that's now how selling stuff works. You sell new stuff each year so people will buy it. You make it an event because that's what marketing is. You wouldn't say "It's time to end yearly car launch events" because cars are only seeing incremental improvements.
If car companies were making a big splash every year for every model without any substantial improvements and just for making the splash then maybe. Car models now usually have "generations" of six years with a mid-generation refresh, in effect they're throwing a launch party every three years. The year-over-year tweaks rarely get much publicity. Marketing is about generating hype but if you overdo it then they can start trash talking your new model for simply not being much of an upgrade. But it's pretty hard to be the first one out to "downgrade" it from a full generation.
I wish Microsoft would make an home edition of Win10 Enterprise LTSB and for that they'd pretty much just have to disable domain support. No Edge, no Microsoft Store, no Cortana, ability to turn off all telemetry, 5+5 years of normal/extended support and optional version upgrades every 2-3 years. Seriously, it's 2018 and operating systems are pretty mature technology that don't need upgrades every six months. They have actually improved things under the hood quite a bit since 2009, it's just the "extras" that are killing the appeal. With Chrome/VLC/Steam etc. I don't need Microsoft's tools, I just need something that runs Windows software.
This method doesn't work well for other topics, like people.
Well it works for some people, for example if you say that everyone who's won an Olympic medal is a notable athlete, everyone who's won an Oscar is a notable actor, everyone that's won a Nobel prize is a notable... something, everyone in Congress is a notable politician and so on. Of course you're just then moving the discussion from the individuals to the qualifying criteria, because there's a lot of crappy competitions and awards and prizes and local politics where you're at most notable to a very limited crowd.
So the quality of your work doesn't matter, as long as you sit there and look like you're doing a hell of a lot of it?
Occasionally that happens, yes. I've been a consultant and had a guaranteed minimum even if I couldn't bill anything, just show up and be "ready" and do misc work nobody cares much about. It's not a lasting situation though and I expect this program would soon kick you out too if you can never complete any work...
In other words, "piracy" basically means people who make copies and sell them.
Bullshit. It's been known as "pirate copying" and "pirate copies" since we were trading floppies in the school yard 30 years ago, obviously completely non-commercial. You just made up your own terms, your own definitions and is going on a rant because nobody gets it "right" even though you're the one trying to redefine everything.
Not really, but I've seen the results of people trying it out and it seems extremely fickle, needs a pretty big training set and you have to mask out other faces if there are any. People use it on celebs because there's tons of photos/videos and someone OCD enough to compile the set. And when they're trying to morph it into porn all the scenes that don't work and all the times it loses track doesn't matter so much. You just pick the clips the virtual mask sticks and glue it together. You'll notice that in a lot of the scenes the woman isn't actually moving her head much so it's a relatively straightforward face replacement, it has trouble with all sorts of half obscured faces, partial faces entering/leaving the camera, accessories like hats or glasses and so on.
In the end it's a really cumbersome process that probably won't work on that cool clip you think it will. Sure you can probably morph someone you know into a Hollywood movie for a few scenes, but it's still a lot of work for a gag. If you just want to put yourself in there it's probably just easier to shoot some footage on green screen and overlay it rather than deep fake it. It's literally for when you want the person being deep faked to take over that actor/actress' performance... Oh also it just works for the face itself, so if the body or hair color/length/style is a mismatch it looks like your faked person in a wig or worse. Another reason why porn is easier, with so much to choose from you can find a similar body that just needs a new face to be a convincing fake.
Yes the horror of Spotify suggesting music for you or Netflix/YouTube recommending shows or Amazon/eBay showing you similar/related items you may want. In theory I'd not be that opposed to this extension, but my biggest doubt is that I surf in many different contexts and putting them all in a blender would just get weird. So I expect that rather than being websites that suit my taste it'll be more like constant sponsored ads trying to cash in on whatever I'm looking at right now.
Teaching bots to miss convincingly was the first problem we had to solve back when we were constructing quakeworld bots. It's hard for me to believe that it's some kind of news when bots defeat humans.
That's like saying I built a bot to play tic-tac-toe, it's hard to believe Deep Blue and AlphaGo made the news. Making an aimbot is trivial, making a system to balance a number of complex objectives, form strategies and adapt to rock-paper-scissors choices is hard.
A man connected to the internet, who lives in a society of millions who provide him with utilities every day, says that he can exist without social structures. Dude, I am sure that there are people who can exist without social structures. Let me give you a hint, they don't comment on slashdot.
