounts local (unless you want them tied together).
I've installed Windows 10 few times so far, it never asked to create a hotmail account. Are you sure you're not running into some crapware from Sony, Dell or whoever sold you the laptop? Windows installer may give you an option to create a Microsoft cloud account so that you can use the same options on more than one Windows device, but even that suggests using whatever email you usually use - a hotmail account is last resort option if this is your first step on the internet and you don't have your own email yet.
A lot of companies and consumers alike haven't figured it out yet - any time you have an internet-enabled device you have to keep supporting it (pay for servers), and patching at least the security holes. All that costs money. People buy products and expect them to last 5-10 years or longer, that is one hell of a support burden! I work in software and security. A 10 year old product is all but forgotten, the engineers who wrote the code are all gone, nobody knows how to maintain it, and most of all, the company is getting absolutely no revenue from the product, so management has zero reasons to commit any resources to maintain it. I've heard people expressing their displeasure of at Microsoft because they bought Office 2010 and can't connect Outlook 2010 securely to a gmail account today because it lacks some newer protocol support (ok, there is a hotfix, but you have to look for it and it's not officially supported) - I've tried explaining it to them but they don't understand it and firmly believe that if they paid for it once, they are entitled to it working forever. Consumers don't get that internet-enabled means you have to keep it up to date, which means it's a subscription service no matter what, whether you pay for it all up front or per month or per year.
All internet enabled products should have a clear planned and committed to End-Of-Life date, which could be extended but never shortened. This would allow consumers to know how long of a life they should expect from a device they are purchasing. There is no such thing as "lifetime" subscription unless it cost a lot of money. SaaS model may actually be the only model that is viable.for internet connected devices.
"If he goes off camera, he's fired". How is this any comfort to the customer - damage is done. Imagine a bank saying "Sorry sir, your account is empty, but don't worry, we fired the guy who left his computer unlocked when he went home. You may deposit additional funds at any of out thousands convenient locations. Please do so ASAP to avoid overdraft charges."
As I was reading this, I was trying to figure out where Alexander was going with it. Then I read the last sentence - "Private companies should share more data with the U.S. government to prevent breaches, ha said.". I guess "Let us fight back for you" is the new version of "Think of the children" or "Stop terrorists"?
Yes. Unfortunately this get much more complicated. Technically when they disabled the air suspension and other changes, each user clicked the "Update" button so there was user permission. The only exception I know of was Tesla disabling AutoPilot somewhere in Asia without consent because laws changed to make it illegal (to use, not own, but Tesla proactively disabled it). The problem is that is the car is an internet connected device and you have to update it for security reasons. Yes, I know people walk around with outdated phones which have more security holes than one can count, but a worst case scenario of your phone being hacked is much more benign than your car being hacked. Remember that those cars have the hardware to drive themselves. They may not be able to drive themselves reliably today, but for a hacker they don't need to drive reliably.
That is what I was saying. Where in what you just said we need new laws? Are we going to mandate by law that people do research before purchasing? My original point was that we don't need new laws to deal with this.
If the TV no longer works as advertised, then in my book it's broken and should be repaired if under warranty or exchanged. If it broke after warranty, no recourse other than bad reputation for the product.
This is a much bigger problem by the way than just TV's. It applies to all products which can be updated over-the-air. How much functionality is a manufacturer allowed to change or remove before you can claim the product is broken? I'll give you an example, I bought a car in 2013 and couple of months into my ownership the manufacturer disabled my air suspension which I paid for. It was explained as a "safety measure" but still, should I have been able to lemon the car because the manufacturer refused to "repair it" in a reasonable time (it took over 4 months before they re-enabled it)?
No disagreement on changing the product afterwards. No different than if Samsung changed your 4K TV to only display 480i content via a software update - you should be able to claim it as defective under warranty or return programs. If they do it after warranty, that's unfortunate but no different than if their update failed and your TV was bricked - after warranty you have no recourse other than what you already mentioned, junk it and never buy another product from them again.
The government is not your parent and you are not an infant. If you agree to get a discounted or even free TV set in exchange for inserted advertisements, it is your choice and you should be free to make it or decline. Why do so many people think that they always know what is better for other people and want to force their "wisdom" onto everybody with laws (and therefore threat of fines or jail)?
Even with $0 income you can get the full $7,500, by leasing.
