Humans don't on the whole care nearly as much about money as they think they do. We're certainly not rational machines who would substitute the weekend tinkering fixing an old alarm clock for an equal amount of time spent earning money so we could buy a new clock and have some left over money. That's not how people work, so yes, I'd say his actions were as rational as any other.
Landfill disagree with you, as much as the "-1, I disagree" votes say otherwise.
I have a Radio Shack clock radio with a huge LED time display. Have had it for maybe twenty years, and it recently decided to show random LED segments instead of the time. Yesterday, I opened it up to look for any obvious smoked transistors or leaky capacitors. No, looks fine. Playing the odds, I replaced the largest (power supply) capacitor, and now it works again. I saved the cost of a new one and saved the landfill from one more piece of e-garbage.
Well good for you and good for the environment, but is it useful for anything more than an anecdote? I'm not saying it to be rude, but if you put a dollar value on your time and factor in the time you took inspecting it, the odds that it would work and that even though you expanded the life span you probably didn't give it another 20 years was it rational? Or was it simply because electronics is a hobby and fixing it was fun and a productive result, like going on a fishing trip and catching dinner? Because otherwise "everybody else" who don't take any interest in it and thinking fixing it is nothing but hassle will be still be throwing it in the landfill.
And even if it was rational for your unique circumstances because you had the item, the tools, the skills and could give yourself a "no cure no pay" deal it wouldn't be profitable for a repair shop. I doubt it would even be useful if you got them for free at a e-recycling center and fixed them, because you probably don't need more than one and 20 year old second hand LED clocks would be worth nothing on eBay. I don't mean to disrespect what you're doing but I just don't see it being very useful to solving any of society's garbage problems, because those solutions have to work for most of the people most of the time. And I'm guessing it will eventually end up in the landfill, so eventually there will be need for recycling not just repair.
There is apparently a structural rule in the paid broadcasting business that says that, once you get enough people, you start degrading the service to get more money. I suppose that comes from marketing people not wanting to raise prices directly, as that's a trigger for the clients to quit. So they start giving less quality, putting ads, etc. Just slowly killing the reasons why you were successful in the first place. I see a business opportunity there.
Well straight up price hikes are a bad idea for business in general, that's not something marketing invented it's pretty much established fact. Smart marketing will however sell you on a new product/service tier while the old degrades so you have the impression you're paying more to get more. Very often do this by making like half-tiers, before you had tiers 1, 2, 3 now you have 0.5, 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 and you like either get some feature from the tier up, or you save a bit of money going down for a lesser service. Then once they're established as tiers 1-4 you simplify to tiers 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 raising the base price while throwing in a bone. And since that brings you back to the beginning so it goes in loops. Preferably with some re-branding so they're not directly comparable like (Value,Premium, Ultra) -> (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) -> (Basic,Standard,Extra) or something like that. It's all quite predictable once you know the game.
Sounds like every sysadmin feels NASA's pain. Don't you just love when there's a remote machine that doesn't respond to any means of contacting it you have, and getting there would take a whole day's trip, preceded by two weeks of having access there organized?
Uh... nope. Most sysadmins have their servers in-house, at a data center or in some branch office where somebody can take a look at it. Operating servers in unmanned locations is a niche, it happens in a lot of industries so it's not exactly rare but no most sysadmins don't know that pain.
Same as these guys -- their own logic is self-contradictory. Either DOTA is a game mainly about reaction time, in which case the 18-player limit will have almost no effect; or DOTA is a game mainly about strategy and how to use characters together, in which case the direct interface will have little effect. Given the fact that poorly-chosen characters caused the computer to lose decisively, I think the first one is much more likely.
I have very limited experience with DOTA but I did watch the games and to me it looked like the computer had some inhuman precision in the micro-game, like the attacks were always flawlessly coordinated where the target(s) would get debuffed and slammed with perfect area-of-effect damage with just enough force to kill while their own forces stayed just far enough back that the human attack only did 98% damage and could retreat. And they could instantly switch tactics if their attack was met by a heavier counter-attack, you couldn't catch them off guard or overextending themselves. I mean this is an area where top human teams also seem rather inhuman, but the AI topped that so the best you can hope for is breaking even.
What did impress me is how reasonable they actually played the rest of the game, like what do we do in order to get XP and gold to prepare for the PvP battles, how do we send heroes down lanes, how do we pick the battles to take. These are questions with a whole lot less definitive answers and there were definitively flaws in those strategies, but like I said above every time they walked into a trap they'd near instantly recognize they were in a bad spot and try to wiggle out of it while a human team would have way more panic and confusion. This was very apparent in game three where everybody admitted they did a very impressive job defending delaying the inevitable but didn't really know how to mix it up and gamble to at least have a shot at winning.
But then it's not voluntary, which was GPs stipulation.
