6 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet. 4 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet.
Tablet's aren't useful for everyone. I don't own one for personal use though my company uses them rather heavily to good effect. There are lots of great uses for one but unfortunately the software to facilitate those use cases to date has often been rather lacking.
4 weeks ago I had a hard drive crash, 100% dead, no recovery possible, thank $diety for decent backups.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with tablets?
Tablet would not do half of what I need to do (half: web browsing and email. Other half: everything else).
Tablets are useful for a LOT more than just web browsing and email. If you think otherwise then you haven't really bothered to look at them seriously.
That said, the problem with Tablets is that the companies making them (Apple especially) are treating them as either supersized smartphones or as low performance laptops instead of treating them as their own unique category of device with special capabilities. The problem is mostly with the software. Tablets should be targeted primarily at replacing a pad of paper and pencil anywhere those are used. I don't need a smartphone with a 10 inch screen. I need a product I can take awesome notes and annotate documents as well as some of the things you use a laptop or smartphone for. My company uses them for a tooling/product database on our manufacturing floor. A smartphone or laptop wouldn't work nearly as well for this purpose. Tablets should be the go to device anywhere a large touch screen or a stylus would be useful and particularly for document editing and note taking. Laptops are awesome at documents where a keyboard and mouse are the best interface (email, word processing, spreadsheets, coding, etc) but not for stuff like equations, drawing, annotations, etc. Smartphones are great where portability and touch screens are paramount but the small screen and power limitations limit them for document creation or annotation. Tablets should be their own unique thing but companies like Apple have been taking the lazy path on the software for them and just treating them as some sort of half assed smartphone/laptop hybrid that doesn't do as well as either.
Military combat equipment doesn't need a safety margin. It's supposed to be unsafe.
It does if you want it actually do its job. I assure you that you want as much safety margin in your tank armor as possible. You want your rifle to still be able to shoot straight if it gets some dirt in it. You want your A10 to still be able to fly home after getting hit with some anti-aircraft fire. You want your engine to still operate in a dusty and super hot desert because you'll die if it fails on you. You want your submarine to be able to dive deeper than you hope to need it to dive. Safety margin in military hardware is vital. The problem is that unlike most other products, someone else is going to be actively trying to destroy your hardware and kill the operator in the process in the most aggressive manner imaginable which makes it pretty much the highest stress environment possible. The armor on the side of a battleship isn't half a meter thick because they think it looks stylish.
The stress for rockets comes from the fact that they are being asked to be reliable under tremendous force, heat, and pressure while being built as light as possible. That's a tough environment but nothing compares to war for being hard on equipment and people.
Hopefully medical equipment, especially life-support and implants, are made to very high standards.
Being made to high standards doesn't mean the product has to operate in a high physical stress environment. My company makes medical equipment and none of it is subjected to the sorts of forces and stresses you find in a rocket launch nor does it have the weight vs performance limitations. Furthermore most medical equipment doesn't have to deal with the tyranny of the rocket equation and the engineering limitations it imposes. Everything in a rocket has to be made as light as possible which causes some really tough engineering challenges - particularly because it necessarily means sacrificing safety margin and/or adding substantial cost in a lot of cases.
That's not a knock on medical equipment or the quality of it. Just observing that it doesn't have to function on the pointy end of a controlled explosion with minimal safety margin.
Umm, if it isn't humans then who exactly? Last I checked we have no evidence of aliens with an interest in dead probes near Ceres and my border collie isn't about to start a space program any time soon no matter how many treats I offer him.
Five hundred years ago, the fastest a human being had ever travelled was 25mph on a horse. A hundred years ago, early planes could reach 100mph. Fifty years ago, the Apollo missions travelled at 24,000 mph. In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.
You've been watching too many science fiction movies. Presuming you aren't trolling, I admire the optimism but it isn't going to go down like that. You are just extrapolating naively based on unrelated past events with cherry picked data. There is no evidence based reason to believe your hypothesis and considerable evidence to doubt it. Our progress in the last 50 years has been somewhere between mild incremental advancement and a regression in capabilities. The economics of space travel haven't improved much - basically only major nation states and a few mega corporations can afford to loft something into low earth orbit much less into deep space. Despite the efforts of SpaceX and others that isn't likely to see more than modest improvement in the next few decades. Dropping the cost of a launch from hundreds of millions to tens of millions still puts it well out of economic viability for most of the population.
