(*) Roughly speaking, population is remaining steady. Meanwhile, productivity keeps rising.
It's not a zero-sum game. Instead of one man in a digger we could hire fifty with shovels but the cost of digging a ditch would rise massively. If anything you'd want the fifty people to take 10 minute shifts driving the digger and doing something productive with the rest of their time. Productivity is good, you think being unproductive is somehow a virtue?
Someone (maybe Asimov) said that short term technological predications were overly optimistic, and long term ones weren't optimistic enough. People who think there will be self driving cars in 5 years (or AI) are the former.
Well most AI is "just" automation and heuristics on steroids, where I find the most predictions fail are those that border between technology and physics like fusion reactors, flying cars, supersonic passenger airplanes and so on. That SpaceX can make a rocket land is an incredible trick of technology, but it doesn't bring us any closer to a warp drive.
Right now I think there's so much money spent on researching self-driving cars it will happen, it's like when they pumped billions and billions into Amazon and even if there was a dot-bust the brick and mortar business was never the same again. Personally I think that when we let an AI control a ton of metal travelling at 50+ MPH in an uncontrolled environment it'll be the icebreaker to far more coexistence instead of safety cages.
Right now, the pizza comes to my door. I don't need to put shoes on or a coat. This customer experience is worse. Why would I choose it when there are other pizza deliveries that will still deliver to the door. It would have to be significantly cheaper...
Here in Norway the pizza shops take ~75 NOK for delivery and ~250 NOK for a big pizza, tipping is not common. At work I get reimbursed 4.10 NOK/km for using my own car which is expected to roughly cover the running cost of the car with gas and wear/tear and the pizza shops usually deliver within 4 km. So at most it's ~33 NOK round trip to deliver a single pizza, my guess the average doing rounds is more like 10-15 NOK. The rest is probably mostly paying the driver for his work shift. I guess the autonomy and ATM and loading it up will add some cost so let's say 25 NOK/delivery should be possible, that's 2/3rds off the delivery charge and 15% off the total... I'd go outside and get it myself for that.
And that's assuming the service doesn't get better, like if the car is only costing money when it's driving and much less per km they could have longer opening hours, greater range, express delivery etc. because it's much less of an issue if there's idle capacity. Though to be honest I think the cart is way before the horse here, what you need is the autonomous car. The other part is just a glorified vending machine, it would be pretty hard to fuck that part up so bad people wouldn't use it.
Of course I don't want insurance. Insurance is simply a bet. And the insurance broker is the bookmaker who's making the profit out of your bet. In the long run, over a lifetime, you save money by not insuring for risks you could easily cover yourself.
The broker is also betting against an average, I know a few people that I'm pretty sure drive phone insurance rates up considerably through clumsiness. Also having insurance might mean people treat the phone more recklessly than if they have to pay for it themselves, meaning the insurance has to cover more damage than you'd think from statistics for non-insured phones. Big ticket items are different but when it comes to phones
I think there's a huge value transfer from low risk, risk adverse customers who want insurance on top of being careful to the clumsy, reckless people who get insurance because they'll probably need it. Paying the broker's profit margin is just the icing on the cake. If you want to compare it pay your own "insurance", just put the same sum on a savings account, do your own "insurance claims" and see if you run at a profit or a loss. It adds up rather quick to the point where you can afford some breakage and still save money.
No shit. Every CPU back in the day was hot enough that if you got three workstations running them in a room, you could turn the heat off.
Welcome to nostalgia, truth is the Athlon/Athlon XP/Athlon 64 topped out at 72/79/89W with a few FX processors going up to 125W, roughly the same as a modern day mainstream CPU. It was however a *huge* power hike from the 34W power consumption on a Pentium 3 and Intel's Netburst was even worse but in the race of the Gigahertz power consumption was completely ignored. If the workstations aren't running as hot or hotter today, it's because they're idle...
