It doesn't work out like that in China. Factory and powerplant emissions in Beijing city are quite low, many factories got moved out of the city for the 2008 Olympics and most of the road vehicles are fairly new (typically they meet an equivalent of Euro 4 vehicle emission standards or better). All the dirty factories in the surrounding province of Hebei now produce so much pollution that Beijing has among the worst air quality in the world in winter, even if the pollution sources are not nearby. From a tall building (there are many in Beijing) can see a chance in wind direction bring in the grey mist of fine particles that smell burnt and irritate your lungs. Just moving the pollution out of town doesn't help you when there's a lot of pollution.
Those electric buses are not yet zero emission in China - where most of the electricity is generated by coal.
They can be zero emission, when solar- or hydro-powered.
Diesel buses will never be zero emission.
But after you have the electric bus, you must close the coal mine, turn off the gas pipeline, and shut down the thermal power plant. Otherwise you just moved the emissions around a little.
Other cars with the cost of Tesla are also built to those standards. Modern car assembly is incredibly precise - if you see any panel fit that is visibly misaligned it is either damaged or has been repaired or replaced. Over the length of (say) the gap at the side of the bonnet where it meets the wing you can detect a couple of millimeters mis-alignment with a glance, and less than 1mm if you look carefully. Body panels are also either very rigid, or elastic enough to retain their shape.
Cheaply produced vehicles, or large truck type vehicles, may not be this well built, but the people selling passenger cars at Tesla's prices are this good already. Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise. If I get a new car from any of them and the measurement is not as specified, indeed my measuring tape should be replaced.
It is good to see that Musk realises he has to have consistent and precise manufacturing quality, but he's not as superior as he claims.
Hospitals (for civilian non-veterans) in the USA have no incentive to be efficient. They can put whatever number they like on the invoice and they'll likely get paid. You people in the USA could get cheaper medical care with cheaper drugs if you would get your hospitals and doctors to find the cheapest supplier - but you seem to think that's some sort of evil socialism and you reject it. You have at least one illness: severe delusion. Maybe you have other illnesses too.
The most significant part of this is an intent to prevent spouses from working.
The most common reason for failure (i.e. return to origin country) of expatriation or immigration of skilled workers is the partner being unhappy. For people from most developed countries, their husband or wife also expects a career - the time of househusbands or even housewives living on a one income family and being happy about that is over. In academia, this is known as the two-body problem: if you hire an academic from another country, there are two bodies to please, not just one.
So if Trump makes it impossible to get a work permit for a spouse when a highly skilled migrant moves to the USA, all those from countries where men and women have approximate equality will just not come. Try telling your partner you're moving to different country for a great professional opportunity but they can't work when they're there, so they have to give up their career and can't start another job or another occupation. It won't go well for most of you, and that's particularly true if you're higher skilled and globally mobile because such people tend to have partners or spouses who are also higher skilled and globally mobile.
Of course, this won't discourage people who are in large company H1B visa schemes used to supply more generic mid-skilled workers for contracts in the USA, especially as they are usually younger and less likely to have spouses and children.
But the university professors, top engineering talent, top management talent - that will all go "My wife can't work? My husband has to lose his career? No thanks - I'll take that job in another country instead." Trump won't understand or even notice, but universities, tech corporations, engineering corporations, and even orchestras will notice.
Alright, so you can have open source linux contributions from large companies.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is basically a patent troll with a sideline in silicon design. They never operate in good faith, and they have a long and inglorious track record of getting a standard that, surprise! they have a patent on, or simply using their patents to screw their competitors and collaborators with lawsuits. When they're not using their patents, they're just not serving users, they don't bother to innovate unless it's to squash their competition.
The reason why GSM wasn't a global standard for many years but CDMA stuck around? Qualcomm, because they got more patent revenue that way. The reason why Android Wear sucks? Qualcomm.... many more
Qualcomm, much more than any other large tech corporation with lawyers and patents, is toxic. An "open standard" with their involvement will have a trap.
It's a good story in the press but this person is hardly unique.
I only fill up my transit cards with cash (whenever I can) and recycle them every so often, but I don't have breathless stories in the press about how amazingly black my Oyster, OV, etc cards are.
