I won't provide an example, but it is fully possible to be honest and considerate at the same time, for example, just like it is possible to express even severe anger and dissatisfaction without shouting or getting into a fight.
Language is communication, you may think you're expressing it but does the recipient comprehend it? I've met the kind of people that seem to think if you're not shouting and cursing at them, you're not really angry. It's like they just hear "blahblahblah" but if you were really angry you wouldn't be calm and collected, so evidently you're not. There's no doubt that some people not only bubble wrap it but shy away from the truth in their quest to be considerate. See the Florence Foster Jenkins movie, she could have used some honest feedback before she booked Carnegie Hall...
The dream of space exploration & colonization is that it's a stepping stone towards other worlds and a vast spread of humanity across the galaxy. Not simply a one-time deal that adds a new region of Earth for humans to live in, but at great expense & difficulty.
Earth to Mars (shortest): 56,000,000 km Earth to nearest star after the Sun: 40,000,000,000,000 km
I think you need to make the same kind of leap as going from horse and carriage to the Saturn V to go from interplanetary to interstellar. Sure keeping people alive is an interesting challenge, but somehow I don't think generation ships that take ~70000 years is the solution. For that we need a revolution in propulsion technology that we're not going to get from Falcon Heavy, SLS or even Musk's ITS. A bit like if I wanted to lift 100kg, I could do that with exercise but none of those plans or experience really bring me closer to lifting 10000kg.
In this case, their grievance is that we exist. ISIS wants a new caliphate to control the entire Middle East and they want to pursue holy war, you can't really negotiate around either of those even if they wanted to.
I think you misspelled "the world", basically their strategy is to generate so much resentment towards Muslims (you know, 1.6 billion people - bigger than declaring war on China) that they get two new recruits for every one that's killed. The only reason it's not working is that so far we haven't taken the bait. We grieve for the dead, increase the military effort but we don't lash out in revenge. I sorta expected some militant nutters to go postal in a mosque or to burn them to the ground but apart from a lot of very vivid commentary there's been very few actual attacks on Muslims in general. If we were as short-tempered as they are like going ballistic over drawings we'd be in WW3 by now.
The only significant change to that chart would be if we could start to project increases. Unless any of them plan on becoming super-centenarians we're likely to hit zero since they're all in their 80s and I don't see any credible plans for a return...
If you regularly need to travel 2-3 hours away from home, the time loss from long mid-trip recharges is not small.
True. But unless it's their day job, how many regularly spend that much time in a car anyway? If you're working eight hours a day - low for the US, I hear - and sleep eight hours you've go no life left with that commute. On the weekend I suppose if you have close relatives or a cabin that's just in the sweet spot it could be a regular thing, but if it's two-three hours one way and you're staying can get destination charging. Or not if it's a remote cabin, but then EVs aren't for you. Don't get me wrong, I've driven much longer but those were hardly trips I'd make every week or every month. If you divide number of cars by number of miles driven it seems to me a lot of cars don't actually go very far.
I like Red Hat and I appreciate all they've done for open-source in the enterprise, but the desktopification of core Linux aspects is a bad thing.
Uh you realize Red Hat only has one little side project for workstations and it's essentially the server version with a GUI and a cheaper license? Fedora is just their testbed, they don't care about the desktop. For me it's pretty clear that the core feature of systemd is resource management for containers and other forms of light virtualization. If you run a dedicated server, you don't need it. If you use a hypervisor and full VMs you don't need it. If you want to "app-ify" your servers with Docker then systemd is the management tool around it. It's a huge selling point to cloud providers which is core business for Red Hat. They're not doing it to compete with Linux Mint...
They did not mark any cards, they noticed a flaw that could be used as a mark. No rule of the casino was broken, they're nullifying it because state law says the presence of marked cards means the game is not lawfully played and thus void regardless of whose fault that is. But this means that all games played with this deck should be declared void, every win and every loss. Otherwise you're saying the casino can write the values on the back of the card, they win it was a fair game but you win and they call foul. So I'm actually with Ivey on this one, he's played with the same deck under the same rules as other players but they're cancelling just his games because he won. That's not a legally sound reasoning.
The cost of access has dropped to $1.50/hour, but that's a lot of money in a country where the average monthly income is $25.
Then maybe it's a good idea to do something about the latter instead of the former... I've paid more than that back in the dial-up days and that wasn't on an island that doesn't have any cheap ways to connect to the rest of the world.
They drive the same route day after day, they don't need to go fast, they are either owned by the city or by companies that have major relationships with the city so they can avoid major regulatory hurdles. These are the obvious first adopters of driverless technology.