From what I understand it the "fixed" CPUs have the same stepping, indicating that it's a build tolerance issue that AMD will initially solve by adding it to their quality control. Presumably they have some inventory that's already boxed, but if you RMA a CPU with this issue they'll explicitly test for it so you don't get affected a second time. I agree it's still not a guarantee you won't experience this problem, but if the cure is a RMA away it's not worse than any other defective/DOA equipment. IMHO that's a solved problem.
Pretty much par for the course, it's always the underdog(s) asking for compatibility, interoperability and so on to break into the market. The top dog is giving it lip service or coming up with excuses with how it hampers innovation and creates a poor customer experience. Occasionally during the toppling an actual industry standard appears more or less by accident, unless it's just an oligarchy designing it like DVDs but pretty much all business alliances are temporary. Which means that yesterday's friend is now your enemy or vice versa. Or even your frenemy.
First IBM was the enemy and Microsoft the hero. Then Microsoft the enemy and Apple(?) the hero. Then Apple the enemy and Google the hero. Then Google the enemy and so on, round and round it goes. If Microsoft wants to open source ASP.NET Core and Apple wants to open source Swift they're a friend today, tomorrow they're back to spyware and walled gardens. Or even doing both at the same time in different markets because they're top dog in one and the underdog in the other. It's basically "king of the hill" for adults, if one big kid tries to hold it many small kids will knock him down.
The phone market is strange in that lots and lots of people want to have the "flagship" phone and you're not allowed to have a more expensive model in your lineup. I mean it's not like every Ford is a Ford GT or every guy with a Canon has a EOS-1D X Mark II. But if Apple wants to make a $999 phone, like actually spec-wise next level not just inlaid with gold and diamonds there's panic. Apple needs to stay out in front on the premium side, if people stop saying "if money was no object, I'd get an iPhone" that's when they should not worry not "damn I want an iPhone, but that last one is bloody expensive". People have been saying that for years and Apple has been making bank on it.
...just whoindahell could be dumb enough to think that Windows phone would ever last? Hell, us North Georgia Rednecks(TM) stayed away from them in droves! Christ, that one sale must have been half of all Windows phone sales. What maroons!!
Well, assuming this was a great modernization I assume she's coming from a world of mostly Microsoft laptops/tablets/servers and that this was her and their first real adventure into smartphones. They probably have a good business relationship and don't mind being a Microsoft shop. They needed a platform to run their custom apps, how many apps the app store has is less of a concern and they probably got a good discount. And Microsoft has in general offered 5+5 years of support on the desktop, they've rarely left their business customers hanging. In isolation the business case might have looked decent until you take a big step back and realize the platform is dying and there's a very real chance Microsoft will pull out of the market entirely and mobile phones aren't like laptops where you just tank them up with your OS image. I'm not saying it was a good decision but I can understand how you'd make a near-sighted decision like that.
I'd also add that calling Android "Linux" is like saying you have a Ferrari because you taped fake paddle shifters to the steering wheel of your 1983 Toyota Carolla.
I'm pretty sure Linux is still the name of Linus' project first and the collection of technologies that happen to like running on top of that kernel second. And they very much like to count Android and busybox when making statistics or the Linux is everywhere posts. People only get religious about GNU/Linux when it's time to make no true Scotsman posts.
Any product with tons of verified reviews means at least that the product has survived and sold enough to gather those reviews. That's an endorsement it's very difficult to fake.
Exactly. Crap gets bad reviews, few sales and the product is discontinued. If a poorly rated product continues to sell it's probably low quality for a low price and the complaints basically boil down to expecting more than you'll reasonably get at that price point or it's a niche product rated poorly by the mainstream because they don't understand who's the target market. Basically it might not be a terrible product for you, if your requirements are low or you happen to fit the niche. A new product that's rated as crap is probably just crap for everyone, they usually start with cheerleader reviews by fans and friends if not outright fakes or paid endorsements so if the crap reviews have already trashed the rating it's a very bad sign. The more reviews, the more likely it's to be near the true rating.
P.S. These guys should really do a study on IMDB movie scores... they might learn a thing or two about the real world.