Uh, unless I totally misread him he was talking about the social interaction/attachment not the actual utilities/services, in a big city nobody will notice if you don't want a social circle. And I'm sure there's some kinds of gig work where you're pretty much only dealing with an app instead of a boss/coworkers/customers. If you also use self-service/checkout systems, e-tail etc. you can pretty much avoid dealing with people entirely while still living in modern society instead of being a hermit. Some people prefer being lone wolves.
For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user.
And not all machines are actually personal, family computers, internet cafes, library computers etc. are still a thing. While I'm not saying it's a good idea, if you want to record users well then you'd need to identify users, not machines. Oh and then I don't want the admins at work to be able to use my ID even though I need to access the Internet. And where would servers or IoT devices fit into this, like do I have to grant the light bulb permission to go online? And I imagine you'll run into all the fun credential passing issues with VPNs, SSH, VMs and so on. It kinda works for people who only have their own cell phone and their own laptop and nothing more complicated than that.
Good managers are rewarded for retaining and motivating people without paying them anything else. (Early in my career I was told by managers that I was "hard to read" or that "they weren't sure what fired me up"; that made the "f u pay me" conversation easier.)
Well if you go into a salary negotiation saying you're super happy with the job and wouldn't dream of switching then you're just being stupid. Dial it down to being content but ready to move on if a better offer comes up. But if I'm miserable about something and it's in my manager's power to fix it then sure I'll tell him. I mean either he can fix it or he can pay me more to make sure I stay anyway, worst case I get nothing and he knows I'm unhappy about it but then I feel I've signaled why and there's no reason for him to act butt hurt or surprised if I quit. Of course if I know he can't fix it then I'd rather leave him in the dark until I hand in my resignation.
It cant depreciate to zero until the lenses are sold. Amateur astronomers will drop a good chunk of change on their objective lenses.
Deprecation is an accounting mechanism, not market value. Basically can I keep this as an asset on my balance sheet or to I have to write it off as an expense on my profit & loss. There are strict rules so that companies don't inflate their profits by over-valuing assets that are actually consumed/worn out over time like say furniture, office equipment, company cars etc. while "hidden assets" that are already written off are okay from an accounting perspective. For example presenting future income from long term contracts as assets is what lead to the Enron scandal. Though I'm not sure why you'd rush to throw it away as new expenses are new expenses.
Three year cycle: Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$20k, Expenses: $10k Year 2: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k Year 3: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k In total $30k spent, $30k written off so book value is now $0, average cost/year = $10k.
Three year cycle stretched to five: Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$20k, Expenses: $10k Year 2: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k Year 3: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k Year 4: 0 Year 5: 0 Average is now $30k/5 = $6k/year.
If you can legally write it off over five years: Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$24k, Expenses: $6k Year 2: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k Year 3: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k Year 4: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k Year 5: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k Still $6k/year, just now written off evenly.
If you lie about it lasting five years: Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$24k (inflated), Expenses: $6k (inflated) Year 2: Assets: -$6k (inflated), Expenses: $6k Year 3: Assets: -$18k, Expenses: $6k, Write-Off: $12k This is probably not legal.
Of course there are legal write-downs/offs (and even write-ups, if an antique gains value) but you can't aim for one, then you're not fairly assessing your assets and can go to jail.
It is all very romantic until you have to actually use one because some âoebureaucratâ refuses to get his collection digitized and a task that would take twenty minutes on a computer takes up the whole afternoonâ"if you are lucky enough to work with well-organized data, that is.
That's what I'm thinking, if I had an actual microfilm it'd go through the scanner once, be stored as PDF on a HDD and go back into the vault permanently or at least until you lost your last "normal" backup. How many microfilms can you store on a 10TB HDD?
Having ability to connect internet, regardless of your geographical location and country will also allow Billions of suppressed people to have free internet access that is not censored by their despot/fascist/communist/dictatorial governments. I believe this is going to be the biggest social positive of these new commercial satellite internet services.
If they want to collect payment they'll probably have to follow local law. Also you must get uplink equipment to the people. And if it gets banned due to non-compliance you can just start rounding up everyone with an antenna. Technically everything you just said is possible today with the old satellites in GEO, it's just very uncommon in practice. I think the best scenario is if there is an official censored service so you can deploy the hardware legally, but that it's easy to get a second account from an uncensored country.
So, in context, you're saying that the "American dream" is equal levels of poverty for all? Because that's what Sanders is promising in context. You get your pick: wealth for all or equality for all. You cannot have wealth and equality for all: it's a logical impossibility.