No, but buses are big and most needed during rush hour. The moment something doesn't work you're likely to inconvenience a lot of people on the bus and on the same road. Garbage trucks are better, but usually noisy so people want collection in daytime with other traffic and you'd need a lot of technology to automate emptying the containers to really automate it. I think sweeper cars would be perfect, nobody would care if they drive at 10 mph with the yellow warning lights say 01-04 AM, if they get stuck or have a breakdown you have time to send a mop-up crew to collect them before the morning rush.
That's a broken financial model. The intersection of people with the capabilities, ideas, enthusiasm, and available time is extremely small. Actually, the highly skilled people are least likely to be available because they are most likely to be working already. My apparently crazy idea is that we need better financial models first. My favorite pipe dream is a kind of a crowd-funding model around clear project proposals.
No, ideas are a dime a dozen. That's the delusion most of these proposals have, that if only they got to share their great proposal with the world lots of people would come help pay for it and lots of developers would come do it for little or nothing. Your proposal sounds extremely similar to other crowdfunding / bounty / donation proposals that have been done, but most of them amount to "Now I've made a tip jar and put in the first $5, why is nothing happening?"
If you're real lucky you find a project where you put in a feature request and somebody says that's a great idea, I'll do it. If you're hiring at full commercial cost, there's tons of contractors willing to do it. Between there you might find people willing to work on it for everything from beer money to paying the bills, but then they mostly work on what they want, not what you want because they're contributing most of the value. The good thing is that they're usually in control of the scope and complexity of the tasks they agree to, so you usually get what you pay for. Still due to whiny brats it's best to put up a tip jar with no guarantees.
If you're looking for someone to create something that doesn't exist and thus probably is nobody's itch, you probably have to get close to commercial funding. Maybe some will do it for somewhat less since it's non-profit and for open source, but not beer money cheap. That means you have to get lots of people on board, which means mediating between all their pet ideas. And when push comes to shove you have to actually have to both get the funding and find someone willing to do it.
What you describe is the perfect waterfall spec, everything is described up front down to the smallest detail. Everyone who's worked with it in the real world knows it's a giant pain in the ass to create, which is why they go agile. Most likely it will have flaws and then the fun starts dealing with your co-sponsors and developer complaining about any inaccuracy in the spec, delay in delivery and what actually constitutes fulfillment. And you don't have any budget or power to approve change orders. Worst case you have a lawyer on your ass because the developer is fed up and wants to get paid.
...at which point 99.99% of the people with ideas will have said "shit I didn't want all this crap, I just had this great idea.... you fix it" and disappear in a puff of righteous indignation that the world didn't just take their great idea and ran with it. I mean that was the hard part right, like coming up with the script for a movie. Once you have that, actors, directors, producers and camera men will come running... or maybe not. I think you can build any platform you want for script writers and movie producers to meet each other, but it won't change the fundamentals. Same with idea people and open source developers.
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically. We have aircraft now. Passenger rail is for short-distance commuting, and it's barely cost effective at that.
Aircraft can't bring you city center to city center. If you add up travel to and from the airport the break-even is usually 3-3.5 hours. The question is whether there's many enough passengers to justify it, laying down rail costs almost the same no matter how many travel. Airplanes are much closer tied to number of flights = cost of delivering service.
The language you use to describe the problem is hurting your ability to solve the problem. You could as much call it crony socialism and be describing exactly the same thing, but the solutions that would get proposed would look somewhat different (and would invariably fail to eliminate the crony component, which is the actual loathsome bit.)
Well crony just means "a close friend especially of long standing" so basically you could use that to describe all forms of "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" relationships. If people with an Ivy League degree only hire people with other Ivy League degrees it's a form of cronyism. Crony socialism would be "some animals are more equal than others". However "crony capitalism" as a combined term has been refined past "cronyism in capitalism" like an old boys club of rich white men sitting on each other's boards to a rather specific term for capitalists who influence and manipulate the political system to create unfair business conditions towards their customers, competitors and employees.
Basically it's a 21st century word for the collusion between business and government, without the authoritarian government of fascism. You do as our lobby group wants, we make lots of money and give you a fat campaign contribution and you get to blast the public with PR campaigns and be/stay in office. Win-win for both of them. I don't think you can do away with the intersection between business and government, for example I don't expect the Greens and the shale oil industry to agree any day soon. The question is more what are legitimate and illegitimate ways for them to interact. A trade association is legal. A cartel is not. What makes one different from the other? The exact nature of the interaction.