Linux is a great success, but it's also a fairly lonely success for the FSF. Pretty much none of the consumer devices running Linux can be altered in any practical way because they have locked boot loaders and only take signed updates. And the user space is pretty much all Apache 2.0, not GPL which doesn't really grant you any rights to the source code shipping with your device. Open source has made it pretty big, but I'd say Linux is an oddity.
With Google's "Treble" interface they're moving towards a stable driver ABI for Android allowing Google to update the OS without the vendor updating their SoC code. Google is big enough to pull this off regardless of what the upstream developers think. They're also working on an alternative Apache-licensed OS called Fuchsia, in case the GPL becomes troublesome. I suppose it could be worse, it could have all been a proprietary blob but it's more of an industry revolution than a user revolution so far.
You just reinvented the coupon. But I guess calling it a cryptocurrency is better for PR.
If it's one non-transferable whoppercoin discount per purchase, then yes. If you can buy/sell/transfer whoppercoins to other wallets and pay entirely in whoppercoins without restrictions, it's a quasi-currency.
Well, it certainly would make enforcement of copyright impossible. All you'd have to do whenever you were accused is to go out and buy a DVD/BluRay and say "look, here's my legal copy". More importantly, it would create a completely unworkable legal concept of "sameness". Consider things like the Star Wars special edition DVDs, is the digital clean-up, new CGI and alternate shooting scene is that the same movie? What about a director's cut, additional dubs and subtitles, a HDR remaster? Is a remix of a song the same song? Is a Linux port of a Windows game the same game? Is the GOTY version the same as the vanilla version? Is the audio book and eBook the same as the paper book? What would a narrator get paid, if people feel they own the book already? How about a translation, does that have any value or are all translations included too? On the other hand, if you say only exactly the same it's easy to make every version have a new cover.
Owning a copy clearly doesn't give you the right to stream it to anyone else, copyright law is pretty clear on that point. The question is whether you can circumvent that through sale and buyback agreements so that temporarily you're the owner and VidAngel is only providing a service to stream your copy to your screen. Basically it's Netflix's old DVD model made all digital where the discs never ship they just make a really, really long virtual HDMI cable over the Internet. Not sure why that would be illegal, streaming a movie you own from your Dropbox account should be legal even though they don't have a distribution license. But I haven't read the legal reasoning...
The web is a decentralized because it sits atop of the tcp/ip protocol. Datacenters are scattered all over the place and not in one, central location. Traffic is routed all over the place. Packets still get scattered around the world. It's as decentralized as it's going to physically get. Because that's a physical concept.
No, it's just as much a logical concept that the end points are not relying on a centralized service as much as a central server. If you set up your own SMTP server, it's decentralized. If you pass everything through Facebook messages, it's centralized. Why? Because they're a third party that is in total control of what they choose to let pass.
The author of the Gizmodo article also wrote articles on a psychiatrist whose patients were appearing as "people you may know", speculating that the doctor had the phone number for the patients.
Well that one doesn't take much speculation, Facebook by default wants access to your contact list and address book. And since most people let it do that your phone number and email address is bound to be recorded from one side or the other.
Ah, but is OTHER humans that are the cause of accidents, not me. That's why it's better if OTHER humans use self-driving cars, but I'm better off in control because I'm better than OTHER humans.
Most days I'm a lot better driver than my worst days, if you ask people what's the worst condition you've been in and still driven then you'll usually get that "uhm there was this one time (because it's not a habit) that I was really tired/angry/excited/sick/tilted (like, before you got into the car) but I had something important to do (justification) but luckily it went well (post-hoc rationalization)" where you'll probably get them to admit they were well below an average driver at the time.
So I think we can have that superiority complex and imagine that ordinarily we're great drivers, but now I'm really hung over so let's not drive right now. I've almost fallen asleep behind the wheel, but there wasn't any other good choices but to take a power nap and keep driving the last half hour. I'd definitively let the car drive if it could, because really I shouldn't be driving and I knew it. But I did it anyway and I'm quite sure I'm not alone in that.