If you lease, the $7,500 is claimed by the leasing company as they are the owner (and have plenty of tax liability), not the the customer who is leasing. Most of the leasing companies just pass the benefit directly to the customer by reducing the price of the car, and therefore the capital cost, and therefore their monthly payment. That is how people were able to lease brand new Nissan Leafs for $0 down and less than $200 per month, which by the way should be affordable to more than 25% of US society (remember that you further save on gas too, so for some it may be a free car, though to save $200 per month you'd have to drive about 2000 miles per month, which is above average).
I see. By that logic, computer engineering is practiced only by the homo sapiens which has the most evolved brain, therefore we can conclude that computer engineering is the cause homo sapiens brain evolvution?
Slashdot Mirror
What is "secret patent stuff"? In the US and most if not all other countries,all patents are publicly available to anyone who want to read them.
An unattainable ideal, at least in a large publicly traded company. What starts as a defensive patent portfolio turn into a resource from which the investors are expecting the company to "extract value", therefore forcing the company to use them offensively to try to collect licensing fees.
The original post states "So the Tesla would pay for itself, assuming the owner never drove it or used it for anything other than mining Ethereum"; WHY? Drawing 2.4KW is like running the heater full blast, the car is capable of significantly more than that. There is absolutely no reason why you'd need to leave the car parked to mine. You simply just need to charge an extra 60KWh per day to sustain the 24/7 mining. Whether you do it once a day, or on multiple stops, it doesn't matter as long as you never know run the battery to 0%. Charging multiple times a day would actually result in less time spent charging as Tesla's can supercharge at 120KW when battery is low, but slows down as the battery gets fuller.
Of course, the whole idea is still silly. Where I live 60KWh costs $6 at home. There are places where it costs as low as $3. $3-$6 per day is not worth an hour or longer per day spent going to a supercharger. Yes, I know the article states $23 profit, but if you can plug it in at home for $3, then the Tesla only makes $3 per day, the rest can be made without the Tesla at home.
Ok, but if the casino simply deposited $0.01 into your account per $1 spent, then it would be a direct payment and then it wouldn't be gambling? Another way to think about out, what if instead of a lottery someone starts a "lootery", where instead tickets customers purchase virtual loot boxes, say for $2 each with a guaranteed win of $0.01 for each, but could also win up to a $1,000,000 (1:14,000,000 chance) Is that gambling from a legal point of view? Not according to ESRB's argument.
If ESRB's argument holds, I'm thinking online lootery and other legally non-gambling enterprises, say online poker - as long as you win something each bet, even if useless, say for each bet made you your level goes up by 1 - level being just a number displayed next to your username so you can boast how many bets you played.
Any purchase of a consumable item has a negative average return, it doesn't make it gambling. I think your definition doesn't work here, to the loot boxes in games, or any in game purchases.
Well, if the ESRB's reasoning of "if you receive a reward, even if useless, then it's not gambling" than any business that is considered and regulated under gambling laws can simply provide their players with rewards points which can be redeemed for prizes (even if useless). Most if not all casino's have rewards programs, I guess they'll be able to claim exemption from gambling laws for any players who collect rewards not based on chance (i.e. if you gamble for $1000, you get a free complementary drink).
So this is going to be like all the "...known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects." warnings which are present of every hotel, store, and most products sold in California. While warning about data breaches may be a good sounding idea, in practice this will turn into "this is a brand new company" indicator, i.e. "no warning about data breach means they are brand new to the internet"
A better idea would be to provide details about time, size and handling of every known breach (how quick were customers notified, what remedy was offered, etc).
Except that they are not proposing complete deregulation. The government continues to protect the Telco's from competition by giving them rights you cannot get as a new company, so even if you wanted to compete with Comcast, they get the right to hang their cables on public utility polls, your new company doesn't. They get easement rights to bury their wires and fibers through public AND private properly rent free, new company doesn't. If it were a true deregulation, the Comcasts of the world would have to negotiate and pay property owners rent for laying cables there. I would offer Comcast the same deal as they offer their customers, low price for 6 months, then back to ever increasing regular rates.
