If we're talking new sales of phones, yes we've reached a plateau. If we're talking about % of world population that use a cell phone... no, we haven't reached a plateau and won't for a long time.
That will probably look more like an S-curve but we're already far past the inflection point. Time per billion unique mobile users according to this:
1st billion: 13+ years (they lack early history) 2nd billion: 4 years 3rd billion: 3 years 4th billion: 3.5 years 5th billion: 4 years
That's 5 billion of a world population of 7.6 including little kids - even in sub-Saharan Africa 70% of the population age 16+ have a cell phone. There's really just three poorly connected countries left in the world: Cuba, North Korea and Ethiopia. We're filling out gaps with the young, old and the gender equality, but the vast majority has a cell phone in the family.
2. Windows Forms and WPF are also Windows-only technology, and that isn't changing even though they'll work with.NET Core 3. There are way too many hooks and dependencies on Windows-specific technology (e.g. DirectX, text rendering, themes, handles) for these to be made into cross-platform applications without major rearchitecting work. In other words, don't wait up for them to produce a competitor to Qt....
Wouldn't WINE potentially have all the missing bits? With.NET Core and WinForms/WPF under the MIT license, WINE under LGPL it should be possible to build non-Windows versions of both OSS and proprietary apps on the Microsoft stack with very little hassle. Granted, the WINE reimplementations might have bugs or limitations but when you have an open source running on top it should be a lot easier to do a side-by-side comparison with Windows and confirm that at least for the way WinForms/WPF uses these libraries we're compatible. And it's not unthinkable Microsoft will open up some of the other non-essential bits too, probably not DirectX but text rendering and themes for example.
Microsoft has changed a lot in recent years, Visual Studio Code and the whole.NET Core represents a big shift in their thinking, they've realized that by losing the mobile market they can't just build a moat around Windows to keep Mac/Linux at bay. And it's too easy to spin up a Linux box if you just need a server. The hook is to try to make you build a service around Azure, on top of that you can have all the clients you like but you can't just migrate off to AWS or some other cloud. It used to be that Java was the enterprise language of choice but C# has been crushing it in recent years and that Oracle bought Java was the kiss of death.
I know this is a wild and crazy concept, but how about building a federated system where people are free to buy their games from multiple sources without being trapped in a vertical slice?
A younger and more idealistic version of myself thought that many groups would cease control over their own distribution through a broad non-profit organization or foundation because the Internet got near infinite space for the long tail. Like instead of the market being dominated by a few for-profit giants hundreds of indie game companies would band together to create a open service that by statute only takes a flat cut of the gross to break even, like a basic shared service on top of a hosting/payment solution. I don't know why it never materialized, a lot of companies rolled their own shopping cart and forum system instead but each alone was no match for Steam etc.
Hopefully this will start a new space race, and focus the US on kicking ass in space. We're the only ones to successfully land on Mars, but we shouldn't get lazy and stop boldly going where... Dammit. ST:TNG marathon is what I'll be doing now.
I'll settle for the replicator and the holodeck, you can have the warp drive.
Well Musk described the Block 5 as the final version and the plan is ten launches before any major rework/disposal, so big problems after three would be underwhelming. It's probably more a question of figuring out how much is enough, what inspections and refurbishment is necessary. I hope they've now found some kind of protocol for it though, you'd think what they do between 3rd and 4th launch should be very similar to what they did between 2nd and 3rd launch. He doesn't have to rush one booster but I hope he does so we'll see if 4th-5th-6th-7th go just as smooth. Also it's the first time I've seen SpaceX give the fairing recovery attempt so much coverage, it probably means they're getting close.
And if they finally get their crew certification then 2019 might become a very interesting year in spaceflight. Well actually they all are, recently.
2018: "Hey! We can cancel that expensive satellite service and force users to buy our shitty DSL service! It's brilliant!"
2021: "SpaceX's new StarLink service starts bundling cable TV channels as part of its new Internet service."
They're not shutting down service now. They launched the last two DirecTV satellites in 2014-15 and with a 20 year lifespan it'll probably be in service until 2035-ish. What they're saying is that they don't see a return on investment on sending up any new TV satellites. The future threat from Starlink is certainly one possible reason, but the main reason is wireless broadband and streaming services. If you can get it I'm not surprised customers ditch DVRs and GEO-satellite Internet. If anything it's SpaceX that should be concerned that their potential subscriber base is dwindling, at least in the US. Even if Starlink halts further land-based sprawl they're not going to stop operating any wireless towers they put in service between now and Starlink launches, that's mostly a sunk cost. And 2021 is if you believe in SpaceX time estimates, personally I think it sounds only slightly less ambitious than his Mars plans...
That's not really the case -- there were markets where food/food ingredients were accessible to customers.