I would bet that this is common for new technologies. I remember the early 1990s when a lot of people didn't like the idea of carrying a cell phone. I remember in the 2000s, few people saw the value of smartphones. I knew several people who weren't sure about Netflix streaming, and thought the idea of cord-cutting was absurd. A lot of those people have now cancelled their cable. Of course people are unsure about self-driving cars. Give it enough time for them to be common, and to have a proven safety record. The results of that survey will change.
I just remember that video from the first pre-alpha test with non-project Google employees where the guy goes rummaging through his backpack for a charger or something for the longest time while the car is speeding down the highway. That's when they figured the path to full autonomy is not through taking away more and more responsibilities, either the car is driving or you are. Presumably it was a huge fan of the project to volunteer but it took only hours or possibly even less from being handed an extremely experimental system to blindly trusting it with his life.
To be honest, in low speed driving I'm more concerned about liability and hurting soft targets than personal danger. With all the crumble zones, airbags, seat belt and so on a crash could get expensive and pedestrians, cyclists, bikers etc. might get hurt but I'm unlikely to sustain any major injury to myself. I know a friend of mine who "only" cracked a rib in a pretty solid crash but the car was a wreck. Also traffic tickets of various kinds. So daily commute that is mostly trickling my way through 20-30 mph zones with traffic slowing it down further? No doubt the car is driving the moment I can let it.
We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.
I don't know where "most of the world" is, but here in Norway at least 99.9% of the terminals and 100% of the ATMs are online doing balance checks and from I've entered my PIN and hit OK to it clears in maybe two seconds. It's long enough that I have to briefly pause before yanking the card out, not long enough that I bring my hand down to wait for the "approved" message. Waiters etc. have wireless terminals that work just as well as the wired ones. I can't imagine twenty seconds unless there's a modem doing dial-up on demand to relay the transaction. The back-end should most definitively answer in a second or less.
The numbers have likely changed, but in 2012 about 50% of all financial transactions were done with cash in the US. For transactions involving amounts of $25 or less, the figure rises to 75% in cash. Getting a 75% adoption rate in Afghanistan seems over-the-top optimistic from the start.
I don't know Afghanistan I doubt people pay customs on a bag of groceries they bought across the border. At the border I would think you're talking about supplies for stores, industry, markets and major/bulk purchases. Like, things they are probably quite capable of paying for electronically if they wanted to. If they wanted to get anywhere they should probably just have imposed a max limit that says customs transactions over say $1000 must be paid electronically, like you simply don't get valid documents otherwise. Then start hitting anyone dodging that limit hard for smuggling so they have to either structure it so they only do $999/trip or pay up. I mean if there's no risk to those paying the bribes it's pretty hard to see how the bribes would stop.
I worked with Javascript in the 90s... if you had come in a time machine and showed me this article from 2017, I'd say if you were bat shit crazy. If you gave me next week's lottery numbers and I won the jackpot I'd say "Well I believe you're from the future... but you're still pulling my leg about this Javascript thing, right?"
Qt is good but two reasons have left it pretty much by the wayside. One is that Microsoft that used to use C++ a lot moved to C#, Apple uses ObjectiveC/Swift, Android uses Java and the web mostly Javascript. While there's quite a few people skilled in C++ I don't think there's many being added to the pool anymore and Qt isn't that great that you learn C++ to use it. The main reason though is that cross-platform today might mean more than Windows/Mac/Linux, also when Windows did a complete do-over with Metro it was hard to keep up.
Qt depends on that a fundamental level desktops have the same elements, push buttons, radio buttons, scroll bars, flat lists, tree lists etc. that can be mapped easily between systems. It works for something like qBittorrent but it's not seeing much adoption in the general case anymore.
It's like MS haven't changed, instead of joining an existing project and improving it, they want to be in control. Old Microsoft, you haven't changed. Do not want
Uhm, because Microsoft always had the canonical source code to ASP.NET and Mono was a shitty attempt to re-implement it as open source? All they had to do was open it up, and they have. Hate on Microsoft all you want but this complaint is just silly.
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(*) Roughly speaking, population is remaining steady. Meanwhile, productivity keeps rising.