A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility.
They had a contract with a third party to supply parts built to certain specifications, they were supposed to do the testing. I really doubt they had any acceptable failure rate in that contract, like you might have with consumer toys. SpaceX had to backtrack and say "if you want it done right, do it yourself" but it's really contrary to what they want because that's the way you end up with massive vertically integrated behemoths and NASA-certified screwdrivers that costs 100x what a normal screwdriver costs.
From whom does one ask permission to go to the moon? And who authorises that authority to grant it? And what would be the punishment if one went to the moon without permission?
If you can drag the whole launch platform into international waters, nobody I think. It's not the going to the moon that's regulated, it's launching to get there. The outer space treaty says that nobody lays claim to own the moon, so there's no such thing as trespass. I'd think most other things would follow the "flag rules", if you're on a US ship in international waters US laws apply aboard the ship. What would happen if you went there, declared the treaty invalid and your independence as a free nation is anyone's guess. Most likely they'd just ignore you and if you tried to attack any "invaders" they'd kill you in self defense.
Vista flopped because the PC manufacturers didn't believe Microsoft on the release date so they dragged their asses in the development of Windows drivers for the new driver model. Then when Vista was released, manufacturers were caught with their pants down. People upgrading to Vista ended up with blue-screens or just couldn't get their hardware to work. Of course, everyone blamed Microsoft.
Well it didn't help that Vista ran like a dog on low end machines. WinXP required 64MB RAM, Vista upped that to 1GB - that's 16x as high in a little over five years - and even that was terrible. I helped a friend who bought a mahcine like that with Vista pre-installed, it was simply painful. I helped him install XP and that worked so much better, since we weren't bumping into the 4GB limit anyway there was no major downsides. While they didn't officially lower the requirement again for Win7, it's generally recognized that Microsoft put Vista on a diet. Three years later not only was more memory common, it actually ran far better on far less.
Other annoying features was an overly aggressive Superfetch, causing disk churn and annoying lacks in responsiveness. And while UAC might be a good thing, it was very noisy to begin with and lots of software triggered UAC prompts more often than they should or even when they didn't need to. For users that already trusted the software they ran under XP it was easy to see the annoyance and hard to see the immediate benefit. It was a whole host of issues that made Vista a giant flop.
Here is how to do it: When trenching the streets, install a wide (12" or more) PUBLICLY OWNED conduit pipe. Then allow any bonded provider to run cable or fiber through that pipe for a small standard fee. Since 99% of the cost of providing service is the trenching, this will make the market far more competitive.
Why bother? Copper and coax are quite clearly inferior solutions for new deployment and laying down a 12" pipe would be a huge cost, just lay down a fiber to the nearest central and let companies compete for what boxes they want to put on the ends. Put out a bid with a reasonable residential SLA for line maintenance, make sure the penalties are sufficient for good service.
It might be a stupid story, but not for the reasons you point out, if you look at the world GDP trend and current distribution it's clear that we're converging. The 1970s when there was a grand canyon between the extremely rich "first world" and the extremely poor "third world" isn't coming back. For sure, right now that machine might fall in the gap where it's worthwhile in the US and not worth it in India. But it's a factor of 10:1 in GDP today and getting less, India's GDP grows by 5-9% and the US by 2-4% per year. Sure there's still expensive and cheap labor, but that they will work for next to nothing is becoming a thing of the past.
And to be honest, one order of magnitude is not much when you talk about automation. Cheaper CPU/GPU/RAM, better/cheaper sensors, downpaid software, mature design and economics of scale often means that if version one works for the US, version two will operate at double the speed at half the purchase/maintenance cost and the whole first world will buy. And when version three rolls around doubling speed and halving cost again even India is in trouble. I think you're either stuck before version one where it's not practically feasible at all or it'll zip past and become something computers/robots do instead of people.
... that has worked on hundred of industrial robots, I have never seen one without an "emergency stop" button. (or even multiple ones)
Which were all in controlled environments to begin with I guess. When they start making autonomous drones, do you think they'll let any joker with an antenna tell it that it's malfunctioning and needs to shut down? It's the robot equivalent of handing out free roofies to everyone, it's probably not a very good idea.
So what exactly did they do with the $34 million dollars? That seems like a substantial amount of funding just to ship a first round of a basic electronics product.
