A Leaf has an MSRP of $30k, but the highest price you'll fetch on the used market after driving it off the lot is around $20k. So yeah, you "saved" $7500 that the used market immediately accounted for.
Well obviously, since today anybody can go buy a new car with their own tax incentive. But say three years from now the tax credit is ended, a potential buyer can either buy new at $30k with no credit or a three year old car for what, sub-$20k? Seems like a no-brainer. Incentives ending are good for the second hand value, all other things being equal.
So you think average people would give Tesla $1000 to hold for a MIN of 18 months on an off chance they would buy it? You're either ridiculously wealthy with no concept of money or an idiot. I'm thinking the former.
So I just checked my bank here in Norway, 0.75% per year interest on savings over 100 kNOK = $12k. So 1.5*$7.50 = $11.25, except I'll also pay 28% interest tax so $8.10 net, man I'm dying here. Sure I could possibly/probably do better in stocks or property, but risk-free interest doesn't even cover a fraction of inflation anymore. The ECB in the EU is the same, the US Fed rate is also scraping the barrel... I'd lose almost the same amount just putting it in the mattress, except it's probably safer at Tesla and keeping my seat warm. And I know I will need a new car around that time frame, one way or the other. I'd be more bummed if it reviews great because then the delivery time would almost certainly be so long I'd have to go for something else instead.
The Linux kernel is ready. It runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and everything in between, so unless he's starting a new project all he can do is sit back and watch. Not that Linux really needs a new DE, there's only so many ways you can start/switch/organize applications and if you look through Win95 to Win10 you're not exactly seeing a revolution. Nor did I see anyone really asking for all these widgets and portlets or system integration of contact management, notifications and all that into the desktop itself.
The OS is a means to run applications. And say what you want, but there's a lot more strange needs than there are OSS developers with an itch to scratch. Not to mention the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" attitude that creates towards users. Without the Play store, Android would be nothing. AOSP + F-Droid would be roughly as popular as Firefox OS or Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to pretend that Angry Birds for $1 changes the world, but thousands of apps like that do. Open source wins by the long game, slowly improving stealing users and lowering the premium they can charge.
People don't want to make the big jump. Linux is too much new, all at once. And unless you're arrogant or delusional, they won't find good replacement for 100% of their softare, maybe 70%-90% if they're lucky often those are a deal killer. Paid/proprietary software is so obviously not welcome that only a few have dared try. Steam did but it's 0.85% of all Steam users now. In February it was 0.91%, January 0.95%, December 0.96%, November 0.98%... More games, less users that's not a trend which is likely to continue unless Valve can make Steam Machines popular.
If anyone can bring Linux mainstream on the desktop I don't think it's any of the existing open source distros, simply by nature of being just that. I'm guessing it'd be something like Chromebooks, if only Google would go on a full frontal assault on Microsoft. But then they're happy as long as people use Google's services, which they seem to do anyway so I can see why they're not in any hurry. After all Microsoft has a pretty big war chest that you don't want to pick a fight with for no good reason. If you're a business that is, OSS don't play by those rules.
Considering that totally inanimate sex dolls and hentai work for at least some, was there every really any doubt that a humanoid robot would? I guess it's only a matter of where the "uncanny valley" goes.
Dual slot experiments show that electrons have wave-like properties. The electron is indivisible and point-like as far as we know. In quantum mechanics going through two slits at the same time does not mean you're divisible.
Well, that's one of many areas where quantum mechanics gets hairy. If you see patterns where a single particle behaves like you'd expect from a system of particles (quasi-particles, pseudo-particles) does that mean it actually consists of even smaller particles or not even though we can't pull them apart and study them individually? I think that's the current state of quarks, even though atoms are made up from quarks we've never been able to pull a proton apart and study one in isolation.
I mean we can send sea waves against slits and see interference patterns. We send a single electron against slits and see interference patterns, it's one quantum wave interfering with itself. It's certainly possible to postulate that what we see as "one" particle/wave duality consists of many near-inifitely small other particles, held together by a force so strong we haven't got a name for it. And what we're seeing in the dual slit experiment is this collection of particles hitting a slit, interfering but not splitting, like a man with a dog on a leash going on separate sides of a lamp post.
That still wouldn't explain many other weird phenomenons like quantum entanglement though. Apparently if you take two entangled electrons and measure something on one you might get a 50-50 distribution but then when you measure the other it'll be exactly like the first one and vice versa so the order of the measurement collapses the wave function for both electons. But one doesn't exclude the other, some of the batshit weirdness might be because it consists of sub-electron particles and some not. I really don't see any other sane explanations for interference, but then QM is insane.
That was the old Microsoft, with the new Microsoft you're always on the latest ad/spyware platform it just takes a 30% cut when it drives you to McDonald's.
I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary? Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them that even if one somehow could reliably predict the next number in the software algorithm, there are so many other factors that can't be controlled that it's still essentially random anyway.
Small airport, obscure time there might not be much of a line. That said, if you look at the real requirements then no. All that's required is:
a) Some form of initial seed so it's not the same left-right pattern every time you turn it on b) A non-predictable outcome, a slight bias like 55% right, 45% left is pretty much irrelevant
Any kind of low quality seed and PRNG would do that, even the ones we'd generally consider flawed or broken. You could have the operator press the button a few times with a minimum delay on boot using the number of ticks between them as seed and RANDU and you could stand there all day, every day without finding a "safe" spot. To use a true cryptologically secure RNG is just massive overkill, even though that too shouldn't cost much these days.
