Too right. Someone in management signed off on this plan.
So did the engineers that implemented said plan. There is no way the engineers involved are not equally guilty as any management who ordered this fraud. Just because the mastermind orders the bank heist doesn't mean the guys who carry it out aren't just as guilty. This was a fraud and any engineer involved damn well knew that what they were doing was both illegal and unethical.
GPU's (and their drivers) have often been written to specifically perform well on the benchmark tests. ISP's and mobile carriers have structured their bandwidth to perform better in 'speed test' situations then they do under normal usage.
All of which are examples of fraud and which should result in lawsuits if not criminal charges.
The way it's always been explained to me is that a corporation has no responsibility other than to the share-holders.
They also have a responsibility to follow the law. Their fiduciary duty does not extend to the point where breaking the law is acceptable.
When you're the specific programmer/engineer that is told, 'make the system lie' do you do it, or do you resign?
If you have an sort of ethical backbone then yes you resign. Personally I would consider gathering evidence to become a whistleblower.
The engineers who did this were equally lacking in ethics as any management involved. This was a deliberate fraud and there is no way they did not know this was wrong and illegal and harmful. Any engineer who went along with this is every bit as guilty. The engineers assisted in the commission of a what they had to know was a crime. "Just following orders" is not an acceptable defense and the Germans better than anyone ought to know that.
The engineers did the dirty deed. It wasn't ONLY an engineering decision but the engineers do not escape culpability here. Management cannot make this happen without the cooperation of engineering. I don't doubt for a moment that this was ordered by an executive somewhere but "just following orders" isn't a valid defense. The Germans of all people ought to know that by now.
Someone in a suit decided it would be more profitable to hide non-compliance, rather than spend the resourcing fixing the problem *with* proper engineering.
And someone with a pocket protector decided it was ok if they committed fraud. There will be plenty of people with their hand in this cookie jar. The real question will be how high up the food chain this reaches.
Kia and Hyundai have both been in the US for less then 4 decades, just off the top of my head.
They've been in the US for less time but they've been making vehicles for longer than that. There have been plenty of attempts at new car companies in the last 40 years but they rarely last or they are tiny niche manufacturers. Not to say it couldn't be done but it's a VERY hard industry to break into at any sort of scale. Huge capital requirements, huge engineering requirements, immense logistics and supply chains, etc. Very challenging.
I look around the office at the POS Windows laptops that people have and I say no, that's not so.
Boy that's some compelling logic you have there... Really refutes the fact that the hardware inside an Apple Macintosh is literally identical to the stuff sold in PCs. Same processor, same RAM, same chipsets, same hard drives. Wow they have a barely different BIOS and put it in a fancy case. How marvelously different...
The ONLY thing that really is different in a Mac or an iPhone is the software.
Then what you say is worth about as much as what Bob Lutz said.
And a hearty screw you to you as well. If you think people that work in the auto industry are idiots then why don't we see you showing us how brilliant you are? Come on smart guy, show us how it's done since you know so much more than the rest of us.
If you're in the industry, you see how things are currently done, and you come to believe that's the way it must be done. And that's the point when a newcomer rolls right over you.
I've been in lots of industries. I just happen to be in the auto industry because the company I run has customers that are auto companies but I deal in medical, industrial, aviation and others beside. But thanks for ignorantly painting me with a broad brush despite knowing nothing about me. The auto industry has seen plenty of newcomers over the years and they have almost all failed. The few newcomers that are still alive are small companies in tiny industry niches. While I hope Tesla really shakes things up, if you think the big auto makers aren't watching them closely you are deluded. GM could make a car very similar to the Tesla very quickly if they think there is a business case for it. Same with Toyota or Ford or VW or any other big maker. They've got huge resources, enormous engineering staffs, and global footprints. They're not stupid - they know that electric vehicles aren't profitable yet and that there are technology issues to work out first. You think it would be hard to make a Chevy Volt electric only?
He said a lot of things in his time, but I don't recall that one.
Here you go straight from the horses mouth. Apple is a software company according to Steve Jobs and I think he is 100% correct. Their hardware is nice but not really much different than their competitors. It's so commoditized in fact that they have someone else make it for them. What Apple does do in house is their software. You can put Windows on a Macintosh and it would be nearly indistinguishable from a Dell if you can't see the badge. You can put Android on an iPhone and it wouldn't be much different than any other Android phone. What makes Apple products unique and what people pay a premium for is the software.
Right, and that's also also an option here. You can get Chinese car manufacturers to manufacture a car just as you can get Chinese electronic manufacturers to manufacture a phone.