My take is that it will be a few centuries before we can get more than a handful of people routinely off the surface of Earth.
Props for the abort system which apparently did its job flawlessly, but... it's a bit worrying that one bent pin on a sensor can do in the entire system.
You know there is a reason that "rocket science" is the standard analogy phrase used for a difficult endeavor. Rockets are chock full of seemingly mundane things that can result in disaster if they don't perform perfectly in extremely high stress conditions. Aside from maybe military combat equipment I can't think of any devices we make which experience tougher conditions with less safety margin.
My first computer only had 64k memory and my current one has 16GB. Cellphones used to be lugged around in cases, now they can fit on my wrist. People used to say humans can't fly. Therefore we will get the probe within 50 years.
Got any more irrelevant analogies to throw in there? How about the rate of internet adoption in third world countries or the rapid adoption of yoga pants? I have to assume you are trolling...
Pro tip. The rate of increase of memory in your computer has fuck-all to do with the problems of deep space travel.
Just because we've made fast progress in one field doesn't mean we are capable of making equivalently fast progress in a completely different endeavor. We've been doing space travel for about 60 years now and we haven't made more than incremental leaps in capabilities for 40 years. Most of the people reading this weren't even alive the last time we put a man on the moon.
It ran out of gas in the middle of no where. Eventually someone will retrieve it.... in about 50 years.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years which is FAR easier to get to. Thinking we're going to be back to Ceres to retrieve a dead probe within another 50 years seems extremely improbable. I know we're all excited about what SpaceX and the rest are doing but let's pump the brakes slightly shall we? Our progress in space isn't going that quickly. Nobody is going to fund a mission to retrieve this thing because there is no economic or scientific value in doing so. If we do send a craft capable of retrieving stuff there are FAR more interesting things to retrieve than a dead probe.
personally - I'd like them to offer a phone that is maybe a few mills thicker but has swap-able batteries.
It's not just you but I think there is a better option because some people like the thinner phones and that's just as valid a viewpoint. What I think they should do is make an interface that you can attach a battery case (or other equipment) so that people who want a bigger battery can have it without the bulky kludge of doing a pass through off the lightning/usb port. Think about it for a second. Virtually everyone puts their phone in a case anyway. Why not make it easy for the case to be the mechanism to add hardware features like a bigger battery or a better camera or a headphone jack? Then people can customize the hardware to suit their particular preferences and Apple (or other smartphone makers) don't have to compromise on the core product design. Win/win and it's fairly cheap to do.
I'm not sure what more people could want them to do on this subject.
What people want is for Apple to be up front and transparent about this sort of "feature". Apple basically hid the fact they were doing this from everyone despite strong suspicions that something like it was happening. This makes it look (true or not) like Apple was up to something shady and/or coersive. Their explanation of trying to save the battery isn't implausible but by hiding the fact they were doing it it looks strongly like they were degrading performance to force upgrade sales. Had Apple been transparent about it from day one it would have been a non-issue.
It wasn't JUST the breakup but there are a lot of things that would never have come to pass without it, including the internet as we know it today. There is almost no way the internet or the world wide web becomes what it is today if AT&T is still a monopoly.
It was the requiring them to let other companies use their lines. That's what changed things. They owned the wires to your house, so they could say "oh, you wanna use them? Then you have to lease a phone from us. You have to get your service from us. Etc. "
The local phone company STILL owns the line going to your house. That never changed. It's true even today. AT&T's monopoly on phones in the house was broken with the Carterfone legal decision back in 1968. That decision eventually let to a lawsuit from MCI which eventually let to the voluntary breakup of AT&T. Yes, that's right, AT&T broke itself up for reasons to complicated to enumerate here. It's really interesting to read about so I highly recommend studying the history.