It's not a zero-sum game. Instead of one man in a digger we could hire fifty with shovels but the cost of digging a ditch would rise massively. If anything you'd want the fifty people to take 10 minute shifts driving the digger and doing something productive with the rest of their time. Productivity is good, you think being unproductive is somehow a virtue?
Someone (maybe Asimov) said that short term technological predications were overly optimistic, and long term ones weren't optimistic enough. People who think there will be self driving cars in 5 years (or AI) are the former.
Well most AI is "just" automation and heuristics on steroids, where I find the most predictions fail are those that border between technology and physics like fusion reactors, flying cars, supersonic passenger airplanes and so on. That SpaceX can make a rocket land is an incredible trick of technology, but it doesn't bring us any closer to a warp drive.
Right now I think there's so much money spent on researching self-driving cars it will happen, it's like when they pumped billions and billions into Amazon and even if there was a dot-bust the brick and mortar business was never the same again. Personally I think that when we let an AI control a ton of metal travelling at 50+ MPH in an uncontrolled environment it'll be the icebreaker to far more coexistence instead of safety cages.
Right now, the pizza comes to my door. I don't need to put shoes on or a coat. This customer experience is worse. Why would I choose it when there are other pizza deliveries that will still deliver to the door. It would have to be significantly cheaper...
Here in Norway the pizza shops take ~75 NOK for delivery and ~250 NOK for a big pizza, tipping is not common. At work I get reimbursed 4.10 NOK/km for using my own car which is expected to roughly cover the running cost of the car with gas and wear/tear and the pizza shops usually deliver within 4 km. So at most it's ~33 NOK round trip to deliver a single pizza, my guess the average doing rounds is more like 10-15 NOK. The rest is probably mostly paying the driver for his work shift. I guess the autonomy and ATM and loading it up will add some cost so let's say 25 NOK/delivery should be possible, that's 2/3rds off the delivery charge and 15% off the total... I'd go outside and get it myself for that.
And that's assuming the service doesn't get better, like if the car is only costing money when it's driving and much less per km they could have longer opening hours, greater range, express delivery etc. because it's much less of an issue if there's idle capacity. Though to be honest I think the cart is way before the horse here, what you need is the autonomous car. The other part is just a glorified vending machine, it would be pretty hard to fuck that part up so bad people wouldn't use it.
Of course I don't want insurance. Insurance is simply a bet. And the insurance broker is the bookmaker who's making the profit out of your bet. In the long run, over a lifetime, you save money by not insuring for risks you could easily cover yourself.
The broker is also betting against an average, I know a few people that I'm pretty sure drive phone insurance rates up considerably through clumsiness. Also having insurance might mean people treat the phone more recklessly than if they have to pay for it themselves, meaning the insurance has to cover more damage than you'd think from statistics for non-insured phones. Big ticket items are different but when it comes to phones
I think there's a huge value transfer from low risk, risk adverse customers who want insurance on top of being careful to the clumsy, reckless people who get insurance because they'll probably need it. Paying the broker's profit margin is just the icing on the cake. If you want to compare it pay your own "insurance", just put the same sum on a savings account, do your own "insurance claims" and see if you run at a profit or a loss. It adds up rather quick to the point where you can afford some breakage and still save money.
No shit. Every CPU back in the day was hot enough that if you got three workstations running them in a room, you could turn the heat off.
Welcome to nostalgia, truth is the Athlon/Athlon XP/Athlon 64 topped out at 72/79/89W with a few FX processors going up to 125W, roughly the same as a modern day mainstream CPU. It was however a *huge* power hike from the 34W power consumption on a Pentium 3 and Intel's Netburst was even worse but in the race of the Gigahertz power consumption was completely ignored. If the workstations aren't running as hot or hotter today, it's because they're idle...
From what I understand it the "fixed" CPUs have the same stepping, indicating that it's a build tolerance issue that AMD will initially solve by adding it to their quality control. Presumably they have some inventory that's already boxed, but if you RMA a CPU with this issue they'll explicitly test for it so you don't get affected a second time. I agree it's still not a guarantee you won't experience this problem, but if the cure is a RMA away it's not worse than any other defective/DOA equipment. IMHO that's a solved problem.