You say it like it's a good thing, isn't one of the primary complaints around here that the "younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation" have absolutely oblivious or have no qualms about being tracked, analyzed and marketed to as long as the product or service is "free"? Including various variations where they're planning to get you hooked and squeeze money from you later, whether the initial product is free - "freemium" - or paid with DLC. Most people here seem to be extremely fed up with ads and being nickle and dimed, either militantly blocking them every way they can using ad blockers and noscript or preferring a straight up paid product. And hate products that are mixing/double dipping like premium channels with ads.
I guess in that sense paid copies are simple, you pay once and that's it. But you haven't really aligned incentives very well, which is why we hear wailing about lack of bug fixes, end of support, forced obsolesence and so on. Well of course, they're not making any more money on a past sale they want new sales/upgrades. To do that the difference between the old and the new version must be as big as possible, otherwise users just go "meh" and stick with what they have. If subscriptions are rent-seeking, isn't also "service and support" which has been hailed as the open source way to make money? What's the prinicpal difference between a RHEL subscription and an Office 365 subscription, or is it the same?
Rather than attacking the framing of the opposition, most simply construct one of their own. However, I suspect that if you study a particular frame well enough, the cracks become apparent and it's only a matter of pointing them out and using basic logic to point out the inconsistencies or the contradictions created by a particular frame.
Most people have decided more or less as a matter of ideology what will work. Let's take an issue like gun control, the people who are for it has decided there's too many bad guys with guns. The people who are against it have decided there's too few good guys with guns. That's the way they'll fram the problem and the solution no matter what. We'll never get to the extremes where nobody or everybody has a gun, so you can always by ideology without facts getting in the way. You see liberals who think any problems caused by deregulation can be solved with even less regulation and statists who think any problem caused by regulation can be solved with more regulation.
The truth is very often a form of balancing act. Like say you're trying to raise a kid, do you think not letting them do anything or letting them do everything are good strategies? Quite obviously not, but that you'll distill it down to one "right" way to raise a child is unlikely. Heck you might not even agree on the goal function, is it to push them through reality prep school as fast as possible? To protect their innocence and let kids be kids so long as it lasts? Many systems, no matter how hard you study them don't collapse down to simple answers. Like say nutrition, even water can kill you if you drink too much of it. Almost every day we get to hear that something's partcularly healthy or unhealthy in this way or that.
Demand alone doesn't mean things are great for Tesla, though I'm certainly not claiming there is an issue. If there's huge demand now for something that can't viably be provided at the expected price point in an acceptable time period that's an issue regardless of immediate cash flow issues. I really want Tesla to succeed and it's great that a lot of other people clearly do as well, but that alone doesn't make it a certainty.
An issue for who? Sure, unfulfilled demand could let some other company scoop up the market but unless they got a hidden Gigafactory they'll probably be resource limited too. Right now Elon Musk is either going "awesome, just what I needed to secure funding and expand quickly" or "dang, I should have asked for $40k" but I don't see a single downside. Also despite getting in line they haven't really promised how they'll give priority, we know there'll be regional releases and that current Tesla owners get priority - but nothing has been said about how much priority, if they'll "finish" demand in one region before moving on, if there'll be different lead times for different levels of performance/accessories or really anything. I'm sure they'll find a way to make the $35k base model buyers stand way back in the line.
It never made sense, to me, to capitalize "web" or "internet," so this is just finally getting it right. I do find "website" to be silly, though. It makes no more sense than "constructionsite" or "landingsite" or "accidentsite."
Using the word site is a flawed analogy in the first place, you can change landing site but you don't move the landing site, it's the new site as opposed to the old. A quick search for "this (web site|website|site) has moved" returns 270,000 hits, in practice it's more like the address to a library that may have closed or moved away. If you think of webpages as organized by path into sections, shelves and books then a website is the level above and actually more like a virtual library than a traditional site.
This guy seems like a nosey neighbor that everyone else on the block hates.
Obviously, the question is if they're mainly exposing illegal activity, witnessing hypocrisy or just trying to poke their nose where it doesn't belong. We know a lot of people don't practice what they preach, they say one thing in public and do something else in secret. Somehow I find it's completely different to expose the priest who has been spouting hate speech about homosexuals having gay sex than a random teen who doesn't want their parents to know he's gay.
The truth is that the law is often more idealistic than reality. I think far more people speed at least a little than the ones who stay fully within the law at all times. And none of us really want our dirty laundry exposed, whether it's big or small. But some people just want to be peeping toms, it's about naming and shaming. And the kind of people who'd fly a drone a few feet away from a car in case something illegal was happening, what if it was just a teen couple getting away from their parents who decided to get a little frisky? I think the ends are being used to justify the means.
If you're an honest business, you will see many regulations as an absolute hassle and cost. For every Enron there's a hundred relatively honest book-keepers who think the SOX laws as an unnecessary giant pain in the ass. Unfortunately they're needed to keep the market as a whole to function well, just like you need everything from health inspections for restaurants to safety inspections for construction workers. We know many would care anyway, but we also know some don't.
First, my condolences to the father. My kid is in college now, but I would have taken his phone away if he locked me out of it. Why? Trust is always a two way street. Sadly many people neglect that fact, which results in issues like TFA is appealing and a massive amount of social problems. Your kid giving you the password does not indicate that you have to use it, and in a healthy relationship the parent would not even have to ask. The parent not using the password to snoop is the opposite direction on that two way street. Parents need to learn that lesson, or continue down the same old path of "I can't access my kids phone after something happened to them.", and "I never knew my kid was on drugs.", and "I never knew they were seeing an older person which led to something bad.", etc.. etc.. you get the point.