Indeed. And the clerk would bring items you were considering to buy / suggested products to the front desk for you to inspect too, customers weren't that in the dark. But it wasn't anything like today with shopping and check-out, even at the market you'd talk to the guy/gal behind the stand and tell what you want and they'd take payment then hand it over. The idea that we'd browse the shelves and pick goods ourselves is actually fairly new. Heck, here in Norway it's only 19 years ago since we allowed that for wine and liquor. When I started drinking you had to check the catalog, go to the counter and tell the clerk what you wanted and they'd bring it to the front desk, it sounds like something from 1899 instead of 1999 but that's how it was.
I don't think I'd really miss it if you could do it asynchronously though, if I could just shop electronically and have the bags ready to go or delivered at the door it's fine. What made it antiquated at the store was that you'd say what you want then stand/sit around waiting for them to get back to you. It wasted your time while you were paying for somebody else's time to walk around and find it. Granted, they knew where pretty much everything was so it was fairly efficient, but really I don't spend much more time shopping at the grocery store than I'd do picking the items online.
You expect SpaceX to make money with the F9 at <$1 million/launch income? I'd list all the ways that's nonsense, but I'd be here all day. For one, there's no "gentle" way to launch and land a rocket no matter the payload. You're still punching through the atmosphere, you're fighting gravity every step of the way so throttling down is almost never the answer - they do it a little bit around max-q to avoid the worst peak stress but otherwise it's pedal to the metal. Yes, you could redesign everything for a 100 km Dragon lift but you'd end with something like the Falcon 1. Except a single engine rocket can't land, so re-usability is out and thus the economics of the plan. No, they'd have to use the F9 and the first stage profile they have and then find something better than wasting 95% of the capacity by just lifting a Dragon. At the very least find a way to stack like five-six of them.
If SpaceX wanted to get into tourism the first stage usually cuts out at ~80 km and the second stage would have enough velocity to cross the 100 km line without further thrust. So they could just design a big passenger "stage" with a few engines and fuel just for the reentry/landing burn. The second stage is 3.6m in diameter, 16m long and the normal payload fairing 5.2m in diameter, 13.9m long so in total almost 30m long. If they can expand the diameter to 5.2 meters all the way - I don't really see why not - they have ~200 m^3 volume and a 116 ton weight budget.
The Dragon crew capsule crams 7 people into 10 m^2 of pressurized space, if we say 150 m^2 is doable then ~100 passengers to space. That's $60 million for an F9 launch / 100 = ~$600k/head, but you wouldn't expend the second stage so it's really just refurb costs. Real cost would be no more than Virgin is charging. Do I think SpaceX is going to do it? Nope. Because there'll be no escape system, propulsive landing and 100 very wealthy, very dead people would kill SpaceX no matter how many disclaimers you make them sign.
I also expect the novelty of it to wear off pretty soon, right now 561 people have been to space. Like ever, all the way back to Yuri Gagarin. If you start adding hundreds each year it's not that special anymore, it's >$100k for a ten minute joyride including a few minutes of weightlessness. I mean the value proposition is absurd, you either have to be a billionaire or a millionaire and space nut to waste so much money on something that'll be over so quick. Granted you don't need many passengers but I think it's a really shallow pool of customers that could run out, once it actually becomes possible.
It does seem obvious that the driver made some very bad decisions, regardless.
Well, duh. The question is weather he made even stupider decisions because he thought tech would save him. And the answer to that is, yes people do. A good example is cell phones, a lot of people think a rescue will come for them. When you were on your own, people prepared better for survival. They knew if they got lost or trapped in a storm they'd probably have to ride it out on their own. Today we see a lot of people who are completely unprepared for the unexpected. They have exactly what they need and nothing more, they depend on a rescue service. That said, in most cases the good outweigh the bad as we rescue more than we lose to stupidity. It's not some universal principle though, it's entirely possible to get less real data with more effort. I'm living through it right now...
... with current ISP bandwidth and monthly data limitations. Not to mention the lack of 8k TVs and Blue-ray devices -- or affordable ones anyway. And... there's no real benefit to 8k for a typical home setting. So, who's this for? People with money to burn?
Twenty years ago I was on 64 kbps ISDN and DVDs was the hot new shit, now I got fiber and there's 4K on BluRay and Netflix. Today it's for the very early adopter... in 10 years? I dunno, 1080p -> 4K went much quicker than I thought considering how much 1080p beat SD.
I don't think your argument is a very good one because most currencies fail eventually. If you got Roman coins that were once backed by the mightiest empire on Earth they're not usable as currency today, but they functioned for a while. If Bitcoin flops and dies because the blockchain is abandoned or becomes chaos, well it functioned for a while. If you bake in the risk premium of the occasional catastrophic failure it's just a cost of doing business. For example drug smugglers know that 100% of the drugs don't make it through, occasionally it's confiscated and they lose everything. It doesn't mean drug smuggling is unprofitable, the margins are so big they make a profit on everything that gets through. I think it's the same with taking payment via cryptocurrencies, every day it works they make money and if it crashes out to $0 well too bad let's start taking payment in some other small, still functional coin(s).