Pretty much par for the course, it's always the underdog(s) asking for compatibility, interoperability and so on to break into the market. The top dog is giving it lip service or coming up with excuses with how it hampers innovation and creates a poor customer experience. Occasionally during the toppling an actual industry standard appears more or less by accident, unless it's just an oligarchy designing it like DVDs but pretty much all business alliances are temporary. Which means that yesterday's friend is now your enemy or vice versa. Or even your frenemy.
First IBM was the enemy and Microsoft the hero. Then Microsoft the enemy and Apple(?) the hero. Then Apple the enemy and Google the hero. Then Google the enemy and so on, round and round it goes. If Microsoft wants to open source ASP.NET Core and Apple wants to open source Swift they're a friend today, tomorrow they're back to spyware and walled gardens. Or even doing both at the same time in different markets because they're top dog in one and the underdog in the other. It's basically "king of the hill" for adults, if one big kid tries to hold it many small kids will knock him down.
The phone market is strange in that lots and lots of people want to have the "flagship" phone and you're not allowed to have a more expensive model in your lineup. I mean it's not like every Ford is a Ford GT or every guy with a Canon has a EOS-1D X Mark II. But if Apple wants to make a $999 phone, like actually spec-wise next level not just inlaid with gold and diamonds there's panic. Apple needs to stay out in front on the premium side, if people stop saying "if money was no object, I'd get an iPhone" that's when they should not worry not "damn I want an iPhone, but that last one is bloody expensive". People have been saying that for years and Apple has been making bank on it.
...just whoindahell could be dumb enough to think that Windows phone would ever last? Hell, us North Georgia Rednecks(TM) stayed away from them in droves! Christ, that one sale must have been half of all Windows phone sales. What maroons!!
Well, assuming this was a great modernization I assume she's coming from a world of mostly Microsoft laptops/tablets/servers and that this was her and their first real adventure into smartphones. They probably have a good business relationship and don't mind being a Microsoft shop. They needed a platform to run their custom apps, how many apps the app store has is less of a concern and they probably got a good discount. And Microsoft has in general offered 5+5 years of support on the desktop, they've rarely left their business customers hanging. In isolation the business case might have looked decent until you take a big step back and realize the platform is dying and there's a very real chance Microsoft will pull out of the market entirely and mobile phones aren't like laptops where you just tank them up with your OS image. I'm not saying it was a good decision but I can understand how you'd make a near-sighted decision like that.
Even if people ran out of bread, Trump creates enough circus that everyone would think it's fake news.
I'd also add that calling Android "Linux" is like saying you have a Ferrari because you taped fake paddle shifters to the steering wheel of your 1983 Toyota Carolla.
I'm pretty sure Linux is still the name of Linus' project first and the collection of technologies that happen to like running on top of that kernel second. And they very much like to count Android and busybox when making statistics or the Linux is everywhere posts. People only get religious about GNU/Linux when it's time to make no true Scotsman posts.
Any product with tons of verified reviews means at least that the product has survived and sold enough to gather those reviews. That's an endorsement it's very difficult to fake.
Exactly. Crap gets bad reviews, few sales and the product is discontinued. If a poorly rated product continues to sell it's probably low quality for a low price and the complaints basically boil down to expecting more than you'll reasonably get at that price point or it's a niche product rated poorly by the mainstream because they don't understand who's the target market. Basically it might not be a terrible product for you, if your requirements are low or you happen to fit the niche. A new product that's rated as crap is probably just crap for everyone, they usually start with cheerleader reviews by fans and friends if not outright fakes or paid endorsements so if the crap reviews have already trashed the rating it's a very bad sign. The more reviews, the more likely it's to be near the true rating.
P.S. These guys should really do a study on IMDB movie scores... they might learn a thing or two about the real world.