Well first of all it said $34 million worth of preorders, doesn't mean they made a full deposit like say for the Tesla Model 3 there's a $1000 depoit for a $35000 car. And even so it's not a Kickstarter, they're not supposed to use this for R&D and say whoops sorry, we used up the money but it didn't work out. They probably took preorders to gauge interest and get investors, for whatever reason it didn't work out - that they couldn't get funding is a red herring, if you got a product and customer ready with a healthy profit margin there's always someone willing. What's more likely is that it was a huge startup cost and risk of losing big nobody wanted to pay. Or that they couldn't deliver the features they promised at the price point they promised.
But they knew this was the job, right? Why would you take a job and then keep working a job that you can't stomach?
Because it would be very bad for evolution if the brain became dysfunctional whenever you experienced something traumatic. It has a range of self-defense mechanisms from immediate responses like adrenaline and emotional shutdown to permanently repressed memories and even split personalities and everything in between. We're able to force ourselves to do things way past the point we get emotionally scarred by it, we bottle it up sometime swithout really realizing it until it bursts.
It's even in the little things, some years back I was on a diet and it was a lot of broccoli as stomach filler to keep me from munching on everything else. I was tired of broccoli, but I was also tired of being fat. So I kept eating broccoli until it hit some kind of tilt, after that I just couldn't stand the taste of it for a few years. Even the smell of it was just revolting to me. I'm guessing it was the job they had, money they needed and thought they just had to grow a thicker hide. So they pushed themselves to do it but instead of becoming immune they hit some kind of tilt, except theirs is a bit worse than mine.
Lots of people experience that looking back in retrospect, how could put up with that kind of abuse or neglect or living like that, well mostly because biology encourages us to look past the negatives. Doesn't matter if you're a sex slave trapped in Fritzl's basement for years, you don't end it. You endure. Maybe it's a long, miserable and apparently hopeless fight but people who go through hell might come out on the other side, reproduce and carry on the genes. Those who figure this shit isn't worth living for don't. It's a morbid rationality to it.
I'm guessing the idea is that this will be much quicker, like if you haven't touched the mouse or keyboard for like 10-60 seconds the camera will check if you're still sitting in front of it and if not lock the machine. I think this is a business winner, so many times I've seen laptops with aggressive screen savers being used in a meeting by someone presenting and it locks because the presenter was talking or taking questions or holding a discussion and not navigating. This way the machine could check yep he's still there, let's NOT lock the machine.
Well, for the most part you can't actually buy the hype it's all pre-release, post-release benchmarks and reviews dominate. I'm not sure what the point of it is really, maybe it'll make a few people hang on to their old gear a tiny bit longer ahead of the release but I doubt it. I mean Apple newer showed previews of future products and I'd call them moderately successful. I guess it's more to please investors and creditors than customers, things are not so hot right now but right around the corner is the pot of gold. The problem is you often end up with a light Osborne effect, most people don't want the product you have now on the shelf they want the next one. And when that's for sale, they want the next one after that. That's not very good if you want to actually make sales.
The test was good. It was Safari that had the flaw. Thanks to the Consumer Reports test it was revealed so it can be fixed. As for actual user, you do know that Macs are popular among web designers?
The test was accurate for the conditions it was tested under. The test was not representative of ordinary use. The former you can blame Apple for. The latter you can blame Consumer Reports for. I mean, you can either assume that Apple hasn't run battery tests on production models or you can assume that you're triggering some kind of abnormal behavior, even though it's not obvious why. It could be faulty hardware, disk corruption, odd settings, flaw in the script, anything really. Wouldn't the sane, normal action be to contact Apple and say we're getting really strange and poor battery life results here, is this normal? And then suspend the review process pending further investigation.
Instead they took the public road and said "nope, not giving it our recommendation battery life is all over the place". They got up on their high horse and said there's nothing wrong with our tests or how we're testing, we're done here. I'm sure they were hoping this would be a huge scoop for them, they certainly got a lot of PR. But at least for me in the end they've come across a bit like crying wolf or at the very least making a mountain out of a mole hill. On the bright say it proves they actually do testing and not just look over the press release and "review" it by bragging about how great it is.
and believe we should all be able to either choose CPUs that lack them, or disable them entirely (motherboard jumper anyone?) as we wish.
If anyone can enable it via malware, they've already totally rooted your PC. If there is a secret NSA knock from the outside, it'll just ignore the jumper. Even if you buy one of the CPUs that lack this feature, you don't really know if Intel has fused it off. If they reuse design blocks it's quite possible entire product lines that don't offer that functionality have it anyway. If you're that paranoid maybe the easiest is a to use a third party NIC? Install a hardware firewall to monitor your connection? Personally I think a hack like that would be way too valuable a secret to risk exposing by going after consumers. There's probably a ton of military, big industry and infrastructure servers that run Intel and full, virtually undiscoverable backdoor access to that would be an espionage gold mine.
