What MPEG is learning is that in reality the world does not need them because open standards are far more cost effective,
Well... there's been many failed attempts at trying to replace closed source codecs with open source ones like Theora, the VPx codecs, Direc, Daala and so on. The only one with a bit of traction was VP9 but not more than that I'd call it a trial balloon. Vorbis never caught on to replace MP3 or AAC either. It's one straw in particular that broke the camel's back and it's that those licensing HEVC saw the rise of video streaming services and got a bit too greedy. The MPEG standards have mostly been driven by dedicated AV companies that make like camcorders and set top boxes and they've sorta refused to see the massive power shift caused by the trend towards streaming/smartphones.
Basically, if you have Android and iPhone (= Google and Apple) recording AV1 video, YouTube and iTunes (= Google and Apple) delivering AV1 video to hardware decoding in smartphones (= Google and Apple) you have a working ecosystem entirely without Canon/Nikon/Panasonic/Samsung/NEC/Fujitsu/JVC and so on. Companies like Intel, AMD and nVidia don't really care that much because practically they need to support HEVC in hardware anyway, they just need to be on board. That's a one time expense, AV1 is free but the HEVC patents will probably expire before they can remove support. It's the possibility of running royalties that caused uproar.
To me this is more like why Google funded Mozilla rather than start Chrome much earlier, they wanted an open web to deliver web apps and through an open source browser they got all forces allied against IE. They didn't care about giving away the browser because it wasn't their money maker. Same with AV1, they're making and giving away the codec because they'll make plenty money on services that use AV1. It's a bad time to be MPEG, they're like Opera that was trying to sell a browser in a market where everyone else is giving it away. It should be expected, you don't really make any money selling JPG or PNG or MP3 codecs... eventually the market for paying for a video codec would dry up. But they probably hoped it would be a while longer...
Are obviously cheap, and just want a reasonably priced phone that works. Not that I know anyone like that personally.
Or a smaller phone, actually what used to be a standard phone until they all started to swell from 4" to 6" screens. With less pixels to drive the performance and battery life matched or exceeded the contemporary 6s. That said there's hardly any competition and it's clearly niche so why come out with a new one on a two year cycle? It'd only tempt people to skip a generation since Apple's phones are generally supported for 4+ years. I'd guess normal fall release of big phones, smaller spring release in 2019 because 3 years is pretty substantial and 6 years is too long to wait. I do hope that one will be an iPhone X trickle-down, I hear good things about it but that price tag... too much.
I'm pretty sure that if you are on active duty in a war zone, PT with your FitBit or Apple Watch isn't high on the list of desired activities.
Unless you're actually deployed on a mission isn't it mostly habit? You go for a jog for the same reason you do your push-ups and sit-ups, it's just the daily routine to stay in shape. Or it's base personnel who despite not being on the extreme front line feel the need to stay in shape, I don't think I've ever seen an obese high ranking officer even though they're just commanding people around.
I know of an application that spoofs your cell phone's GPS receiver and can place you anyplace you want in the world. Seems like a way to provide any data you want to the application... Makes me wonder if the military isn't capable of making it appear like their resources are vastly different than they actually are.
Well they could, but it's unlikely they could hide an entire base anyway. That doesn't mean they want to give away the exact scope or layout, entry/exit points etc. for snipers, someone to stage an assault, plant an IED or whatever.
It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.
And quite possibly a case of poor visual-textual memory in general. I'm great at absorbing facts, not totally autistic but textbooks, numbers, dates, menus, formulas, function names and that sort of thing. Like I get tired of pulling out my VISA card to pay online it's only 16 digits + expiry month + 3 digits (CVC) and I memorize it without really trying while others struggle with their PIN. If you ask me to distinguish between brands of dog or types of fish I'm quite poor, sure I can rattle off the names of dozens but connecting the name with the photo?
I notice that I cheat by "quantifying" characteristics like big dog, small dog, long hair, short hair, big nose, small nose, straight ears, hanging ears, colors, textures etc. until I have a decent classifier. I can't draw them worth shit though, I only know how to pick them apart not put them together. And it doesn't work well for people because the differences are much smaller, I really should remember that specific face and be able to pick it out in a crowd. Maybe in a context but out on the street others recognize me ninety-nine times out of a hundred and I'm not that memorable. I'm just almost never that positively sure.