The mistake the regulators made with the breakup was that our government didn't make rules preventing the companies providing the wires to your house from being more than "dumb pipes". The companies providing the lines to your house should have no control over what content goes over those lines. The whole net neutrality debate comes from this decision. The companies providing the content should have no control over the lines to your house. This keeps conflicts of interest detrimental to the consumer out of the market significantly. So the breakup wasn't the success it could have been but it's very clear that the net result of the breakup was a net good for us as consumers. We got cheaper long distance, the internet, unix, competitive ISPs, competitive phone equipment makers, and a lot more. Not perfect but a lot better than it probably would have been otherwise.
Split up Standard Oil in 1910--how well did that work out?
Pretty well. At it's peak Standard Oil controlled somewhere around 90% of all oil production and sales in the US and they were renowned for predatory business practices. You really think having one private company with that much control over our energy supply is a good idea?
Split up Ma Bell--happy with the result?
Short answer yes. The reason you have a lot of the choices you do is precisely because AT&T was broken up. You might not be old enough to remember what it was like prior to the breakup but I am. Prior to the breakup there was basically no competition in the long distance call market. Unix was in no small part a result of the breakup. AT&T wanted to get into the computer business and the breakup was the price they had to pay to do it. The breakup introduced a lot of competition and innovation that likely would never have happened without it. Could the AT&T breakup have been done better? You could make a case for that. But it almost certainly was a good thing overall.
Split it up and the parts will recombine in some other form but functionally equivalent.
Umm, no. The current AT&T has no where near the market power the company had prior to the breakup. I'm not sure you fully appreciate how powerful a monopoly AT&T was prior to the breakup.
Very recently it came to light that Alzheimers may be a viral or bacterial infection and the amyloid plaques actually are a defense mechanism.
That possibility is NOT a recent revelation. We have no evidence of a specific pathogen but that's been on the list of possible causes for a long time. More than a few types of cancer are caused by viruses and many other diseases we don't normally associate with viruses or bacteria. My wife is a pathologist and she's spoken about this very topic to me 20 years ago. It wouldn't at all be shocking if some or even all Alzheimer's turned out to be caused by a pathogen. We just don't have strong evidence currently to support that hypothesis though perhaps there has been some recent data that I'm not aware of. (obviously i'm not an expert)
THe thing is, and the clue to the other two cases,was asking why didn't those bad proteins get evolved away.
For there to be an evolutionary pressure it needs to have an effect on reproduction. Lot's of diseases don't affect anyone until after they have passed the age where they would spawn offspring so there is no direct mechanism to remove the proteins from the gene pool.
The render on Engadget shows a camera bump protruding beyond the case!
Yeah... Apple is a little too obsessed with making their designs thin even when it's not particularly helpful in the big picture. Thin is great all other things being equal but I think some of the tradeoffs they make for it aren't ideal. (battery life, camera quality, durability, etc) That said I'd be fine with it if they would get their head out of their hind end when it comes to accessory design, particularly cases and styluses. The keyboard option they provide is CLEARLY an afterthought. They designed the iPad and only afterwards thought about keyboard design. IMO they need to start thinking of the whole system as a single design. Make an interface for the cases (not just the lightning/usb port) that allows them to do interesting things without clumsy hacks. Integrate a holder for a stylus into the device or (prob better) case. Make a keyboard that isn't just a slap on afterthought. A few magnets for holding things doesn't qualify as serious attempts at integration.
While the Apple Pencil appears to be a better design, it still is flawed. Apple has a real problem with treating accessories as total after thoughts. Magnetic attachment to the side? That's fine I guess until I want to put it away or carry it or do anything besides gently put on on a desktop and not touch it. Knocking it off the edge will be stupid easy. Even worse if you want to carry it somewhere without worrying about it falling off. How about a design that won't fall off/out with the slightest provocation? The pencil should have a case or a slot in the device itself you can slide it into when not in use. Something that I can put into a bag without knocking the stylus $diety knows where.
For all their vaunted "design" expertise, Apple really sucks at designing accessories for real world use.
Automation is destroying those jobs. Manufacturing still happens in the US, but we'll lose most of the last manufacturing jobs anyway since automation is currently improving rapidly. It's already taken most of the manufacturing jobs, it will take most of the rest in short order.
