In Europe we simply call it crossing the road, there's not even a word for it in the languages I know. Why do americans and chinese criminalise jaywalking ? WTF do they think is wrong with simply crossing a road when no cars are present ? I don't get it.
Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Serbia and Slovakia has rules against jaywalking too. But at least in Germany the fine is really symbolic, like 5-10 euro where the cop has to watch you cross and be annoyed enough about it to fine you. It's a cultural thing about rules, you wouldn't ignore a red light in a car because the coast is clear so why is the red man different? If it's there, use it. If it's there, wait for your turn. Don't set a bad example for the kids scurrying across the street at the smallest gap in traffic. It's also not so symbolic when it comes to division of fault and whether something was just an accident or reckless driving, that you were jaywalking counts against you even though the driver has a general obligation - a green light is not a license to ram. Though I prefer our system where we focus on saying it's allowed and focus on making everyone cross safely instead. But both systems works quite well.
I think you should develop this thought further, it's not complete.
I thought it was easy to follow but let me spell it out further:
1. I have USD and want to buy drugs 2. I buy BTC for my USD 3. I buy drugs with my BTC 4. The dealer sells BTC for USD
Even if the price of BTC stayed flat we'd be paying transaction and exchange fees, the seller would get less money than I started with. Like I pay $100, dealer gets $90 out and the cost of going via BTC is $10, compared to me handing him a $100 bill. Neither of us care what a bitcoin is worth. Or that it's even Bitcoin in the middle and not some other alt-currency. It's just a dollar sale by proxy.
If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.
It's a reason why users could put up with fees but it doesn't give one Bitcoin any particular value. If you're only converting back and forth to dollars it doesn't matter if it's 100 BTC or 0.01 BTC in the middle, only if you put $100 in does it come out as $99, $95 or $90 on the other side. And there's no inherent reason to use Bitcoin over any other crypto-currency, as long as someone will put a dollar value to it.
The company owner however, doesn't want to switch because all of the work the consultant provided is covered under a "warranty" for 3 years
Also if the work is covered under a warranty, shouldn't that mean they have to repair whatever even if not under contract?
Better questions, how often have they ever gotten warranty repairs free? Who's time and money is spent investigating a possible warranty issue? If the consultant blames Microsoft, would they ever make a third party review? Even if they did and found shoddy work is mostly at fault, would they ever have the time and resources to drive a process to force the consultant to unwillingly fix it under warranty? I smell a cushy kickback scheme here, the consultant gets the job of finding the problem. So 90% of the time, it's not his fault and he bills in full, while 10% of the time he'll say it's a "free" warranty fix. Of course he bakes that into his rates, but in return he gets all new business because the owner feels he'll lose "invested" warranty time going with somebody else. He's being played by a simple mind trick.
There's two things that you don't ever take away: 1. Emergency stop 2. Emergency exit
What do you do if the car has some kind of hazardous short circuit, sensor damage, loss of control, driving right into a tornado or some other oddball emergency? There should always be a big red button to make it stop dead. There should always be a safety hammer to get out. What do you do if the captive thief sets the seat on fire? We don't allow death traps, even when they can only be triggered by someone breaking and entering. I'm kinda torn on remote kill capability, that could save lives by stopping high speed car chases easier. I guess you could use remote control as a gentler and more controlled kill, but if the people in the car wants it to stop it should stop. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Personally, I think the whole point is moot. We've reached the point where the powers-that-be have pretty much succeeded in disrupting The Pirate Bay off of the web. And it doesn't matter to the minority: they use Tor browser to visit the site, and once they have the magnet link, VPN to download the torrents.
I'm not sure the 245th most popular site on the Internet is "off the web". And there's a pack of other torrent sites chasing it. And then there's probably short lived mirror domains that don't get counted. And private trackers. And then there's a ton of other methods like uploading it to a file host instead. Even 4K BluRay is cracked and that's so close to the movie master they might as well give up.
And even if you know nothing about that technical mumbo-jumbo, pirate sites can just write the link as text and ask users to copy-paste. But Hollywood doesn't care whether it's feasible, they just want to whine themselves to more laws written in their favor. Fortunately Internet providers, hosts and services are now so essential that they don't get what they want.
What just puzzles me, and I have no explanation for it other than the usual "Commies like to win medals in world competitions" explanation, is why China cares so much about chess.
Isn't that enough? All authoritarian regimes like to do generous amounts of chest-thumping, which brings funding for recruitment and training. And in people's mind chess is related to intelligence, even though Carlsen seems to mostly have an exceptional memory. China would love to have the world's smartest chess player, it's a great sales pitch to everyone who tries to dismiss them as being nothing more than the source of cheap trinkets and toys who get or take the designs from everyone else. Though I honestly don't think anyone is that naive anymore.