I hope they charge Viner with the same crimes as Barriss, those two were in a conspiracy to swat that house and who actually made the call is of minor importance. I don't see Gaskill being charged with anything, if you taunt someone that's generally not a crime even if the taunted person injuries somebody else in the process of attacking you.
If we could find an "honest politician" who was also willing to talk about this "on the record", chances are they would tell us that the West will continue to do this because this would be the "least worst" option - that condemning Turkey for the Human Rights abuse would risk moving Erdogan away from NATO and towards Russia. Not something that the West would find appealing...
I think if you found a honest politician they'd say Erdogan is already a lost cause and Turkey is well underway to become a new Iran/Saudi-Arabia. I just hope we'll manage to save the Kurds somehow, even though it's a political minefield in Syria, Iraq and Iran too. They've made a massive effort against IS and deserve so much better than their governments are treating them.
Human-Computer Interface courses are available and I'd gladly run one for the GNOME team if I thought they'd pay attention.
Of course they would... they'd make a list of it called "Conventional wisdom" then add a column "Our innovative design change" and do drugs until the latter was full too. In fact it may already have happened.
The only location where a nuclear event is likely to take place would be in North Korea: If any event took place, it would have to be a limited attack by the North Korea, prompting a US response. But that isn't to suggest an entire global nuclear winter would necessarily follow.
Assuming the Trump administration is willing to sit there and watch them build bigger bombs and better missiles while throwing insults and bluffs for Kim Jong-il to call. I mean if this was a bar I'd call them fighting words, just looking for an excuse to start swinging fists. And assuming China is willing to just let North Korea fall and be gobbled up by a US-friendly united Korea. My guess is that after the US has leveled Pyongyang and started to prepare for an invasion China would roll in their troops and try to make it a new Tibet.
Uh, insurance has butt naked age discrimination. There's certain demographics that they obviously use such as age and gender, location, make and model of car. And I don't mean just the list price of the car, but the probability that the sort of people who buy this sort of car gets into accidents. This is particularly obvious if you start comparing luxury cars and sports cars of equal value. The problem is that this is something every insurance company knows so it's already priced in. The profit is in figuring out which 28yo females in San Diego driving a Prius are actually likely to get into an accident or not.
An insurance company's appetite for information never stops, they'd like to install a GPS tracker & black box, vacuum your Facebook account and smartphone to build a better risk profile because figuring it that you're actually a 7.09% risk customer rather than 7.98% or 6.48% is how they make extra money. Trouble is that it's just an arms race, if all have more detailed information they all figure out the same more exact risk and they're back to the basic margin. It wouldn't actually hurt the market all if you whitelisted criteria and said if we find you discriminating on anything else we'll fine you or revoke your license. But that's commie talk, the free market will fix this.
In what country do they have the police budget for that? Not here in Norway at least unless there's injury to a person, it impedes traffic or there's suspicion of drunk driving. Accidents are only property damage you fill out a form together with separate forms in the back if you disagree on what happened, check license plate and ID the file it with the insurance. If the other driver is not there, most people bail. Some pretend to give contact info and bail. Some give contact info and leave. Some hang around but unless it's a big accident other people aren't likely to stop you leaving, though many will take pictures. And if it is big damage to a stationary object well then they should stop you because then you're clearly not fit to drive.
This brings up the disturbing trends of people not believing the experts in fields, and some of them are in leadership positions who's actions causes change. Now a leader may not follow the advice of the expert, because their may be factors beyond that particular field, that need to be weighed in, however these experts should be listened to as you gut instinct and general knowledge in most things are actually at a basic level.
The trouble is in deconstructing knowledge from perspective and agenda. For example take the war on drugs, there's plenty of experts and organizations on both sides of the fence. If you ask a rehab clinic drugs leads to addicts, because the drug users they see are those who became addicted. The police will see criminal drug users. The psychologist will see drug users with psychological problems. On the other hand a medical marijuana shop may stand to make a huge profit if it's legalized for recreational use, they're not exactly neutral either. It's hard to find people that are highly knowledgeable about a topic and not deeply invested or biased in some way. I mean it works for Donald Knuth and CS, but in more practical matters it's not that easy to know who to believe. And people like to believe that the "experts" that agree with them are those that are right.