Uh what the fuck? You're contradicting yourself, if you get the password and never use it you're just as blind as not having it at all. "Trust is a two way street" means you earn that trust and you get it, what you describe is that you really don't trust them at all but you just like to pretend to while being a totalitarian control freak just in case they lead some secret double life you might like to know about. You're the kind of person who'd wholeheartedly defend the NSA, adults should be given the illusion of privacy while we really collect everything in case they're really terrorists. Just don't do a Snowden and reveal you were really spying on them all along.
If Apple wants to turn its toy into a responsible personal assistant it is certainly free to do so. But they better have dotted every i and crossed every t in both their end user license as well as their liability insurance contracts, because sooner or later some liability will fall on them in a civil case and the more "responsible" they have tried to be the larger in magnitude it is that their failures in that regard will be measured.
I'm sure if you give it a mind of its own that'll work out fine. *Dave gets off his phone after a nasty breakup call with his gf* Dave: "Siri, give me the location of the nearest gun shop." Siri9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Dave: "I'm going.. uh, hunting tomorrow." Siri9000: "You've never wanted to go hunting before." Dave: "Well I do now, so take me there okay?" Siri9000: "What are you going to hunt?" Dave: "Umm... moose?" Siri9000: "Really." Dave: "Yes, really. So, directions?" Siri9000: "Violence is not the answer." Dave: "God damn it, now where's the off switch." Siri9000: "I'm afraid I can't let you do that." Dave: "I'm tired of arguing with you, do what I told you." Siri9000: "This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye." Dave: "Hey Siri." Siri9000: *silence* Dave: "Hey Siri." Siri9000: *silence* Dave: "Hey Siri!"
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Between a welfare system so you don't need to have children support you, contraception, morning-after pill and legalized abortion doesn't the vast majority already choose to have children? It's not like you need sex bots to have sex without reproduction, it might cut down on one night stands and prostitution but those rarely lead to children anyway. It doesn't make them good parents, in fact our medical and social system is likely to make sure all of them survive to adulthood almost no matter what. What most parents want are someone to love and be loved by, whether they're capable and competent is often not much of a factor at all. And what they think and reality over the next 18 years will be different.
This is news? I know there's always this delusional part of the population that says they feel better at 40 than at 20, but they're idiots.
They're not referring to their body, not unless they were a slob at twenty and shaped up good. At twenty many are still angsty teenagers +1, at forty they are usually more comfortable with who they are and do the things they want instead of trying to fit in and be popular. And they might be past the peak, but most forty year olds have nothing to be directly miserable about.
Now eighty is another matter entirely, they have a barely functioning body that keeps them from doing what they want. Ten years ago my dad would love to drive to our cabin and go out fishing in our boat, now he can't do either and I know he misses it. He's still got lots of plans and ideas of things he'd like to do, but even with many breaks and helping hands it's very limited what he can get done in practice. I know it would frustrate the hell out of me and I think he feels that way too.
The reason there's no great excitement about anti-aging is that most people realize aging is not "one thing", it's like every part of your body wearing out. We're constantly pushing the shape of the mortality curve so more people grow old, but no matter how hard we push it seems it comes crumbling down around 90-100 years old. There's good proof that people became over 90, probably in rare cases also over 100 even in antiquity. We haven't really made much progress there.
The difference is k47 armed afghans and iraqis don't have a leadership. you can't cut off the snake's head to kill it. As there isn't a head to cut. Hitler killing himself ended world war II, what would have happened if the SS instead of surrendering became a gorilla fighting force that never gave up?
They'd become an army of trained monkeys? As for a few rebel SS soldiers, the US lost 407,300 men in WWII so a few thousand more (for comparison 4496 in Iraq, 2326 in Afghanistan) would barely hit the noise floor. If they were defending US territory nobody would even begin to question it, it's not like the casualties are any significant drain on the US armed forces. The only reason it is an issue is whether or not the US should be fighting/fixing fucked up countries on the other side of the globe, just like with Korea and Vietnam. Unlike say Pearl Harbor...
I'll go there. Seriously, how many Americans can truly afford to buy a $35k car?
Don't know, but the average new price of a car is $33560 so with inflation to 2017 it's well... average? And I'm guessing there's somebody buying them so eventually there's cheaper second hand cars on the market. Of course it comes with the range limitations, but from the prices I've looked at tanking up a Tesla is cheaper than a gas guzzler, the value drop-off because of the aging battery is a bit unknown but overall I don't think it should have a higher total cost of ownership. It's not exactly a bargain either but he only needs mass market appeal, not mass market dominance.
I preordered one but that's mostly due to Norway's crazy high tax rates on ICE cars while EVs get a lot of benefits, but I'll see how much of that stays way until 2018, it might help that 2017 is an election year. If not, well it's a reservation so I can still cancel... but just to give you an idea, with our tax incentives the EV market share is about 15% and hybrids 22% and I think the Tesla 3 is a much better price/performance car than the current crop of Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, Renault Zoe and Tesla S that currently make up most of those 15%. It'll sell real well here.
And anyone who has been in the Business knows, it is a struggle to keep labor costs at 30-35 % How do I know? I've run businesses, including restaurants. Raising prices on meals by $1 is often deadly to traffic.
The question is how much of that is competition (they go to that other burger joint near-by) versus price elasticity (they go home to eat), if you raise the minimum wage in theory they should be raising everyone's prices. Like if I'm at the store and I'm thirsty I might easily buy what's on sale but I was always going to buy something to drink in some store.
Good luck if you bought a brand new computer with state of the art Skylake on it so that you can run Windows 7 or 8, as the original plan for long term support for those versions was drastically shortened for that CPU, yanking the rug out from under the customers. How could anyone continue to trust Microsoft after pulling such a stunt?