Never borrowing is not really a good sign of financial responsibility.
It depends on how and why, if you're living in a rented apartment in a big city where your daily needs are met by public transportation there's no inherent reason you should have a loan. Yes, you could try to game credit cards but it's a hassle and the time and effort it takes could probably be spent on other cost cutting measures too like taking advantage of sales, cooking your own food, better maintenance of things you own and so on. Taking out a loan to speculate in property value is certainly possible, but the only guaranteed savings is being your own landlord. Would you really sell your house, even though it fits your needs and you've spent years furnishing and customizing it simply because you think prices have peaked? I doubt that, so the vast majority sit through both the ups and downs.
Loans that are proper investments with a ROI or long lasting items you essentially "write off" in your own bookkeeping make sense, like you're buying a car to drive for the next ten years but it has to be paid today. A mortgage in the "safe zone" of the property value (<60% around here) for a low risk customer should have a <1% post-inflation interest, that's a small price for having the money now rather than later. What I don't understand are the people who owe like 1-2 paychecks, zero safety buffer and pay >10% interest. In all but the most dire circumstances I'd cut back enough to get out of that red zone, both for my own peace of mind and the savings. But I've got a friend who's constantly living on credit and he's got this huge urgency of things he'd like to spend money on and is only waiting for the paycheck to come in. I simply think he doesn't worry, tomorrow's problems can be fixed tomorrow.
Credit scores exist without having a credit card. Open a bank account and you have a credit history which is practically global (banks operate these metrics across continents) except for some third world countries.
Pretty sure that's not true, at least a friend of mine who emigrated to America from Norway said he had no credit score there despite having both bank accounts and loans here. But what he did was get all the credit cards he could find, live on credit for a month then paid it off. Apparently that was enough to establish a decent credit score, he had an income that more than justified the mortgage so it wasn't that. They just hit a divide by zero when he had no credit history at all.
Because nowadays, there's barely a point in replacing them. A 6 year old PC can still play modern games.
And even then a modern graphics card would bring it almost all the way up to speed. I mean it should have a Sandy Bridge+ generation CPU, DDR3 RAM and a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot. And if they get a shop to swap it they should get an SSD too, if they don't already have one. By the way, just managed to get a 2TB SSD for $220 + VAT on a Black Friday sale which was <5x the cost/GB for the cheapest HDD. Last year it would have been well over double that, spinning rust has stagnated while SSDs are still falling quite a bit.
Meh,/. has always had their share of goatse posts and misc junk floating at -1. The signal-to-noise ratio looks worse mainly because the signal is weak, as a news aggregation it always sucked but the comments/discussions used to be great. Now it's mostly loons that don't have the sense to leave, like me. I feel like I'm clinging on because I don't want an era to end, kinda how I still watch the Simpsons even though they've grown stale a long time ago.
I thought that was true only of Windows Store, and the big difference between Microsoft's strategies with Windows 10 on ARM and Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) was that Microsoft was allowing users to install applications from outside the Store.
Microsoft hasn't quite decided if they want to be Apple or Google yet, they got the store-only S versions and the open versions. Either way they know the "default store" is going to be the big one, just look at where Chrome and Firefox is on Android, everywhere and nowhere respectively. I guess we'll know more in 2020 once Win7 is out of support and Microsoft can finally start to boil the frog properly. In any case I think Windows on ARM is a dud (again), because it's still an odd side dish to a 99% Intel market. Either you transition like Apple did with Macs a couple times or just stick with x86.
I think the next few years are going to be interesting, I got a PS4 Pro to play RDR2 and I have to say... it's pretty good. With keyboard + mouse support kinda there, cross-platform walls crumbling due to Fortnite and another half-gen worth of performance I may not care that much to be part of the PC master race when the PS5/XB2 rolls around. I can't really imagine Apple not putting an A13/A14 chip in their Macs (or even a A12X+), Google keeps chipping away basic users with Chromebooks and for us nerds there's always Linux... I'm eyeing a future where Windows is leaking users in many directions and not really gaining in any.
I mean there was a time they seemed kinda invincible but Windows Phone showed they absolutely could be fought and defeated. I still think they got the corporate desktop locked down good through AD, but they could definitively go in direction of being the next Blackberry. Or rather the next AWS, from what I understand Azure is doing great. On the other hand I wouldn't be the first to claim the Windows desktop will fall any day now, so maybe my crystal ball is defective. But it's gotta hurt that Intel is threading the water and everyone else has caught up...
Nonsense. The only problem of public transport is everyone expecting it to be profitable. If it is supposed to retain usability and at least a minimum of attractiveness in terms of both service and price, it just can't be profitable in the long run. To be and stay an affordable and usable means of transportation, it has to be publicly financed, and generously so. It's really that simple.