You can tell that NSA is inhabited by a lot of super-nerds. It's actually a quiet little in-joke.
While they do, I doubt any of them were involved. This was probably the result of some senior executive strategy seminar where they discussed their "vision" and "core values" at some fancy executive retreat. No doubt there's a follow-up planned in a year or two to "evaluate" it too.
His true pay is the increase in value of his 27% stake in the company. Tesla's market cap today is $59.29B. So, Musk's portion of that is about $16B. If the market cap hits $100B, his 27% will be $11B more valuable. A $1B award on top of that $11B gain hardly even qualifies as icing on the cake.
I wonder how motivational it is at that stage anyway, if he's already got $16B he could eat three star Michelin dinners and ride limos and private jets to five star resorts the rest of his life without making a dent in it. It's a bit like trying to give criminals fourteen consecutive life sentences and pretending it's more than one.
Well I'm not saying it's for consumer reasons, but there's a helluva lot of business reasons Apple might try putting an A11X in a laptop and not just a tablet. Intel likes to charge a lot for low power mobile chips, no doubt Apple is considering the same kind of ARM portables as Microsoft. And knowing Apple it'd probably be a store-only device for a 30% cut of everything.
Maybe having the unwashed masses be involved in every single decision the gov makes turns it into a popularity contest and strips actual merit from ideas anyway, and facebook is just the latest doing exactly that?
More like Wikipedia democracy... whoever has an ax to grind or agenda to run and know all the rules and processes overwhelms the majority by persistence. A direct democracy has to be balanced so you ask people to decide on a reasonable number of issues because you can't have 300 million paying attention to everything that happens in every sub-committee. Hell, I hear even Congressmen who have politics as a full time job don't have time for that. That and getting people to balance out the budget, if they want to spend money one place they have to cut it somewhere else or get a majority to cut total taxes. It could be done - more reasonably than today anyway - but why would the duopoly you have change the system? It's either team red or team blue but they know that after 8+/-4 years the grass will look greener on the other side.
According to the BLS some 154 million Americans are employed. That <1% of those jobs would disappear in 8 years, in fact less than 0.1% per year sounds like the most unrevolutionary revolution ever. We'll all run out of jobs like... year 3000.
Don't think so, a Falcon 9 will get you ~4 tons to Mars which probably means ~6 tons to the Moon which should be plenty for a small lander/rover and according to Musk himself the fuel is only about $200k. Everything else was on the money though, it'll cost way more than $20m to claim those $20m.
We should only need one image format, that automatically identifies the type of image that it is looking at. There is no format today that can take an image of, say, a newspaper page with both text and image on it. Different parts need different image compression techniques. Some lossless, some lossy.
Sounds like you want magic, if I'm doing preservation work I might want it all lossless. I might be scanning a photo book where I care about the pictures or a ledger where I care about the text. What if the text is added on top of the photo or blended into it with transparency? What's text anyway, is it black on white or is it runes and hieroglyphics and stone tables and scrolls? If you want to mix it up I think you should just go with a document format like PDF because the text is probably better off being OCR'd unless you're trying to preserve a particular look.
The claim that this somehow violates Ireland/EU law is absurd, unless you are arguing that a person sitting at a computer in the U.S. is somehow bound by the laws of a foreign country.
Uh yes? If you hack an Irish server it's most definitively a crime in Ireland. Same if you plan and direct an IRA bombing from abroad, being physically present has never been a requirement. Sure enforcement can be tricky if they refuse to extradite, but that's just a practical problem.
This is a deliberate mis-stating of the issue. Right now, a Microsoft employee, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can access those servers and find the information that is being requested.
Technical capability and legal permission are not the same. For example we've had doctors and nurses criminally prosecuted for snooping on journals of patients they had no business reading, that they're capable of copying this information doesn't mean they can do so legally. I think anyone who's held root/admin privileges on company servers understands this.
This is done every day as a matter of routine operation, by Microsoft and every other company that has operations in multiple countries.