Well he didn't say by law, he did say mob rule which can be a lot more subtle. For example say you want to buy your groceries in cash, well there's four self-checkout lanes (electronic only), two card-only registries and one cash registry. Which always has a line. Or they want you to pay for an electronic ticket on the bus, it starts as an alternative. Then you start getting a rebate on electronic tickets. Then you start selling period cards only electronically. Then the physical ticket machines start disappearing or not get repaired when they're vandalized. And so it goes until you're either paying electronically or you're paying cash for a ridiculously overpriced single-ride ticket only tourists would use.
The other obvious alternative is to offer convenience, like nobody would carry a cell phone if it was marketed as a radio buoy. Nobody would make GPS tracking of your car compulsory, but you'll probably take it if it's a condition for a self-driving car. Or simply make perks a bonus thing if you register as a customer and use our smartphone app, then make the "perk" level the new normal and the rest effectively penalized. There's lots of subtle and not so subtle ways the government and big business could make it convenient to be chipped and inconvenient not to be, without making it a formal requirement. And that's before you start going Chinese with the "social credit" system...
Yes, (some) real pilots train in simulators. The article however is about video games - which are to those simulators like a skateboard is to a F1 racer. Still useful for some things, but not even remotely the same thing.
Flight simulators have been their own class of "games" for decades, they're kinda like some survival games it's not really about conquering or achieving anything just mastering it and not dying is the game. I remember we used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator as kids, it was notoriously hard and we never managed to land properly. But we did manage to take off, occasionally do a few tricks in the air but just as often go into a fatal spin, crash into building or whatever. Since then they've only gone further and further in realism, it's for a niche crowd but it's still games.
I had kinda the same experience with TV when I was growing up, here in Norway there was only one TV station. And even though we got VHS tapes after a while, there was still only one family TV so I ended up watching a varied selection. When I think back it was okay, but I think that's only because there was never really any alternatives. Today, if I knew there was plenty other channels and Netflix and plenty other electronic entertainment I'd be bored in two minutes and ready to kill myself in ten. It's kinda when me and a buddy play retro C64 games, they take many minutes to load from tape. Today I'm used to SSD response times and would strangle any game that took so long (GTA V, I'm looking at you).
Seriously there's like an article here every week on how MoviePass is changing the terms. If I had been a customer the number of changes by itself would be reason to say fuck this, I'll just go buy a ticket when I need one. They're like a fat fuck jumping around trying to find the magic diet that'll make them slim in a week, it ain't gonna happen.
A car like this could work well in China, India, South-East Asia, Japan, and much of Europe. If they are made available on-demand, like Ofo and Mobike do with electric scooters, this could be a really big deal.
Actually I was thinking quite the opposite, this could be good enough for my daily commute that I'd probably prefer to own. What I need is for Google to get their self-driving car to my area so I have hassle-free access to a big rental car. It doesn't even need coverage where I want to go, as long as it can deliver itself and drop off itself after I'm done because that's usually the annoying part. Particularly if you have a lot of luggage you have to take public transport to the rental place, drive home, load it up and then on the return drive home, unload it, drive to the rental place, then take public transport home. Of course if it could drive autonomously part or all the way that'd be a bonus.
People love apt-get and hate the app store because apt-get does not attempt to lock you into anything. There is no 30% cut of anything being skimmed off by middlemen.
Well 30% of $0 doesn't work out to much, Debian doesn't want paid apps in their repository. Meanwhile "people" leave $60 billion dollars in Apple and Google's app store. I like open source, but if you want/need some kind of COTS software open source doesn't like you. Not even Steam managed to turn that ship around, Linux is 0.5% of their market and dropping. It's a smashing success for cloud servers where you can just clone up a thousand instances without worrying about licensing but on the desktop it's still 1% hippies and tin foil hats. I'll be joining you once Win7 goes out of support, but sigh... it's not exactly with great love anymore.
They don't realize that at some point with socialism, you DO run out of other peoples' money to spend.
Most of the time, "them" is also "us". I got my public education, now I'm paying taxes for public education. Now I'm paying taxes for public pensions, when I retire I'll have my public pension. If you work, you get unemployment benefits. Other things are like collective insurance, if I got cancer tomorrow the public healthcare system will be there for me. If I'm in a terrible car accident, I'll get my disability pension. You might say all of this could have been organized privately and in theory it could, but in reality many people can't see past their next paycheck. If you didn't have unemployment benefits many recently fired would have $0 in the bank and $0 income. And there's really no sane person who would want to be without catastrophic health insurance. Yes, it becomes an argument about who should be paying for public parks if you don't go to public parks but it's not the end of the world.
The really big problem comes when there is a distinct "them" and "us". A classic hot-button topic in Europe at the moment is immigration, also for a number of other reasons but the economic transfer of wealth from the natives to the migrants/refugees is a big part of it. We've finally come to the point here in Norway where we dare to do the math. Native male, 25 to death: +$400k. Non-western migrant, 25 to death: -$700k. I was young. I will be old, hopefully. I might get sick or injured. But I'll never be a migrant, should I work my butt off so they can have a welfare state? I realize they don't know the language or the culture, don't have the same education level and we took them in due to war and alleged persecution not as migrant workers so I wasn't expecting the numbers to be equal. But it's still a choice we make by granting them entry that we can't be blind to.