I just like making total surveillance more difficult.
I think it does have something to do with Tesla: NRK (Norwegian State broadcaster, for those joining us from outside the Nordic countries) reports on this: https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/tes... Google Translate works OK if you don't read Norwegian.
It says that the vehicles were mostly Lithuanian and apart from the overloading and bad tyre maintenance, they were also EURO III standard vehicles, so at least 13 years old (EURO III was superceded in 2005). That's quite old for a commercial vehicle. I'm sure there are companies with newer vehicles that could have been contracted to do this job, and I'm sure this company was cheap.
Tesla decided to use a cheap contractor rather than a quality contractor. Their attitude of trying to pay their workers and contractors less and treating them badly led to this.
I bought three of these for various things, and they always seemed to work well. In particular, the 5600mAh one is thin, much thinner than the typical power bank based on cylindrical cells. I have never had any problems with them, but I shall stilll be disposing of them. I suspect that Amazon got bitten by a a slightly out of tolerance manufacturing technique, which happens to a lot of other power pack and battery makers too. Amazon is, unlike many of them, able to do a recall and willing to do so. I don't hold this against them, and I'd buy "Amazon Basics" again.
Amazon's returns process was pretty slick. They do send you an email with an external link, but: The order number can be searched against your Amazon order history, and their help pages recommend you do this if you get an email about an Amazon order; The product name, email, order number, etc, all matched what I had purchased; The external site didn't ask for any personal information.
The external site only asked what power packs I had, gave a bunch of links to disposal information in various countries, and said I would get a refund. So the security risks are close to zero, even if the link didn't see legitimate.
Japan has had booths to make phone calls in shared spaces for a long time, because in Japan it is impolite to speak audibly on your phone in such places as airline lounges, trains, etc. I only wish it was similarly socially unacceptable to speak loudly on your phone around other people in Europe or the USA.
These used to be phone booths with payphones. Older structures still have them, newer structures are built with them and signs indicating 'phone zone' or similar.
Meanwhile, how do you phone someone to talk about what is on your desk? I can't take my working environment to the phone booth when I call someone to discuss something I'm working on.
I know the headline is tongue-in-cheek, but if smartphone makers actually blame customers it is very much Who Moved My Cheese?
They're going to have to focus on delivering improvements at reasonable cost, rather than the best technology at no-matter-the-price.
To use the car analogy, Apple and Samsung have been lucky enough to have a Ford-sized market with Mercedes-sized prices until now. Now that customers have realised that smartphone technology is mature enough that the improvements are small and incremental, the smartphone makers have to deliver improvements at Ford-sized prices for a Ford-sized market.
There are reasons why Ford doesn't sell too many self-driving, highly stylish, highly-automated, very comfortable, luxurious, prestigious cars: it's because their customers can't (or won't) pay enough for that. Instead they make cars with mature, cheaper, technology and if the technology isn't mature enough to be cheap it's not in a Ford. Apple and Samsung are going to have to get used to making phones that way, and accepting the lower revenues per device and lower sales rates that come with it.
If people prefer to work away from the office, the office needs to improve.
The news here is not that home working is wildly superior.
The news is that modern offices are terrible. Noisy, crowded, lacking in privacy, environmentally inadequate, poorly located for employees to travel to.
Meanwhile, some people can't handle working at home and develop severe mental problems from the lack of social interaction so it's hardly a panacea.
The project is (at least partly, perhaps majorly) to power the UK. The UK has lots of space to put wind turbines in windy places.
The old rural NIMBYs just don't want them, so the UK government (whose support base is mostly older, rural-er, NIMBYer people) has decided not to approve any wind turbine projects on land.
The real answer is: put them on land, and raise the middle finger to the old rural people. They don't care, they won't be around when the global climate is completely broken by their selfishness.
Selling a lot of BTC, quickly, and more importantly reliably, needs the cooperation of bitcoin miners to process your transaction quickly, ahead of others, instead of waiting until... whenever.
So, look who processed all those BTC sale transactions and how they are connected with the sellers.