Linux is a great success, but it's also a fairly lonely success for the FSF. Pretty much none of the consumer devices running Linux can be altered in any practical way because they have locked boot loaders and only take signed updates. And the user space is pretty much all Apache 2.0, not GPL which doesn't really grant you any rights to the source code shipping with your device. Open source has made it pretty big, but I'd say Linux is an oddity.
With Google's "Treble" interface they're moving towards a stable driver ABI for Android allowing Google to update the OS without the vendor updating their SoC code. Google is big enough to pull this off regardless of what the upstream developers think. They're also working on an alternative Apache-licensed OS called Fuchsia, in case the GPL becomes troublesome. I suppose it could be worse, it could have all been a proprietary blob but it's more of an industry revolution than a user revolution so far.
You just reinvented the coupon. But I guess calling it a cryptocurrency is better for PR.
If it's one non-transferable whoppercoin discount per purchase, then yes. If you can buy/sell/transfer whoppercoins to other wallets and pay entirely in whoppercoins without restrictions, it's a quasi-currency.
Well, it certainly would make enforcement of copyright impossible. All you'd have to do whenever you were accused is to go out and buy a DVD/BluRay and say "look, here's my legal copy". More importantly, it would create a completely unworkable legal concept of "sameness". Consider things like the Star Wars special edition DVDs, is the digital clean-up, new CGI and alternate shooting scene is that the same movie? What about a director's cut, additional dubs and subtitles, a HDR remaster? Is a remix of a song the same song? Is a Linux port of a Windows game the same game? Is the GOTY version the same as the vanilla version? Is the audio book and eBook the same as the paper book? What would a narrator get paid, if people feel they own the book already? How about a translation, does that have any value or are all translations included too? On the other hand, if you say only exactly the same it's easy to make every version have a new cover.
Owning a copy clearly doesn't give you the right to stream it to anyone else, copyright law is pretty clear on that point. The question is whether you can circumvent that through sale and buyback agreements so that temporarily you're the owner and VidAngel is only providing a service to stream your copy to your screen. Basically it's Netflix's old DVD model made all digital where the discs never ship they just make a really, really long virtual HDMI cable over the Internet. Not sure why that would be illegal, streaming a movie you own from your Dropbox account should be legal even though they don't have a distribution license. But I haven't read the legal reasoning...
The web is a decentralized because it sits atop of the tcp/ip protocol. Datacenters are scattered all over the place and not in one, central location. Traffic is routed all over the place. Packets still get scattered around the world. It's as decentralized as it's going to physically get. Because that's a physical concept.
No, it's just as much a logical concept that the end points are not relying on a centralized service as much as a central server. If you set up your own SMTP server, it's decentralized. If you pass everything through Facebook messages, it's centralized. Why? Because they're a third party that is in total control of what they choose to let pass.
The author of the Gizmodo article also wrote articles on a psychiatrist whose patients were appearing as "people you may know", speculating that the doctor had the phone number for the patients.
Well that one doesn't take much speculation, Facebook by default wants access to your contact list and address book. And since most people let it do that your phone number and email address is bound to be recorded from one side or the other.
Ah, but is OTHER humans that are the cause of accidents, not me. That's why it's better if OTHER humans use self-driving cars, but I'm better off in control because I'm better than OTHER humans.
Most days I'm a lot better driver than my worst days, if you ask people what's the worst condition you've been in and still driven then you'll usually get that "uhm there was this one time (because it's not a habit) that I was really tired/angry/excited/sick/tilted (like, before you got into the car) but I had something important to do (justification) but luckily it went well (post-hoc rationalization)" where you'll probably get them to admit they were well below an average driver at the time.
So I think we can have that superiority complex and imagine that ordinarily we're great drivers, but now I'm really hung over so let's not drive right now. I've almost fallen asleep behind the wheel, but there wasn't any other good choices but to take a power nap and keep driving the last half hour. I'd definitively let the car drive if it could, because really I shouldn't be driving and I knew it. But I did it anyway and I'm quite sure I'm not alone in that.