Facepalm 1: What you just said is you can't pick wealth for all, some have to be poor. Faceplan 2: The average moves, we're all richer than 100 years ago. Many of the things we have today didn't exist even for kings or Rockefellers.
We often define wealth in terms of luxuries and what other people can't have, in that sense there'll always be things in limited supply. There will always be shitty jobs that are last pick, at least until we automate everything. But everyone can have electricity, running hot and cold water, food on the table, clothes on their back... most things are not in any real sense limited. To take one example, in Europe there's now a goal to give everyone access to 100 Mbit broadband by 2025. Roughly everyone has a cell phone from almost none 25 years ago. It's not a zero-sum game, there's no fixed amount of wealth to go around we constantly make more.
I hated note-taking, if the teacher/professor wouldn't give you a full written transcript/curriculum so he'd force you to be in class I felt he was just protecting his own job. That is not to say I couldn't make notes of my own, but they'd be mine not copying the teacher's. Though I preferred reading and exercises, plain writing didn't really help me at all.
He seems a lot smarter than I am and so I do not want to dismiss what he is saying... but I cannot possibly see how programming is harder than it used to be.
Well, he seems to be conflating programming syntax with standard libraries, since he's talking about a hundred thousand pages. Like for example I looked at the Swift language reference and it's 676 pages long and that covers every bit of grammar in great detail. And even that is confusing the part that complex programming languages are there to make programming simple. A Turing machine is ridiculously simple, read the tape symbol, write new symbol, go to new state, move left/right on tape. It's also horribly difficult to get anything useful done that way.
We are accumulating knowledge embodied in libraries and that's a good thing, consider something like medicine where a few hundred years ago you could probably know most there was to know about medicine. Today there's whole libraries of data and hundreds of specializations which practically means one doctor only knows one little bit. Sometimes we need people to dive into those libraries to make them better and document more clearly what they do and don't do. But there's simply not enough time in a man's life to reinvent everything.
The other alternative is that we want an AI that's so smart that it'll fill in all the blanks, like you tell me a business requirement and I'll extract from that the GUI, the features, the business logic, the error handling and so on. Honestly even us humans can't figure that one out, so I doubt an AI ever will. There's a reason we invented programming languages instead of English, it just doesn't have the necessary precision and unambiguity required. To say nothing of all we think is implied even though we never explicitly said it, which is particularly fun working with outsourcing.
How do ISPs "contribute" to piracy, and by that I mean that they do something that aids or enables piracy specifically, instead of just providing a conduit to anything and anyone?
Go back and read the Betamax case and how it was a close 5-4 call that VCRs remained legal and that the majority opinion was initially the dissenting one. The law and courts have always struggled with products and services that are used to facilitate crime, because naturally it would be quite profitable if you could stay on the legal side and rent it out to crime while claiming ignorance. Think ships for piracy on the high seas, distilleries during prohibition, selling lock picks, date rape drugs, large amounts of cough medicine, whatever. It's the same shithole civil forfeiture laws came from too, the property was involved in crime so let's take it even though we can't prove the owner was involved.
That is not at all the same thing as "refusing to take measures", the latter should only be actionable if the ISPs are actually responsible for curtailing piracy.
In some cases due to an insane amount of scrutiny they've made quite specific laws on what's necessary, for example I think gun shops are regulated so that if they've done the necessary background checks and whatever it doesn't matter what the statistic is on how they're used or how many other "suspect" circumstances there were they can't be held liable. The DMCA was this sort of a compromise, an ISP is by default not liable for what people do online unless you've been notified and then there were various rules for take downs, counter-notifications etc. but they mostly applied to hosting and search engines. What should an ISP do? Well:
(i) Conditions for Eligibility. (1) Accommodation of technology. The limitations on liability established by this section shall apply to a service provider only if the service provider (A) has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers; and
So what's a "reasonable" system, "provides for" termination, "appropriate circumstances" and "repeat infringers"? I mean any ToS says they may kick you out if you break the law, but it doesn't say they have to. And it doesn't define repeat infringers, like is an uncontested notice equal to an admission of guilt because some random guy from the peanut gallery sent your ISP an accusation? It doesn't say. And it's never been properly settled in court. My thought is that this will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court because it's just terribly written law.
Although Google is a great force behind Android, the bulk of it are open source components developed (or at least: created) elsewhere.
Oh please, Google basically wrote a new userspace on top of Android. They added so much changes to the Linux kernel that for a long time they were their own fork. That statement is about as much bullshit as claiming macOS is just repackaged BSD with Apple toppings.