The challenge is to find a way to do that while also getting good value. It's very easy for all quasi-monopolists to push the consequences ahead of them rather than deliver a better service. Obviously having competing subways doesn't work, so the usual solution is to run some kind of subsidization but try to operate them as a business with a budget and to make the most of what they get. But since it's not "real" profit they typically can't make investment decisions like new lines or subway cars or signal systems on their own because that'll require new subsidies, which means they get some perverse incentives to not spend "their" money on it but rather let it crumble until they get new external funding. It's not trivial making it work well, even the places it does work well...
Also, the summary implies they went from 80% coverage to 90%. That is a dramatic improvement, so I don't see what people are whining about. Saying "until we're at 100 percent, the problem isn't solved" is idiotic. Nothing is ever 100%. That would mean every alley or campsite with a homeless bum needs to have broadband.
Well nothing is 100.00% but if somebody in earlier days said 90% of people are literate or 90% got electricity, the rest is too hard that would be controversial too. I certainly wouldn't call 90% Internet coverage a good place to stop, but high speed Internet... eh. I don't think you're a savage if you're stuck on a 1 Mbit connection. I mean it would be slow and annoying and you could forget streaming video but like digital divide, not part of modern society crippled? I don't think so. Or maybe I've put on my nostalgia glasses since I lived without the Internet, but I guess people lived without electricity too.
In the urban areas there's certainly a fiber revolution, here in Norway now I see 46% are on fiber and it's been going up by about 4%/year for the last ten years. I guess the pace will die down as it stops eating up cable/DSL customers and move to the long tail, but I really think it's possible that in my lifetime we'll have a universal fiber fund. Why not? From my first modem to today my broadband is >10000 times faster in 25 years. It doesn't take a miracle for gigabit to be the norm 25 years from now...
Probably means fewer passengers and a really crappy fuel economy per passenger compared with the wider and slower jets in service.
Obviously, but first class/premium business is also vastly less efficient than cattle class. If it becomes a choice between 4 hours in a normal seat or 8 hours with extra comfort/space I'd go for the shorter one every time.
It's basically a 'penny stock'. One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.
Yeah, except in this case I'm not so sure even they are in control.... cause a big drop, does it crash and burn instead of letting you buy cheap? Start a big price hike, are people buying into it again or are they glad to recover their losses and bail? With a penny stock they know who's playing and being played, here it's more like a herd that can at any moment set off on a crazy stampede.
The country who's totally got experience with war and occupation. Sorry, when the next Hitler rolls around I damn well hope the military shoots back and kills as many as possible of the bastards. And if that means going on the offensive all the way to Berlin, so be it. WW2 ended because of D-day and the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you can't defend yourself to victory. And in a real war it's not about duty and honor, it's about freedom and survival as a people and a nation. Try making a dictator that'd send 6 million men, women and children to the gas chambers feel ashamed about using AI.
My dad is old enough to remember WW2, of course as a child so he was probably shielded from the worst of it and for me it's nothing but stories. But I understand enough to know I don't really understand it at all, you look at endless rows of graves, some corpses so ravaged you didn't even know who you buried and it's like a plane crash is nothing. 9/11 was nothing. Vietnam was nothing. Millions upon millions upon millions died and lives were pretty much as cheap as back in the Roman Empire. I really hope I'll never see war, but if we're in it I want us to win it by all means necessary.
Even if the SLS ever flies it's obviously not going to be used for ferrying people to the ISS, so selling seats it is. Though if it was actually profitable I bet SpaceX would pretty soon partner with Bigelow for a private space hotel or just launch something of their own, a single Falcon Heavy launch should suffice to launch a pretty big single module space station. Even though you'd probably run out of volume first in a LEO launch I'm sure there's a way to make some variation of a telescopic fishing rod or fold-out design without recreating Bigelow's inflatable technology. They'd have to sign a lot of customers though and probably at a cost of $10 million/head.
<troll>Shouldn't we say the same about Linux users and systemd?</troll>
On a more serious note though, if you look at the migration off XP and Win7 it's clear that most users don't want OS updates twice a year but more like twice a decade. Linux distributions are different because there you upgrade all your applications too, I don't think I've ever upgraded because of OS-level services.
Real question: is "how the fuck is this actually better than biometrics?" Biometrics are relatively difficult to clone or spoof. A chip is just an ID card implanted in a person -- it can be cloned or otherwise spoofed more easily than the alternative.
Your information is out of date. The first generation of passive RFID chips were nothing more than that, a bar code in digital form. However passive chips aren't actually passive in a computing sense, they're just powered by the radio signal so the available power is very low. So they started making more complex challenge-response systems, some of which was snake oil but now they've found ways to do it with proper cryptographic primitives.