Space travel is 10% science and 90% demonstrating that you can lob a nuke around the earth. But, hey, it's that 90% that pays for the science.
I think you're projecting Cold War history on everyone else. India doesn't have any particular need for ICBMs, if they're going to start a shooting war with anyone it'll probably be Pakistan and they're right next door. The driving force here was probably business, providing a cheaper alternative to the US/European/Russian launch options for telecom, observation satellites and so on. It probably looked like a good idea, I mean the Proton rocket is a 50+ year old design and was up until recently pretty competitive so if India could undercut them on labor cost they could become the "budget" launch provider. Of course then SpaceX happened...
Norway's Statoil is an example of socialism, but that is a special situation of a massive public resource owned by a small population. Very few other countries have that benefit.
Well yes, but Statoil - actually it's now Equinor - is very much run like a corporation with ~30% publicly traded stock and the government doesn't interfere in their business decisions. The oil fund - which is where the real money is at, over 10x bigger than the market cap of Equinor - comes from a 55% special tax on top of the regular 23% tax so for every $100 of oil they pump up $78 goes to the government and they're still making money. I literally can't phantom how Venezuela could manage to fuck it up this badly with oil, it's basically printing free money. Anyway, the point is that we don't operate it according to a socialist plan economy. It's a business whose owners happen to be the general public. This is a very common confusion, yes we have socialized healthcare but we hire a lot of private services, just because the government picks up the tab doesn't mean it's done by a public employee.
Yeah, definitely. How much are you trying to dump?
I think we had this same discussion when BTC slumped from $1000 to $230, okay the fad is over everybody go home. Then it rebounded and went up, up and away to $20k. I'm not saying the GP is right, but we've already had crazier rallies than that. The person who'd go short in BTC is even crazier than the person who'd invest in BTC...
It's a dead end if you want to build Lt. Cmdr. Data, but honestly I just want a glorified Roomba. I mean we struggle to make a burger flipping robot, imagine having a chef in your kitchen 24x7x365 and for bonus points it'll set the table, be your waiter and clean the dishes. And that can't just vacuum the floors but scrub the toilet, dust the furniture, rinse the sink, clean the windows and so on. And that can take my dirty laundry, sort it, wash it, dry it, iron my shirts and hang them in my closet. I don't think there are physical limitations to this, it's that we can't produce "dumb" intelligence cheap enough. No consciousness or real creativity needed, just small variations on a theme.
Ummm, no it isn't. It isn't much like life in any city. Not saying it's better or worse but it definitely isn't what I'd call similar. For one thing I'm pretty confident the dating scene isn't exactly a target rich environment. And 24/7 access to electricity and places to go use it is not a trivial difference.
I guess he wants to say something like "We live in caves, but we're not cavemen" because the reporter is there to make an article on this primitive society but they have TV, phones, computers, Internet and an Xbox. Like many tourist destinations it's now probably more or less a sham where they put on a show but in reality live much more modern, mundane lives. I remember seeing a documentary about a guy who stayed with a tribe in the Amazon for a long time, like much longer than a tourist group or news crew and it was just like that. Maybe it was a historical reenactment but it was just an act, they didn't actually live that way anymore.
If this had been a SpaceX launch, that fact would likely be front-and-center to this submission - NASA would probably be a footnote at best. Shouldn't we give the same love to ULA?
Well this is one of few satellite launches with a significant scientific payload. These are the SpaceX launches in 2018:
Considering it was SpaceX's first high-priority science mission launched for NASA that seems fair, but it was NASA that got to be front and center. The TL;DR version: You're wrong.
So I don't know if JPEG was cutting edge in 1992 or lossy encoding was widespread in the scientific and research spaces and JPEG just happened to be one such implementation? Can anyone who was there at the time comment?
I think the most correct thing to say is that around that time doing Discrete Cosine Transformations in real time became feasible. Just a random blurb I found:
Currently, the Atari JPEG decoder can decompress a 24 bits 320x200 picture in less than one second, which allows use of JPEG in games for example. This decoder is faster on the Falcon030 than the one we have tested on PC 486 DX2 66Mhz.
Wohoo we can decompress a 320x200 JPG in less than a second. If you wanted to show something like a 1024x768 (XGA, 1990) photo that'd only take like 12 seconds. It's also at the core of MP3 encoding, which also became feasible around the 486/Pentium days. Before that it was usually GIFs with lossless LZW compression or simply BMP with none whatsoever. Lossy decoding was actually a costly task once upon a time. And back then it was mostly stored on a floppy or something, "download time" didn't become a thing until BBS via modem and later the Internet.
And a lossy image format is something for which DRM is a non-starter, because of the ease of screenshotting or even taking the picture of the screen with a camera.
Not sure why you emphasized lossy, taking a screenshot of a JPG is less useful than a screenshot of a PNG as you lost the most efficient representation and will either have to save it losslessly or suffer transcoding losses. As for the analog hole that's true for using a video camera too but DRM for video is still a big thing, what you can snap with your cell phone will have a lot lower quality. That leaves screenshots, of course this would have to tie into the protected media framework but for all intents and purposes you can consider it a one-frame movie.