Exactly, it is routine for employees in one jurisdiction to have access to data held in a different jurisdiction. And all of that is based on contracts and agreements that lets Microsoft US have access to Microsoft Ireland's servers and data within the boundaries of Irish law. The US courts are saying we can force Microsoft US to do whatever we want. The problem is that then they're saying those agreements are worthless, you can't trust an American to honor them because he can be forced by US courts to break them. Which means Microsoft Ireland will be forced by Ireland/the EU to rescind those permissions.
In fact all sorts of cloud/hosting/outsourcing industries could be hit with this, it'd be a total meltdown where the only way you can abide by domestic laws is to have only domestic people working on it. Imagine if India said "That's great we'll do like the US, everything that's outsourced or subcontracted to Indians can now be subpoena'ed under Indian law." and everyone would shit bricks. Which is why I don't understand why the US is pushing for this, if they win US employees and companies will become toxic for global operations.
Have you seen how many bank branches have closed down entirely? (...) Sucks to be a business with nowhere to deposit your takings.
That's been taken over by machines too, both notes and coins. Those who have a big cash surplus tend to have a security company drive around and collect it rather than carry large amounts of cash to the bank though. Though most businesses around here actually hand out more money than they take in, people get money by electronic deposit and those who let you pay by debit card also tend to let you do small cash withdrawals.
No, all for fucking 300 $1.2k phones, aka $360,000 worth of stolen merchandise. The police were hoping that they'd find all of the phones (and the thieves) at the same location.
Yeah, assuming Apple's list was almost right and this was like one phone showing up of 300 stolen it smells like an America's Dumbest Criminals episode. Perp steals 300 iPhones, keeps one for himself or his cousin Bob because they need a new phone. I'd probably just surround the place and knock though, what are you going to do flush 300 phones down the toilet?
The US has been riling up NATO against Russia for some time now. You had the whole debacle of trying to force all NATO countries to spend 2% of their GDP on their defence budget, even though the US alone has an ~8x larger military budget than Russia.
IMHO that was way overdue. The US went to war all over the globe to stop the spread of global communism, so naturally they'd aid Europe if they came under attack by the Soviet Union. But after the Soviet Union fell most of Europe has massively cut their military spending relying on US backing through NATO, while the US has lost their main ideological reason to send their soldiers to fight in our wars. The Ukraine/Crimea situation became the opportunity to remind the other NATO members that it's a mutual defense treaty where each has to contribute their part. I'm not sure how that translates to aggression towards Russia, most people saw that as the US backing out of Europe and saying Europe must be able to fend for itself.
Of course he had to backtrack and reaffirm that the US is fully committed to the alliance and that an attack on one is an attack on all, but I think the lingering message was clear. The US will help you with arms and high tech weaponry etc. but the US is in no hurry to get into another Vietnam, you'd better have a basic army that can do most of the shooting and dying. Just because we're allies there's a sliding scale of how much and how quick we're willing to help. There's not a whole lot of good things I have to say about Trump, but that's one area I think is absolute lack of political correctness did some good. The NATO treaty is an exceptionally simple and unconditional "us against the commies" agreement you'd never make today.
It seems to me, that we are at long last ACTUALLY entering the Space Age - a label given too prematurely.
Reaching orbit was - unlike many other arbitrary lines in the sand - a real breakthrough compared to crashing back to earth. And we went from that to landing on the Moon and sending the first probe to leave the solar system in 20 years (1957-1977), that's an amazing development over a short time that deserves its own "age". If you look at all the communication satellites, broadcast satellites, observation satellites, GPS system, ISS, deep space probes etc. we have in space I think it would be complete lunacy to claim that the "Space Age" starts now.
Maybe this will be like a new age but then it should pick a new name, though honestly I'm not sure what's revolutionary so far. There's a new generation of rockets sure, but so far they're doing things we've already done like launch satellites into space or resupply the ISS. All the plans for the Moon, Mars etc. are still on the drawing board. And the Falcon 9s are technically not the first thing we've sent into space, landed and sent again - that honor belongs to the Space Shuttle despite its exorbitant refurbishment costs. There's a lot more promised for the future than what's reality today. When does the Space Colonization Age start?