I would bet that this is common for new technologies. I remember the early 1990s when a lot of people didn't like the idea of carrying a cell phone. I remember in the 2000s, few people saw the value of smartphones. I knew several people who weren't sure about Netflix streaming, and thought the idea of cord-cutting was absurd. A lot of those people have now cancelled their cable. Of course people are unsure about self-driving cars. Give it enough time for them to be common, and to have a proven safety record. The results of that survey will change.
I just remember that video from the first pre-alpha test with non-project Google employees where the guy goes rummaging through his backpack for a charger or something for the longest time while the car is speeding down the highway. That's when they figured the path to full autonomy is not through taking away more and more responsibilities, either the car is driving or you are. Presumably it was a huge fan of the project to volunteer but it took only hours or possibly even less from being handed an extremely experimental system to blindly trusting it with his life.
To be honest, in low speed driving I'm more concerned about liability and hurting soft targets than personal danger. With all the crumble zones, airbags, seat belt and so on a crash could get expensive and pedestrians, cyclists, bikers etc. might get hurt but I'm unlikely to sustain any major injury to myself. I know a friend of mine who "only" cracked a rib in a pretty solid crash but the car was a wreck. Also traffic tickets of various kinds. So daily commute that is mostly trickling my way through 20-30 mph zones with traffic slowing it down further? No doubt the car is driving the moment I can let it.
We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.
I don't know where "most of the world" is, but here in Norway at least 99.9% of the terminals and 100% of the ATMs are online doing balance checks and from I've entered my PIN and hit OK to it clears in maybe two seconds. It's long enough that I have to briefly pause before yanking the card out, not long enough that I bring my hand down to wait for the "approved" message. Waiters etc. have wireless terminals that work just as well as the wired ones. I can't imagine twenty seconds unless there's a modem doing dial-up on demand to relay the transaction. The back-end should most definitively answer in a second or less.
The numbers have likely changed, but in 2012 about 50% of all financial transactions were done with cash in the US. For transactions involving amounts of $25 or less, the figure rises to 75% in cash. Getting a 75% adoption rate in Afghanistan seems over-the-top optimistic from the start.
I don't know Afghanistan I doubt people pay customs on a bag of groceries they bought across the border. At the border I would think you're talking about supplies for stores, industry, markets and major/bulk purchases. Like, things they are probably quite capable of paying for electronically if they wanted to. If they wanted to get anywhere they should probably just have imposed a max limit that says customs transactions over say $1000 must be paid electronically, like you simply don't get valid documents otherwise. Then start hitting anyone dodging that limit hard for smuggling so they have to either structure it so they only do $999/trip or pay up. I mean if there's no risk to those paying the bribes it's pretty hard to see how the bribes would stop.
I worked with Javascript in the 90s... if you had come in a time machine and showed me this article from 2017, I'd say if you were bat shit crazy. If you gave me next week's lottery numbers and I won the jackpot I'd say "Well I believe you're from the future... but you're still pulling my leg about this Javascript thing, right?"
Qt is good but two reasons have left it pretty much by the wayside. One is that Microsoft that used to use C++ a lot moved to C#, Apple uses ObjectiveC/Swift, Android uses Java and the web mostly Javascript. While there's quite a few people skilled in C++ I don't think there's many being added to the pool anymore and Qt isn't that great that you learn C++ to use it. The main reason though is that cross-platform today might mean more than Windows/Mac/Linux, also when Windows did a complete do-over with Metro it was hard to keep up.
Qt depends on that a fundamental level desktops have the same elements, push buttons, radio buttons, scroll bars, flat lists, tree lists etc. that can be mapped easily between systems. It works for something like qBittorrent but it's not seeing much adoption in the general case anymore.
But who would you root for, do you want Microsoft or Poettering in your Linux?
It's like MS haven't changed, instead of joining an existing project and improving it, they want to be in control. Old Microsoft, you haven't changed. Do not want
Uhm, because Microsoft always had the canonical source code to ASP.NET and Mono was a shitty attempt to re-implement it as open source? All they had to do was open it up, and they have. Hate on Microsoft all you want but this complaint is just silly.