No it isn't a viable option. There isn't enough margin in cars to outsource the manufacturing, not even in luxury cars. I'm in the auto industry myself and I'm both an industrial engineer and an accountant. The economics of it do not work. Even the most profitable manufacturers (Toyota and Porsche currently) eek out about a 10% net profit margin in a good year and that is with huge volume and they aren't sharing their manufacturing with anyone for the most part aside from a couple of minor joint ventures.
Which is idiotic. With no disrespect to the company Tesla there is NO way they are worth anywhere close to an amount that could possibly justify that market cap. That is just idiot speculators who have bid up the price of the company well beyond any sane valuation. No company selling 60K vehicles a year without profits is worth even close to a company that sells over 2 million vehicles a year and makes profits in the billions. GM's market cap is reasonable. Anyone buying Tesla's stock at current prices is weapons grade stupid.
By what metric are they "losing" this competition?
Profits. All the competitors to the Model S are profitable whereas the Model S is basically break even at best. This is largely because the other companies are much larger and can break their overhead and fixed costs over many more units. Unless Tesla can bring more products to market successfully then they will eventually fold the company. The Model S is a great product but it won't be enough to "win" by itself. Outselling your competitors by selling at a loss is NOT a winning strategy.
Any existing car company would really benefit from an Apple buy-out.
Maybe but Apple wouldn't. Apple is a victim of their own success here. They have 25% profit margins and even the most profitable auto makers earn at best 10% in good times. Furthermore running a big auto company with a completely different culture in an industry Apple has no experience in would be a HUGE distraction to say the least. Apple is basically a software company. (Those are Steve Jobs' words, not mine) They almost completely outsource their manufacturing. Now suddenly they are going all in on heavy manufacturing by buying a huge company with a completely different culture and far worse finances?
Apple could do it but I can't see how it would be a good idea for them.
They should just buy Tesla. Instant start, applefy the fuck out of it.
Tesla's market cap makes that idea really dumb. Right now Tesla's stock is WAAAAYYY overvalued. Apple could buy them but they'd likely never earn their money back. If Tesla's market cap takes a dip I guess I could see it happening but right now it would be idiotic for anyone to try to buy Tesla - Apple or otherwise. Tesla's market cap (around $35B) is almost that of GM (around $45B) and there is NO way Tesla is legitimately worth anywhere close to that. Apple could buy their choice of either GM or Ford and they could do it with cash. They won't (because that would be dumb too) but they could.
One of the big three would probably go under in 5 years.
Umm, no. While Bob Lutz is a dope and a blowhard, he's not entirely wrong. (just mostly) The existing big auto companies are very hard to displace and Apple isn't going to knock them out of the market any time soon. Apple has NO experience, expertise or advantage (aside from a big bankroll) in that industry. There is a reason there have been virtually no new car companies then last 4 decades. Tesla is the first in a long time that seems to have a prayer of breaking through and even it's future isn't secure and it's barely breaking even right now. Apple is basically a software and design company. They outsource their manufacturing almost entirely. You think they are going to suddenly be amazing at heavy manufacturing? You think their shareholders are going to be happy going from 25% profit margins down to *maybe* 5-10%?
They bought Dr Dre's shitty headphones?
And they are likely making a killing selling them. Might not be the best product ever but hard to argue they aren't making money.
But at what price point does exploration suddenly become a good idea? Would you wait forever?
It's not a price point but rather what social motivation would make it a viable idea? (It's always been a good idea) I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a pretty compelling argument that historically there have only been two drivers for this sort of large endeavor. First is an existential threat like war. The US went to the moon because of competition with the Soviet Union. If you are worried you are going to die that tends to open the purse strings of the treasury. If we saw a big asteroid coming for Earth I guarantee you that NASA would become the best funded organization on earth literally overnight. But since that hasn't happened (yet) our leaders attention is focused on more immediate concerns.
The second is economic gain. BUT pure exploration of the big expensive kind is almost NEVER done by private enterprise and realistically it cannot be done except by governments. You simply cannot make a business case for it. Uncertain economic returns, huge unquantifiable risks, and indeterminate time to payback makes for an impossible business case. Go ahead and try to get adequate funding without being able to specify the return, the risk or the time to payback. That will be the shortest meeting of your life. There might be a fortune in platinum to be mined in space but you simply cannot currently make an economically viable business case to go get it with any reasonably viable existing or near term technology. Once the exploration has happened and the frontier pushed back a bit THEN we start to see the businesses push things forward. But we aren't there yet.
We need to keep going at it but we probably need to accept that it is going to take a while. We're still trying to figure out how to get into space economically and how to build a self contained biosphere that can support humans safely away from Earth. We don't need to be happy about it and we absolutely should push our leaders on this but realistically it just isn't likely to happen quickly unless one of the two drivers above kicks in for some reason.