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What MPEG is learning is that in reality the world does not need them because open standards are far more cost effective,
Well... there's been many failed attempts at trying to replace closed source codecs with open source ones like Theora, the VPx codecs, Direc, Daala and so on. The only one with a bit of traction was VP9 but not more than that I'd call it a trial balloon. Vorbis never caught on to replace MP3 or AAC either. It's one straw in particular that broke the camel's back and it's that those licensing HEVC saw the rise of video streaming services and got a bit too greedy. The MPEG standards have mostly been driven by dedicated AV companies that make like camcorders and set top boxes and they've sorta refused to see the massive power shift caused by the trend towards streaming/smartphones.
Basically, if you have Android and iPhone (= Google and Apple) recording AV1 video, YouTube and iTunes (= Google and Apple) delivering AV1 video to hardware decoding in smartphones (= Google and Apple) you have a working ecosystem entirely without Canon/Nikon/Panasonic/Samsung/NEC/Fujitsu/JVC and so on. Companies like Intel, AMD and nVidia don't really care that much because practically they need to support HEVC in hardware anyway, they just need to be on board. That's a one time expense, AV1 is free but the HEVC patents will probably expire before they can remove support. It's the possibility of running royalties that caused uproar.
To me this is more like why Google funded Mozilla rather than start Chrome much earlier, they wanted an open web to deliver web apps and through an open source browser they got all forces allied against IE. They didn't care about giving away the browser because it wasn't their money maker. Same with AV1, they're making and giving away the codec because they'll make plenty money on services that use AV1. It's a bad time to be MPEG, they're like Opera that was trying to sell a browser in a market where everyone else is giving it away. It should be expected, you don't really make any money selling JPG or PNG or MP3 codecs... eventually the market for paying for a video codec would dry up. But they probably hoped it would be a while longer...
Are obviously cheap, and just want a reasonably priced phone that works. Not that I know anyone like that personally.
Or a smaller phone, actually what used to be a standard phone until they all started to swell from 4" to 6" screens. With less pixels to drive the performance and battery life matched or exceeded the contemporary 6s. That said there's hardly any competition and it's clearly niche so why come out with a new one on a two year cycle? It'd only tempt people to skip a generation since Apple's phones are generally supported for 4+ years. I'd guess normal fall release of big phones, smaller spring release in 2019 because 3 years is pretty substantial and 6 years is too long to wait. I do hope that one will be an iPhone X trickle-down, I hear good things about it but that price tag... too much.
I'm pretty sure that if you are on active duty in a war zone, PT with your FitBit or Apple Watch isn't high on the list of desired activities.
Unless you're actually deployed on a mission isn't it mostly habit? You go for a jog for the same reason you do your push-ups and sit-ups, it's just the daily routine to stay in shape. Or it's base personnel who despite not being on the extreme front line feel the need to stay in shape, I don't think I've ever seen an obese high ranking officer even though they're just commanding people around.
I know of an application that spoofs your cell phone's GPS receiver and can place you anyplace you want in the world. Seems like a way to provide any data you want to the application... Makes me wonder if the military isn't capable of making it appear like their resources are vastly different than they actually are.
Well they could, but it's unlikely they could hide an entire base anyway. That doesn't mean they want to give away the exact scope or layout, entry/exit points etc. for snipers, someone to stage an assault, plant an IED or whatever.
It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.
And quite possibly a case of poor visual-textual memory in general. I'm great at absorbing facts, not totally autistic but textbooks, numbers, dates, menus, formulas, function names and that sort of thing. Like I get tired of pulling out my VISA card to pay online it's only 16 digits + expiry month + 3 digits (CVC) and I memorize it without really trying while others struggle with their PIN. If you ask me to distinguish between brands of dog or types of fish I'm quite poor, sure I can rattle off the names of dozens but connecting the name with the photo?
I notice that I cheat by "quantifying" characteristics like big dog, small dog, long hair, short hair, big nose, small nose, straight ears, hanging ears, colors, textures etc. until I have a decent classifier. I can't draw them worth shit though, I only know how to pick them apart not put them together. And it doesn't work well for people because the differences are much smaller, I really should remember that specific face and be able to pick it out in a crowd. Maybe in a context but out on the street others recognize me ninety-nine times out of a hundred and I'm not that memorable. I'm just almost never that positively sure.