Same thing with exchanges and such, they'll just structure commissions and fees so they make money whether the currency goes up or down or flops. Speculators? Well, some win... but like day traders, many people lose. But the other groups I mentioned have some nominal interest in keeping it working, they don't want it all to crash. But one currency is quite expendable, in fact many alt-coins have already been born and died rather quick. They're not going to do anything about people losing money, not until the system itself starts to tear apart.
But it should also be noted that when Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, some of the people that Joe McCarthy was accused of unjustly persecuting turned out to have actually been commie agents.
Not really surprising, if you let the cops break down doors at random in violation of the 4th amendment they'd probably find a lot of guilty people too. In retrospect you can always claim the times you were right were justified and the times you were wrong were honest mistakes. There's no doubt more guilty people would go to jail if you lowered the standard from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "probably", but a whole lot more innocent men too. And beyond that you have guilt by association and "no smoke without fire", statistically you're probably more likely to be a communist if your friends are communists than the general population. And there's probably more rapists among those accused of rape than those who've never been accused. It's just a terrible way to run a justice system. And beyond that lies putting the blame on entire populations, which is how you end up with genocide.
There's probably arguments that you don't need addresses at all, but I think the arguments for non-street addresses are nerd masturbation. What they totally fail to grasp is that in most cases a local reference is sufficient, for an analogy with date and time "Tuesday at two" is usually meaningful in context, you don't have to go ISO 8601 and say 2018-12-04T14:00:00 because it's obvious you mean this year and the coming Tuesday and two in the afternoon not two in the middle of the night and on the strike of the hour. Unless it's not, in which case you append as necessary. Same thing with global coordinates, you don't need a globally unique address to deliver me a pizza. I don't want an address where a lisp or typo sends me halfway across the world. I don't want to constantly repeat "planet Earth, Solar system, Milky Way galaxy". The "old way" was way, way more fault-tolerant .
Compared with that, the Information revolution did not increase productivity by that much. Yes, it's nice to have information at your fingertips, but you don't have those immense productivity increases. Most increases of productivity today still are part of Industrial Revolution I (manual labor gets mechanized) or Industrial Revolution II (trade and information exchange get sped up).
The information revolution is what makes CAD/CAM, industrial robots and a ton of other modern production techniques possible, you're dismissing one of the main results of the revolution. And to be honest I think the rest is full of shit too, digital services saves us a ton of time and money. Unfortunately most the savings go to the 1% richest in the world, but really the world as a whole has never been better off.
Most restaurants I go to, you get your meal first, and then you pay.
Yes, but if you consider food service as a whole the low end with fast food and cafeterias is counter service and the very high end often have reservations with no-show fees. If restaurants "in the middle" wanted to go cashless they'd probably do like unmanned gas stations, they make a reservation on your card before you start to fill gas and bill you when you're done. Or rather they'll let you split and pay the bill however you like but if all else fails they have a card to bill and a known person to collect the debt on.
There are no relevant statistics on self-driving cars in the real world. This is because there are NO self-driving cars available in the hands of consumers which self-drive in complete control in all the same conditions (snow, ice, rain, darkness, etc) on all sorts of roads (rural, dirt, highways, freeways, under construction, traffic control devices out or missing, road routing changed without notice, detours, worn out lane markings, areas highly congested with pedestrians and children etc) that humans drive in regularly.
But you're assuming we can't break down those statistics and create more relevant apples-to-apples comparisons or at least put some bounds on how much that skews the statistics. I'm sure the insurance companies sit on more than enough data to know what the accident rate is on daytime, overcast highway driving in the summer by low risk drivers that are not found during the investigation to be drunk, drugged or anything like that. All you need is a few representative roads with traffic counters/license plate readers to get volume and the rest of the data you get from accidents. Or one of those on board GPS insurance deals.
I think it's likely that some categories of accidents will become much less common with self-driving cars (esp. those involving drunk drivers piloting the car in question and those that existing collision avoidance, lane keeping, etc would also reduce). On the other hand, I expect some categories of accidents will be more common with self-driving cars - mostly those where a human driver has to make a logical decision based an somewhat unusual circumstances (such as a downed tree or noticing that there is a stop sign but it's been run over or a new traffic control sign appearing warning of a difficult to anticipate transient situation).
We may not have statistics but we can speculate, for example >70% of the fatal road accidents here in Norway involve head-on collisions or driving off the road. That is to say a car with OCD that always stays in its lane should be pretty good even if it struggles with pedestrians (11%), intersections (8%), lane changes/overtakes (3%) and other misc accidents (4%). There's a lot of data to suggest impaired drivers cause a lot of accidents whether it's intoxication, drugs, sick, tired, old age, inexperience/panic and then there's distracted or reckless driving. Now that in itself doesn't say anything because we don't know how often we use or human mind to get out of accidents, but... I think we fail much more often at the basics than pull some amazing insight out of the hat.