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns.
The returns were easily demonstrable once we knew of the existence of a new continent. Furthermore the technology for journeying there, exploring and generating an economic return already existed and was well proven (boats, horses, guns, farming, tools, etc) and in wide use. While journeying across the oceans was risky and expensive it wasn't even remotely close to as risky or expensive as space travel. All the technology we had prior to Columbus crossing the Atlantic worked without modification on both sides of the Ocean. Almost NONE of the technology we possess for traveling and mining and living on Earth or in low orbit is viable in deep space and in many cases not on other worlds either. We utterly lack the ability to make viable and self sustaining biospheres capable of supporting extended life in space. One day hopefully but not today.
I strongly advocate exploring the solar system and working towards human habitation away from Earth. But I'm also not blind to the reality of how lacking we are in our technology to facilitate such travel much less our ability to economically exploit resources away from Earth. The economics of asteroid mining or other similar such endeavors currently make zero sense unless you start invoking fictional technologies like space elevators and advanced autonomous mining robots that are well beyond our current level of technology. I sincerely hope we get there but it's almost certain to take longer than my remaining lifespan to even get rudimentary pieces in place even assuming we can collectively agree to spend the money to make it happen. We cannot currently even get into low earth orbit economically so we have a long (and exciting) journey ahead of us.
Which is why governments do stupid stuff like this they demonstrate they're clueless idiots who don't understand the technology
Sometimes they are clueless but more often I think they understand just fine. Their "ignorance" is willful. They could easily reach out to parties that can explain the technology and the arguments for and against but they clearly are not doing this. So I think it's malicious instead of ignorant or if it is ignorant it is SO ignorant that there is effectively not difference.
The police don't like encryption because it makes their job harder. They don't really care about the knock on effects. They only care about their ability to catch criminals and what politician wants to be against that? The politicians only care about staying in power. They don't really care about the knock on effects either so long as they don't affect their ability to stay in power. Easiest argument in the world for a politician to make is to be against criminals or terrorists. The collateral damage from their simplistic sound bite arguments gets brushed under the rug.
If this were to actually happen, it would certainly be abused - India's government is notoriously corrupt.
It wouldn't just be abused by the government. Backdoors cannot be restricted to just the groups you intend - i.e. just the "good guys". It's simply not possible. Governments find this fact to be highly inconvenient and keep trying to find some way to weasel around it. This is just one of the more blatant attempts at weaseling.
"I read the draft. I understand that the manner in which it is written can lead to misconceptions. I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded.".
Translation: "This was a blatant power grab and we got caught. I have asked for it to be reworded so that people won't notice the problem next time."
The advertiser is compensating you for your attention and bandwidth by purchasing content that you wish to view/read.
No they are not. We had no such agreement prior to my visiting the site. Ergo the owner of the site assumes all the risk in this relationship. If they don't want to display their content to me without me viewing their advertisements, then that is their prerogative but I want to know that up front. Since they did not negotiate directly with me then they take all the risk of me blocking their advertisers which I am 100% within my rights to do and I assure you that I am vigorous in blocking ads and trackers where I have the means.
In an non-advertising supported model, you would be required to pay something to get access to the content, in the advertising-supported model, this cost would be paid on your behalf by the advertisers.
This presumes both models have prior consent. I did not consent to being advertised to or tracked prior to visiting the website. Ergo the advertiser isn't paying anything on my behalf. The advertiser is paying the website operator in the hopes of getting me to view certain information as well as learn some information themselves. That is a risk they assume and is not my concern. I was at no time a part of this negotiation. If they want my cooperation then they can negotiate directly with me prior to visiting the website. They may not like the price I name for my attention and browsing habits but that's how the market should work.
If you have stuff to sell. Most websites are not about physical product pushing.
Not my problem. If they don't have a revenue stream besides ads I don't feel any sympathy whatsoever.
You need an incredible amount of infrastructure and support to be able to do something like that. Show me someone that will pay you for hosting advertising when they don't own the means of managing the analytics.
Again, not my problem. Either develop the technology, get a license to use it or stop bothering me. Their choice.
These companies bad business models are not something I'm concerned with. If they rely on obnoxious tracking advertisement which I can block then they have an idiotic business model and deserve to go out of business. If they want to negotiate with me to reimburse me directly for my time and attention and browsing habits then we can talk. I don't give that information away for free and certainly not without prior consent. It has a value and I intend to be the one to benefit from that value. Until such a day I will continue to block ads and trackers whenever possible and I won't lose a moment's sleep over it.