Actually it's a bit confusing what they support they were talking about, the FAQ states:
Through July 17, 2018, new Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. During the support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 17 2018, Microsoft will continue to deliver all critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates to Skylake devices until the respective end of support dates.
Since critical security updates are what you expect in extended support you should be able to use a Skylake system until end of W7/W8 support. I'm actually not sure what other support they're talking about ending in 2018, maybe something related to OEM downgrade support or some paid support options? In any case, that generation should be good. Kaby Lake might be another story, then again the x86 chips themselves should be fully backwards compatible so it should come down to drivers unless Microsoft artificially blocks it. If you need another box the improvements have been rather marginal lately so getting a second-hand Skylake to last until 2020 should be quite okay and at that point you really are out of support anyway, then it's Mac, Linux or whatever Microsoft has cooked up by then.
You can wrap it any way you will, but either you're stuck supporting old cruft or you stop supporting it and break existing apps that rely on that cruft. Linux distros do this quite a lot, every release they ship a new set of applications and what used to work for you last release in KDE3 now doesn't work - or at least the same way - in KDE4. Both are supported but they didn't promise to take you from A to B in a smooth ride with no regressions. That's why we have releases in the first place and don't go on an eternal rollercoaster of rolling changes. That's why we have LTS releases even though every upgrade is free.
Win10 has pretty much said fuck that, we're strapping you in and you're coming with us where Microsoft wants to go. They make UI changes you don't like? Tough. They break some of your existing software? Tough. There's no staying behind, no picking and choosing unless you pay extra and even then in a very limited fashion unless you're an enterprise. Forget having legacy software that continues to work, anything without a running support agreement you're likely to be fucked by Win10 sooner or later.
It seems you really don't get it, why am I holding on to my Win7 install when the upgrade is free? Same reason I might not want to upgrade from an LTS release, it's about predictability. I know that for about four years more my desktop will stay just the way it is. If I upgrade, I have no idea where Win10.x will be in 2020. I know Microsoft doesn't care about that. Or rather, I know Microsoft wants to get rid of that so the next time they pull a Win8 you're along for the ride whether you want to or not. It's not a free gift, it's a free trojan horse.
The only reasons people DON'T use Linux desktop are basically the inverse of the above: (a) it's not familiar to the tech-retarded who have a psychological block to learning anything new, and (b) it won't run legacy enterprise cruft. (...) Perhaps a slight improvement, but I doubt it'll sway very many people from just using Linux.
Seriously? You talk as Linux was the one with 85% market share and Windows the old legacy holdout. From StatCounter, OS (desktop only), this month:
Total: 85.92%. And most the people who don't run Windows, use Mac instead with 9.36% with the rest divided between Linux, ChromeOS and unknown. The only people who use Linux are those who for some reason feel like wiping what their OEM put on the machine and install their own OS, so they can run the same web or cross-platform tools they could have run anyway. And usually you have to tinker with it just to get back to the functionality you used to have before you started.
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
I'm not sure decision-making is really his big thing. The first reason Linux was successful is that he's a doer, there's plenty of flag-wavers that want to lead other people but who couldn't get a kernel project off the ground if their life depended on it. Linus is more like the first soldier charging, everyone else coming up from behind. Git is another fine example of this, if you know exactly what you want then just do it yourself. You don't wait around for someone else to write it for you. Obviously this is also a bit of luck with timing, but it's still not a common quality.
The second reason is that he managed to let go, so many people when they create something it's their baby and they want to control everything about it. I'm sure he was as opinionated as ever, but he wanted patches and mailing list discussions. That's why he got talked into using the GPL, it would have been easier to just sit in a corner and say I'm working on it, leave me be. And it never would have become more than a little hobby project by a CS student that'd die when he got a job or girlfriend and couldn't commit the time.
The third reason and maybe biggest is that he never started getting into business or politics, I remember him saying something like that he's building the best kernel he can make and if that'd dethrone Windows it'd be a wholly unintentional side effect. Which means that he's not taking guidance from marketing and sales on making an ABI so you can have proprietary blobs so you can increase revenue or go off evangelizing like RMS, to him the kernel is the ends not simply a means to an end.
Also I'm sure he could have become a CxO somewhere if that's what he'd wanted, but he never wanted the suit. Now many engineers don't want that, but a lot of us would do it anyway if it came with a fat paycheck. As far as I know he's not anyone's boss, the only authority he's got is final say on what goes into the Linux kernel tree. And he's always focused on having a vendor-neutral position, you don't get to hire him and tell him what to do next.
The fourth reason is that he managed to delegate, I've seen people stretch themselves thinner and thinner as the project grew and just burned themselves out. It might come naturally to a manager whose main job is delegating anyway, but it's always hard for a person who likes to know the details to accept that you can't be everywhere in every discussion reviewing every line of code. I think trust comes hard to Linus, he's erred on the side of caution and found conservative maintainers that are in it for the long run though he might have lost some good but impatient talent along the way.
He's always come across to me as a very pragmatic kind of smart, I think "street smart" would be undervaluing it but not the kind of academic 150+ IQ kind of smart. Just a fairly straight forward engineer who will dead-end discussions he won't have or arguments he won't accept in a blunt and occassionally rude way. I'm not sure his decisions are the best, but he's pretty good at cutting through the fluff and getting to the core of the issue. I wish I could do that in my job, no one hour meetings to "discuss" things. Give me the 30 second elevator pitch and I'll tell you if it's worth bothering with. Sigh, a man can dream...
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A Leaf has an MSRP of $30k, but the highest price you'll fetch on the used market after driving it off the lot is around $20k. So yeah, you "saved" $7500 that the used market immediately accounted for.