People drive even when they know they probably shouldn't all the time, I've driven to the point where I almost fell asleep behind the wheel. Not proud of it but honestly it was just luck that my wake-up call wasn't in a ditch. I've driven angry. I've driven stressed. I've driven distraught. I've been so caught up in things that I was barely paying attention to the road. And when you've driven your commute 999 times before you don't expect the curve ball. I've fiddled with the radio or my cell phone. I've been hung over. I've been sick. I've been a newbie behind the wheel, I've seen my parents drive a bit too long. I'm not sure if the computer can beat us at our best, but I'm quite sure we're not at our best quite often. I just don't think we get the opportunity to shine anywhere near as often as we get the opportunity to fail spectacularly.
The mind likes to oversell the small concessions, it's totally okay to fly a weekend to Paris as long as you get a Fairtrade caffe latte with ecological soy milk. A small savings on a big expense, it was expensive but you got it on sale. You walked the stairs so super size that burger, you earned it. For some people it forms into the delusion that they're saving the world if they're slightly greener than those around them, like you're not fat if you can point to some other guy and say "no, he's fat"...
I'm rather curious what would have been used as the next form of tie-breaking if rapid chess proved no better at establishing a victor. Even more rapid chess?
Yes, after rapid then blitz and if still even then Armageddon - white gets a slight time advantage, black only has to draw to win.
You will go to tourist traps, places where nobody who lives there will go.
Well, IMHO you have to go one way or the other - either you need to visit the unique tourist attractions or you have to find the real local culture. The middle ground is full of dull global chains and streets that looks just like any other city. I mean if I think about most "tourist traps" locally it's not like I've never been to them, but once is often enough. Same when you go places, been at the Eiffel Tower: check. Been to Brandenburger Tor: check. Been to the Parthenon: check. It's not something I need to do ten times or a hundred times, more like crossed off the bucket list. Other times it's getting away from the tourist areas and find a local place that is genuine, like a real British pub with ordinary people. If you don't do either then travelling is really a dud.
(and doesn't care because security isn't their job)
Well they probably care a lot about the integrity of the designs, if you could compromise the masks it probably takes only a minor adjustment to create a hardware backdoor. Of course this is more three letter agency level hack than a script kiddie, but the prize is potentially huge as no code is safe if the hardware can't be trusted.
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world.
I agree that could be a problem if the number of possible interactions is so large that you need a semantic understanding to whittle it down to a reasonable number. But if it can backtrack random luck to identify the game mechanics that triggered it that's a huge step up, like for example to open the treasure chest it must first find the key or to cross the drawbridge it must first lower it - even though that gives no score by itself. It's hard for an AI to pick out the "meaningful" actions from all the rest, it probably needs some kind of trial and error.
This isn't just about Apple or video game consoles. Do you want a future where the only way to get software onto any device you buy is through the device manufacturer's store, where they charge a 30% tax^h^h^hfee? Or do you want a future where manufacturers only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device?
It's not Apple's job to create a better product than Apple, that's what competition is for. Has Apple interfered with the manufacture, distribution or sale of alternative smartphones? Has Apple refused or punished apps for being interoperable with alternatives? Has Apple abused their control over the platform to push out third party software in favor of their own products? If no, then I really don't see the problem because they've not interfered in the creation of a device that "only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device". Just like app developers can offer free ad supported and paid apps or they can pick just one. It's not a monopoly that you have to pick a different app if you want a different business model. Nor a different phone.
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
Honestly, they don't need to. Americans think electronic payments cost 2-3% like VISA, MasterCard, AmEx etc. charge because they bake in fraud protection, insurance, credit, kickbacks etc. and a solid profit margin but in reality an plain debit electronic transaction is super cheap. Here in Norway the national system (BankAxept) charges $0.015 to $0.03 per transaction depending on unit volume. And no, I don't mean percent I mean $15-30 per 1000 sales. All companies that pay their taxes lose money on cash handling, they want electronic payments and many high value stores and services would like to go cashless but so far the law doesn't let them. Even in the large grocery chains it's now only around 11% cash and since almost everybody pays bills online and pay electronic shopping online cash is now only 3% of the white economy.
A mobile pay solution "Vipps" has taken a massive chunk of the individual-to-individual market since up to ~$600 there's no fee at all and you only need their phone number. Only 1% of the population say they don't use any electronic payment cards at all. In short, cash is dying all on its own and really the only strong argument that seems to stick is preparedness, what would you do if you go cashless and the payment solutions are down. That and a minority of the elderly, but really we can't push those ahead of us much longer. And there's a strong lobby who'd like us to go cashless too, if we weren't already running in that direction...