At least in theory it's an open platform, you don't need Google to use Android. You don't need to go through Google's app store to distribute apps for it. So Google doesn't deserve payment for the privilege of 'allowing' a developer into the Android ecosystem.
Access to a market is still a service, even if it's not exclusive access. Sure I could set up my own retail outlet or I could ask Wal-Mart to sell my product, they'd probably take a solid cut for access to a customer base even though those customers could shop elsewhere.
Being a longtime game developer and distributor, Epic knows what these costs are. They've done the math, and found that Google's cut is much higher than their service is worth.
If Android went closed like iOS they'd probably pay up, so more like the platform's openness allows them to work around Google and avoid contributing to the development of the platform. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, it's how all desktop platforms work (Windows/Mac/Linux) but it's at odds with the way Android is funded.
Okay it's not user friendly install-wise. But at least Epic will be left with more $$ to put into their next projects. Win-win for Epic & their users alike.
Yeah, though if it becomes commonplace it's wildly optimistic to think it'll continue. Google has already threatened to alter it's licensing model if the EU anti-trust ruling stands. It would be quite possible for Google to say fuck it, we're doing the iOS model with partners.
So the TL;DR version is "Go walled gardens fuck yeah." well remember that when Windows and Mac go store-only and boot locking kills Linux/AOSP. Because that's what you want, you buy a device from $vendor and they control what you can run on it. It's probably where we're going but I wouldn't be cheering on that development...
The SpaceX suits aren't planetary (or lunar) surface suits. That's what needs development. Although this is not and never would be, a significant blocker for a planetary or lunar mission. It's just an engineering problem.
What's the rest? The ISS has proven we can live in a tin can for a very long time in zero-G, with low-G probably a lot longer. Chemical rockets have brought probes throughout the entire solar system and beyond, there's nothing about say a manned Mars mission that seems unfeasible if you throw enough money at it, at least as a $100 billion dollar flag-planting exercise. Don't get me wrong, SpaceX is doing a lot of revolutionary engineering. I'm a lot less sure how much new science there is to it.
President Trump made an announcement to investigate the creation of a military space force, which if created makes many missions from NASA redundant. This military space force could operate military space launches, manned and unmanned, for the military instead of contracting that out to NASA.
Like the military would do anything like build rockets in-house, they'd outsource it to ULA at 10x the current cost. But then I kinda knew this would be a facepalm when you mentioned Trump...
If these providers were really treating me so incredibly unfairly, why wouldn't another option naturally emerge?
Because even if a competitor could get permits, the moment they announced plans for a roll-out your speeds would go up, prices go down, the network would start getting upgrades and by the time the new network was ready most people would be too lazy to switch so the imagined profits wouldn't be there anymore. Basically people aren't spiteful enough to switch over past poor price-performance and reward the company who (re-)booted the competition. And the competitors knows this, so they don't try in the first place. Also they have high-profit areas of their own, basically if you start killing my profits in one area I'll start killing your profits in some other area. So there's a high incentive to come to some sort of informal understanding.
That's why most threats to them come from outside players that don't have a market to lose like municipal broadband, Starlink etc. otherwise they're happy to serve you slow DSL until the cows come home. The other big incentive would be government bids, but I've read a surprisingly large number of "we gave the ISPs money, but they didn't roll out broadband like they're supposed to" stories that to me makes no sense. It's not hard to create "no cure, no pay" contracts, daily fines for non-compliance and yet it seems no agreement has teeth and whoever wrote them is either incompetent or corrupt. Maybe if New York kicks Charter out for real it'll get better, but why go the nuclear option and get a new deal that won't be honored when you could have had a running financial penalty.
The county my cabin is in here in Norway made a rather simple bid: Fiber available to all permanent residents in the county, cabins are optional, what's your bid? It took three years, 120 km worth of digs and now it's done, from no cable, no fiber just shitty DSL to 70%+ signing up for fiber. Population density of county is ~35/km^2 same as Alabama or Missouri, nothing that qualifies as a town just rural population and yet the fiber roll-out is done. Median speed here in Norway is now 45.8 Mbit and up 45.4% YoY due to small revolutions like these. Granted, fiber doesn't work everywhere but it can work many places if you just make the jump. It's a lot more profitable to just cash in on old copper though...
Slashdot Mirror
Typical consumers started associating the word "broadband" with "fast".
And so it means that now. Anything else is as useless as claiming "gay" is not a sexual orientation. But hey /. likes hopeless, lost battles.
that's now how selling stuff works. You sell new stuff each year so people will buy it. You make it an event because that's what marketing is. You wouldn't say "It's time to end yearly car launch events" because cars are only seeing incremental improvements.