For example here's a paper about using ECC verification of authentic bank notes. Here's AES encryption for storage and Keccak hashing. They make the tags considerably more complex and costly with greatly reduced range but for finger/card on scanner distances we can now make passive tokens as secure as active ones. What hasn't really materialized yet is a dominant cryptographic standard, though EPC Gen2v2 has the framework for it in the communications protocol.
What also hasn't really materialized yet is any standard system for unrelated parties to share a chip, apart from the simple identification tag were they can get your serial number and put it into their system. The chips are very much still designed around having one company picking features and programming them, not the user gathering stuff from many companies on their personal chip. I suppose we will get there, but this is still very much a moving target.
John Young was a pioneering astronaut who died in January at the age of 87 -- 36 years after he became the ninth person to walk on the moon, driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle.
The poor bastard. Imagine having to spend 36 years driving a moon rover. Couldn't NASA get him back to Earth somehow?
I'm more interested in how I could walk to work, driving my car...
Perhaps one day Mars' winds will blow the dust off and Opportunity will say, Hey! Remember me?
If it doesn't get enough power to call home now it'll freeze to death in the winter, February to May are the coldest months so if no dust devil clears up the panels before that it's the last nail in the coffin. That's on the off chance that nothing else broke and there's a Goldilocks amount of dust covering the panels - too much to call home, not enough to run the batteries dry. The nature of the dust could also be an issue, a bigger storm than ever before could also have whirled up coarser dust that a dust devil will have a harder time clearing. Overall I'd give very slim odds of it coming back to life.
While I agree in theory with you; I think in practice anything greater than 10 years is not practical. Providing support has a definite price to pay in terms of resources and providing for a decade is an extremely long time. Just think back to what the computing landscape by going back every 10 years ago will make this obvious.
What's obvious? * AMD and Intel had x86-64 already (2000/2004) * Double data rate type three SDRAM (DDR3 SDRAM) has been in use since 2007 * PCI-SIG announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification on 15 January 2007 * Since 2004, AGP has been progressively phased out; by mid-2008 only a few models remained * The USB 3.0 specification was released on 12 November 2008 * SATA's market share in the desktop PC market was 99% in 2008 * 802.11-2007 rolled up all the 802.11a/b/g amendments (1997-2003) into one WiFi standard * Production of consumer HDMI products started in late 2003 * DisplayPort 1.0 was approved by VESA on 3 May 2006 * 1000BASE-T was standardized in 1999
Yes, it would have been easier to only support PCIe 3.0 (2010) and to include NVMe support (2011) or 801.11n (2009) or 801.11ac (2013) or Thunderbolt (2011) but on a technical level I don't feel a 2008 PC using all the latest standards is weird. There's no COM or LPT ports, no ISA/EISA/MCA/AGP cards, game ports, token ring and so on. I guess you could find the oddball Firewire port and the venerable VGA connector is still around in 2018, but on the whole it's quite "modern" in terms of standards. I guess you wouldn't find any with actual USB 3.0 ports as the standard was just out, but USB 2.0 is still universally supported anyway.
I guess you could always run into hardware specific chipset bugs and backporting modern APIs could be a hassle, but my impression is that if you just want support so your line of business software that's essentially unchanged since the green screen days works and runs on a supported platform with security patches it's not a huge effort. It's not a huge market, but I think that it's there. At least from work I know we killed one solution because Windows 2003 ran out of support and triggered costly upgrades to the whole stack, it was kinda replaced but if there'd been a low-cost option to keep the lights on we'd have taken it.
My take is that we need different economic models. For example, I think we should have a pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation system as part of the general solution to the monopoly problem. The tax rate on corporate profits should be progressive, but not in absolute terms, but rather based on market share.
This is one of those ideas that sound plausible on paper but when you look at it in practice it will bring registration and gerrymandering hell to everyone as politicians, lobbyists and corporations manipulate what is "the same" market. Like for example if you produce salmon are you in the salmon market, the fish market or the food market? Luxury brands like Rolex will be taxed almost nothing as they're a tiny segment of the watch market. Every professional eBay seller would have to register every product by a constantly changing definition of market.
And if you could reduce taxes by splitting a corporate entity you'd see lots of shell companies selling a single product or service, maybe even down to the particular instance like here's the Intel i9-9900k by Intel i9-9900k Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel or joint ventures with 0.01% to the other company if you start making rules about that. And either you make this based on past market share which favor the "new" companies who had 0% or you're creating a system where you don't know your tax rate and thus the profit margin until the bill is due.