Slashdot Mirror
If we're talking new sales of phones, yes we've reached a plateau. If we're talking about % of world population that use a cell phone... no, we haven't reached a plateau and won't for a long time.
That will probably look more like an S-curve but we're already far past the inflection point. Time per billion unique mobile users according to this:
1st billion: 13+ years (they lack early history)
2nd billion: 4 years
3rd billion: 3 years
4th billion: 3.5 years
5th billion: 4 years
That's 5 billion of a world population of 7.6 including little kids - even in sub-Saharan Africa 70% of the population age 16+ have a cell phone. There's really just three poorly connected countries left in the world: Cuba, North Korea and Ethiopia. We're filling out gaps with the young, old and the gender equality, but the vast majority has a cell phone in the family.
2. Windows Forms and WPF are also Windows-only technology, and that isn't changing even though they'll work with .NET Core 3. There are way too many hooks and dependencies on Windows-specific technology (e.g. DirectX, text rendering, themes, handles) for these to be made into cross-platform applications without major rearchitecting work. In other words, don't wait up for them to produce a competitor to Qt....
Wouldn't WINE potentially have all the missing bits? With .NET Core and WinForms/WPF under the MIT license, WINE under LGPL it should be possible to build non-Windows versions of both OSS and proprietary apps on the Microsoft stack with very little hassle. Granted, the WINE reimplementations might have bugs or limitations but when you have an open source running on top it should be a lot easier to do a side-by-side comparison with Windows and confirm that at least for the way WinForms/WPF uses these libraries we're compatible. And it's not unthinkable Microsoft will open up some of the other non-essential bits too, probably not DirectX but text rendering and themes for example.
Microsoft has changed a lot in recent years, Visual Studio Code and the whole .NET Core represents a big shift in their thinking, they've realized that by losing the mobile market they can't just build a moat around Windows to keep Mac/Linux at bay. And it's too easy to spin up a Linux box if you just need a server. The hook is to try to make you build a service around Azure, on top of that you can have all the clients you like but you can't just migrate off to AWS or some other cloud. It used to be that Java was the enterprise language of choice but C# has been crushing it in recent years and that Oracle bought Java was the kiss of death.
I know this is a wild and crazy concept, but how about building a federated system where people are free to buy their games from multiple sources without being trapped in a vertical slice?
A younger and more idealistic version of myself thought that many groups would cease control over their own distribution through a broad non-profit organization or foundation because the Internet got near infinite space for the long tail. Like instead of the market being dominated by a few for-profit giants hundreds of indie game companies would band together to create a open service that by statute only takes a flat cut of the gross to break even, like a basic shared service on top of a hosting/payment solution. I don't know why it never materialized, a lot of companies rolled their own shopping cart and forum system instead but each alone was no match for Steam etc.
Hopefully this will start a new space race, and focus the US on kicking ass in space. We're the only ones to successfully land on Mars, but we shouldn't get lazy and stop boldly going where... Dammit. ST:TNG marathon is what I'll be doing now.
I'll settle for the replicator and the holodeck, you can have the warp drive.
Ghost Town
Wouldn't Tumblweed be more appropriate?
Well Musk described the Block 5 as the final version and the plan is ten launches before any major rework/disposal, so big problems after three would be underwhelming. It's probably more a question of figuring out how much is enough, what inspections and refurbishment is necessary. I hope they've now found some kind of protocol for it though, you'd think what they do between 3rd and 4th launch should be very similar to what they did between 2nd and 3rd launch. He doesn't have to rush one booster but I hope he does so we'll see if 4th-5th-6th-7th go just as smooth. Also it's the first time I've seen SpaceX give the fairing recovery attempt so much coverage, it probably means they're getting close.
And if they finally get their crew certification then 2019 might become a very interesting year in spaceflight. Well actually they all are, recently.
2018: "Hey! We can cancel that expensive satellite service and force users to buy our shitty DSL service! It's brilliant!"
2021: "SpaceX's new StarLink service starts bundling cable TV channels as part of its new Internet service."
They're not shutting down service now. They launched the last two DirecTV satellites in 2014-15 and with a 20 year lifespan it'll probably be in service until 2035-ish. What they're saying is that they don't see a return on investment on sending up any new TV satellites. The future threat from Starlink is certainly one possible reason, but the main reason is wireless broadband and streaming services. If you can get it I'm not surprised customers ditch DVRs and GEO-satellite Internet. If anything it's SpaceX that should be concerned that their potential subscriber base is dwindling, at least in the US. Even if Starlink halts further land-based sprawl they're not going to stop operating any wireless towers they put in service between now and Starlink launches, that's mostly a sunk cost. And 2021 is if you believe in SpaceX time estimates, personally I think it sounds only slightly less ambitious than his Mars plans...
That's not really the case -- there were markets where food/food ingredients were accessible to customers.