Is this government removing other related regulations, like the land easements that allow Telco's to plow through my property and lay they fiber there rent free? It is my understanding that they were granted those because they were a public utility, therefore regulated for the benefit of the public.If the FCC and the current political party get they wants want to deregulate the Telcos, great, let the Comcasts of the world negotiate with each individual property owner how much rent they want for running cables through their land. They want to charge more to carry traffic from EFF, no problem, I want to charge them unregulated rent for their fibers going through my property, or come dig it out and take it with you (it's only $10 per month for the first 6 months, regular rates apply after that, subject to change without notice).
I suspect than unfortunately that is no the case here. The government will deregulate what traffic the telcos carry and how much they charge, but they will continue to protect the Telco effective monopoly with regulation forcing me to allow them to use my land for their business. Oh yes, legally it's not a monopoly because there is more than one Telco, so I guess my argument is not legally sound.
Define the logistics of "deserve". If someone " "deserves" more than they can produce, whose productivity output should you take it away from? There is nothing for free in the world, someone has to bake the bread the "deserving" person will eat, and if you give it to them for free, you now robbed the baker of a good he or she has produced. I what if that baker then decided he deserves stuff for free too, then what, slave labor to force people to work to their full ability?
Pay structure too complex to figure out by an average person is not new nor unique to today's economy. I've had a job since I was 15 and was never afraid to try things, so back in early 90's I signed up to sell vacuums door to door. On first day of training I did a back of the napkin calculation that I'll be working for less than $2/hr plus I have to provide my own car and insurance (I included the cost of gas in the wage calculations). After asking the trainer whether I miscalculated, I was shown some poster guy somewhere who managed to made good money. I was then politely escorted out of the training during a break and asked to never come back.
Another example that comes to mind was when I helped my sister figure out how she makes less than minimum wage in cold call telemarketing selling picture packages for a photographer.
So yes this is a real problem, however how is it different from people paying $50 to cash their $500 check so they can go out on a Friday night, or paying huge interest and penalties on credit cards, car loans, etc. It's a society tax on not being able to do math and/or make rational financial decisions in life.
Back when internet hit mainstream, we had a Dot-Com boom. Anyone could start a website in their basement, grab a cleaver domain name, raise money, spend it like it's raining cash, go IPO and collect money from naive buyers who invested purely because they wanted to get on the bandwagon. Not everyone succeeded in the end, but a large number of people did burn through a ton of cash, and some people did make millions before the bubble burst in 2001, when the world ran out of suckers to offload the dot-com stocks to at an even more inflated price.
So is this a new cryptocurrency bubble in progress now? Anyone can fork existing cryptocurrencies, or create new ones (harder to do but not impossible), call it something that inspires trust in unsuspecting buyers who feel like they want to get a piece of the action, take the money and run? How long before that bursts and there are hundreds if not thousands worthless crypto-currencies, like dot-coms after 2001?
There is a difference between creating an cloud account and hosting email with a company. For example. slashdot is not hosting your email even though they do require you to login to post :-)
As for local account, absolutely a good option. If you ever have to administer a few Windows machine, even better is to setup a home server, such as Windows SBS - it allows you to centrally managed passwords, remotely backup all PC's to server, monitor all PC's health and deployment of updates, provide a shared network drive for all, provide a simple to use VPN server for all users (to which you can connect using Mac, Linux, PC or phones too), etc. If you ever become a family IT guy, it simplifies things, even more so if you have remote family members like parents of grandparents you help (that's when automatic VPN is very helpful) - once setup, most of your work is to look at a daily email report so see if everyone is patched up to date, if everyone is backed up, if they had any malware or other troubles detected - takes 5 seconds every morning to look to make sure everything is "green".
Microsoft will try to convince you to get a hotmail account to use your machine. This isn't necessary, but I don't recall how to avoid it. Play around on that screen to keep your accounts local (unless you want them tied together).
I've installed Windows 10 few times so far, it never asked to create a hotmail account. Are you sure you're not running into some crapware from Sony, Dell or whoever sold you the laptop? Windows installer may give you an option to create a Microsoft cloud account so that you can use the same options on more than one Windows device, but even that suggests using whatever email you usually use - a hotmail account is last resort option if this is your first step on the internet and you don't have your own email yet.