Honestly I'm kinda impressed that the copyright cartel hasn't managed to push this out of software and into an embedded side channel where the graphics card is decrypting the content, storing it in a private memory area and only overlays it as the last step before sending it out via HDCP in such a way that not even the driver can read out the contents bypassing the whole OS. For the web that would be trivial, just include the public key in the request header and the server will encrypt to your graphics card if it trusts it or refuse if it's unknown.
I guess that would be harder for stored content but you could have like individual -> model -> generation -> vendor keys, like this content plays on all AMD/nVidia/Intel cards. If a breach is discovered, well all existing content is broken but you can encode for 5th generation AMD cards and above. Or if a particular model is broken then enumerate the rest + newer cards for the future. It seems a lot easier than securing a whole OS.
What the GDPR did was force companies to actually show you just what kind of privacy they rip off you in exchange for their "service". Before that, they could simply silently take away your privacy. Saying that the GDPR makes you give up your privacy is like saying having to label food puts artificial crap and MSG into it. It was in there before, you just didn't know.
The only thing the GDPR has done is to drive consumers into EULA exhaustion on every damn website they visit and make sure they have a tracking cookie to remember your GDPR consent, try turning cookies off and you'll now go crazy. And once you do click OK there's no standard placement/icon/requirement to let you go back and review/change what you've agreed to. Basically what the solution completely fails to have is some sort of auto-negotiation where the web page could say I'd like to track you in these ways, the client could answer back "nope, these are my privacy preferences" and the site could either let it pass or say that this tracking is mandatory, either you agree or you can't access the content. Take for example/. it probably needs to track that I'm logged in as a user. But one or a hundred tracking methods is roughly equally annoying once they have to beg for permission.
I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.
Which is why I'm not very concerned. The JPEG group was there at the right time, in the right place 25 years ago when we needed a "good enough" picture standard for the web and I don't know they've achieved anything of significance since. There's been tons of attempts to replace it which hasn't moved the needle an inch, it'd take an industry-wide alliance with a completely royalty free and open standard to even stand a chance. I'll believe it when I see cameras do "RAW+[new image format]" instead of "RAW+JPG" and you can put it on the web and it'll work in all major browsers on desktop and mobile.
Market manipulation to what, exactly? Did Musk sell any shares? No? Really solid market manipulation case you've got there.
Uh what? Stock price manipulation to get a CEO bonus, to secure some line of credit, hold off some a vote by the board to replace you, help your golf buddy to sell off his stock... there's all sorts of reasons why manipulating the stock price by itself is illegal. Musk better have backing for what he said or else he may have taken his extremely optimistic and premature announcements one step too far.
Keyswitch is less reliable than a regular mechanical switch.
Even if that was true you could use a locking cover with keys, code, RFID or whatever. I've heard the same excuse with military equipment and there I can kinda understand that you need to go NOW NOW NOW and there's no time to fiddle with keys. Not so much for civilian airplanes...
Let's take Etex.net. They have a service area of 710 square miles. That's about the size of Singapore, with a population density of about 0. There are probably 30,000 potential customers in their service area.
So 30000/710 = ~42/square mile or roughly the same as here in Norway (41). Right now 94% has access to a wired connection, 84% has the possibility for 100 Mbps download and 52% has fiber.
So you can string fiber 20 miles to that guy's house for $140k. How do you make that back?
If there's one guy living 20 miles from everybody else in a dead end where you'd never need a fiber passing through then obviously you don't. But that cost is an actual cable gate and everything, not one more strand of fiber. So it's more about the marginal cost of connecting one more fiber customer.
Here in Norway we actually have good public data on this. So 52% has access to fiber today, what about the other 48%? Based on GPS coordinates 73% of them are within 100m of an existing fiber delivery. Another 18% is within 500m (0.3 miles). That's 0.52 + 0.48 * (0.73+0.18) = 95%+ of the population in total. Around here they estimate $15k/km so 0.3 * $15k = $3000, for rural areas it's typically an extra $500 in hook-up and then they estimate roughly $100/year of the subscription fee will be used to down pay the fiber over 25 years. At least here that's feasible and rolling out at a pace of about 4-5%/year.
My estimate is that at least the people who have cable/VDSL will get fiber eventually, that's 85%. The remaining 9% who are wired maybe. The last few percent are really unfeasible though, we have people with >10km to the nearest access point, even if we build out all those <500m today that means they're still >9500m away from the nearest fiber, they're like your lone man in the wilderness. But that's more likely with 4 people/square mile, not 40. It's rural but hardly empty wilderness.
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Humans don't on the whole care nearly as much about money as they think they do. We're certainly not rational machines who would substitute the weekend tinkering fixing an old alarm clock for an equal amount of time spent earning money so we could buy a new clock and have some left over money. That's not how people work, so yes, I'd say his actions were as rational as any other.
Landfill disagree with you, as much as the "-1, I disagree" votes say otherwise.