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I won't provide an example, but it is fully possible to be honest and considerate at the same time, for example, just like it is possible to express even severe anger and dissatisfaction without shouting or getting into a fight.
Language is communication, you may think you're expressing it but does the recipient comprehend it? I've met the kind of people that seem to think if you're not shouting and cursing at them, you're not really angry. It's like they just hear "blahblahblah" but if you were really angry you wouldn't be calm and collected, so evidently you're not. There's no doubt that some people not only bubble wrap it but shy away from the truth in their quest to be considerate. See the Florence Foster Jenkins movie, she could have used some honest feedback before she booked Carnegie Hall...
The dream of space exploration & colonization is that it's a stepping stone towards other worlds and a vast spread of humanity across the galaxy. Not simply a one-time deal that adds a new region of Earth for humans to live in, but at great expense & difficulty.
Earth to Mars (shortest): 56,000,000 km
Earth to nearest star after the Sun: 40,000,000,000,000 km
I think you need to make the same kind of leap as going from horse and carriage to the Saturn V to go from interplanetary to interstellar. Sure keeping people alive is an interesting challenge, but somehow I don't think generation ships that take ~70000 years is the solution. For that we need a revolution in propulsion technology that we're not going to get from Falcon Heavy, SLS or even Musk's ITS. A bit like if I wanted to lift 100kg, I could do that with exercise but none of those plans or experience really bring me closer to lifting 10000kg.
In this case, their grievance is that we exist. ISIS wants a new caliphate to control the entire Middle East and they want to pursue holy war, you can't really negotiate around either of those even if they wanted to.
I think you misspelled "the world", basically their strategy is to generate so much resentment towards Muslims (you know, 1.6 billion people - bigger than declaring war on China) that they get two new recruits for every one that's killed. The only reason it's not working is that so far we haven't taken the bait. We grieve for the dead, increase the military effort but we don't lash out in revenge. I sorta expected some militant nutters to go postal in a mosque or to burn them to the ground but apart from a lot of very vivid commentary there's been very few actual attacks on Muslims in general. If we were as short-tempered as they are like going ballistic over drawings we'd be in WW3 by now.
The only significant change to that chart would be if we could start to project increases. Unless any of them plan on becoming super-centenarians we're likely to hit zero since they're all in their 80s and I don't see any credible plans for a return...
If you regularly need to travel 2-3 hours away from home, the time loss from long mid-trip recharges is not small.
True. But unless it's their day job, how many regularly spend that much time in a car anyway? If you're working eight hours a day - low for the US, I hear - and sleep eight hours you've go no life left with that commute. On the weekend I suppose if you have close relatives or a cabin that's just in the sweet spot it could be a regular thing, but if it's two-three hours one way and you're staying can get destination charging. Or not if it's a remote cabin, but then EVs aren't for you. Don't get me wrong, I've driven much longer but those were hardly trips I'd make every week or every month. If you divide number of cars by number of miles driven it seems to me a lot of cars don't actually go very far.
I like Red Hat and I appreciate all they've done for open-source in the enterprise, but the desktopification of core Linux aspects is a bad thing.
Uh you realize Red Hat only has one little side project for workstations and it's essentially the server version with a GUI and a cheaper license? Fedora is just their testbed, they don't care about the desktop. For me it's pretty clear that the core feature of systemd is resource management for containers and other forms of light virtualization. If you run a dedicated server, you don't need it. If you use a hypervisor and full VMs you don't need it. If you want to "app-ify" your servers with Docker then systemd is the management tool around it. It's a huge selling point to cloud providers which is core business for Red Hat. They're not doing it to compete with Linux Mint...
The players cheated.
They did not mark any cards, they noticed a flaw that could be used as a mark. No rule of the casino was broken, they're nullifying it because state law says the presence of marked cards means the game is not lawfully played and thus void regardless of whose fault that is. But this means that all games played with this deck should be declared void, every win and every loss. Otherwise you're saying the casino can write the values on the back of the card, they win it was a fair game but you win and they call foul. So I'm actually with Ivey on this one, he's played with the same deck under the same rules as other players but they're cancelling just his games because he won. That's not a legally sound reasoning.
The cost of access has dropped to $1.50/hour, but that's a lot of money in a country where the average monthly income is $25.
Then maybe it's a good idea to do something about the latter instead of the former... I've paid more than that back in the dial-up days and that wasn't on an island that doesn't have any cheap ways to connect to the rest of the world.