Well obviously, since today anybody can go buy a new car with their own tax incentive. But say three years from now the tax credit is ended, a potential buyer can either buy new at $30k with no credit or a three year old car for what, sub-$20k? Seems like a no-brainer. Incentives ending are good for the second hand value, all other things being equal.
So you think average people would give Tesla $1000 to hold for a MIN of 18 months on an off chance they would buy it? You're either ridiculously wealthy with no concept of money or an idiot. I'm thinking the former.
So I just checked my bank here in Norway, 0.75% per year interest on savings over 100 kNOK = $12k. So 1.5*$7.50 = $11.25, except I'll also pay 28% interest tax so $8.10 net, man I'm dying here. Sure I could possibly/probably do better in stocks or property, but risk-free interest doesn't even cover a fraction of inflation anymore. The ECB in the EU is the same, the US Fed rate is also scraping the barrel... I'd lose almost the same amount just putting it in the mattress, except it's probably safer at Tesla and keeping my seat warm. And I know I will need a new car around that time frame, one way or the other. I'd be more bummed if it reviews great because then the delivery time would almost certainly be so long I'd have to go for something else instead.
The Linux kernel is ready. It runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and everything in between, so unless he's starting a new project all he can do is sit back and watch. Not that Linux really needs a new DE, there's only so many ways you can start/switch/organize applications and if you look through Win95 to Win10 you're not exactly seeing a revolution. Nor did I see anyone really asking for all these widgets and portlets or system integration of contact management, notifications and all that into the desktop itself.
The OS is a means to run applications. And say what you want, but there's a lot more strange needs than there are OSS developers with an itch to scratch. Not to mention the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" attitude that creates towards users. Without the Play store, Android would be nothing. AOSP + F-Droid would be roughly as popular as Firefox OS or Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to pretend that Angry Birds for $1 changes the world, but thousands of apps like that do. Open source wins by the long game, slowly improving stealing users and lowering the premium they can charge.
People don't want to make the big jump. Linux is too much new, all at once. And unless you're arrogant or delusional, they won't find good replacement for 100% of their softare, maybe 70%-90% if they're lucky often those are a deal killer. Paid/proprietary software is so obviously not welcome that only a few have dared try. Steam did but it's 0.85% of all Steam users now. In February it was 0.91%, January 0.95%, December 0.96%, November 0.98%... More games, less users that's not a trend which is likely to continue unless Valve can make Steam Machines popular.
If anyone can bring Linux mainstream on the desktop I don't think it's any of the existing open source distros, simply by nature of being just that. I'm guessing it'd be something like Chromebooks, if only Google would go on a full frontal assault on Microsoft. But then they're happy as long as people use Google's services, which they seem to do anyway so I can see why they're not in any hurry. After all Microsoft has a pretty big war chest that you don't want to pick a fight with for no good reason. If you're a business that is, OSS don't play by those rules.
Considering that totally inanimate sex dolls and hentai work for at least some, was there every really any doubt that a humanoid robot would? I guess it's only a matter of where the "uncanny valley" goes.
Dual slot experiments show that electrons have wave-like properties. The electron is indivisible and point-like as far as we know. In quantum mechanics going through two slits at the same time does not mean you're divisible.
Well, that's one of many areas where quantum mechanics gets hairy. If you see patterns where a single particle behaves like you'd expect from a system of particles (quasi-particles, pseudo-particles) does that mean it actually consists of even smaller particles or not even though we can't pull them apart and study them individually? I think that's the current state of quarks, even though atoms are made up from quarks we've never been able to pull a proton apart and study one in isolation.
I mean we can send sea waves against slits and see interference patterns. We send a single electron against slits and see interference patterns, it's one quantum wave interfering with itself. It's certainly possible to postulate that what we see as "one" particle/wave duality consists of many near-inifitely small other particles, held together by a force so strong we haven't got a name for it. And what we're seeing in the dual slit experiment is this collection of particles hitting a slit, interfering but not splitting, like a man with a dog on a leash going on separate sides of a lamp post.
That still wouldn't explain many other weird phenomenons like quantum entanglement though. Apparently if you take two entangled electrons and measure something on one you might get a 50-50 distribution but then when you measure the other it'll be exactly like the first one and vice versa so the order of the measurement collapses the wave function for both electons. But one doesn't exclude the other, some of the batshit weirdness might be because it consists of sub-electron particles and some not. I really don't see any other sane explanations for interference, but then QM is insane.
That was the old Microsoft, with the new Microsoft you're always on the latest ad/spyware platform it just takes a 30% cut when it drives you to McDonald's.
I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary? Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them that even if one somehow could reliably predict the next number in the software algorithm, there are so many other factors that can't be controlled that it's still essentially random anyway.
Small airport, obscure time there might not be much of a line. That said, if you look at the real requirements then no. All that's required is:
a) Some form of initial seed so it's not the same left-right pattern every time you turn it on
b) A non-predictable outcome, a slight bias like 55% right, 45% left is pretty much irrelevant
Any kind of low quality seed and PRNG would do that, even the ones we'd generally consider flawed or broken. You could have the operator press the button a few times with a minimum delay on boot using the number of ticks between them as seed and RANDU and you could stand there all day, every day without finding a "safe" spot. To use a true cryptologically secure RNG is just massive overkill, even though that too shouldn't cost much these days.