A lot of companies and consumers alike haven't figured it out yet - any time you have an internet-enabled device you have to keep supporting it (pay for servers), and patching at least the security holes. All that costs money. People buy products and expect them to last 5-10 years or longer, that is one hell of a support burden! I work in software and security. A 10 year old product is all but forgotten, the engineers who wrote the code are all gone, nobody knows how to maintain it, and most of all, the company is getting absolutely no revenue from the product, so management has zero reasons to commit any resources to maintain it. I've heard people expressing their displeasure of at Microsoft because they bought Office 2010 and can't connect Outlook 2010 securely to a gmail account today because it lacks some newer protocol support (ok, there is a hotfix, but you have to look for it and it's not officially supported) - I've tried explaining it to them but they don't understand it and firmly believe that if they paid for it once, they are entitled to it working forever. Consumers don't get that internet-enabled means you have to keep it up to date, which means it's a subscription service no matter what, whether you pay for it all up front or per month or per year.
All internet enabled products should have a clear planned and committed to End-Of-Life date, which could be extended but never shortened. This would allow consumers to know how long of a life they should expect from a device they are purchasing. There is no such thing as "lifetime" subscription unless it cost a lot of money. SaaS model may actually be the only model that is viable.for internet connected devices.
"If he goes off camera, he's fired". How is this any comfort to the customer - damage is done. Imagine a bank saying "Sorry sir, your account is empty, but don't worry, we fired the guy who left his computer unlocked when he went home. You may deposit additional funds at any of out thousands convenient locations. Please do so ASAP to avoid overdraft charges."
As I was reading this, I was trying to figure out where Alexander was going with it. Then I read the last sentence - "Private companies should share more data with the U.S. government to prevent breaches, ha said.". I guess "Let us fight back for you" is the new version of "Think of the children" or "Stop terrorists"?
Yes. Unfortunately this get much more complicated. Technically when they disabled the air suspension and other changes, each user clicked the "Update" button so there was user permission. The only exception I know of was Tesla disabling AutoPilot somewhere in Asia without consent because laws changed to make it illegal (to use, not own, but Tesla proactively disabled it). The problem is that is the car is an internet connected device and you have to update it for security reasons. Yes, I know people walk around with outdated phones which have more security holes than one can count, but a worst case scenario of your phone being hacked is much more benign than your car being hacked. Remember that those cars have the hardware to drive themselves. They may not be able to drive themselves reliably today, but for a hacker they don't need to drive reliably.
That is what I was saying. Where in what you just said we need new laws? Are we going to mandate by law that people do research before purchasing? My original point was that we don't need new laws to deal with this.
If the TV no longer works as advertised, then in my book it's broken and should be repaired if under warranty or exchanged. If it broke after warranty, no recourse other than bad reputation for the product.
This is a much bigger problem by the way than just TV's. It applies to all products which can be updated over-the-air. How much functionality is a manufacturer allowed to change or remove before you can claim the product is broken? I'll give you an example, I bought a car in 2013 and couple of months into my ownership the manufacturer disabled my air suspension which I paid for. It was explained as a "safety measure" but still, should I have been able to lemon the car because the manufacturer refused to "repair it" in a reasonable time (it took over 4 months before they re-enabled it)?
No disagreement on changing the product afterwards. No different than if Samsung changed your 4K TV to only display 480i content via a software update - you should be able to claim it as defective under warranty or return programs. If they do it after warranty, that's unfortunate but no different than if their update failed and your TV was bricked - after warranty you have no recourse other than what you already mentioned, junk it and never buy another product from them again.
The government is not your parent and you are not an infant. If you agree to get a discounted or even free TV set in exchange for inserted advertisements, it is your choice and you should be free to make it or decline. Why do so many people think that they always know what is better for other people and want to force their "wisdom" onto everybody with laws (and therefore threat of fines or jail)?
Exactly. I know plenty of people, myself included, who run Linux boxes, but very rarely as a desktop.
Even with $0 income you can get the full $7,500, by leasing.
If you lease, the $7,500 is claimed by the leasing company as they are the owner (and have plenty of tax liability), not the the customer who is leasing. Most of the leasing companies just pass the benefit directly to the customer by reducing the price of the car, and therefore the capital cost, and therefore their monthly payment. That is how people were able to lease brand new Nissan Leafs for $0 down and less than $200 per month, which by the way should be affordable to more than 25% of US society (remember that you further save on gas too, so for some it may be a free car, though to save $200 per month you'd have to drive about 2000 miles per month, which is above average).
I see. By that logic, computer engineering is practiced only by the homo sapiens which has the most evolved brain, therefore we can conclude that computer engineering is the cause homo sapiens brain evolvution?