The problem I have is that no company has defined "well behaved ads" in a way that I agree with. For me, the #1 feature of a well behaved ad is that it does not track or otherwise spy on me. As near as I can tell, there's no such thing as a "well behaved" ad.
I'd add a bit to that. No tracking of any kind unless explicitly opt-in requested with informed consent and respects do-not-track requests. No sharing of user information with other organizations. Minimal bandwidth. No animation. No flash or similar technology. No malware or ware of any kind. No redirects unless explicitly selected by user. No pop up/under/over of any kind ever.
And you are right, I don't think there is an actual "well behaved" ad these days.
Adblocking would never have become a thing if they had stuck to image only banner ads and such and never introduced 'punch the monkey' type ads.
I find even most banner ads to be obnoxious. But punch-the-money ads are hardly the worst of it. Pop ups, pop overs, pop unders, oversized ads, redirects, etc are all obnoxious. They are using MY bandwidth that I pay for. But the worst of it is the tracking. They honestly think that they have some right to keep track of everything I do on the internet which is beyond creepy not to mention invasive.
This is not actually malicious, but an artifact of the rendering engines and the order in which they render things.
I don't believe it is unintentional for one second. Advertisers have every incentive to redirect you to their worthless app and we know without any doubt that many of them lack any moral compass when it comes to stunts like this.
Of course, it is possible that some designers are deliberately taking advantage of this.
Gee, you think?
This is quite likely a response to the many complaints of the delays before the page starts rendering by users and webmasters. On some things, you just can't win.
A much simpler explanation is that it is douche bag advertisers trying to make a buck.
Some people do not know the actual brand of their toaster. they call it "toaster" rather than the "Skynet 9000 turbo bread bronzer".
Toaster, hell. Ask my wife the brand of car we own. To her they are the silver pickup and the grey truck. This is a woman with a doctorate so I'm not insulting her intelligence - she's arguably smarter than I am. She just doesn't care about the differences. At all.
Folks here on slashdot might give a crap about the fine distinctions between an iPad and a Surface tablet. Lots more folks really don't care even a tiny bit. To them the differences are purely academic.
I think what he meant was that (price of 64GB - price of 16GB)/(cost of 64GB - cost of 16GB) = 20. Or if you prefer, that 48GB don't cost anywhere close to $100.
I understand that but my point is that it's just not a relevant consideration. Of course it doesn't cost $100 - Apple is trying to make a profit and that's fine. But it isn't just the cost of the material that matters. Adding a 32GB model adds cost, both in materials and in logistical, sales and production overhead. Exactly how much isn't important. What is important is whether the added cost of offering a 32GB model will result in additional marginal sales. Apple has almost certainly done the math and the number of extra sales they would realize by offering a 32GB model they believe to be less than the costs incurred. They have reason to believe that the number of customers who "need" a iPhone with more than 16GB but less than 32GB is too small to justify the added cost of offering a 32GB model. It's more cost effective to just offer a 64GB model right now and most customers aren't likely to care since a 64GB model will serve their needs just fine.
If we just cut everyone a check to replace social security, disability, food stamps, WIC, section whatever housing, welfare, unemployment, etc etc etc that would drastically reduce the size of the government.
Very doubtful that it would have a substantial impact on the size of the government. Probably would just shuffle things around a bit. And frankly the mere size of the government isn't really the important problem. There are well run governments that are larger percentages of their economies than the US government. Much of the size of our government is in things that have nothing to do with payouts like the ones you mentioned. The military, NASA, Dept of Education, Homeland Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Dept of State, etc would be completely unaffected. You might gain some efficiency if it worked (not a certainty) but it wouldn't drastically shrink the government.
No, THE problem is what is the government spending our money on and how are they getting that revenue. Right now we spend a ludicrous amount of money on an oversized military and we spend a similarly large amount of money on Medicare/Medicaid but we are unwilling to raise taxes to match the level of expenditures we demand. So we are borrowing huge sums and pushing the tax burden into the future where it will only get larger. THAT is the problem. The democrats don't want to cut benefits and the republicans don't want to raise taxes. Sooner or later that is going to bite us in the ass unless they figure out a compromise of some sort. So far we are in no danger of that happening.
(just wait until Medicare and Medicaid are replaced by "here's $100, buy your own damn insurance").
Won't happen because no rational insurance company wants to underwrite old people because there is no money in it. Old people consume by far the most medical care and routinely are not in a position to pay the full cost of their medical care. Hence we have to run it as a government program.
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Too right. Someone in management signed off on this plan.
So did the engineers that implemented said plan. There is no way the engineers involved are not equally guilty as any management who ordered this fraud. Just because the mastermind orders the bank heist doesn't mean the guys who carry it out aren't just as guilty. This was a fraud and any engineer involved damn well knew that what they were doing was both illegal and unethical.