Clearly, BTC trading benefits from insiders because it is so illiquid.
I have been a Shazam user since it was a shortcode (2580) to call with your mobile phone and you got back an SMS message either identifying the song (and costing you) or saying sorry (for free). That was before app stores, and almost before phone apps, just after Shazam launched. A music- and technology-obsessed friend told me about it, and I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. I still think it's pretty cool.
I don't have a lot of confidence Apple won't ruin it. Will the Android app get any love now? Will there be links to buy the music from anyone except the iTunes store?
Shazam made a genuinely innovative idea that is useful for many people and it still is. Apple used to do that, now all their ideas are just marketing and they buy other companies to wither in Cupertino.
It is far more likely that Startcom are having problems being accepted by browser manufacturers because:
Wosign owns Startcom. Wosign is known to issue certificates outside the CA/Browser forum rules. Startcom has also been seen to issue certificates outside the CA/Browser forum rules since they were purchased by Wosign. Wosign still owns Startcom and therefore still controls Startcom.
Startcom is still poisoned by Wosign and since Wosign won't separate from Startcom, Startcom cannot be trusted as a CA and they know it.
Nothing to do with their business model, everything to do with who is in control of Startcom.
Compare this with military base exchanges (PX/BX). There is a bidding and qualification process for these, and then a vendor gets to be present in the captive markets of US military personnel who mostly shop on their base. So, it's a closed market operated by the US government that benefits the relatively few larger corporations who enter it. No-one is upset about that.
I'm not a big fan of Amazon's market power, but the reality is that they have changed retail: you have to be at least as good as Amazon to survive. So you have to be as easy to access, easy to buy from, as cheap, as full of local individual character as Amazon, or some other combination of attributes that makes you at least equal, in the consumer mind, to Amazon.
Now, you also have to be at least as good at selling and delivering to government as Amazon. Get to it.
"Why Do Web Developers Keep Making The Same Mistakes?"
StackOverflow.com
(they read the same wrong answers as other people, because every "I found this useful" or "Lots of people read this" ranking system does not detect factual errors, only opinions)
I look forward to this race being run in Finland in October next year with the same winning criteria.
Of course this is getting easier in late spring in a sunny desert. The success for real life usage will be when this works in a place with inclement weather and short days - like where most of the world's population lives for most of the year.
The base Model S used to be very under-equipped for its price. The interior is still bad - looks and feels cheap, it's uncomfortable, it lacks the comfort and convenience features of competitors. It's like the interior of a mid price muscle car, not a high priced luxury saloon.
Making features that are available on the competition standard on the Model S as well is a first step.
Charging extra for software is just petty and buyers will agree; other manufacturers like Mercedes charge for hardware-software combinations, not just software. Selling cars with the full capabilities of the hardware included in the price is the next step.
Finally until the Model S has an interior of the quality seen in Volvo, Mercedes or BMW then it will still look overpriced.
Today I look inside the Model S and I think "you paid how much for this?". Tesla needs to change that to "you got a nice car for your money here."
Remember Facebook creates shadow profiles for people they think they can track (such as via the website "like" feature) but they do not yet know the identity of, and they can work out the connections between shadow profiles.
Instead ask why people have a need for such features?
That is because Chrome does not allow any sort of complex proxy settings. That's why I use Firefox, because it makes it easy to customise proxy settings without needing an extension. This is commonly needed in corporate environments where network access is not straightforward.
Chrome could reduce the problem by adding better controls itself - instead Google have left this for "the market to provide" extensions, and that is where the mess comes from today.
They do this in other places, such as the lack of any builtin Bluetooth file transfer or other features in Android (when my Nokia phone had built-in Bluetooth file transfer 15 years ago). They made this problem much worse than it has to be.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't work out like that in China. Factory and powerplant emissions in Beijing city are quite low, many factories got moved out of the city for the 2008 Olympics and most of the road vehicles are fairly new (typically they meet an equivalent of Euro 4 vehicle emission standards or better).
All the dirty factories in the surrounding province of Hebei now produce so much pollution that Beijing has among the worst air quality in the world in winter, even if the pollution sources are not nearby. From a tall building (there are many in Beijing) can see a chance in wind direction bring in the grey mist of fine particles that smell burnt and irritate your lungs.