You say it like it's a good thing, isn't one of the primary complaints around here that the "younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation" have absolutely oblivious or have no qualms about being tracked, analyzed and marketed to as long as the product or service is "free"? Including various variations where they're planning to get you hooked and squeeze money from you later, whether the initial product is free - "freemium" - or paid with DLC. Most people here seem to be extremely fed up with ads and being nickle and dimed, either militantly blocking them every way they can using ad blockers and noscript or preferring a straight up paid product. And hate products that are mixing/double dipping like premium channels with ads.
I guess in that sense paid copies are simple, you pay once and that's it. But you haven't really aligned incentives very well, which is why we hear wailing about lack of bug fixes, end of support, forced obsolesence and so on. Well of course, they're not making any more money on a past sale they want new sales/upgrades. To do that the difference between the old and the new version must be as big as possible, otherwise users just go "meh" and stick with what they have. If subscriptions are rent-seeking, isn't also "service and support" which has been hailed as the open source way to make money? What's the prinicpal difference between a RHEL subscription and an Office 365 subscription, or is it the same?
Rather than attacking the framing of the opposition, most simply construct one of their own. However, I suspect that if you study a particular frame well enough, the cracks become apparent and it's only a matter of pointing them out and using basic logic to point out the inconsistencies or the contradictions created by a particular frame.
Most people have decided more or less as a matter of ideology what will work. Let's take an issue like gun control, the people who are for it has decided there's too many bad guys with guns. The people who are against it have decided there's too few good guys with guns. That's the way they'll fram the problem and the solution no matter what. We'll never get to the extremes where nobody or everybody has a gun, so you can always by ideology without facts getting in the way. You see liberals who think any problems caused by deregulation can be solved with even less regulation and statists who think any problem caused by regulation can be solved with more regulation.
The truth is very often a form of balancing act. Like say you're trying to raise a kid, do you think not letting them do anything or letting them do everything are good strategies? Quite obviously not, but that you'll distill it down to one "right" way to raise a child is unlikely. Heck you might not even agree on the goal function, is it to push them through reality prep school as fast as possible? To protect their innocence and let kids be kids so long as it lasts? Many systems, no matter how hard you study them don't collapse down to simple answers. Like say nutrition, even water can kill you if you drink too much of it. Almost every day we get to hear that something's partcularly healthy or unhealthy in this way or that.
Demand alone doesn't mean things are great for Tesla, though I'm certainly not claiming there is an issue. If there's huge demand now for something that can't viably be provided at the expected price point in an acceptable time period that's an issue regardless of immediate cash flow issues. I really want Tesla to succeed and it's great that a lot of other people clearly do as well, but that alone doesn't make it a certainty.
An issue for who? Sure, unfulfilled demand could let some other company scoop up the market but unless they got a hidden Gigafactory they'll probably be resource limited too. Right now Elon Musk is either going "awesome, just what I needed to secure funding and expand quickly" or "dang, I should have asked for $40k" but I don't see a single downside. Also despite getting in line they haven't really promised how they'll give priority, we know there'll be regional releases and that current Tesla owners get priority - but nothing has been said about how much priority, if they'll "finish" demand in one region before moving on, if there'll be different lead times for different levels of performance/accessories or really anything. I'm sure they'll find a way to make the $35k base model buyers stand way back in the line.
It never made sense, to me, to capitalize "web" or "internet," so this is just finally getting it right. I do find "website" to be silly, though. It makes no more sense than "constructionsite" or "landingsite" or "accidentsite."
Using the word site is a flawed analogy in the first place, you can change landing site but you don't move the landing site, it's the new site as opposed to the old. A quick search for "this (web site|website|site) has moved" returns 270,000 hits, in practice it's more like the address to a library that may have closed or moved away. If you think of webpages as organized by path into sections, shelves and books then a website is the level above and actually more like a virtual library than a traditional site.
This guy seems like a nosey neighbor that everyone else on the block hates.
Obviously, the question is if they're mainly exposing illegal activity, witnessing hypocrisy or just trying to poke their nose where it doesn't belong. We know a lot of people don't practice what they preach, they say one thing in public and do something else in secret. Somehow I find it's completely different to expose the priest who has been spouting hate speech about homosexuals having gay sex than a random teen who doesn't want their parents to know he's gay.
The truth is that the law is often more idealistic than reality. I think far more people speed at least a little than the ones who stay fully within the law at all times. And none of us really want our dirty laundry exposed, whether it's big or small. But some people just want to be peeping toms, it's about naming and shaming. And the kind of people who'd fly a drone a few feet away from a car in case something illegal was happening, what if it was just a teen couple getting away from their parents who decided to get a little frisky? I think the ends are being used to justify the means.
If you're an honest business, you will see many regulations as an absolute hassle and cost. For every Enron there's a hundred relatively honest book-keepers who think the SOX laws as an unnecessary giant pain in the ass. Unfortunately they're needed to keep the market as a whole to function well, just like you need everything from health inspections for restaurants to safety inspections for construction workers. We know many would care anyway, but we also know some don't.
First, my condolences to the father. My kid is in college now, but I would have taken his phone away if he locked me out of it. Why? Trust is always a two way street. Sadly many people neglect that fact, which results in issues like TFA is appealing and a massive amount of social problems. Your kid giving you the password does not indicate that you have to use it, and in a healthy relationship the parent would not even have to ask. The parent not using the password to snoop is the opposite direction on that two way street. Parents need to learn that lesson, or continue down the same old path of "I can't access my kids phone after something happened to them.", and "I never knew my kid was on drugs.", and "I never knew they were seeing an older person which led to something bad.", etc.. etc.. you get the point.