GPU's (and their drivers) have often been written to specifically perform well on the benchmark tests.
ISP's and mobile carriers have structured their bandwidth to perform better in 'speed test' situations then they do under normal usage.
All of which are examples of fraud and which should result in lawsuits if not criminal charges.
The way it's always been explained to me is that a corporation has no responsibility other than to the share-holders.
They also have a responsibility to follow the law. Their fiduciary duty does not extend to the point where breaking the law is acceptable.
When you're the specific programmer/engineer that is told, 'make the system lie' do you do it, or do you resign?
If you have an sort of ethical backbone then yes you resign. Personally I would consider gathering evidence to become a whistleblower.
The basic problem is a lack of management ethics.
The engineers who did this were equally lacking in ethics as any management involved. This was a deliberate fraud and there is no way they did not know this was wrong and illegal and harmful. Any engineer who went along with this is every bit as guilty. The engineers assisted in the commission of a what they had to know was a crime. "Just following orders" is not an acceptable defense and the Germans better than anyone ought to know that.
Gaming a test is not unethical.
This is almost the very definition of fraud. I wonder who raised you if you think fraud is in any way ethical.
Tests were made to be gamed, rules were made to be broken.
This isn't some child's game where nobody gets hurt. You seem to have a profoundly broken moral compass if you think this was in any way justifiable.
The ethical question is: If you found this kind of clever hack, would you tell?
Yes I would. What they did offends me on a variety of levels. They profited through a deliberate deception and realized unlawful gains.
This was a financial decision, pure and simple.
The engineers did the dirty deed. It wasn't ONLY an engineering decision but the engineers do not escape culpability here. Management cannot make this happen without the cooperation of engineering. I don't doubt for a moment that this was ordered by an executive somewhere but "just following orders" isn't a valid defense. The Germans of all people ought to know that by now.
Someone in a suit decided it would be more profitable to hide non-compliance, rather than spend the resourcing fixing the problem *with* proper engineering.
And someone with a pocket protector decided it was ok if they committed fraud. There will be plenty of people with their hand in this cookie jar. The real question will be how high up the food chain this reaches.
Kia and Hyundai have both been in the US for less then 4 decades, just off the top of my head.
They've been in the US for less time but they've been making vehicles for longer than that. There have been plenty of attempts at new car companies in the last 40 years but they rarely last or they are tiny niche manufacturers. Not to say it couldn't be done but it's a VERY hard industry to break into at any sort of scale. Huge capital requirements, huge engineering requirements, immense logistics and supply chains, etc. Very challenging.
I look around the office at the POS Windows laptops that people have and I say no, that's not so.
Boy that's some compelling logic you have there... Really refutes the fact that the hardware inside an Apple Macintosh is literally identical to the stuff sold in PCs. Same processor, same RAM, same chipsets, same hard drives. Wow they have a barely different BIOS and put it in a fancy case. How marvelously different...
The ONLY thing that really is different in a Mac or an iPhone is the software.
Then what you say is worth about as much as what Bob Lutz said.
And a hearty screw you to you as well. If you think people that work in the auto industry are idiots then why don't we see you showing us how brilliant you are? Come on smart guy, show us how it's done since you know so much more than the rest of us.
If you're in the industry, you see how things are currently done, and you come to believe that's the way it must be done. And that's the point when a newcomer rolls right over you.
I've been in lots of industries. I just happen to be in the auto industry because the company I run has customers that are auto companies but I deal in medical, industrial, aviation and others beside. But thanks for ignorantly painting me with a broad brush despite knowing nothing about me. The auto industry has seen plenty of newcomers over the years and they have almost all failed. The few newcomers that are still alive are small companies in tiny industry niches. While I hope Tesla really shakes things up, if you think the big auto makers aren't watching them closely you are deluded. GM could make a car very similar to the Tesla very quickly if they think there is a business case for it. Same with Toyota or Ford or VW or any other big maker. They've got huge resources, enormous engineering staffs, and global footprints. They're not stupid - they know that electric vehicles aren't profitable yet and that there are technology issues to work out first. You think it would be hard to make a Chevy Volt electric only?
He said a lot of things in his time, but I don't recall that one.
Here you go straight from the horses mouth. Apple is a software company according to Steve Jobs and I think he is 100% correct. Their hardware is nice but not really much different than their competitors. It's so commoditized in fact that they have someone else make it for them. What Apple does do in house is their software. You can put Windows on a Macintosh and it would be nearly indistinguishable from a Dell if you can't see the badge. You can put Android on an iPhone and it wouldn't be much different than any other Android phone. What makes Apple products unique and what people pay a premium for is the software.