Indeed. And the clerk would bring items you were considering to buy / suggested products to the front desk for you to inspect too, customers weren't that in the dark. But it wasn't anything like today with shopping and check-out, even at the market you'd talk to the guy/gal behind the stand and tell what you want and they'd take payment then hand it over. The idea that we'd browse the shelves and pick goods ourselves is actually fairly new. Heck, here in Norway it's only 19 years ago since we allowed that for wine and liquor. When I started drinking you had to check the catalog, go to the counter and tell the clerk what you wanted and they'd bring it to the front desk, it sounds like something from 1899 instead of 1999 but that's how it was.
I don't think I'd really miss it if you could do it asynchronously though, if I could just shop electronically and have the bags ready to go or delivered at the door it's fine. What made it antiquated at the store was that you'd say what you want then stand/sit around waiting for them to get back to you. It wasted your time while you were paying for somebody else's time to walk around and find it. Granted, they knew where pretty much everything was so it was fairly efficient, but really I don't spend much more time shopping at the grocery store than I'd do picking the items online.
You expect SpaceX to make money with the F9 at <$1 million/launch income? I'd list all the ways that's nonsense, but I'd be here all day. For one, there's no "gentle" way to launch and land a rocket no matter the payload. You're still punching through the atmosphere, you're fighting gravity every step of the way so throttling down is almost never the answer - they do it a little bit around max-q to avoid the worst peak stress but otherwise it's pedal to the metal. Yes, you could redesign everything for a 100 km Dragon lift but you'd end with something like the Falcon 1. Except a single engine rocket can't land, so re-usability is out and thus the economics of the plan. No, they'd have to use the F9 and the first stage profile they have and then find something better than wasting 95% of the capacity by just lifting a Dragon. At the very least find a way to stack like five-six of them.
If SpaceX wanted to get into tourism the first stage usually cuts out at ~80 km and the second stage would have enough velocity to cross the 100 km line without further thrust. So they could just design a big passenger "stage" with a few engines and fuel just for the reentry/landing burn. The second stage is 3.6m in diameter, 16m long and the normal payload fairing 5.2m in diameter, 13.9m long so in total almost 30m long. If they can expand the diameter to 5.2 meters all the way - I don't really see why not - they have ~200 m^3 volume and a 116 ton weight budget.
The Dragon crew capsule crams 7 people into 10 m^2 of pressurized space, if we say 150 m^2 is doable then ~100 passengers to space. That's $60 million for an F9 launch / 100 = ~$600k/head, but you wouldn't expend the second stage so it's really just refurb costs. Real cost would be no more than Virgin is charging. Do I think SpaceX is going to do it? Nope. Because there'll be no escape system, propulsive landing and 100 very wealthy, very dead people would kill SpaceX no matter how many disclaimers you make them sign.
I also expect the novelty of it to wear off pretty soon, right now 561 people have been to space. Like ever, all the way back to Yuri Gagarin. If you start adding hundreds each year it's not that special anymore, it's >$100k for a ten minute joyride including a few minutes of weightlessness. I mean the value proposition is absurd, you either have to be a billionaire or a millionaire and space nut to waste so much money on something that'll be over so quick. Granted you don't need many passengers but I think it's a really shallow pool of customers that could run out, once it actually becomes possible.
It does seem obvious that the driver made some very bad decisions, regardless.
Well, duh. The question is weather he made even stupider decisions because he thought tech would save him. And the answer to that is, yes people do. A good example is cell phones, a lot of people think a rescue will come for them. When you were on your own, people prepared better for survival. They knew if they got lost or trapped in a storm they'd probably have to ride it out on their own. Today we see a lot of people who are completely unprepared for the unexpected. They have exactly what they need and nothing more, they depend on a rescue service. That said, in most cases the good outweigh the bad as we rescue more than we lose to stupidity. It's not some universal principle though, it's entirely possible to get less real data with more effort. I'm living through it right now...
... with current ISP bandwidth and monthly data limitations. Not to mention the lack of 8k TVs and Blue-ray devices -- or affordable ones anyway. And... there's no real benefit to 8k for a typical home setting. So, who's this for? People with money to burn?
Twenty years ago I was on 64 kbps ISDN and DVDs was the hot new shit, now I got fiber and there's 4K on BluRay and Netflix. Today it's for the very early adopter... in 10 years? I dunno, 1080p -> 4K went much quicker than I thought considering how much 1080p beat SD.
I don't think your argument is a very good one because most currencies fail eventually. If you got Roman coins that were once backed by the mightiest empire on Earth they're not usable as currency today, but they functioned for a while. If Bitcoin flops and dies because the blockchain is abandoned or becomes chaos, well it functioned for a while. If you bake in the risk premium of the occasional catastrophic failure it's just a cost of doing business. For example drug smugglers know that 100% of the drugs don't make it through, occasionally it's confiscated and they lose everything. It doesn't mean drug smuggling is unprofitable, the margins are so big they make a profit on everything that gets through. I think it's the same with taking payment via cryptocurrencies, every day it works they make money and if it crashes out to $0 well too bad let's start taking payment in some other small, still functional coin(s).