I have a Radio Shack clock radio with a huge LED time display. Have had it for maybe twenty years, and it recently decided to show random LED segments instead of the time. Yesterday, I opened it up to look for any obvious smoked transistors or leaky capacitors. No, looks fine. Playing the odds, I replaced the largest (power supply) capacitor, and now it works again. I saved the cost of a new one and saved the landfill from one more piece of e-garbage.
Well good for you and good for the environment, but is it useful for anything more than an anecdote? I'm not saying it to be rude, but if you put a dollar value on your time and factor in the time you took inspecting it, the odds that it would work and that even though you expanded the life span you probably didn't give it another 20 years was it rational? Or was it simply because electronics is a hobby and fixing it was fun and a productive result, like going on a fishing trip and catching dinner? Because otherwise "everybody else" who don't take any interest in it and thinking fixing it is nothing but hassle will be still be throwing it in the landfill.
And even if it was rational for your unique circumstances because you had the item, the tools, the skills and could give yourself a "no cure no pay" deal it wouldn't be profitable for a repair shop. I doubt it would even be useful if you got them for free at a e-recycling center and fixed them, because you probably don't need more than one and 20 year old second hand LED clocks would be worth nothing on eBay. I don't mean to disrespect what you're doing but I just don't see it being very useful to solving any of society's garbage problems, because those solutions have to work for most of the people most of the time. And I'm guessing it will eventually end up in the landfill, so eventually there will be need for recycling not just repair.
There is apparently a structural rule in the paid broadcasting business that says that, once you get enough people, you start degrading the service to get more money. I suppose that comes from marketing people not wanting to raise prices directly, as that's a trigger for the clients to quit. So they start giving less quality, putting ads, etc. Just slowly killing the reasons why you were successful in the first place. I see a business opportunity there.
Well straight up price hikes are a bad idea for business in general, that's not something marketing invented it's pretty much established fact. Smart marketing will however sell you on a new product/service tier while the old degrades so you have the impression you're paying more to get more. Very often do this by making like half-tiers, before you had tiers 1, 2, 3 now you have 0.5, 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 and you like either get some feature from the tier up, or you save a bit of money going down for a lesser service. Then once they're established as tiers 1-4 you simplify to tiers 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 raising the base price while throwing in a bone. And since that brings you back to the beginning so it goes in loops. Preferably with some re-branding so they're not directly comparable like (Value,Premium, Ultra) -> (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) -> (Basic,Standard,Extra) or something like that. It's all quite predictable once you know the game.
Sounds like every sysadmin feels NASA's pain. Don't you just love when there's a remote machine that doesn't respond to any means of contacting it you have, and getting there would take a whole day's trip, preceded by two weeks of having access there organized?
Uh... nope. Most sysadmins have their servers in-house, at a data center or in some branch office where somebody can take a look at it. Operating servers in unmanned locations is a niche, it happens in a lot of industries so it's not exactly rare but no most sysadmins don't know that pain.
Same as these guys -- their own logic is self-contradictory. Either DOTA is a game mainly about reaction time, in which case the 18-player limit will have almost no effect; or DOTA is a game mainly about strategy and how to use characters together, in which case the direct interface will have little effect. Given the fact that poorly-chosen characters caused the computer to lose decisively, I think the first one is much more likely.
I have very limited experience with DOTA but I did watch the games and to me it looked like the computer had some inhuman precision in the micro-game, like the attacks were always flawlessly coordinated where the target(s) would get debuffed and slammed with perfect area-of-effect damage with just enough force to kill while their own forces stayed just far enough back that the human attack only did 98% damage and could retreat. And they could instantly switch tactics if their attack was met by a heavier counter-attack, you couldn't catch them off guard or overextending themselves. I mean this is an area where top human teams also seem rather inhuman, but the AI topped that so the best you can hope for is breaking even.
What did impress me is how reasonable they actually played the rest of the game, like what do we do in order to get XP and gold to prepare for the PvP battles, how do we send heroes down lanes, how do we pick the battles to take. These are questions with a whole lot less definitive answers and there were definitively flaws in those strategies, but like I said above every time they walked into a trap they'd near instantly recognize they were in a bad spot and try to wiggle out of it while a human team would have way more panic and confusion. This was very apparent in game three where everybody admitted they did a very impressive job defending delaying the inevitable but didn't really know how to mix it up and gamble to at least have a shot at winning.
But then it's not voluntary, which was GPs stipulation.
Well he didn't say by law, he did say mob rule which can be a lot more subtle. For example say you want to buy your groceries in cash, well there's four self-checkout lanes (electronic only), two card-only registries and one cash registry. Which always has a line. Or they want you to pay for an electronic ticket on the bus, it starts as an alternative. Then you start getting a rebate on electronic tickets. Then you start selling period cards only electronically. Then the physical ticket machines start disappearing or not get repaired when they're vandalized. And so it goes until you're either paying electronically or you're paying cash for a ridiculously overpriced single-ride ticket only tourists would use.