Right, and that's also also an option here. You can get Chinese car manufacturers to manufacture a car just as you can get Chinese electronic manufacturers to manufacture a phone.
No it isn't a viable option. There isn't enough margin in cars to outsource the manufacturing, not even in luxury cars. I'm in the auto industry myself and I'm both an industrial engineer and an accountant. The economics of it do not work. Even the most profitable manufacturers (Toyota and Porsche currently) eek out about a 10% net profit margin in a good year and that is with huge volume and they aren't sharing their manufacturing with anyone for the most part aside from a couple of minor joint ventures.
Which is idiotic. With no disrespect to the company Tesla there is NO way they are worth anywhere close to an amount that could possibly justify that market cap. That is just idiot speculators who have bid up the price of the company well beyond any sane valuation. No company selling 60K vehicles a year without profits is worth even close to a company that sells over 2 million vehicles a year and makes profits in the billions. GM's market cap is reasonable. Anyone buying Tesla's stock at current prices is weapons grade stupid.
By what metric are they "losing" this competition?
Profits. All the competitors to the Model S are profitable whereas the Model S is basically break even at best. This is largely because the other companies are much larger and can break their overhead and fixed costs over many more units. Unless Tesla can bring more products to market successfully then they will eventually fold the company. The Model S is a great product but it won't be enough to "win" by itself. Outselling your competitors by selling at a loss is NOT a winning strategy.
Any existing car company would really benefit from an Apple buy-out.
Maybe but Apple wouldn't. Apple is a victim of their own success here. They have 25% profit margins and even the most profitable auto makers earn at best 10% in good times. Furthermore running a big auto company with a completely different culture in an industry Apple has no experience in would be a HUGE distraction to say the least. Apple is basically a software company. (Those are Steve Jobs' words, not mine) They almost completely outsource their manufacturing. Now suddenly they are going all in on heavy manufacturing by buying a huge company with a completely different culture and far worse finances?
Apple could do it but I can't see how it would be a good idea for them.
They should just buy Tesla. Instant start, applefy the fuck out of it.
Tesla's market cap makes that idea really dumb. Right now Tesla's stock is WAAAAYYY overvalued. Apple could buy them but they'd likely never earn their money back. If Tesla's market cap takes a dip I guess I could see it happening but right now it would be idiotic for anyone to try to buy Tesla - Apple or otherwise. Tesla's market cap (around $35B) is almost that of GM (around $45B) and there is NO way Tesla is legitimately worth anywhere close to that. Apple could buy their choice of either GM or Ford and they could do it with cash. They won't (because that would be dumb too) but they could.
One of the big three would probably go under in 5 years.
Umm, no. While Bob Lutz is a dope and a blowhard, he's not entirely wrong. (just mostly) The existing big auto companies are very hard to displace and Apple isn't going to knock them out of the market any time soon. Apple has NO experience, expertise or advantage (aside from a big bankroll) in that industry. There is a reason there have been virtually no new car companies then last 4 decades. Tesla is the first in a long time that seems to have a prayer of breaking through and even it's future isn't secure and it's barely breaking even right now. Apple is basically a software and design company. They outsource their manufacturing almost entirely. You think they are going to suddenly be amazing at heavy manufacturing? You think their shareholders are going to be happy going from 25% profit margins down to *maybe* 5-10%?
They bought Dr Dre's shitty headphones?
And they are likely making a killing selling them. Might not be the best product ever but hard to argue they aren't making money.
But at what price point does exploration suddenly become a good idea? Would you wait forever?
It's not a price point but rather what social motivation would make it a viable idea? (It's always been a good idea) I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a pretty compelling argument that historically there have only been two drivers for this sort of large endeavor. First is an existential threat like war. The US went to the moon because of competition with the Soviet Union. If you are worried you are going to die that tends to open the purse strings of the treasury. If we saw a big asteroid coming for Earth I guarantee you that NASA would become the best funded organization on earth literally overnight. But since that hasn't happened (yet) our leaders attention is focused on more immediate concerns.
The second is economic gain. BUT pure exploration of the big expensive kind is almost NEVER done by private enterprise and realistically it cannot be done except by governments. You simply cannot make a business case for it. Uncertain economic returns, huge unquantifiable risks, and indeterminate time to payback makes for an impossible business case. Go ahead and try to get adequate funding without being able to specify the return, the risk or the time to payback. That will be the shortest meeting of your life. There might be a fortune in platinum to be mined in space but you simply cannot currently make an economically viable business case to go get it with any reasonably viable existing or near term technology. Once the exploration has happened and the frontier pushed back a bit THEN we start to see the businesses push things forward. But we aren't there yet.