I'm pretty sure I have at least a dozen more crazy ideas, but time's up for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
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In Europe we simply call it crossing the road, there's not even a word for it in the languages I know. Why do americans and chinese criminalise jaywalking ? WTF do they think is wrong with simply crossing a road when no cars are present ? I don't get it.
Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Serbia and Slovakia has rules against jaywalking too. But at least in Germany the fine is really symbolic, like 5-10 euro where the cop has to watch you cross and be annoyed enough about it to fine you. It's a cultural thing about rules, you wouldn't ignore a red light in a car because the coast is clear so why is the red man different? If it's there, use it. If it's there, wait for your turn. Don't set a bad example for the kids scurrying across the street at the smallest gap in traffic. It's also not so symbolic when it comes to division of fault and whether something was just an accident or reckless driving, that you were jaywalking counts against you even though the driver has a general obligation - a green light is not a license to ram. Though I prefer our system where we focus on saying it's allowed and focus on making everyone cross safely instead. But both systems works quite well.
I think you should develop this thought further, it's not complete.
I thought it was easy to follow but let me spell it out further:
1. I have USD and want to buy drugs
2. I buy BTC for my USD
3. I buy drugs with my BTC
4. The dealer sells BTC for USD
Even if the price of BTC stayed flat we'd be paying transaction and exchange fees, the seller would get less money than I started with. Like I pay $100, dealer gets $90 out and the cost of going via BTC is $10, compared to me handing him a $100 bill. Neither of us care what a bitcoin is worth. Or that it's even Bitcoin in the middle and not some other alt-currency. It's just a dollar sale by proxy.
If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.
It's a reason why users could put up with fees but it doesn't give one Bitcoin any particular value. If you're only converting back and forth to dollars it doesn't matter if it's 100 BTC or 0.01 BTC in the middle, only if you put $100 in does it come out as $99, $95 or $90 on the other side. And there's no inherent reason to use Bitcoin over any other crypto-currency, as long as someone will put a dollar value to it.
The company owner however, doesn't want to switch because all of the work the consultant provided is covered under a "warranty" for 3 years
Also if the work is covered under a warranty, shouldn't that mean they have to repair whatever even if not under contract?
Better questions, how often have they ever gotten warranty repairs free? Who's time and money is spent investigating a possible warranty issue? If the consultant blames Microsoft, would they ever make a third party review? Even if they did and found shoddy work is mostly at fault, would they ever have the time and resources to drive a process to force the consultant to unwillingly fix it under warranty? I smell a cushy kickback scheme here, the consultant gets the job of finding the problem. So 90% of the time, it's not his fault and he bills in full, while 10% of the time he'll say it's a "free" warranty fix. Of course he bakes that into his rates, but in return he gets all new business because the owner feels he'll lose "invested" warranty time going with somebody else. He's being played by a simple mind trick.
There's two things that you don't ever take away:
1. Emergency stop
2. Emergency exit
What do you do if the car has some kind of hazardous short circuit, sensor damage, loss of control, driving right into a tornado or some other oddball emergency? There should always be a big red button to make it stop dead. There should always be a safety hammer to get out. What do you do if the captive thief sets the seat on fire? We don't allow death traps, even when they can only be triggered by someone breaking and entering. I'm kinda torn on remote kill capability, that could save lives by stopping high speed car chases easier. I guess you could use remote control as a gentler and more controlled kill, but if the people in the car wants it to stop it should stop. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Personally, I think the whole point is moot. We've reached the point where the powers-that-be have pretty much succeeded in disrupting The Pirate Bay off of the web. And it doesn't matter to the minority: they use Tor browser to visit the site, and once they have the magnet link, VPN to download the torrents.
I'm not sure the 245th most popular site on the Internet is "off the web". And there's a pack of other torrent sites chasing it. And then there's probably short lived mirror domains that don't get counted. And private trackers. And then there's a ton of other methods like uploading it to a file host instead. Even 4K BluRay is cracked and that's so close to the movie master they might as well give up.
And even if you know nothing about that technical mumbo-jumbo, pirate sites can just write the link as text and ask users to copy-paste. But Hollywood doesn't care whether it's feasible, they just want to whine themselves to more laws written in their favor. Fortunately Internet providers, hosts and services are now so essential that they don't get what they want.
What just puzzles me, and I have no explanation for it other than the usual "Commies like to win medals in world competitions" explanation, is why China cares so much about chess.
Isn't that enough? All authoritarian regimes like to do generous amounts of chest-thumping, which brings funding for recruitment and training. And in people's mind chess is related to intelligence, even though Carlsen seems to mostly have an exceptional memory. China would love to have the world's smartest chess player, it's a great sales pitch to everyone who tries to dismiss them as being nothing more than the source of cheap trinkets and toys who get or take the designs from everyone else. Though I honestly don't think anyone is that naive anymore.