They drive the same route day after day, they don't need to go fast, they are either owned by the city or by companies that have major relationships with the city so they can avoid major regulatory hurdles. These are the obvious first adopters of driverless technology.
No, but buses are big and most needed during rush hour. The moment something doesn't work you're likely to inconvenience a lot of people on the bus and on the same road. Garbage trucks are better, but usually noisy so people want collection in daytime with other traffic and you'd need a lot of technology to automate emptying the containers to really automate it. I think sweeper cars would be perfect, nobody would care if they drive at 10 mph with the yellow warning lights say 01-04 AM, if they get stuck or have a breakdown you have time to send a mop-up crew to collect them before the morning rush.
That's a broken financial model. The intersection of people with the capabilities, ideas, enthusiasm, and available time is extremely small. Actually, the highly skilled people are least likely to be available because they are most likely to be working already. My apparently crazy idea is that we need better financial models first. My favorite pipe dream is a kind of a crowd-funding model around clear project proposals.
No, ideas are a dime a dozen. That's the delusion most of these proposals have, that if only they got to share their great proposal with the world lots of people would come help pay for it and lots of developers would come do it for little or nothing. Your proposal sounds extremely similar to other crowdfunding / bounty / donation proposals that have been done, but most of them amount to "Now I've made a tip jar and put in the first $5, why is nothing happening?"
If you're real lucky you find a project where you put in a feature request and somebody says that's a great idea, I'll do it. If you're hiring at full commercial cost, there's tons of contractors willing to do it. Between there you might find people willing to work on it for everything from beer money to paying the bills, but then they mostly work on what they want, not what you want because they're contributing most of the value. The good thing is that they're usually in control of the scope and complexity of the tasks they agree to, so you usually get what you pay for. Still due to whiny brats it's best to put up a tip jar with no guarantees.
If you're looking for someone to create something that doesn't exist and thus probably is nobody's itch, you probably have to get close to commercial funding. Maybe some will do it for somewhat less since it's non-profit and for open source, but not beer money cheap. That means you have to get lots of people on board, which means mediating between all their pet ideas. And when push comes to shove you have to actually have to both get the funding and find someone willing to do it.
What you describe is the perfect waterfall spec, everything is described up front down to the smallest detail. Everyone who's worked with it in the real world knows it's a giant pain in the ass to create, which is why they go agile. Most likely it will have flaws and then the fun starts dealing with your co-sponsors and developer complaining about any inaccuracy in the spec, delay in delivery and what actually constitutes fulfillment. And you don't have any budget or power to approve change orders. Worst case you have a lawyer on your ass because the developer is fed up and wants to get paid.
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically. We have aircraft now. Passenger rail is for short-distance commuting, and it's barely cost effective at that.
Aircraft can't bring you city center to city center. If you add up travel to and from the airport the break-even is usually 3-3.5 hours. The question is whether there's many enough passengers to justify it, laying down rail costs almost the same no matter how many travel. Airplanes are much closer tied to number of flights = cost of delivering service.
The language you use to describe the problem is hurting your ability to solve the problem. You could as much call it crony socialism and be describing exactly the same thing, but the solutions that would get proposed would look somewhat different (and would invariably fail to eliminate the crony component, which is the actual loathsome bit.)
Well crony just means "a close friend especially of long standing" so basically you could use that to describe all forms of "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" relationships. If people with an Ivy League degree only hire people with other Ivy League degrees it's a form of cronyism. Crony socialism would be "some animals are more equal than others". However "crony capitalism" as a combined term has been refined past "cronyism in capitalism" like an old boys club of rich white men sitting on each other's boards to a rather specific term for capitalists who influence and manipulate the political system to create unfair business conditions towards their customers, competitors and employees.
Basically it's a 21st century word for the collusion between business and government, without the authoritarian government of fascism. You do as our lobby group wants, we make lots of money and give you a fat campaign contribution and you get to blast the public with PR campaigns and be/stay in office. Win-win for both of them. I don't think you can do away with the intersection between business and government, for example I don't expect the Greens and the shale oil industry to agree any day soon. The question is more what are legitimate and illegitimate ways for them to interact. A trade association is legal. A cartel is not. What makes one different from the other? The exact nature of the interaction.
A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility.
They had a contract with a third party to supply parts built to certain specifications, they were supposed to do the testing. I really doubt they had any acceptable failure rate in that contract, like you might have with consumer toys. SpaceX had to backtrack and say "if you want it done right, do it yourself" but it's really contrary to what they want because that's the way you end up with massive vertically integrated behemoths and NASA-certified screwdrivers that costs 100x what a normal screwdriver costs.