The other obvious alternative is to offer convenience, like nobody would carry a cell phone if it was marketed as a radio buoy. Nobody would make GPS tracking of your car compulsory, but you'll probably take it if it's a condition for a self-driving car. Or simply make perks a bonus thing if you register as a customer and use our smartphone app, then make the "perk" level the new normal and the rest effectively penalized. There's lots of subtle and not so subtle ways the government and big business could make it convenient to be chipped and inconvenient not to be, without making it a formal requirement. And that's before you start going Chinese with the "social credit" system...
Yes, (some) real pilots train in simulators. The article however is about video games - which are to those simulators like a skateboard is to a F1 racer. Still useful for some things, but not even remotely the same thing.
Flight simulators have been their own class of "games" for decades, they're kinda like some survival games it's not really about conquering or achieving anything just mastering it and not dying is the game. I remember we used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator as kids, it was notoriously hard and we never managed to land properly. But we did manage to take off, occasionally do a few tricks in the air but just as often go into a fatal spin, crash into building or whatever. Since then they've only gone further and further in realism, it's for a niche crowd but it's still games.
I had kinda the same experience with TV when I was growing up, here in Norway there was only one TV station. And even though we got VHS tapes after a while, there was still only one family TV so I ended up watching a varied selection. When I think back it was okay, but I think that's only because there was never really any alternatives. Today, if I knew there was plenty other channels and Netflix and plenty other electronic entertainment I'd be bored in two minutes and ready to kill myself in ten. It's kinda when me and a buddy play retro C64 games, they take many minutes to load from tape. Today I'm used to SSD response times and would strangle any game that took so long (GTA V, I'm looking at you).
Seriously there's like an article here every week on how MoviePass is changing the terms. If I had been a customer the number of changes by itself would be reason to say fuck this, I'll just go buy a ticket when I need one. They're like a fat fuck jumping around trying to find the magic diet that'll make them slim in a week, it ain't gonna happen.
A car like this could work well in China, India, South-East Asia, Japan, and much of Europe. If they are made available on-demand, like Ofo and Mobike do with electric scooters, this could be a really big deal.
Actually I was thinking quite the opposite, this could be good enough for my daily commute that I'd probably prefer to own. What I need is for Google to get their self-driving car to my area so I have hassle-free access to a big rental car. It doesn't even need coverage where I want to go, as long as it can deliver itself and drop off itself after I'm done because that's usually the annoying part. Particularly if you have a lot of luggage you have to take public transport to the rental place, drive home, load it up and then on the return drive home, unload it, drive to the rental place, then take public transport home. Of course if it could drive autonomously part or all the way that'd be a bonus.
People love apt-get and hate the app store because apt-get does not attempt to lock you into anything. There is no 30% cut of anything being skimmed off by middlemen.
Well 30% of $0 doesn't work out to much, Debian doesn't want paid apps in their repository. Meanwhile "people" leave $60 billion dollars in Apple and Google's app store. I like open source, but if you want/need some kind of COTS software open source doesn't like you. Not even Steam managed to turn that ship around, Linux is 0.5% of their market and dropping. It's a smashing success for cloud servers where you can just clone up a thousand instances without worrying about licensing but on the desktop it's still 1% hippies and tin foil hats. I'll be joining you once Win7 goes out of support, but sigh... it's not exactly with great love anymore.
They don't realize that at some point with socialism, you DO run out of other peoples' money to spend.
Most of the time, "them" is also "us". I got my public education, now I'm paying taxes for public education. Now I'm paying taxes for public pensions, when I retire I'll have my public pension. If you work, you get unemployment benefits. Other things are like collective insurance, if I got cancer tomorrow the public healthcare system will be there for me. If I'm in a terrible car accident, I'll get my disability pension. You might say all of this could have been organized privately and in theory it could, but in reality many people can't see past their next paycheck. If you didn't have unemployment benefits many recently fired would have $0 in the bank and $0 income. And there's really no sane person who would want to be without catastrophic health insurance. Yes, it becomes an argument about who should be paying for public parks if you don't go to public parks but it's not the end of the world.
The really big problem comes when there is a distinct "them" and "us". A classic hot-button topic in Europe at the moment is immigration, also for a number of other reasons but the economic transfer of wealth from the natives to the migrants/refugees is a big part of it. We've finally come to the point here in Norway where we dare to do the math. Native male, 25 to death: +$400k. Non-western migrant, 25 to death: -$700k. I was young. I will be old, hopefully. I might get sick or injured. But I'll never be a migrant, should I work my butt off so they can have a welfare state? I realize they don't know the language or the culture, don't have the same education level and we took them in due to war and alleged persecution not as migrant workers so I wasn't expecting the numbers to be equal. But it's still a choice we make by granting them entry that we can't be blind to.
Space travel is 10% science and 90% demonstrating that you can lob a nuke around the earth. But, hey, it's that 90% that pays for the science.