Never borrowing is not really a good sign of financial responsibility.
It depends on how and why, if you're living in a rented apartment in a big city where your daily needs are met by public transportation there's no inherent reason you should have a loan. Yes, you could try to game credit cards but it's a hassle and the time and effort it takes could probably be spent on other cost cutting measures too like taking advantage of sales, cooking your own food, better maintenance of things you own and so on. Taking out a loan to speculate in property value is certainly possible, but the only guaranteed savings is being your own landlord. Would you really sell your house, even though it fits your needs and you've spent years furnishing and customizing it simply because you think prices have peaked? I doubt that, so the vast majority sit through both the ups and downs.
Loans that are proper investments with a ROI or long lasting items you essentially "write off" in your own bookkeeping make sense, like you're buying a car to drive for the next ten years but it has to be paid today. A mortgage in the "safe zone" of the property value (<60% around here) for a low risk customer should have a <1% post-inflation interest, that's a small price for having the money now rather than later. What I don't understand are the people who owe like 1-2 paychecks, zero safety buffer and pay >10% interest. In all but the most dire circumstances I'd cut back enough to get out of that red zone, both for my own peace of mind and the savings. But I've got a friend who's constantly living on credit and he's got this huge urgency of things he'd like to spend money on and is only waiting for the paycheck to come in. I simply think he doesn't worry, tomorrow's problems can be fixed tomorrow.
Credit scores exist without having a credit card. Open a bank account and you have a credit history which is practically global (banks operate these metrics across continents) except for some third world countries.
Pretty sure that's not true, at least a friend of mine who emigrated to America from Norway said he had no credit score there despite having both bank accounts and loans here. But what he did was get all the credit cards he could find, live on credit for a month then paid it off. Apparently that was enough to establish a decent credit score, he had an income that more than justified the mortgage so it wasn't that. They just hit a divide by zero when he had no credit history at all.
Because nowadays, there's barely a point in replacing them. A 6 year old PC can still play modern games.
And even then a modern graphics card would bring it almost all the way up to speed. I mean it should have a Sandy Bridge+ generation CPU, DDR3 RAM and a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot. And if they get a shop to swap it they should get an SSD too, if they don't already have one. By the way, just managed to get a 2TB SSD for $220 + VAT on a Black Friday sale which was <5x the cost/GB for the cheapest HDD. Last year it would have been well over double that, spinning rust has stagnated while SSDs are still falling quite a bit.
Meh, /. has always had their share of goatse posts and misc junk floating at -1. The signal-to-noise ratio looks worse mainly because the signal is weak, as a news aggregation it always sucked but the comments/discussions used to be great. Now it's mostly loons that don't have the sense to leave, like me. I feel like I'm clinging on because I don't want an era to end, kinda how I still watch the Simpsons even though they've grown stale a long time ago.
I thought that was true only of Windows Store, and the big difference between Microsoft's strategies with Windows 10 on ARM and Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) was that Microsoft was allowing users to install applications from outside the Store.
Microsoft hasn't quite decided if they want to be Apple or Google yet, they got the store-only S versions and the open versions. Either way they know the "default store" is going to be the big one, just look at where Chrome and Firefox is on Android, everywhere and nowhere respectively. I guess we'll know more in 2020 once Win7 is out of support and Microsoft can finally start to boil the frog properly. In any case I think Windows on ARM is a dud (again), because it's still an odd side dish to a 99% Intel market. Either you transition like Apple did with Macs a couple times or just stick with x86.
I think the next few years are going to be interesting, I got a PS4 Pro to play RDR2 and I have to say... it's pretty good. With keyboard + mouse support kinda there, cross-platform walls crumbling due to Fortnite and another half-gen worth of performance I may not care that much to be part of the PC master race when the PS5/XB2 rolls around. I can't really imagine Apple not putting an A13/A14 chip in their Macs (or even a A12X+), Google keeps chipping away basic users with Chromebooks and for us nerds there's always Linux... I'm eyeing a future where Windows is leaking users in many directions and not really gaining in any.
I mean there was a time they seemed kinda invincible but Windows Phone showed they absolutely could be fought and defeated. I still think they got the corporate desktop locked down good through AD, but they could definitively go in direction of being the next Blackberry. Or rather the next AWS, from what I understand Azure is doing great. On the other hand I wouldn't be the first to claim the Windows desktop will fall any day now, so maybe my crystal ball is defective. But it's gotta hurt that Intel is threading the water and everyone else has caught up...
Nonsense. The only problem of public transport is everyone expecting it to be profitable. If it is supposed to retain usability and at least a minimum of attractiveness in terms of both service and price, it just can't be profitable in the long run. To be and stay an affordable and usable means of transportation, it has to be publicly financed, and generously so. It's really that simple.