From whom does one ask permission to go to the moon? And who authorises that authority to grant it? And what would be the punishment if one went to the moon without permission?
If you can drag the whole launch platform into international waters, nobody I think. It's not the going to the moon that's regulated, it's launching to get there. The outer space treaty says that nobody lays claim to own the moon, so there's no such thing as trespass. I'd think most other things would follow the "flag rules", if you're on a US ship in international waters US laws apply aboard the ship. What would happen if you went there, declared the treaty invalid and your independence as a free nation is anyone's guess. Most likely they'd just ignore you and if you tried to attack any "invaders" they'd kill you in self defense.
Vista flopped because the PC manufacturers didn't believe Microsoft on the release date so they dragged their asses in the development of Windows drivers for the new driver model. Then when Vista was released, manufacturers were caught with their pants down. People upgrading to Vista ended up with blue-screens or just couldn't get their hardware to work. Of course, everyone blamed Microsoft.
Well it didn't help that Vista ran like a dog on low end machines. WinXP required 64MB RAM, Vista upped that to 1GB - that's 16x as high in a little over five years - and even that was terrible. I helped a friend who bought a mahcine like that with Vista pre-installed, it was simply painful. I helped him install XP and that worked so much better, since we weren't bumping into the 4GB limit anyway there was no major downsides. While they didn't officially lower the requirement again for Win7, it's generally recognized that Microsoft put Vista on a diet. Three years later not only was more memory common, it actually ran far better on far less.
Other annoying features was an overly aggressive Superfetch, causing disk churn and annoying lacks in responsiveness. And while UAC might be a good thing, it was very noisy to begin with and lots of software triggered UAC prompts more often than they should or even when they didn't need to. For users that already trusted the software they ran under XP it was easy to see the annoyance and hard to see the immediate benefit. It was a whole host of issues that made Vista a giant flop.
Here is how to do it: When trenching the streets, install a wide (12" or more) PUBLICLY OWNED conduit pipe. Then allow any bonded provider to run cable or fiber through that pipe for a small standard fee. Since 99% of the cost of providing service is the trenching, this will make the market far more competitive.
Why bother? Copper and coax are quite clearly inferior solutions for new deployment and laying down a 12" pipe would be a huge cost, just lay down a fiber to the nearest central and let companies compete for what boxes they want to put on the ends. Put out a bid with a reasonable residential SLA for line maintenance, make sure the penalties are sufficient for good service.
It might be a stupid story, but not for the reasons you point out, if you look at the world GDP trend and current distribution it's clear that we're converging. The 1970s when there was a grand canyon between the extremely rich "first world" and the extremely poor "third world" isn't coming back. For sure, right now that machine might fall in the gap where it's worthwhile in the US and not worth it in India. But it's a factor of 10:1 in GDP today and getting less, India's GDP grows by 5-9% and the US by 2-4% per year. Sure there's still expensive and cheap labor, but that they will work for next to nothing is becoming a thing of the past.
And to be honest, one order of magnitude is not much when you talk about automation. Cheaper CPU/GPU/RAM, better/cheaper sensors, downpaid software, mature design and economics of scale often means that if version one works for the US, version two will operate at double the speed at half the purchase/maintenance cost and the whole first world will buy. And when version three rolls around doubling speed and halving cost again even India is in trouble. I think you're either stuck before version one where it's not practically feasible at all or it'll zip past and become something computers/robots do instead of people.
Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
Yeah, we could have done that... but some stupid git invented 64 bit computers and now we're doomed I say... DOOOOMED!
... that has worked on hundred of industrial robots, I have never seen one without an "emergency stop" button. (or even multiple ones)
Which were all in controlled environments to begin with I guess. When they start making autonomous drones, do you think they'll let any joker with an antenna tell it that it's malfunctioning and needs to shut down? It's the robot equivalent of handing out free roofies to everyone, it's probably not a very good idea.
So what exactly did they do with the $34 million dollars? That seems like a substantial amount of funding just to ship a first round of a basic electronics product.
Well first of all it said $34 million worth of preorders, doesn't mean they made a full deposit like say for the Tesla Model 3 there's a $1000 depoit for a $35000 car. And even so it's not a Kickstarter, they're not supposed to use this for R&D and say whoops sorry, we used up the money but it didn't work out. They probably took preorders to gauge interest and get investors, for whatever reason it didn't work out - that they couldn't get funding is a red herring, if you got a product and customer ready with a healthy profit margin there's always someone willing. What's more likely is that it was a huge startup cost and risk of losing big nobody wanted to pay. Or that they couldn't deliver the features they promised at the price point they promised.