I think you're projecting Cold War history on everyone else. India doesn't have any particular need for ICBMs, if they're going to start a shooting war with anyone it'll probably be Pakistan and they're right next door. The driving force here was probably business, providing a cheaper alternative to the US/European/Russian launch options for telecom, observation satellites and so on. It probably looked like a good idea, I mean the Proton rocket is a 50+ year old design and was up until recently pretty competitive so if India could undercut them on labor cost they could become the "budget" launch provider. Of course then SpaceX happened...
Norway's Statoil is an example of socialism, but that is a special situation of a massive public resource owned by a small population. Very few other countries have that benefit.
Well yes, but Statoil - actually it's now Equinor - is very much run like a corporation with ~30% publicly traded stock and the government doesn't interfere in their business decisions. The oil fund - which is where the real money is at, over 10x bigger than the market cap of Equinor - comes from a 55% special tax on top of the regular 23% tax so for every $100 of oil they pump up $78 goes to the government and they're still making money. I literally can't phantom how Venezuela could manage to fuck it up this badly with oil, it's basically printing free money. Anyway, the point is that we don't operate it according to a socialist plan economy. It's a business whose owners happen to be the general public. This is a very common confusion, yes we have socialized healthcare but we hire a lot of private services, just because the government picks up the tab doesn't mean it's done by a public employee.
Yeah, definitely. How much are you trying to dump?
I think we had this same discussion when BTC slumped from $1000 to $230, okay the fad is over everybody go home. Then it rebounded and went up, up and away to $20k. I'm not saying the GP is right, but we've already had crazier rallies than that. The person who'd go short in BTC is even crazier than the person who'd invest in BTC...
It's a dead end if you want to build Lt. Cmdr. Data, but honestly I just want a glorified Roomba. I mean we struggle to make a burger flipping robot, imagine having a chef in your kitchen 24x7x365 and for bonus points it'll set the table, be your waiter and clean the dishes. And that can't just vacuum the floors but scrub the toilet, dust the furniture, rinse the sink, clean the windows and so on. And that can take my dirty laundry, sort it, wash it, dry it, iron my shirts and hang them in my closet. I don't think there are physical limitations to this, it's that we can't produce "dumb" intelligence cheap enough. No consciousness or real creativity needed, just small variations on a theme.
Ummm, no it isn't. It isn't much like life in any city. Not saying it's better or worse but it definitely isn't what I'd call similar. For one thing I'm pretty confident the dating scene isn't exactly a target rich environment. And 24/7 access to electricity and places to go use it is not a trivial difference.
I guess he wants to say something like "We live in caves, but we're not cavemen" because the reporter is there to make an article on this primitive society but they have TV, phones, computers, Internet and an Xbox. Like many tourist destinations it's now probably more or less a sham where they put on a show but in reality live much more modern, mundane lives. I remember seeing a documentary about a guy who stayed with a tribe in the Amazon for a long time, like much longer than a tourist group or news crew and it was just like that. Maybe it was a historical reenactment but it was just an act, they didn't actually live that way anymore.
If this had been a SpaceX launch, that fact would likely be front-and-center to this submission - NASA would probably be a footnote at best. Shouldn't we give the same love to ULA?
Well this is one of few satellite launches with a significant scientific payload. These are the SpaceX launches in 2018:
Zuma - classified
GovSat-1 / SES-16 - telecom
Musk's Tesla - showoff
Paz - spy satellite
Hispasat 30W-6 - telecom
Iridium NEXT-5 - telecom
CRS-14 - ISS resupply
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite - science
Bangabandhu-1 - telecom
Iridium NEXT-6 - telecom
SES-12 - telecom
CRS-15 - ISS resupply
Telstar 19V - telecom
Iridium NEXT-7 - telecom
Merah Putih - telecom
What was the /. headline for TESS?
NASA Planet-Hunter Set For Launch
Though to be fair, there was a followup:
SpaceX Launches NASA's Planet-Hunting Satellite, Successfully Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket
Considering it was SpaceX's first high-priority science mission launched for NASA that seems fair, but it was NASA that got to be front and center. The TL;DR version: You're wrong.
So I don't know if JPEG was cutting edge in 1992 or lossy encoding was widespread in the scientific and research spaces and JPEG just happened to be one such implementation? Can anyone who was there at the time comment?
I think the most correct thing to say is that around that time doing Discrete Cosine Transformations in real time became feasible. Just a random blurb I found:
Currently, the Atari JPEG decoder can decompress a 24 bits 320x200 picture in less than one second, which allows use of JPEG in games for example. This decoder is faster on the Falcon030 than the one we have tested on PC 486 DX2 66Mhz.
Wohoo we can decompress a 320x200 JPG in less than a second. If you wanted to show something like a 1024x768 (XGA, 1990) photo that'd only take like 12 seconds. It's also at the core of MP3 encoding, which also became feasible around the 486/Pentium days. Before that it was usually GIFs with lossless LZW compression or simply BMP with none whatsoever. Lossy decoding was actually a costly task once upon a time. And back then it was mostly stored on a floppy or something, "download time" didn't become a thing until BBS via modem and later the Internet.
And a lossy image format is something for which DRM is a non-starter, because of the ease of screenshotting or even taking the picture of the screen with a camera.