The challenge is to find a way to do that while also getting good value. It's very easy for all quasi-monopolists to push the consequences ahead of them rather than deliver a better service. Obviously having competing subways doesn't work, so the usual solution is to run some kind of subsidization but try to operate them as a business with a budget and to make the most of what they get. But since it's not "real" profit they typically can't make investment decisions like new lines or subway cars or signal systems on their own because that'll require new subsidies, which means they get some perverse incentives to not spend "their" money on it but rather let it crumble until they get new external funding. It's not trivial making it work well, even the places it does work well...
Also, the summary implies they went from 80% coverage to 90%. That is a dramatic improvement, so I don't see what people are whining about. Saying "until we're at 100 percent, the problem isn't solved" is idiotic. Nothing is ever 100%. That would mean every alley or campsite with a homeless bum needs to have broadband.
Well nothing is 100.00% but if somebody in earlier days said 90% of people are literate or 90% got electricity, the rest is too hard that would be controversial too. I certainly wouldn't call 90% Internet coverage a good place to stop, but high speed Internet... eh. I don't think you're a savage if you're stuck on a 1 Mbit connection. I mean it would be slow and annoying and you could forget streaming video but like digital divide, not part of modern society crippled? I don't think so. Or maybe I've put on my nostalgia glasses since I lived without the Internet, but I guess people lived without electricity too.
In the urban areas there's certainly a fiber revolution, here in Norway now I see 46% are on fiber and it's been going up by about 4%/year for the last ten years. I guess the pace will die down as it stops eating up cable/DSL customers and move to the long tail, but I really think it's possible that in my lifetime we'll have a universal fiber fund. Why not? From my first modem to today my broadband is >10000 times faster in 25 years. It doesn't take a miracle for gigabit to be the norm 25 years from now...
Probably means fewer passengers and a really crappy fuel economy per passenger compared with the wider and slower jets in service.
Obviously, but first class/premium business is also vastly less efficient than cattle class. If it becomes a choice between 4 hours in a normal seat or 8 hours with extra comfort/space I'd go for the shorter one every time.
It's basically a 'penny stock'. One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.
Yeah, except in this case I'm not so sure even they are in control.... cause a big drop, does it crash and burn instead of letting you buy cheap? Start a big price hike, are people buying into it again or are they glad to recover their losses and bail? With a penny stock they know who's playing and being played, here it's more like a herd that can at any moment set off on a crazy stampede.
The country who's totally got experience with war and occupation. Sorry, when the next Hitler rolls around I damn well hope the military shoots back and kills as many as possible of the bastards. And if that means going on the offensive all the way to Berlin, so be it. WW2 ended because of D-day and the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you can't defend yourself to victory. And in a real war it's not about duty and honor, it's about freedom and survival as a people and a nation. Try making a dictator that'd send 6 million men, women and children to the gas chambers feel ashamed about using AI.
My dad is old enough to remember WW2, of course as a child so he was probably shielded from the worst of it and for me it's nothing but stories. But I understand enough to know I don't really understand it at all, you look at endless rows of graves, some corpses so ravaged you didn't even know who you buried and it's like a plane crash is nothing. 9/11 was nothing. Vietnam was nothing. Millions upon millions upon millions died and lives were pretty much as cheap as back in the Roman Empire. I really hope I'll never see war, but if we're in it I want us to win it by all means necessary.
Even if the SLS ever flies it's obviously not going to be used for ferrying people to the ISS, so selling seats it is. Though if it was actually profitable I bet SpaceX would pretty soon partner with Bigelow for a private space hotel or just launch something of their own, a single Falcon Heavy launch should suffice to launch a pretty big single module space station. Even though you'd probably run out of volume first in a LEO launch I'm sure there's a way to make some variation of a telescopic fishing rod or fold-out design without recreating Bigelow's inflatable technology. They'd have to sign a lot of customers though and probably at a cost of $10 million/head.
<troll>Shouldn't we say the same about Linux users and systemd?</troll>
On a more serious note though, if you look at the migration off XP and Win7 it's clear that most users don't want OS updates twice a year but more like twice a decade. Linux distributions are different because there you upgrade all your applications too, I don't think I've ever upgraded because of OS-level services.
Real question: is "how the fuck is this actually better than biometrics?" Biometrics are relatively difficult to clone or spoof. A chip is just an ID card implanted in a person -- it can be cloned or otherwise spoofed more easily than the alternative.
Your information is out of date. The first generation of passive RFID chips were nothing more than that, a bar code in digital form. However passive chips aren't actually passive in a computing sense, they're just powered by the radio signal so the available power is very low. So they started making more complex challenge-response systems, some of which was snake oil but now they've found ways to do it with proper cryptographic primitives.