We need to keep going at it but we probably need to accept that it is going to take a while. We're still trying to figure out how to get into space economically and how to build a self contained biosphere that can support humans safely away from Earth. We don't need to be happy about it and we absolutely should push our leaders on this but realistically it just isn't likely to happen quickly unless one of the two drivers above kicks in for some reason.
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns.
The returns were easily demonstrable once we knew of the existence of a new continent. Furthermore the technology for journeying there, exploring and generating an economic return already existed and was well proven (boats, horses, guns, farming, tools, etc) and in wide use. While journeying across the oceans was risky and expensive it wasn't even remotely close to as risky or expensive as space travel. All the technology we had prior to Columbus crossing the Atlantic worked without modification on both sides of the Ocean. Almost NONE of the technology we possess for traveling and mining and living on Earth or in low orbit is viable in deep space and in many cases not on other worlds either. We utterly lack the ability to make viable and self sustaining biospheres capable of supporting extended life in space. One day hopefully but not today.
I strongly advocate exploring the solar system and working towards human habitation away from Earth. But I'm also not blind to the reality of how lacking we are in our technology to facilitate such travel much less our ability to economically exploit resources away from Earth. The economics of asteroid mining or other similar such endeavors currently make zero sense unless you start invoking fictional technologies like space elevators and advanced autonomous mining robots that are well beyond our current level of technology. I sincerely hope we get there but it's almost certain to take longer than my remaining lifespan to even get rudimentary pieces in place even assuming we can collectively agree to spend the money to make it happen. We cannot currently even get into low earth orbit economically so we have a long (and exciting) journey ahead of us.
Which is why governments do stupid stuff like this they demonstrate they're clueless idiots who don't understand the technology
Sometimes they are clueless but more often I think they understand just fine. Their "ignorance" is willful. They could easily reach out to parties that can explain the technology and the arguments for and against but they clearly are not doing this. So I think it's malicious instead of ignorant or if it is ignorant it is SO ignorant that there is effectively not difference.
The police don't like encryption because it makes their job harder. They don't really care about the knock on effects. They only care about their ability to catch criminals and what politician wants to be against that? The politicians only care about staying in power. They don't really care about the knock on effects either so long as they don't affect their ability to stay in power. Easiest argument in the world for a politician to make is to be against criminals or terrorists. The collateral damage from their simplistic sound bite arguments gets brushed under the rug.
If this were to actually happen, it would certainly be abused - India's government is notoriously corrupt.
It wouldn't just be abused by the government. Backdoors cannot be restricted to just the groups you intend - i.e. just the "good guys". It's simply not possible. Governments find this fact to be highly inconvenient and keep trying to find some way to weasel around it. This is just one of the more blatant attempts at weaseling.
"I read the draft. I understand that the manner in which it is written can lead to misconceptions. I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded." .
Translation: "This was a blatant power grab and we got caught. I have asked for it to be reworded so that people won't notice the problem next time."
The advertiser is compensating you for your attention and bandwidth by purchasing content that you wish to view/read.
No they are not. We had no such agreement prior to my visiting the site. Ergo the owner of the site assumes all the risk in this relationship. If they don't want to display their content to me without me viewing their advertisements, then that is their prerogative but I want to know that up front. Since they did not negotiate directly with me then they take all the risk of me blocking their advertisers which I am 100% within my rights to do and I assure you that I am vigorous in blocking ads and trackers where I have the means.
In an non-advertising supported model, you would be required to pay something to get access to the content, in the advertising-supported model, this cost would be paid on your behalf by the advertisers.
This presumes both models have prior consent. I did not consent to being advertised to or tracked prior to visiting the website. Ergo the advertiser isn't paying anything on my behalf. The advertiser is paying the website operator in the hopes of getting me to view certain information as well as learn some information themselves. That is a risk they assume and is not my concern. I was at no time a part of this negotiation. If they want my cooperation then they can negotiate directly with me prior to visiting the website. They may not like the price I name for my attention and browsing habits but that's how the market should work.
If you have stuff to sell. Most websites are not about physical product pushing.
Not my problem. If they don't have a revenue stream besides ads I don't feel any sympathy whatsoever.
You need an incredible amount of infrastructure and support to be able to do something like that. Show me someone that will pay you for hosting advertising when they don't own the means of managing the analytics.
Again, not my problem. Either develop the technology, get a license to use it or stop bothering me. Their choice.
These companies bad business models are not something I'm concerned with. If they rely on obnoxious tracking advertisement which I can block then they have an idiotic business model and deserve to go out of business. If they want to negotiate with me to reimburse me directly for my time and attention and browsing habits then we can talk. I don't give that information away for free and certainly not without prior consent. It has a value and I intend to be the one to benefit from that value. Until such a day I will continue to block ads and trackers whenever possible and I won't lose a moment's sleep over it.