I hope they charge Viner with the same crimes as Barriss, those two were in a conspiracy to swat that house and who actually made the call is of minor importance. I don't see Gaskill being charged with anything, if you taunt someone that's generally not a crime even if the taunted person injuries somebody else in the process of attacking you.
If we could find an "honest politician" who was also willing to talk about this "on the record", chances are they would tell us that the West will continue to do this because this would be the "least worst" option - that condemning Turkey for the Human Rights abuse would risk moving Erdogan away from NATO and towards Russia. Not something that the West would find appealing...
I think if you found a honest politician they'd say Erdogan is already a lost cause and Turkey is well underway to become a new Iran/Saudi-Arabia. I just hope we'll manage to save the Kurds somehow, even though it's a political minefield in Syria, Iraq and Iran too. They've made a massive effort against IS and deserve so much better than their governments are treating them.
Human-Computer Interface courses are available and I'd gladly run one for the GNOME team if I thought they'd pay attention.
Of course they would... they'd make a list of it called "Conventional wisdom" then add a column "Our innovative design change" and do drugs until the latter was full too. In fact it may already have happened.
The only location where a nuclear event is likely to take place would be in North Korea: If any event took place, it would have to be a limited attack by the North Korea, prompting a US response. But that isn't to suggest an entire global nuclear winter would necessarily follow.
Assuming the Trump administration is willing to sit there and watch them build bigger bombs and better missiles while throwing insults and bluffs for Kim Jong-il to call. I mean if this was a bar I'd call them fighting words, just looking for an excuse to start swinging fists. And assuming China is willing to just let North Korea fall and be gobbled up by a US-friendly united Korea. My guess is that after the US has leveled Pyongyang and started to prepare for an invasion China would roll in their troops and try to make it a new Tibet.
Thiny veiled age discrimmination?
Uh, insurance has butt naked age discrimination. There's certain demographics that they obviously use such as age and gender, location, make and model of car. And I don't mean just the list price of the car, but the probability that the sort of people who buy this sort of car gets into accidents. This is particularly obvious if you start comparing luxury cars and sports cars of equal value. The problem is that this is something every insurance company knows so it's already priced in. The profit is in figuring out which 28yo females in San Diego driving a Prius are actually likely to get into an accident or not.
An insurance company's appetite for information never stops, they'd like to install a GPS tracker & black box, vacuum your Facebook account and smartphone to build a better risk profile because figuring it that you're actually a 7.09% risk customer rather than 7.98% or 6.48% is how they make extra money. Trouble is that it's just an arms race, if all have more detailed information they all figure out the same more exact risk and they're back to the basic margin. It wouldn't actually hurt the market all if you whitelisted criteria and said if we find you discriminating on anything else we'll fine you or revoke your license. But that's commie talk, the free market will fix this.
In what country do they have the police budget for that? Not here in Norway at least unless there's injury to a person, it impedes traffic or there's suspicion of drunk driving. Accidents are only property damage you fill out a form together with separate forms in the back if you disagree on what happened, check license plate and ID the file it with the insurance. If the other driver is not there, most people bail. Some pretend to give contact info and bail. Some give contact info and leave. Some hang around but unless it's a big accident other people aren't likely to stop you leaving, though many will take pictures. And if it is big damage to a stationary object well then they should stop you because then you're clearly not fit to drive.
Or actually no it wouldn't... having sex with them would be okay, but they're 17y3m so that would be "child" porn. Go figure...
- Either of the Olson twins
Why not? This would be roughly 2003 and legal where I live... if you don't want it I'll take both please.
This brings up the disturbing trends of people not believing the experts in fields, and some of them are in leadership positions who's actions causes change. Now a leader may not follow the advice of the expert, because their may be factors beyond that particular field, that need to be weighed in, however these experts should be listened to as you gut instinct and general knowledge in most things are actually at a basic level.
The trouble is in deconstructing knowledge from perspective and agenda. For example take the war on drugs, there's plenty of experts and organizations on both sides of the fence. If you ask a rehab clinic drugs leads to addicts, because the drug users they see are those who became addicted. The police will see criminal drug users. The psychologist will see drug users with psychological problems. On the other hand a medical marijuana shop may stand to make a huge profit if it's legalized for recreational use, they're not exactly neutral either. It's hard to find people that are highly knowledgeable about a topic and not deeply invested or biased in some way. I mean it works for Donald Knuth and CS, but in more practical matters it's not that easy to know who to believe. And people like to believe that the "experts" that agree with them are those that are right.