If car companies were making a big splash every year for every model without any substantial improvements and just for making the splash then maybe. Car models now usually have "generations" of six years with a mid-generation refresh, in effect they're throwing a launch party every three years. The year-over-year tweaks rarely get much publicity. Marketing is about generating hype but if you overdo it then they can start trash talking your new model for simply not being much of an upgrade. But it's pretty hard to be the first one out to "downgrade" it from a full generation.
I wish Windows laptops still shipped with 7.
I wish Microsoft would make an home edition of Win10 Enterprise LTSB and for that they'd pretty much just have to disable domain support. No Edge, no Microsoft Store, no Cortana, ability to turn off all telemetry, 5+5 years of normal/extended support and optional version upgrades every 2-3 years. Seriously, it's 2018 and operating systems are pretty mature technology that don't need upgrades every six months. They have actually improved things under the hood quite a bit since 2009, it's just the "extras" that are killing the appeal. With Chrome/VLC/Steam etc. I don't need Microsoft's tools, I just need something that runs Windows software.
This method doesn't work well for other topics, like people.
Well it works for some people, for example if you say that everyone who's won an Olympic medal is a notable athlete, everyone who's won an Oscar is a notable actor, everyone that's won a Nobel prize is a notable... something, everyone in Congress is a notable politician and so on. Of course you're just then moving the discussion from the individuals to the qualifying criteria, because there's a lot of crappy competitions and awards and prizes and local politics where you're at most notable to a very limited crowd.
So the quality of your work doesn't matter, as long as you sit there and look like you're doing a hell of a lot of it?
Occasionally that happens, yes. I've been a consultant and had a guaranteed minimum even if I couldn't bill anything, just show up and be "ready" and do misc work nobody cares much about. It's not a lasting situation though and I expect this program would soon kick you out too if you can never complete any work...
Are you drunk or high or something?
"Copyright piracy" is a legal term
No. Never has been.
In other words, "piracy" basically means people who make copies and sell them.
Bullshit. It's been known as "pirate copying" and "pirate copies" since we were trading floppies in the school yard 30 years ago, obviously completely non-commercial. You just made up your own terms, your own definitions and is going on a rant because nobody gets it "right" even though you're the one trying to redefine everything.
Not really, but I've seen the results of people trying it out and it seems extremely fickle, needs a pretty big training set and you have to mask out other faces if there are any. People use it on celebs because there's tons of photos/videos and someone OCD enough to compile the set. And when they're trying to morph it into porn all the scenes that don't work and all the times it loses track doesn't matter so much. You just pick the clips the virtual mask sticks and glue it together. You'll notice that in a lot of the scenes the woman isn't actually moving her head much so it's a relatively straightforward face replacement, it has trouble with all sorts of half obscured faces, partial faces entering/leaving the camera, accessories like hats or glasses and so on.
In the end it's a really cumbersome process that probably won't work on that cool clip you think it will. Sure you can probably morph someone you know into a Hollywood movie for a few scenes, but it's still a lot of work for a gag. If you just want to put yourself in there it's probably just easier to shoot some footage on green screen and overlay it rather than deep fake it. It's literally for when you want the person being deep faked to take over that actor/actress' performance... Oh also it just works for the face itself, so if the body or hair color/length/style is a mismatch it looks like your faked person in a wig or worse. Another reason why porn is easier, with so much to choose from you can find a similar body that just needs a new face to be a convincing fake.
Yes the horror of Spotify suggesting music for you or Netflix/YouTube recommending shows or Amazon/eBay showing you similar/related items you may want. In theory I'd not be that opposed to this extension, but my biggest doubt is that I surf in many different contexts and putting them all in a blender would just get weird. So I expect that rather than being websites that suit my taste it'll be more like constant sponsored ads trying to cash in on whatever I'm looking at right now.
Teaching bots to miss convincingly was the first problem we had to solve back when we were constructing quakeworld bots. It's hard for me to believe that it's some kind of news when bots defeat humans.
That's like saying I built a bot to play tic-tac-toe, it's hard to believe Deep Blue and AlphaGo made the news. Making an aimbot is trivial, making a system to balance a number of complex objectives, form strategies and adapt to rock-paper-scissors choices is hard.
A man connected to the internet, who lives in a society of millions who provide him with utilities every day, says that he can exist without social structures. Dude, I am sure that there are people who can exist without social structures. Let me give you a hint, they don't comment on slashdot.