The problem I have is that no company has defined "well behaved ads" in a way that I agree with. For me, the #1 feature of a well behaved ad is that it does not track or otherwise spy on me. As near as I can tell, there's no such thing as a "well behaved" ad.
I'd add a bit to that. No tracking of any kind unless explicitly opt-in requested with informed consent and respects do-not-track requests. No sharing of user information with other organizations. Minimal bandwidth. No animation. No flash or similar technology. No malware or ware of any kind. No redirects unless explicitly selected by user. No pop up/under/over of any kind ever.
And you are right, I don't think there is an actual "well behaved" ad these days.
Adblocking would never have become a thing if they had stuck to image only banner ads and such and never introduced 'punch the monkey' type ads.
I find even most banner ads to be obnoxious. But punch-the-money ads are hardly the worst of it. Pop ups, pop overs, pop unders, oversized ads, redirects, etc are all obnoxious. They are using MY bandwidth that I pay for. But the worst of it is the tracking. They honestly think that they have some right to keep track of everything I do on the internet which is beyond creepy not to mention invasive.
This is not actually malicious, but an artifact of the rendering engines and the order in which they render things.
I don't believe it is unintentional for one second. Advertisers have every incentive to redirect you to their worthless app and we know without any doubt that many of them lack any moral compass when it comes to stunts like this.
Of course, it is possible that some designers are deliberately taking advantage of this.
Gee, you think?
This is quite likely a response to the many complaints of the delays before the page starts rendering by users and webmasters. On some things, you just can't win.
A much simpler explanation is that it is douche bag advertisers trying to make a buck.
Some people do not know the actual brand of their toaster. they call it "toaster" rather than the "Skynet 9000 turbo bread bronzer".
Toaster, hell. Ask my wife the brand of car we own. To her they are the silver pickup and the grey truck. This is a woman with a doctorate so I'm not insulting her intelligence - she's arguably smarter than I am. She just doesn't care about the differences. At all.
Folks here on slashdot might give a crap about the fine distinctions between an iPad and a Surface tablet. Lots more folks really don't care even a tiny bit. To them the differences are purely academic.
I think what he meant was that (price of 64GB - price of 16GB)/(cost of 64GB - cost of 16GB) = 20. Or if you prefer, that 48GB don't cost anywhere close to $100.
I understand that but my point is that it's just not a relevant consideration. Of course it doesn't cost $100 - Apple is trying to make a profit and that's fine. But it isn't just the cost of the material that matters. Adding a 32GB model adds cost, both in materials and in logistical, sales and production overhead. Exactly how much isn't important. What is important is whether the added cost of offering a 32GB model will result in additional marginal sales. Apple has almost certainly done the math and the number of extra sales they would realize by offering a 32GB model they believe to be less than the costs incurred. They have reason to believe that the number of customers who "need" a iPhone with more than 16GB but less than 32GB is too small to justify the added cost of offering a 32GB model. It's more cost effective to just offer a 64GB model right now and most customers aren't likely to care since a 64GB model will serve their needs just fine.
If we just cut everyone a check to replace social security, disability, food stamps, WIC, section whatever housing, welfare, unemployment, etc etc etc that would drastically reduce the size of the government.
Very doubtful that it would have a substantial impact on the size of the government. Probably would just shuffle things around a bit. And frankly the mere size of the government isn't really the important problem. There are well run governments that are larger percentages of their economies than the US government. Much of the size of our government is in things that have nothing to do with payouts like the ones you mentioned. The military, NASA, Dept of Education, Homeland Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Dept of State, etc would be completely unaffected. You might gain some efficiency if it worked (not a certainty) but it wouldn't drastically shrink the government.
No, THE problem is what is the government spending our money on and how are they getting that revenue. Right now we spend a ludicrous amount of money on an oversized military and we spend a similarly large amount of money on Medicare/Medicaid but we are unwilling to raise taxes to match the level of expenditures we demand. So we are borrowing huge sums and pushing the tax burden into the future where it will only get larger. THAT is the problem. The democrats don't want to cut benefits and the republicans don't want to raise taxes. Sooner or later that is going to bite us in the ass unless they figure out a compromise of some sort. So far we are in no danger of that happening.
(just wait until Medicare and Medicaid are replaced by "here's $100, buy your own damn insurance").
Won't happen because no rational insurance company wants to underwrite old people because there is no money in it. Old people consume by far the most medical care and routinely are not in a position to pay the full cost of their medical care. Hence we have to run it as a government program.