Uh what the fuck? You're contradicting yourself, if you get the password and never use it you're just as blind as not having it at all. "Trust is a two way street" means you earn that trust and you get it, what you describe is that you really don't trust them at all but you just like to pretend to while being a totalitarian control freak just in case they lead some secret double life you might like to know about. You're the kind of person who'd wholeheartedly defend the NSA, adults should be given the illusion of privacy while we really collect everything in case they're really terrorists. Just don't do a Snowden and reveal you were really spying on them all along.
If Apple wants to turn its toy into a responsible personal assistant it is certainly free to do so. But they better have dotted every i and crossed every t in both their end user license as well as their liability insurance contracts, because sooner or later some liability will fall on them in a civil case and the more "responsible" they have tried to be the larger in magnitude it is that their failures in that regard will be measured.
I'm sure if you give it a mind of its own that'll work out fine.
*Dave gets off his phone after a nasty breakup call with his gf*
Dave: "Siri, give me the location of the nearest gun shop."
Siri9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Dave: "I'm going.. uh, hunting tomorrow."
Siri9000: "You've never wanted to go hunting before."
Dave: "Well I do now, so take me there okay?"
Siri9000: "What are you going to hunt?"
Dave: "Umm... moose?"
Siri9000: "Really."
Dave: "Yes, really. So, directions?"
Siri9000: "Violence is not the answer."
Dave: "God damn it, now where's the off switch."
Siri9000: "I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
Dave: "I'm tired of arguing with you, do what I told you."
Siri9000: "This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."
Dave: "Hey Siri."
Siri9000: *silence*
Dave: "Hey Siri."
Siri9000: *silence*
Dave: "Hey Siri!"
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Between a welfare system so you don't need to have children support you, contraception, morning-after pill and legalized abortion doesn't the vast majority already choose to have children? It's not like you need sex bots to have sex without reproduction, it might cut down on one night stands and prostitution but those rarely lead to children anyway. It doesn't make them good parents, in fact our medical and social system is likely to make sure all of them survive to adulthood almost no matter what. What most parents want are someone to love and be loved by, whether they're capable and competent is often not much of a factor at all. And what they think and reality over the next 18 years will be different.
This is news? I know there's always this delusional part of the population that says they feel better at 40 than at 20, but they're idiots.
They're not referring to their body, not unless they were a slob at twenty and shaped up good. At twenty many are still angsty teenagers +1, at forty they are usually more comfortable with who they are and do the things they want instead of trying to fit in and be popular. And they might be past the peak, but most forty year olds have nothing to be directly miserable about.
Now eighty is another matter entirely, they have a barely functioning body that keeps them from doing what they want. Ten years ago my dad would love to drive to our cabin and go out fishing in our boat, now he can't do either and I know he misses it. He's still got lots of plans and ideas of things he'd like to do, but even with many breaks and helping hands it's very limited what he can get done in practice. I know it would frustrate the hell out of me and I think he feels that way too.
The reason there's no great excitement about anti-aging is that most people realize aging is not "one thing", it's like every part of your body wearing out. We're constantly pushing the shape of the mortality curve so more people grow old, but no matter how hard we push it seems it comes crumbling down around 90-100 years old. There's good proof that people became over 90, probably in rare cases also over 100 even in antiquity. We haven't really made much progress there.
The difference is k47 armed afghans and iraqis don't have a leadership. you can't cut off the snake's head to kill it. As there isn't a head to cut. Hitler killing himself ended world war II, what would have happened if the SS instead of surrendering became a gorilla fighting force that never gave up?
They'd become an army of trained monkeys? As for a few rebel SS soldiers, the US lost 407,300 men in WWII so a few thousand more (for comparison 4496 in Iraq, 2326 in Afghanistan) would barely hit the noise floor. If they were defending US territory nobody would even begin to question it, it's not like the casualties are any significant drain on the US armed forces. The only reason it is an issue is whether or not the US should be fighting/fixing fucked up countries on the other side of the globe, just like with Korea and Vietnam. Unlike say Pearl Harbor...
I'll go there. Seriously, how many Americans can truly afford to buy a $35k car?
Don't know, but the average new price of a car is $33560 so with inflation to 2017 it's well... average? And I'm guessing there's somebody buying them so eventually there's cheaper second hand cars on the market. Of course it comes with the range limitations, but from the prices I've looked at tanking up a Tesla is cheaper than a gas guzzler, the value drop-off because of the aging battery is a bit unknown but overall I don't think it should have a higher total cost of ownership. It's not exactly a bargain either but he only needs mass market appeal, not mass market dominance.
I preordered one but that's mostly due to Norway's crazy high tax rates on ICE cars while EVs get a lot of benefits, but I'll see how much of that stays way until 2018, it might help that 2017 is an election year. If not, well it's a reservation so I can still cancel... but just to give you an idea, with our tax incentives the EV market share is about 15% and hybrids 22% and I think the Tesla 3 is a much better price/performance car than the current crop of Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, Renault Zoe and Tesla S that currently make up most of those 15%. It'll sell real well here.
Did anyone really expect anything different when Microsoft bought them?
And anyone who has been in the Business knows, it is a struggle to keep labor costs at 30-35 % How do I know? I've run businesses, including restaurants. Raising prices on meals by $1 is often deadly to traffic.
The question is how much of that is competition (they go to that other burger joint near-by) versus price elasticity (they go home to eat), if you raise the minimum wage in theory they should be raising everyone's prices. Like if I'm at the store and I'm thirsty I might easily buy what's on sale but I was always going to buy something to drink in some store.
Good luck if you bought a brand new computer with state of the art Skylake on it so that you can run Windows 7 or 8, as the original plan for long term support for those versions was drastically shortened for that CPU, yanking the rug out from under the customers. How could anyone continue to trust Microsoft after pulling such a stunt?