Just moving the pollution out of town doesn't help you when there's a lot of pollution.
Those electric buses are not yet zero emission in China - where most of the electricity is generated by coal.
They can be zero emission, when solar- or hydro-powered.
Diesel buses will never be zero emission.
But after you have the electric bus, you must close the coal mine, turn off the gas pipeline, and shut down the thermal power plant. Otherwise you just moved the emissions around a little.
Other cars with the cost of Tesla are also built to those standards. Modern car assembly is incredibly precise - if you see any panel fit that is visibly misaligned it is either damaged or has been repaired or replaced. Over the length of (say) the gap at the side of the bonnet where it meets the wing you can detect a couple of millimeters mis-alignment with a glance, and less than 1mm if you look carefully. Body panels are also either very rigid, or elastic enough to retain their shape.
Cheaply produced vehicles, or large truck type vehicles, may not be this well built, but the people selling passenger cars at Tesla's prices are this good already. Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise. If I get a new car from any of them and the measurement is not as specified, indeed my measuring tape should be replaced.
It is good to see that Musk realises he has to have consistent and precise manufacturing quality, but he's not as superior as he claims.
Hospitals (for civilian non-veterans) in the USA have no incentive to be efficient. They can put whatever number they like on the invoice and they'll likely get paid.
You people in the USA could get cheaper medical care with cheaper drugs if you would get your hospitals and doctors to find the cheapest supplier - but you seem to think that's some sort of evil socialism and you reject it. You have at least one illness: severe delusion. Maybe you have other illnesses too.
The most significant part of this is an intent to prevent spouses from working.
The most common reason for failure (i.e. return to origin country) of expatriation or immigration of skilled workers is the partner being unhappy. For people from most developed countries, their husband or wife also expects a career - the time of househusbands or even housewives living on a one income family and being happy about that is over. In academia, this is known as the two-body problem: if you hire an academic from another country, there are two bodies to please, not just one.
So if Trump makes it impossible to get a work permit for a spouse when a highly skilled migrant moves to the USA, all those from countries where men and women have approximate equality will just not come. Try telling your partner you're moving to different country for a great professional opportunity but they can't work when they're there, so they have to give up their career and can't start another job or another occupation. It won't go well for most of you, and that's particularly true if you're higher skilled and globally mobile because such people tend to have partners or spouses who are also higher skilled and globally mobile.
Of course, this won't discourage people who are in large company H1B visa schemes used to supply more generic mid-skilled workers for contracts in the USA, especially as they are usually younger and less likely to have spouses and children.
But the university professors, top engineering talent, top management talent - that will all go "My wife can't work? My husband has to lose his career? No thanks - I'll take that job in another country instead." Trump won't understand or even notice, but universities, tech corporations, engineering corporations, and even orchestras will notice.
Alright, so you can have open source linux contributions from large companies.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is basically a patent troll with a sideline in silicon design. They never operate in good faith, and they have a long and inglorious track record of getting a standard that, surprise! they have a patent on, or simply using their patents to screw their competitors and collaborators with lawsuits. When they're not using their patents, they're just not serving users, they don't bother to innovate unless it's to squash their competition.
The reason why GSM wasn't a global standard for many years but CDMA stuck around? Qualcomm, because they got more patent revenue that way. ... many more
The reason why Android Wear sucks? Qualcomm.
Qualcomm, much more than any other large tech corporation with lawyers and patents, is toxic. An "open standard" with their involvement will have a trap.
What is going to be the huge security hole in this release of MacOS 13?
Every previous minor release has had a huge security hole in it, so what's it going to be this time?
It's a good story in the press but this person is hardly unique.
I only fill up my transit cards with cash (whenever I can) and recycle them every so often, but I don't have breathless stories in the press about how amazingly black my Oyster, OV, etc cards are.
I just like making total surveillance more difficult.
I think it does have something to do with Tesla: NRK (Norwegian State broadcaster, for those joining us from outside the Nordic countries) reports on this: https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/tes... Google Translate works OK if you don't read Norwegian.