You can tell that NSA is inhabited by a lot of super-nerds. It's actually a quiet little in-joke.
While they do, I doubt any of them were involved. This was probably the result of some senior executive strategy seminar where they discussed their "vision" and "core values" at some fancy executive retreat. No doubt there's a follow-up planned in a year or two to "evaluate" it too.
His true pay is the increase in value of his 27% stake in the company. Tesla's market cap today is $59.29B. So, Musk's portion of that is about $16B. If the market cap hits $100B, his 27% will be $11B more valuable. A $1B award on top of that $11B gain hardly even qualifies as icing on the cake.
I wonder how motivational it is at that stage anyway, if he's already got $16B he could eat three star Michelin dinners and ride limos and private jets to five star resorts the rest of his life without making a dent in it. It's a bit like trying to give criminals fourteen consecutive life sentences and pretending it's more than one.
Well I'm not saying it's for consumer reasons, but there's a helluva lot of business reasons Apple might try putting an A11X in a laptop and not just a tablet. Intel likes to charge a lot for low power mobile chips, no doubt Apple is considering the same kind of ARM portables as Microsoft. And knowing Apple it'd probably be a store-only device for a 30% cut of everything.
Maybe having the unwashed masses be involved in every single decision the gov makes turns it into a popularity contest and strips actual merit from ideas anyway, and facebook is just the latest doing exactly that?
More like Wikipedia democracy... whoever has an ax to grind or agenda to run and know all the rules and processes overwhelms the majority by persistence. A direct democracy has to be balanced so you ask people to decide on a reasonable number of issues because you can't have 300 million paying attention to everything that happens in every sub-committee. Hell, I hear even Congressmen who have politics as a full time job don't have time for that. That and getting people to balance out the budget, if they want to spend money one place they have to cut it somewhere else or get a majority to cut total taxes. It could be done - more reasonably than today anyway - but why would the duopoly you have change the system? It's either team red or team blue but they know that after 8+/-4 years the grass will look greener on the other side.
According to the BLS some 154 million Americans are employed. That <1% of those jobs would disappear in 8 years, in fact less than 0.1% per year sounds like the most unrevolutionary revolution ever. We'll all run out of jobs like... year 3000.
Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that
Don't think so, a Falcon 9 will get you ~4 tons to Mars which probably means ~6 tons to the Moon which should be plenty for a small lander/rover and according to Musk himself the fuel is only about $200k. Everything else was on the money though, it'll cost way more than $20m to claim those $20m.
We should only need one image format, that automatically identifies the type of image that it is looking at. There is no format today that can take an image of, say, a newspaper page with both text and image on it. Different parts need different image compression techniques. Some lossless, some lossy.
Sounds like you want magic, if I'm doing preservation work I might want it all lossless. I might be scanning a photo book where I care about the pictures or a ledger where I care about the text. What if the text is added on top of the photo or blended into it with transparency? What's text anyway, is it black on white or is it runes and hieroglyphics and stone tables and scrolls? If you want to mix it up I think you should just go with a document format like PDF because the text is probably better off being OCR'd unless you're trying to preserve a particular look.
The claim that this somehow violates Ireland/EU law is absurd, unless you are arguing that a person sitting at a computer in the U.S. is somehow bound by the laws of a foreign country.
Uh yes? If you hack an Irish server it's most definitively a crime in Ireland. Same if you plan and direct an IRA bombing from abroad, being physically present has never been a requirement. Sure enforcement can be tricky if they refuse to extradite, but that's just a practical problem.
This is a deliberate mis-stating of the issue. Right now, a Microsoft employee, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can access those servers and find the information that is being requested.
Technical capability and legal permission are not the same. For example we've had doctors and nurses criminally prosecuted for snooping on journals of patients they had no business reading, that they're capable of copying this information doesn't mean they can do so legally. I think anyone who's held root/admin privileges on company servers understands this.
This is done every day as a matter of routine operation, by Microsoft and every other company that has operations in multiple countries.