Not sure why you emphasized lossy, taking a screenshot of a JPG is less useful than a screenshot of a PNG as you lost the most efficient representation and will either have to save it losslessly or suffer transcoding losses. As for the analog hole that's true for using a video camera too but DRM for video is still a big thing, what you can snap with your cell phone will have a lot lower quality. That leaves screenshots, of course this would have to tie into the protected media framework but for all intents and purposes you can consider it a one-frame movie.
Honestly I'm kinda impressed that the copyright cartel hasn't managed to push this out of software and into an embedded side channel where the graphics card is decrypting the content, storing it in a private memory area and only overlays it as the last step before sending it out via HDCP in such a way that not even the driver can read out the contents bypassing the whole OS. For the web that would be trivial, just include the public key in the request header and the server will encrypt to your graphics card if it trusts it or refuse if it's unknown.
I guess that would be harder for stored content but you could have like individual -> model -> generation -> vendor keys, like this content plays on all AMD/nVidia/Intel cards. If a breach is discovered, well all existing content is broken but you can encode for 5th generation AMD cards and above. Or if a particular model is broken then enumerate the rest + newer cards for the future. It seems a lot easier than securing a whole OS.
What the GDPR did was force companies to actually show you just what kind of privacy they rip off you in exchange for their "service". Before that, they could simply silently take away your privacy. Saying that the GDPR makes you give up your privacy is like saying having to label food puts artificial crap and MSG into it. It was in there before, you just didn't know.
The only thing the GDPR has done is to drive consumers into EULA exhaustion on every damn website they visit and make sure they have a tracking cookie to remember your GDPR consent, try turning cookies off and you'll now go crazy. And once you do click OK there's no standard placement/icon/requirement to let you go back and review/change what you've agreed to. Basically what the solution completely fails to have is some sort of auto-negotiation where the web page could say I'd like to track you in these ways, the client could answer back "nope, these are my privacy preferences" and the site could either let it pass or say that this tracking is mandatory, either you agree or you can't access the content. Take for example /. it probably needs to track that I'm logged in as a user. But one or a hundred tracking methods is roughly equally annoying once they have to beg for permission.
I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.
Which is why I'm not very concerned. The JPEG group was there at the right time, in the right place 25 years ago when we needed a "good enough" picture standard for the web and I don't know they've achieved anything of significance since. There's been tons of attempts to replace it which hasn't moved the needle an inch, it'd take an industry-wide alliance with a completely royalty free and open standard to even stand a chance. I'll believe it when I see cameras do "RAW+[new image format]" instead of "RAW+JPG" and you can put it on the web and it'll work in all major browsers on desktop and mobile.
Market manipulation to what, exactly? Did Musk sell any shares? No? Really solid market manipulation case you've got there.
Uh what? Stock price manipulation to get a CEO bonus, to secure some line of credit, hold off some a vote by the board to replace you, help your golf buddy to sell off his stock... there's all sorts of reasons why manipulating the stock price by itself is illegal. Musk better have backing for what he said or else he may have taken his extremely optimistic and premature announcements one step too far.
Keyswitch is less reliable than a regular mechanical switch.
Even if that was true you could use a locking cover with keys, code, RFID or whatever. I've heard the same excuse with military equipment and there I can kinda understand that you need to go NOW NOW NOW and there's no time to fiddle with keys. Not so much for civilian airplanes...
Let's take Etex.net. They have a service area of 710 square miles. That's about the size of Singapore, with a population density of about 0. There are probably 30,000 potential customers in their service area.
So 30000/710 = ~42/square mile or roughly the same as here in Norway (41). Right now 94% has access to a wired connection, 84% has the possibility for 100 Mbps download and 52% has fiber.
So you can string fiber 20 miles to that guy's house for $140k. How do you make that back?
If there's one guy living 20 miles from everybody else in a dead end where you'd never need a fiber passing through then obviously you don't. But that cost is an actual cable gate and everything, not one more strand of fiber. So it's more about the marginal cost of connecting one more fiber customer.
Here in Norway we actually have good public data on this. So 52% has access to fiber today, what about the other 48%? Based on GPS coordinates 73% of them are within 100m of an existing fiber delivery. Another 18% is within 500m (0.3 miles). That's 0.52 + 0.48 * (0.73+0.18) = 95%+ of the population in total. Around here they estimate $15k/km so 0.3 * $15k = $3000, for rural areas it's typically an extra $500 in hook-up and then they estimate roughly $100/year of the subscription fee will be used to down pay the fiber over 25 years. At least here that's feasible and rolling out at a pace of about 4-5%/year.
My estimate is that at least the people who have cable/VDSL will get fiber eventually, that's 85%. The remaining 9% who are wired maybe. The last few percent are really unfeasible though, we have people with >10km to the nearest access point, even if we build out all those <500m today that means they're still >9500m away from the nearest fiber, they're like your lone man in the wilderness. But that's more likely with 4 people/square mile, not 40. It's rural but hardly empty wilderness.