In some cases that it true. In some cases it is not. People here tend to hugely misunderstand what automation can and cannot do and the costs involved. Manufacturing in the US is going to be a lot like farming in the sense that productivity is going to continue to increase but head counts will be an increasingly smaller percentage of the total workforce. This is NOT a bad thing. It just means that economic value will come from other sectors of the economy. A lot of manufacturing jobs are boring assembly jobs that are a huge waste of human capital. China will be doing these low skill jobs longer than the US because their labor costs less but eventually they will have the same problem if they want to increase their per-capita standard of living.
Sure, but we only need the best and the brightest. We don't need the masses of asses.
You don't get to pick and choose if you actually want the best and brightest. There is no way to know in advance who the best and brightest immigrants are. Not with any reliability. Good luck picking the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs (immigrant and child of immigrant) out of a crowd. You are playing a numbers game. You bring in a lot of immigrants in the (reasonable) hope that some of them will be above average performers. Children of poor and uneducated immigrants often do very well. Immigrants often are among our best performing entrepreneurs but you'll have no way to reliably know which ones they are in advance. Furthermore we still need LOTS of low skilled people to do important but low paying jobs. Our agriculture industry is a world leader but a critical factor in that is having access to abundant low skilled labor. Putting up fences (literal or figurative) to immigrants will just make it that much harder to compete with China in the long run. We're 5% of the global population but something around 15-20% of global GDP. China has 20% of the global population and is catching up fast on GDP. If we don't bring in as much talent as we can get our hands on (no matter where it was born) the results of that competition are a predictable as a sunrise tomorrow. (spoilers: we lose without those "masses of asses")
Consequently, these immigration policies won't much affect America's performance.
You could not be more wrong. Our immigration policies will have a HUGE impact on America's performance in the future.
You need manufacturing to have a strong economy because you need lots of workers all working together in the same place with the same interests. In other words, Unions. What made the US middle class grow was Unions fought (and died) to pry money out of the hands of the working class. You can't do that at a WalMart, there's just not enough of a concentration. Also, the ruling class got this Union busting down pat.
You have the story wrong. The US HAS manufacturing. It never left despite what you might hear from the uninformed. The US manufacturing sector is over $3 TRILLION annually which puts us neck and neck with China for the largest manufacturing sector in the world. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be one the fifth largest economy in the world - larger than the UK and just behind Germany.
What has changed since WWII is our cost of labor and the rest of the world rebuilt. US labor today is among the most expensive in the world. As a result US manufacturing HAS to focus on capital intensive products instead of labor intensive ones. It is literally impossible for US companies to compete on labor prices. 70 years ago US labor costs were a lot closer to the global mean AND the rest of the world was recovering from WWII. Now China has a LOT of labor and simple supply and demand means that having a lot of something means it will cost less and so their labor costs less than ours because they have an abundance of it. QED products that are sensitive to manufacturing cost of labor will inevitably migrate to locations with lower labor costs. Products not so sensitive to labor costs will go to places with low capital costs. The US has the lowest cost of capital in the world currently so we get the capital intensive products instead of the labor intensive ones. In plain english we make cars and airplanes and don't make Happy Meal toys and the cheap crap you buy in Walmart.
As for unions, basically unions were TOO successful. They priced themselves out of the market for labor intensive manufacturing in a global market. And for capital intensive manufacturing there isn't as much need for unions because the pay rates are much higher and there is a lot of automation. As a result when politicians promise to bring back manufacturing jobs they are literally promising the impossible. The only way the US will get back labor intensive manufacturing on a large scale is for the cost of US labor to fall back towards the global mean. This means paying US workers MUCH less then they currently demand. Otherwise the only alternative is to automate the work which is what capital intensive manufacturing does. So pick your poison - much lower paying jobs OR automation.
Ironically when people argue against immigration in our country, they are arguing against the only thing that will allow our demographics to compete with China and India. China has 4 people for every 1 in the US and a lot of those people are very smart and hard working. Without immigrants (both skilled and unskilled), the US will eventually lose that fight just from sheer numbers. China has more labor that costs less AND a lot of very smart high end labor too. Doesn't mean the US will become some backwater but without welcoming the best and brightest into our country with open arms we don't have a prayer of keeping up in the long run.