It says that the vehicles were mostly Lithuanian and apart from the overloading and bad tyre maintenance, they were also EURO III standard vehicles, so at least 13 years old (EURO III was superceded in 2005). That's quite old for a commercial vehicle. I'm sure there are companies with newer vehicles that could have been contracted to do this job, and I'm sure this company was cheap.
Tesla decided to use a cheap contractor rather than a quality contractor. Their attitude of trying to pay their workers and contractors less and treating them badly led to this.
I bought three of these for various things, and they always seemed to work well. In particular, the 5600mAh one is thin, much thinner than the typical power bank based on cylindrical cells. I have never had any problems with them, but I shall stilll be disposing of them. I suspect that Amazon got bitten by a a slightly out of tolerance manufacturing technique, which happens to a lot of other power pack and battery makers too. Amazon is, unlike many of them, able to do a recall and willing to do so. I don't hold this against them, and I'd buy "Amazon Basics" again.
I am replacing the slim pack with this one from Anker: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pr...
Amazon's returns process was pretty slick. They do send you an email with an external link, but:
The order number can be searched against your Amazon order history, and their help pages recommend you do this if you get an email about an Amazon order;
The product name, email, order number, etc, all matched what I had purchased;
The external site didn't ask for any personal information.
The external site only asked what power packs I had, gave a bunch of links to disposal information in various countries, and said I would get a refund. So the security risks are close to zero, even if the link didn't see legitimate.
Japan has had booths to make phone calls in shared spaces for a long time, because in Japan it is impolite to speak audibly on your phone in such places as airline lounges, trains, etc. I only wish it was similarly socially unacceptable to speak loudly on your phone around other people in Europe or the USA.
These used to be phone booths with payphones. Older structures still have them, newer structures are built with them and signs indicating 'phone zone' or similar.
Meanwhile, how do you phone someone to talk about what is on your desk? I can't take my working environment to the phone booth when I call someone to discuss something I'm working on.
I know the headline is tongue-in-cheek, but if smartphone makers actually blame customers it is very much Who Moved My Cheese?
They're going to have to focus on delivering improvements at reasonable cost, rather than the best technology at no-matter-the-price.
To use the car analogy, Apple and Samsung have been lucky enough to have a Ford-sized market with Mercedes-sized prices until now. Now that customers have realised that smartphone technology is mature enough that the improvements are small and incremental, the smartphone makers have to deliver improvements at Ford-sized prices for a Ford-sized market.
There are reasons why Ford doesn't sell too many self-driving, highly stylish, highly-automated, very comfortable, luxurious, prestigious cars: it's because their customers can't (or won't) pay enough for that. Instead they make cars with mature, cheaper, technology and if the technology isn't mature enough to be cheap it's not in a Ford. Apple and Samsung are going to have to get used to making phones that way, and accepting the lower revenues per device and lower sales rates that come with it.
If people prefer to work away from the office, the office needs to improve.
The news here is not that home working is wildly superior.
The news is that modern offices are terrible. Noisy, crowded, lacking in privacy, environmentally inadequate, poorly located for employees to travel to.
Meanwhile, some people can't handle working at home and develop severe mental problems from the lack of social interaction so it's hardly a panacea.
The project is (at least partly, perhaps majorly) to power the UK. The UK has lots of space to put wind turbines in windy places.
The old rural NIMBYs just don't want them, so the UK government (whose support base is mostly older, rural-er, NIMBYer people) has decided not to approve any wind turbine projects on land.
The real answer is: put them on land, and raise the middle finger to the old rural people. They don't care, they won't be around when the global climate is completely broken by their selfishness.
Selling a lot of BTC, quickly, and more importantly reliably, needs the cooperation of bitcoin miners to process your transaction quickly, ahead of others, instead of waiting until... whenever.
So, look who processed all those BTC sale transactions and how they are connected with the sellers.
Clearly, BTC trading benefits from insiders because it is so illiquid.
I have been a Shazam user since it was a shortcode (2580) to call with your mobile phone and you got back an SMS message either identifying the song (and costing you) or saying sorry (for free). That was before app stores, and almost before phone apps, just after Shazam launched. A music- and technology-obsessed friend told me about it, and I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. I still think it's pretty cool.