Same thing with exchanges and such, they'll just structure commissions and fees so they make money whether the currency goes up or down or flops. Speculators? Well, some win... but like day traders, many people lose. But the other groups I mentioned have some nominal interest in keeping it working, they don't want it all to crash. But one currency is quite expendable, in fact many alt-coins have already been born and died rather quick. They're not going to do anything about people losing money, not until the system itself starts to tear apart.
But it should also be noted that when Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, some of the people that Joe McCarthy was accused of unjustly persecuting turned out to have actually been commie agents.
Not really surprising, if you let the cops break down doors at random in violation of the 4th amendment they'd probably find a lot of guilty people too. In retrospect you can always claim the times you were right were justified and the times you were wrong were honest mistakes. There's no doubt more guilty people would go to jail if you lowered the standard from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "probably", but a whole lot more innocent men too. And beyond that you have guilt by association and "no smoke without fire", statistically you're probably more likely to be a communist if your friends are communists than the general population. And there's probably more rapists among those accused of rape than those who've never been accused. It's just a terrible way to run a justice system. And beyond that lies putting the blame on entire populations, which is how you end up with genocide.
There's probably arguments that you don't need addresses at all, but I think the arguments for non-street addresses are nerd masturbation. What they totally fail to grasp is that in most cases a local reference is sufficient, for an analogy with date and time "Tuesday at two" is usually meaningful in context, you don't have to go ISO 8601 and say 2018-12-04T14:00:00 because it's obvious you mean this year and the coming Tuesday and two in the afternoon not two in the middle of the night and on the strike of the hour. Unless it's not, in which case you append as necessary. Same thing with global coordinates, you don't need a globally unique address to deliver me a pizza. I don't want an address where a lisp or typo sends me halfway across the world. I don't want to constantly repeat "planet Earth, Solar system, Milky Way galaxy". The "old way" was way, way more fault-tolerant .
Compared with that, the Information revolution did not increase productivity by that much. Yes, it's nice to have information at your fingertips, but you don't have those immense productivity increases. Most increases of productivity today still are part of Industrial Revolution I (manual labor gets mechanized) or Industrial Revolution II (trade and information exchange get sped up).
The information revolution is what makes CAD/CAM, industrial robots and a ton of other modern production techniques possible, you're dismissing one of the main results of the revolution. And to be honest I think the rest is full of shit too, digital services saves us a ton of time and money. Unfortunately most the savings go to the 1% richest in the world, but really the world as a whole has never been better off.
Most restaurants I go to, you get your meal first, and then you pay.
Yes, but if you consider food service as a whole the low end with fast food and cafeterias is counter service and the very high end often have reservations with no-show fees. If restaurants "in the middle" wanted to go cashless they'd probably do like unmanned gas stations, they make a reservation on your card before you start to fill gas and bill you when you're done. Or rather they'll let you split and pay the bill however you like but if all else fails they have a card to bill and a known person to collect the debt on.
There are no relevant statistics on self-driving cars in the real world. This is because there are NO self-driving cars available in the hands of consumers which self-drive in complete control in all the same conditions (snow, ice, rain, darkness, etc) on all sorts of roads (rural, dirt, highways, freeways, under construction, traffic control devices out or missing, road routing changed without notice, detours, worn out lane markings, areas highly congested with pedestrians and children etc) that humans drive in regularly.
But you're assuming we can't break down those statistics and create more relevant apples-to-apples comparisons or at least put some bounds on how much that skews the statistics. I'm sure the insurance companies sit on more than enough data to know what the accident rate is on daytime, overcast highway driving in the summer by low risk drivers that are not found during the investigation to be drunk, drugged or anything like that. All you need is a few representative roads with traffic counters/license plate readers to get volume and the rest of the data you get from accidents. Or one of those on board GPS insurance deals.
I think it's likely that some categories of accidents will become much less common with self-driving cars (esp. those involving drunk drivers piloting the car in question and those that existing collision avoidance, lane keeping, etc would also reduce). On the other hand, I expect some categories of accidents will be more common with self-driving cars - mostly those where a human driver has to make a logical decision based an somewhat unusual circumstances (such as a downed tree or noticing that there is a stop sign but it's been run over or a new traffic control sign appearing warning of a difficult to anticipate transient situation).
We may not have statistics but we can speculate, for example >70% of the fatal road accidents here in Norway involve head-on collisions or driving off the road. That is to say a car with OCD that always stays in its lane should be pretty good even if it struggles with pedestrians (11%), intersections (8%), lane changes/overtakes (3%) and other misc accidents (4%). There's a lot of data to suggest impaired drivers cause a lot of accidents whether it's intoxication, drugs, sick, tired, old age, inexperience/panic and then there's distracted or reckless driving. Now that in itself doesn't say anything because we don't know how often we use or human mind to get out of accidents, but... I think we fail much more often at the basics than pull some amazing insight out of the hat.