Uh, unless I totally misread him he was talking about the social interaction/attachment not the actual utilities/services, in a big city nobody will notice if you don't want a social circle. And I'm sure there's some kinds of gig work where you're pretty much only dealing with an app instead of a boss/coworkers/customers. If you also use self-service/checkout systems, e-tail etc. you can pretty much avoid dealing with people entirely while still living in modern society instead of being a hermit. Some people prefer being lone wolves.
One guy went into a conference room and played xbox for three fucking weeks trying to get fired. He gave up and quit.
Waaaaaaaaaait a minute, he could play xbox all day without getting fired and wanted to quit? What company is this, asking for a friend...
For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user.
And not all machines are actually personal, family computers, internet cafes, library computers etc. are still a thing. While I'm not saying it's a good idea, if you want to record users well then you'd need to identify users, not machines. Oh and then I don't want the admins at work to be able to use my ID even though I need to access the Internet. And where would servers or IoT devices fit into this, like do I have to grant the light bulb permission to go online? And I imagine you'll run into all the fun credential passing issues with VPNs, SSH, VMs and so on. It kinda works for people who only have their own cell phone and their own laptop and nothing more complicated than that.
Good managers are rewarded for retaining and motivating people without paying them anything else. (Early in my career I was told by managers that I was "hard to read" or that "they weren't sure what fired me up"; that made the "f u pay me" conversation easier.)
Well if you go into a salary negotiation saying you're super happy with the job and wouldn't dream of switching then you're just being stupid. Dial it down to being content but ready to move on if a better offer comes up. But if I'm miserable about something and it's in my manager's power to fix it then sure I'll tell him. I mean either he can fix it or he can pay me more to make sure I stay anyway, worst case I get nothing and he knows I'm unhappy about it but then I feel I've signaled why and there's no reason for him to act butt hurt or surprised if I quit. Of course if I know he can't fix it then I'd rather leave him in the dark until I hand in my resignation.
It cant depreciate to zero until the lenses are sold. Amateur astronomers will drop a good chunk of change on their objective lenses.
Deprecation is an accounting mechanism, not market value. Basically can I keep this as an asset on my balance sheet or to I have to write it off as an expense on my profit & loss. There are strict rules so that companies don't inflate their profits by over-valuing assets that are actually consumed/worn out over time like say furniture, office equipment, company cars etc. while "hidden assets" that are already written off are okay from an accounting perspective. For example presenting future income from long term contracts as assets is what lead to the Enron scandal. Though I'm not sure why you'd rush to throw it away as new expenses are new expenses.
Three year cycle:
Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$20k, Expenses: $10k
Year 2: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k
Year 3: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k
In total $30k spent, $30k written off so book value is now $0, average cost/year = $10k.
Three year cycle stretched to five:
Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$20k, Expenses: $10k
Year 2: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k
Year 3: Assets: -$10k, Expenses: $10k
Year 4: 0
Year 5: 0
Average is now $30k/5 = $6k/year.
If you can legally write it off over five years:
Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$24k, Expenses: $6k
Year 2: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k
Year 3: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k
Year 4: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k
Year 5: Assets: -$6k, Expenses: $6k
Still $6k/year, just now written off evenly.
If you lie about it lasting five years:
Year 1: Cash: -$30k, Assets: +$24k (inflated), Expenses: $6k (inflated)
Year 2: Assets: -$6k (inflated), Expenses: $6k
Year 3: Assets: -$18k, Expenses: $6k, Write-Off: $12k
This is probably not legal.
Of course there are legal write-downs/offs (and even write-ups, if an antique gains value) but you can't aim for one, then you're not fairly assessing your assets and can go to jail.
It is all very romantic until you have to actually use one because some âoebureaucratâ refuses to get his collection digitized and a task that would take twenty minutes on a computer takes up the whole afternoonâ"if you are lucky enough to work with well-organized data, that is.
That's what I'm thinking, if I had an actual microfilm it'd go through the scanner once, be stored as PDF on a HDD and go back into the vault permanently or at least until you lost your last "normal" backup. How many microfilms can you store on a 10TB HDD?
Having ability to connect internet, regardless of your geographical location and country will also allow Billions of suppressed people to have free internet access that is not censored by their despot/fascist/communist/dictatorial governments. I believe this is going to be the biggest social positive of these new commercial satellite internet services.
If they want to collect payment they'll probably have to follow local law. Also you must get uplink equipment to the people. And if it gets banned due to non-compliance you can just start rounding up everyone with an antenna. Technically everything you just said is possible today with the old satellites in GEO, it's just very uncommon in practice. I think the best scenario is if there is an official censored service so you can deploy the hardware legally, but that it's easy to get a second account from an uncensored country.