I don't have a lot of confidence Apple won't ruin it. Will the Android app get any love now? Will there be links to buy the music from anyone except the iTunes store?
Shazam made a genuinely innovative idea that is useful for many people and it still is. Apple used to do that, now all their ideas are just marketing and they buy other companies to wither in Cupertino.
It is far more likely that Startcom are having problems being accepted by browser manufacturers because:
Wosign owns Startcom.
Wosign is known to issue certificates outside the CA/Browser forum rules.
Startcom has also been seen to issue certificates outside the CA/Browser forum rules since they were purchased by Wosign.
Wosign still owns Startcom and therefore still controls Startcom.
Startcom is still poisoned by Wosign and since Wosign won't separate from Startcom, Startcom cannot be trusted as a CA and they know it.
Nothing to do with their business model, everything to do with who is in control of Startcom.
So, how many of you still think that Uber is about providing good opportunities for people to earn extra money driving for Uber?
Uber is about making as much money as possible for a few people (the executives and the other shareholders) and nothing else.
All those people who have given up some other line of paid work to drive for Uber are going to be doomed.
Think about that before taking out that multi-year car lease that you'll pay for by driving for Uber.
Compare this with military base exchanges (PX/BX). There is a bidding and qualification process for these, and then a vendor gets to be present in the captive markets of US military personnel who mostly shop on their base. So, it's a closed market operated by the US government that benefits the relatively few larger corporations who enter it. No-one is upset about that.
I'm not a big fan of Amazon's market power, but the reality is that they have changed retail: you have to be at least as good as Amazon to survive. So you have to be as easy to access, easy to buy from, as cheap, as full of local individual character as Amazon, or some other combination of attributes that makes you at least equal, in the consumer mind, to Amazon.
Now, you also have to be at least as good at selling and delivering to government as Amazon. Get to it.
"Why Do Web Developers Keep Making The Same Mistakes?"
StackOverflow.com
(they read the same wrong answers as other people, because every "I found this useful" or "Lots of people read this" ranking system does not detect factual errors, only opinions)
I look forward to this race being run in Finland in October next year with the same winning criteria.
Of course this is getting easier in late spring in a sunny desert. The success for real life usage will be when this works in a place with inclement weather and short days - like where most of the world's population lives for most of the year.
The base Model S used to be very under-equipped for its price. The interior is still bad - looks and feels cheap, it's uncomfortable, it lacks the comfort and convenience features of competitors. It's like the interior of a mid price muscle car, not a high priced luxury saloon.
Making features that are available on the competition standard on the Model S as well is a first step.
Charging extra for software is just petty and buyers will agree; other manufacturers like Mercedes charge for hardware-software combinations, not just software. Selling cars with the full capabilities of the hardware included in the price is the next step.
Finally until the Model S has an interior of the quality seen in Volvo, Mercedes or BMW then it will still look overpriced.
Today I look inside the Model S and I think "you paid how much for this?". Tesla needs to change that to "you got a nice car for your money here."
It should be called "Brodega". Only VC-funded Bros can come up with an idea this bad.
Remember Facebook creates shadow profiles for people they think they can track (such as via the website "like" feature) but they do not yet know the identity of, and they can work out the connections between shadow profiles.
It is feasible that they connected:
Facebook user1 -- shadow -- shadow -- facebook user2
Then said "user1, do you know user2?"
In a country with good privacy laws, such tracking would not be allowed. The USA is not such a country.
Instead ask why people have a need for such features?
That is because Chrome does not allow any sort of complex proxy settings. That's why I use Firefox, because it makes it easy to customise proxy settings without needing an extension. This is commonly needed in corporate environments where network access is not straightforward.
Chrome could reduce the problem by adding better controls itself - instead Google have left this for "the market to provide" extensions, and that is where the mess comes from today.
They do this in other places, such as the lack of any builtin Bluetooth file transfer or other features in Android (when my Nokia phone had built-in Bluetooth file transfer 15 years ago). They made this problem much worse than it has to be.