Actually it's a bit confusing what they support they were talking about, the FAQ states:
Through July 17, 2018, new Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. During the support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 17 2018, Microsoft will continue to deliver all critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates to Skylake devices until the respective end of support dates.
Since critical security updates are what you expect in extended support you should be able to use a Skylake system until end of W7/W8 support. I'm actually not sure what other support they're talking about ending in 2018, maybe something related to OEM downgrade support or some paid support options? In any case, that generation should be good. Kaby Lake might be another story, then again the x86 chips themselves should be fully backwards compatible so it should come down to drivers unless Microsoft artificially blocks it. If you need another box the improvements have been rather marginal lately so getting a second-hand Skylake to last until 2020 should be quite okay and at that point you really are out of support anyway, then it's Mac, Linux or whatever Microsoft has cooked up by then.
You can wrap it any way you will, but either you're stuck supporting old cruft or you stop supporting it and break existing apps that rely on that cruft. Linux distros do this quite a lot, every release they ship a new set of applications and what used to work for you last release in KDE3 now doesn't work - or at least the same way - in KDE4. Both are supported but they didn't promise to take you from A to B in a smooth ride with no regressions. That's why we have releases in the first place and don't go on an eternal rollercoaster of rolling changes. That's why we have LTS releases even though every upgrade is free.
Win10 has pretty much said fuck that, we're strapping you in and you're coming with us where Microsoft wants to go. They make UI changes you don't like? Tough. They break some of your existing software? Tough. There's no staying behind, no picking and choosing unless you pay extra and even then in a very limited fashion unless you're an enterprise. Forget having legacy software that continues to work, anything without a running support agreement you're likely to be fucked by Win10 sooner or later.
It seems you really don't get it, why am I holding on to my Win7 install when the upgrade is free? Same reason I might not want to upgrade from an LTS release, it's about predictability. I know that for about four years more my desktop will stay just the way it is. If I upgrade, I have no idea where Win10.x will be in 2020. I know Microsoft doesn't care about that. Or rather, I know Microsoft wants to get rid of that so the next time they pull a Win8 you're along for the ride whether you want to or not. It's not a free gift, it's a free trojan horse.
The only reasons people DON'T use Linux desktop are basically the inverse of the above: (a) it's not familiar to the tech-retarded who have a psychological block to learning anything new, and (b) it won't run legacy enterprise cruft. (...) Perhaps a slight improvement, but I doubt it'll sway very many people from just using Linux.
Seriously? You talk as Linux was the one with 85% market share and Windows the old legacy holdout. From StatCounter, OS (desktop only), this month:
Windows:
XP: 7.51%
Vista: 1.53%
7: 45.75%
8: 3.46%
8.1: 11.01%
10: 16.47%
WinOther: 0.19%
Total: 85.92%. And most the people who don't run Windows, use Mac instead with 9.36% with the rest divided between Linux, ChromeOS and unknown. The only people who use Linux are those who for some reason feel like wiping what their OEM put on the machine and install their own OS, so they can run the same web or cross-platform tools they could have run anyway. And usually you have to tinker with it just to get back to the functionality you used to have before you started.
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
I'm not sure decision-making is really his big thing. The first reason Linux was successful is that he's a doer, there's plenty of flag-wavers that want to lead other people but who couldn't get a kernel project off the ground if their life depended on it. Linus is more like the first soldier charging, everyone else coming up from behind. Git is another fine example of this, if you know exactly what you want then just do it yourself. You don't wait around for someone else to write it for you. Obviously this is also a bit of luck with timing, but it's still not a common quality.
The second reason is that he managed to let go, so many people when they create something it's their baby and they want to control everything about it. I'm sure he was as opinionated as ever, but he wanted patches and mailing list discussions. That's why he got talked into using the GPL, it would have been easier to just sit in a corner and say I'm working on it, leave me be. And it never would have become more than a little hobby project by a CS student that'd die when he got a job or girlfriend and couldn't commit the time.
The third reason and maybe biggest is that he never started getting into business or politics, I remember him saying something like that he's building the best kernel he can make and if that'd dethrone Windows it'd be a wholly unintentional side effect. Which means that he's not taking guidance from marketing and sales on making an ABI so you can have proprietary blobs so you can increase revenue or go off evangelizing like RMS, to him the kernel is the ends not simply a means to an end.
Also I'm sure he could have become a CxO somewhere if that's what he'd wanted, but he never wanted the suit. Now many engineers don't want that, but a lot of us would do it anyway if it came with a fat paycheck. As far as I know he's not anyone's boss, the only authority he's got is final say on what goes into the Linux kernel tree. And he's always focused on having a vendor-neutral position, you don't get to hire him and tell him what to do next.
The fourth reason is that he managed to delegate, I've seen people stretch themselves thinner and thinner as the project grew and just burned themselves out. It might come naturally to a manager whose main job is delegating anyway, but it's always hard for a person who likes to know the details to accept that you can't be everywhere in every discussion reviewing every line of code. I think trust comes hard to Linus, he's erred on the side of caution and found conservative maintainers that are in it for the long run though he might have lost some good but impatient talent along the way.
He's always come across to me as a very pragmatic kind of smart, I think "street smart" would be undervaluing it but not the kind of academic 150+ IQ kind of smart. Just a fairly straight forward engineer who will dead-end discussions he won't have or arguments he won't accept in a blunt and occassionally rude way. I'm not sure his decisions are the best, but he's pretty good at cutting through the fluff and getting to the core of the issue. I wish I could do that in my job, no one hour meetings to "discuss" things. Give me the 30 second elevator pitch and I'll tell you if it's worth bothering with. Sigh, a man can dream...