Exactly, it is routine for employees in one jurisdiction to have access to data held in a different jurisdiction. And all of that is based on contracts and agreements that lets Microsoft US have access to Microsoft Ireland's servers and data within the boundaries of Irish law. The US courts are saying we can force Microsoft US to do whatever we want. The problem is that then they're saying those agreements are worthless, you can't trust an American to honor them because he can be forced by US courts to break them. Which means Microsoft Ireland will be forced by Ireland/the EU to rescind those permissions.
In fact all sorts of cloud/hosting/outsourcing industries could be hit with this, it'd be a total meltdown where the only way you can abide by domestic laws is to have only domestic people working on it. Imagine if India said "That's great we'll do like the US, everything that's outsourced or subcontracted to Indians can now be subpoena'ed under Indian law." and everyone would shit bricks. Which is why I don't understand why the US is pushing for this, if they win US employees and companies will become toxic for global operations.
Have you seen how many bank branches have closed down entirely? (...) Sucks to be a business with nowhere to deposit your takings.
That's been taken over by machines too, both notes and coins. Those who have a big cash surplus tend to have a security company drive around and collect it rather than carry large amounts of cash to the bank though. Though most businesses around here actually hand out more money than they take in, people get money by electronic deposit and those who let you pay by debit card also tend to let you do small cash withdrawals.
No, all for fucking 300 $1.2k phones, aka $360,000 worth of stolen merchandise. The police were hoping that they'd find all of the phones (and the thieves) at the same location.
Yeah, assuming Apple's list was almost right and this was like one phone showing up of 300 stolen it smells like an America's Dumbest Criminals episode. Perp steals 300 iPhones, keeps one for himself or his cousin Bob because they need a new phone. I'd probably just surround the place and knock though, what are you going to do flush 300 phones down the toilet?
The US has been riling up NATO against Russia for some time now. You had the whole debacle of trying to force all NATO countries to spend 2% of their GDP on their defence budget, even though the US alone has an ~8x larger military budget than Russia.
IMHO that was way overdue. The US went to war all over the globe to stop the spread of global communism, so naturally they'd aid Europe if they came under attack by the Soviet Union. But after the Soviet Union fell most of Europe has massively cut their military spending relying on US backing through NATO, while the US has lost their main ideological reason to send their soldiers to fight in our wars. The Ukraine/Crimea situation became the opportunity to remind the other NATO members that it's a mutual defense treaty where each has to contribute their part. I'm not sure how that translates to aggression towards Russia, most people saw that as the US backing out of Europe and saying Europe must be able to fend for itself.
Of course he had to backtrack and reaffirm that the US is fully committed to the alliance and that an attack on one is an attack on all, but I think the lingering message was clear. The US will help you with arms and high tech weaponry etc. but the US is in no hurry to get into another Vietnam, you'd better have a basic army that can do most of the shooting and dying. Just because we're allies there's a sliding scale of how much and how quick we're willing to help. There's not a whole lot of good things I have to say about Trump, but that's one area I think is absolute lack of political correctness did some good. The NATO treaty is an exceptionally simple and unconditional "us against the commies" agreement you'd never make today.
It seems to me, that we are at long last ACTUALLY entering the Space Age - a label given too prematurely.
Reaching orbit was - unlike many other arbitrary lines in the sand - a real breakthrough compared to crashing back to earth. And we went from that to landing on the Moon and sending the first probe to leave the solar system in 20 years (1957-1977), that's an amazing development over a short time that deserves its own "age". If you look at all the communication satellites, broadcast satellites, observation satellites, GPS system, ISS, deep space probes etc. we have in space I think it would be complete lunacy to claim that the "Space Age" starts now.
Maybe this will be like a new age but then it should pick a new name, though honestly I'm not sure what's revolutionary so far. There's a new generation of rockets sure, but so far they're doing things we've already done like launch satellites into space or resupply the ISS. All the plans for the Moon, Mars etc. are still on the drawing board. And the Falcon 9s are technically not the first thing we've sent into space, landed and sent again - that honor belongs to the Space Shuttle despite its exorbitant refurbishment costs. There's a lot more promised for the future than what's reality today. When does the Space Colonization Age start?