People drive even when they know they probably shouldn't all the time, I've driven to the point where I almost fell asleep behind the wheel. Not proud of it but honestly it was just luck that my wake-up call wasn't in a ditch. I've driven angry. I've driven stressed. I've driven distraught. I've been so caught up in things that I was barely paying attention to the road. And when you've driven your commute 999 times before you don't expect the curve ball. I've fiddled with the radio or my cell phone. I've been hung over. I've been sick. I've been a newbie behind the wheel, I've seen my parents drive a bit too long. I'm not sure if the computer can beat us at our best, but I'm quite sure we're not at our best quite often. I just don't think we get the opportunity to shine anywhere near as often as we get the opportunity to fail spectacularly.
The mind likes to oversell the small concessions, it's totally okay to fly a weekend to Paris as long as you get a Fairtrade caffe latte with ecological soy milk. A small savings on a big expense, it was expensive but you got it on sale. You walked the stairs so super size that burger, you earned it. For some people it forms into the delusion that they're saving the world if they're slightly greener than those around them, like you're not fat if you can point to some other guy and say "no, he's fat"...
I'm rather curious what would have been used as the next form of tie-breaking if rapid chess proved no better at establishing a victor. Even more rapid chess?
Yes, after rapid then blitz and if still even then Armageddon - white gets a slight time advantage, black only has to draw to win.
You will go to tourist traps, places where nobody who lives there will go.
Well, IMHO you have to go one way or the other - either you need to visit the unique tourist attractions or you have to find the real local culture. The middle ground is full of dull global chains and streets that looks just like any other city. I mean if I think about most "tourist traps" locally it's not like I've never been to them, but once is often enough. Same when you go places, been at the Eiffel Tower: check. Been to Brandenburger Tor: check. Been to the Parthenon: check. It's not something I need to do ten times or a hundred times, more like crossed off the bucket list. Other times it's getting away from the tourist areas and find a local place that is genuine, like a real British pub with ordinary people. If you don't do either then travelling is really a dud.
(and doesn't care because security isn't their job)
Well they probably care a lot about the integrity of the designs, if you could compromise the masks it probably takes only a minor adjustment to create a hardware backdoor. Of course this is more three letter agency level hack than a script kiddie, but the prize is potentially huge as no code is safe if the hardware can't be trusted.
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world.
I agree that could be a problem if the number of possible interactions is so large that you need a semantic understanding to whittle it down to a reasonable number. But if it can backtrack random luck to identify the game mechanics that triggered it that's a huge step up, like for example to open the treasure chest it must first find the key or to cross the drawbridge it must first lower it - even though that gives no score by itself. It's hard for an AI to pick out the "meaningful" actions from all the rest, it probably needs some kind of trial and error.
This isn't just about Apple or video game consoles. Do you want a future where the only way to get software onto any device you buy is through the device manufacturer's store, where they charge a 30% tax^h^h^hfee? Or do you want a future where manufacturers only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device?
It's not Apple's job to create a better product than Apple, that's what competition is for. Has Apple interfered with the manufacture, distribution or sale of alternative smartphones? Has Apple refused or punished apps for being interoperable with alternatives? Has Apple abused their control over the platform to push out third party software in favor of their own products? If no, then I really don't see the problem because they've not interfered in the creation of a device that "only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device". Just like app developers can offer free ad supported and paid apps or they can pick just one. It's not a monopoly that you have to pick a different app if you want a different business model. Nor a different phone.
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
Honestly, they don't need to. Americans think electronic payments cost 2-3% like VISA, MasterCard, AmEx etc. charge because they bake in fraud protection, insurance, credit, kickbacks etc. and a solid profit margin but in reality an plain debit electronic transaction is super cheap. Here in Norway the national system (BankAxept) charges $0.015 to $0.03 per transaction depending on unit volume. And no, I don't mean percent I mean $15-30 per 1000 sales. All companies that pay their taxes lose money on cash handling, they want electronic payments and many high value stores and services would like to go cashless but so far the law doesn't let them. Even in the large grocery chains it's now only around 11% cash and since almost everybody pays bills online and pay electronic shopping online cash is now only 3% of the white economy.
A mobile pay solution "Vipps" has taken a massive chunk of the individual-to-individual market since up to ~$600 there's no fee at all and you only need their phone number. Only 1% of the population say they don't use any electronic payment cards at all. In short, cash is dying all on its own and really the only strong argument that seems to stick is preparedness, what would you do if you go cashless and the payment solutions are down. That and a minority of the elderly, but really we can't push those ahead of us much longer. And there's a strong lobby who'd like us to go cashless too, if we weren't already running in that direction...