But they knew this was the job, right? Why would you take a job and then keep working a job that you can't stomach?
Because it would be very bad for evolution if the brain became dysfunctional whenever you experienced something traumatic. It has a range of self-defense mechanisms from immediate responses like adrenaline and emotional shutdown to permanently repressed memories and even split personalities and everything in between. We're able to force ourselves to do things way past the point we get emotionally scarred by it, we bottle it up sometime swithout really realizing it until it bursts.
It's even in the little things, some years back I was on a diet and it was a lot of broccoli as stomach filler to keep me from munching on everything else. I was tired of broccoli, but I was also tired of being fat. So I kept eating broccoli until it hit some kind of tilt, after that I just couldn't stand the taste of it for a few years. Even the smell of it was just revolting to me. I'm guessing it was the job they had, money they needed and thought they just had to grow a thicker hide. So they pushed themselves to do it but instead of becoming immune they hit some kind of tilt, except theirs is a bit worse than mine.
Lots of people experience that looking back in retrospect, how could put up with that kind of abuse or neglect or living like that, well mostly because biology encourages us to look past the negatives. Doesn't matter if you're a sex slave trapped in Fritzl's basement for years, you don't end it. You endure. Maybe it's a long, miserable and apparently hopeless fight but people who go through hell might come out on the other side, reproduce and carry on the genes. Those who figure this shit isn't worth living for don't. It's a morbid rationality to it.
I'm guessing the idea is that this will be much quicker, like if you haven't touched the mouse or keyboard for like 10-60 seconds the camera will check if you're still sitting in front of it and if not lock the machine. I think this is a business winner, so many times I've seen laptops with aggressive screen savers being used in a meeting by someone presenting and it locks because the presenter was talking or taking questions or holding a discussion and not navigating. This way the machine could check yep he's still there, let's NOT lock the machine.
also, don't go buy the hype.
Well, for the most part you can't actually buy the hype it's all pre-release, post-release benchmarks and reviews dominate. I'm not sure what the point of it is really, maybe it'll make a few people hang on to their old gear a tiny bit longer ahead of the release but I doubt it. I mean Apple newer showed previews of future products and I'd call them moderately successful. I guess it's more to please investors and creditors than customers, things are not so hot right now but right around the corner is the pot of gold. The problem is you often end up with a light Osborne effect, most people don't want the product you have now on the shelf they want the next one. And when that's for sale, they want the next one after that. That's not very good if you want to actually make sales.
The test was good. It was Safari that had the flaw. Thanks to the Consumer Reports test it was revealed so it can be fixed. As for actual user, you do know that Macs are popular among web designers?
The test was accurate for the conditions it was tested under. The test was not representative of ordinary use. The former you can blame Apple for. The latter you can blame Consumer Reports for. I mean, you can either assume that Apple hasn't run battery tests on production models or you can assume that you're triggering some kind of abnormal behavior, even though it's not obvious why. It could be faulty hardware, disk corruption, odd settings, flaw in the script, anything really. Wouldn't the sane, normal action be to contact Apple and say we're getting really strange and poor battery life results here, is this normal? And then suspend the review process pending further investigation.
Instead they took the public road and said "nope, not giving it our recommendation battery life is all over the place". They got up on their high horse and said there's nothing wrong with our tests or how we're testing, we're done here. I'm sure they were hoping this would be a huge scoop for them, they certainly got a lot of PR. But at least for me in the end they've come across a bit like crying wolf or at the very least making a mountain out of a mole hill. On the bright say it proves they actually do testing and not just look over the press release and "review" it by bragging about how great it is.
and believe we should all be able to either choose CPUs that lack them, or disable them entirely (motherboard jumper anyone?) as we wish.
If anyone can enable it via malware, they've already totally rooted your PC. If there is a secret NSA knock from the outside, it'll just ignore the jumper. Even if you buy one of the CPUs that lack this feature, you don't really know if Intel has fused it off. If they reuse design blocks it's quite possible entire product lines that don't offer that functionality have it anyway. If you're that paranoid maybe the easiest is a to use a third party NIC? Install a hardware firewall to monitor your connection? Personally I think a hack like that would be way too valuable a secret to risk exposing by going after consumers. There's probably a ton of military, big industry and infrastructure servers that run Intel and full, virtually undiscoverable backdoor access to that would be an espionage gold mine.