So, in context, you're saying that the "American dream" is equal levels of poverty for all? Because that's what Sanders is promising in context. You get your pick: wealth for all or equality for all. You cannot have wealth and equality for all: it's a logical impossibility.
Facepalm 1: What you just said is you can't pick wealth for all, some have to be poor.
Faceplan 2: The average moves, we're all richer than 100 years ago. Many of the things we have today didn't exist even for kings or Rockefellers.
We often define wealth in terms of luxuries and what other people can't have, in that sense there'll always be things in limited supply. There will always be shitty jobs that are last pick, at least until we automate everything. But everyone can have electricity, running hot and cold water, food on the table, clothes on their back... most things are not in any real sense limited. To take one example, in Europe there's now a goal to give everyone access to 100 Mbit broadband by 2025. Roughly everyone has a cell phone from almost none 25 years ago. It's not a zero-sum game, there's no fixed amount of wealth to go around we constantly make more.
I hated note-taking, if the teacher/professor wouldn't give you a full written transcript/curriculum so he'd force you to be in class I felt he was just protecting his own job. That is not to say I couldn't make notes of my own, but they'd be mine not copying the teacher's. Though I preferred reading and exercises, plain writing didn't really help me at all.
He seems a lot smarter than I am and so I do not want to dismiss what he is saying... but I cannot possibly see how programming is harder than it used to be.
Well, he seems to be conflating programming syntax with standard libraries, since he's talking about a hundred thousand pages. Like for example I looked at the Swift language reference and it's 676 pages long and that covers every bit of grammar in great detail. And even that is confusing the part that complex programming languages are there to make programming simple. A Turing machine is ridiculously simple, read the tape symbol, write new symbol, go to new state, move left/right on tape. It's also horribly difficult to get anything useful done that way.
We are accumulating knowledge embodied in libraries and that's a good thing, consider something like medicine where a few hundred years ago you could probably know most there was to know about medicine. Today there's whole libraries of data and hundreds of specializations which practically means one doctor only knows one little bit. Sometimes we need people to dive into those libraries to make them better and document more clearly what they do and don't do. But there's simply not enough time in a man's life to reinvent everything.
The other alternative is that we want an AI that's so smart that it'll fill in all the blanks, like you tell me a business requirement and I'll extract from that the GUI, the features, the business logic, the error handling and so on. Honestly even us humans can't figure that one out, so I doubt an AI ever will. There's a reason we invented programming languages instead of English, it just doesn't have the necessary precision and unambiguity required. To say nothing of all we think is implied even though we never explicitly said it, which is particularly fun working with outsourcing.
How do ISPs "contribute" to piracy, and by that I mean that they do something that aids or enables piracy specifically, instead of just providing a conduit to anything and anyone?
Go back and read the Betamax case and how it was a close 5-4 call that VCRs remained legal and that the majority opinion was initially the dissenting one. The law and courts have always struggled with products and services that are used to facilitate crime, because naturally it would be quite profitable if you could stay on the legal side and rent it out to crime while claiming ignorance. Think ships for piracy on the high seas, distilleries during prohibition, selling lock picks, date rape drugs, large amounts of cough medicine, whatever. It's the same shithole civil forfeiture laws came from too, the property was involved in crime so let's take it even though we can't prove the owner was involved.
That is not at all the same thing as "refusing to take measures", the latter should only be actionable if the ISPs are actually responsible for curtailing piracy.
In some cases due to an insane amount of scrutiny they've made quite specific laws on what's necessary, for example I think gun shops are regulated so that if they've done the necessary background checks and whatever it doesn't matter what the statistic is on how they're used or how many other "suspect" circumstances there were they can't be held liable. The DMCA was this sort of a compromise, an ISP is by default not liable for what people do online unless you've been notified and then there were various rules for take downs, counter-notifications etc. but they mostly applied to hosting and search engines. What should an ISP do? Well:
(i) Conditions for Eligibility.
(1) Accommodation of technology. The limitations on liability established by this section shall apply to a service provider only if the service provider
(A) has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers; and
So what's a "reasonable" system, "provides for" termination, "appropriate circumstances" and "repeat infringers"? I mean any ToS says they may kick you out if you break the law, but it doesn't say they have to. And it doesn't define repeat infringers, like is an uncontested notice equal to an admission of guilt because some random guy from the peanut gallery sent your ISP an accusation? It doesn't say. And it's never been properly settled in court. My thought is that this will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court because it's just terribly written law.