For example here's a paper about using ECC verification of authentic bank notes. Here's AES encryption for storage and Keccak hashing. They make the tags considerably more complex and costly with greatly reduced range but for finger/card on scanner distances we can now make passive tokens as secure as active ones. What hasn't really materialized yet is a dominant cryptographic standard, though EPC Gen2v2 has the framework for it in the communications protocol.
What also hasn't really materialized yet is any standard system for unrelated parties to share a chip, apart from the simple identification tag were they can get your serial number and put it into their system. The chips are very much still designed around having one company picking features and programming them, not the user gathering stuff from many companies on their personal chip. I suppose we will get there, but this is still very much a moving target.
John Young was a pioneering astronaut who died in January at the age of 87 -- 36 years after he became the ninth person to walk on the moon, driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle.
The poor bastard. Imagine having to spend 36 years driving a moon rover. Couldn't NASA get him back to Earth somehow?
I'm more interested in how I could walk to work, driving my car...
Perhaps one day Mars' winds will blow the dust off and Opportunity will say, Hey! Remember me?
If it doesn't get enough power to call home now it'll freeze to death in the winter, February to May are the coldest months so if no dust devil clears up the panels before that it's the last nail in the coffin. That's on the off chance that nothing else broke and there's a Goldilocks amount of dust covering the panels - too much to call home, not enough to run the batteries dry. The nature of the dust could also be an issue, a bigger storm than ever before could also have whirled up coarser dust that a dust devil will have a harder time clearing. Overall I'd give very slim odds of it coming back to life.
While I agree in theory with you; I think in practice anything greater than 10 years is not practical. Providing support has a definite price to pay in terms of resources and providing for a decade is an extremely long time. Just think back to what the computing landscape by going back every 10 years ago will make this obvious.
What's obvious?
* AMD and Intel had x86-64 already (2000/2004)
* Double data rate type three SDRAM (DDR3 SDRAM) has been in use since 2007
* PCI-SIG announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification on 15 January 2007
* Since 2004, AGP has been progressively phased out; by mid-2008 only a few models remained
* The USB 3.0 specification was released on 12 November 2008
* SATA's market share in the desktop PC market was 99% in 2008
* 802.11-2007 rolled up all the 802.11a/b/g amendments (1997-2003) into one WiFi standard
* Production of consumer HDMI products started in late 2003
* DisplayPort 1.0 was approved by VESA on 3 May 2006
* 1000BASE-T was standardized in 1999
Yes, it would have been easier to only support PCIe 3.0 (2010) and to include NVMe support (2011) or 801.11n (2009) or 801.11ac (2013) or Thunderbolt (2011) but on a technical level I don't feel a 2008 PC using all the latest standards is weird. There's no COM or LPT ports, no ISA/EISA/MCA/AGP cards, game ports, token ring and so on. I guess you could find the oddball Firewire port and the venerable VGA connector is still around in 2018, but on the whole it's quite "modern" in terms of standards. I guess you wouldn't find any with actual USB 3.0 ports as the standard was just out, but USB 2.0 is still universally supported anyway.
I guess you could always run into hardware specific chipset bugs and backporting modern APIs could be a hassle, but my impression is that if you just want support so your line of business software that's essentially unchanged since the green screen days works and runs on a supported platform with security patches it's not a huge effort. It's not a huge market, but I think that it's there. At least from work I know we killed one solution because Windows 2003 ran out of support and triggered costly upgrades to the whole stack, it was kinda replaced but if there'd been a low-cost option to keep the lights on we'd have taken it.
My take is that we need different economic models. For example, I think we should have a pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation system as part of the general solution to the monopoly problem. The tax rate on corporate profits should be progressive, but not in absolute terms, but rather based on market share.
This is one of those ideas that sound plausible on paper but when you look at it in practice it will bring registration and gerrymandering hell to everyone as politicians, lobbyists and corporations manipulate what is "the same" market. Like for example if you produce salmon are you in the salmon market, the fish market or the food market? Luxury brands like Rolex will be taxed almost nothing as they're a tiny segment of the watch market. Every professional eBay seller would have to register every product by a constantly changing definition of market.
And if you could reduce taxes by splitting a corporate entity you'd see lots of shell companies selling a single product or service, maybe even down to the particular instance like here's the Intel i9-9900k by Intel i9-9900k Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel or joint ventures with 0.01% to the other company if you start making rules about that. And either you make this based on past market share which favor the "new" companies who had 0% or you're creating a system where you don't know your tax rate and thus the profit margin until the bill is due.
I'm pretty sure I have at least a dozen more crazy ideas, but time's up for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Well, at least you know they're crazy...