Although Google is a great force behind Android, the bulk of it are open source components developed (or at least: created) elsewhere.
Oh please, Google basically wrote a new userspace on top of Android. They added so much changes to the Linux kernel that for a long time they were their own fork. That statement is about as much bullshit as claiming macOS is just repackaged BSD with Apple toppings.
At least in theory it's an open platform, you don't need Google to use Android. You don't need to go through Google's app store to distribute apps for it. So Google doesn't deserve payment for the privilege of 'allowing' a developer into the Android ecosystem.
Access to a market is still a service, even if it's not exclusive access. Sure I could set up my own retail outlet or I could ask Wal-Mart to sell my product, they'd probably take a solid cut for access to a customer base even though those customers could shop elsewhere.
Being a longtime game developer and distributor, Epic knows what these costs are. They've done the math, and found that Google's cut is much higher than their service is worth.
If Android went closed like iOS they'd probably pay up, so more like the platform's openness allows them to work around Google and avoid contributing to the development of the platform. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, it's how all desktop platforms work (Windows/Mac/Linux) but it's at odds with the way Android is funded.
Okay it's not user friendly install-wise. But at least Epic will be left with more $$ to put into their next projects. Win-win for Epic & their users alike.
Yeah, though if it becomes commonplace it's wildly optimistic to think it'll continue. Google has already threatened to alter it's licensing model if the EU anti-trust ruling stands. It would be quite possible for Google to say fuck it, we're doing the iOS model with partners.
So the TL;DR version is "Go walled gardens fuck yeah." well remember that when Windows and Mac go store-only and boot locking kills Linux/AOSP. Because that's what you want, you buy a device from $vendor and they control what you can run on it. It's probably where we're going but I wouldn't be cheering on that development...
The SpaceX suits aren't planetary (or lunar) surface suits. That's what needs development. Although this is not and never would be, a significant blocker for a planetary or lunar mission. It's just an engineering problem.
What's the rest? The ISS has proven we can live in a tin can for a very long time in zero-G, with low-G probably a lot longer. Chemical rockets have brought probes throughout the entire solar system and beyond, there's nothing about say a manned Mars mission that seems unfeasible if you throw enough money at it, at least as a $100 billion dollar flag-planting exercise. Don't get me wrong, SpaceX is doing a lot of revolutionary engineering. I'm a lot less sure how much new science there is to it.
President Trump made an announcement to investigate the creation of a military space force, which if created makes many missions from NASA redundant. This military space force could operate military space launches, manned and unmanned, for the military instead of contracting that out to NASA.
Like the military would do anything like build rockets in-house, they'd outsource it to ULA at 10x the current cost. But then I kinda knew this would be a facepalm when you mentioned Trump...
If these providers were really treating me so incredibly unfairly, why wouldn't another option naturally emerge?
Because even if a competitor could get permits, the moment they announced plans for a roll-out your speeds would go up, prices go down, the network would start getting upgrades and by the time the new network was ready most people would be too lazy to switch so the imagined profits wouldn't be there anymore. Basically people aren't spiteful enough to switch over past poor price-performance and reward the company who (re-)booted the competition. And the competitors knows this, so they don't try in the first place. Also they have high-profit areas of their own, basically if you start killing my profits in one area I'll start killing your profits in some other area. So there's a high incentive to come to some sort of informal understanding.
That's why most threats to them come from outside players that don't have a market to lose like municipal broadband, Starlink etc. otherwise they're happy to serve you slow DSL until the cows come home. The other big incentive would be government bids, but I've read a surprisingly large number of "we gave the ISPs money, but they didn't roll out broadband like they're supposed to" stories that to me makes no sense. It's not hard to create "no cure, no pay" contracts, daily fines for non-compliance and yet it seems no agreement has teeth and whoever wrote them is either incompetent or corrupt. Maybe if New York kicks Charter out for real it'll get better, but why go the nuclear option and get a new deal that won't be honored when you could have had a running financial penalty.
The county my cabin is in here in Norway made a rather simple bid: Fiber available to all permanent residents in the county, cabins are optional, what's your bid? It took three years, 120 km worth of digs and now it's done, from no cable, no fiber just shitty DSL to 70%+ signing up for fiber. Population density of county is ~35/km^2 same as Alabama or Missouri, nothing that qualifies as a town just rural population and yet the fiber roll-out is done. Median speed here in Norway is now 45.8 Mbit and up 45.4% YoY due to small revolutions like these. Granted, fiber doesn't work everywhere but it can work many places if you just make the jump. It's a lot more profitable to just cash in on old copper though...