We've known for decades that organophosphates are very dangerous. This is why they developed neonicotinoids that are much safer.
There is evidence that neonicotinoids hurt pollinators. Just because a few drops applied directly to a person don't result in a trip to the morgue doesn't mean they are "safer". Sometimes the indirect consequences are worse than the direct ones. No pollinators = no food and last I checked famine was pretty dangerous to humans.
Seriously though, just because we all grew up riding around in the back of a pickup truck doesn't mean it was safe.
Doesn't mean it needs to be banned, either.
So you are arguing in effect that people shouldn't be required to wear seat belts either? Because that's the same argument. Sometimes we need to ban behaviors that are needlessly dangerous because sometimes people don't know better and/or are bad at evaluating risk. A certain percentage of them are going to die unnecessarily and that measurably affects the rest of society in tangible ways. When others have to pay for first responders to scrape you off the highway because you wanted to do something idiotic then we get a vote on whether we permit that behavior. Obviously we can't stop someone from doing something stupid/dangerous if they are determined but we can deter some people and save some lives in the process. There is nothing physically preventing a 12 year old from getting the keys to a car and driving it but we deter them from trying by having consequences for doing so because in most cases it would be needlessly dangerous.
The question is whether these chemicals are sufficiently dangerous and costly (negative health effects, environmental cost, etc) to justify banning them. Sometimes we have to do something dangerous because the alternatives outcomes are worse or because we have limited alternative options. I'm no expert but I strongly suspect we have alternative options here and are capable of developing more. So if these chemicals are dangerous (and they evidently are) and we have viable alternatives then we're kind of idiots if we don't ban them for use cases where we don't need them.
Nice try, but no. "Tesla is still losing money" might mean what you describe.
I'm among other things a certified accountant and my specialty is corporate cost accounting in manufacturing. There is no "might" qualifier here. I described exactly what is happening with Tesla from a big picture perspective. It's nothing unusual. My company has exactly the same situation of every product we sell albeit on a much smaller scale. The company you work for does too.
But "on each car they sell" is clearly referring to the per-car production cost versus the per-car price.
Per car production costs are not a fixed number and it's a mistake to think they are. You cannot simply take the cost of the labor for the guys on the assembly line and the cost of the materials as the "per-car price" (the gross margin) and call it a day. If it were that easy there would be no need for accountants. Even if we ignore the cost of building the assembly line for the sake of argument (and we shouldn't), there are lots of day to day expenses that directly affect the cost of the product but cannot be easily or tidily allocated directly to the product. Any number you see for per-unit costs is an estimate with an army of assumptions underlying that number. It might be a pretty good and useful estimate but it's an estimate all the same. There is a saying among accountants that it's better to be approximately correct than precisely wrong.
Let's use an example. Running an auto assembly plant requires a lot of water. Equipment needs cooling, people need to drink, toilets need flushing, etc. It's self evident that at least some of the water used is a direct cost of manufacturing but there is a problem. There is no tidy way to assign a fixed and unchanging number for the amount of water used to produce each car. Some of it is clearly used in production and you can allocate it across the number of vehicles produced but it's not a linear function. It is FAR too expensive to try to measure all water usage for every purpose. If you change the number of units produced the amount of water required doesn't change by a matching amount so the costs don't match neatly either. And worse any allocation algorithm you can come up with will almost certainly not accurately allocate the costs for any non-trivial case. And there are countless other costs that are either impractical or impossible to neatly allocate. How much of an engineers salary should be allocated to a given product or component if you aren't tracking their time to a ridiculously expensive degree?
If you have a clean and cost effective solution to this problem please publish it in a peer reviewed journal and collect your Nobel Prize in Economics. Seriously, it's that important and difficult of a problem.
By the way, there is no fact when things are badly defined.
The problem is NOT that things are badly defined. All these terms are very well defined despite a lot of people here on slashdot being uneducated as to their meaning. Seriously a shocking amount of effort goes into defining these terms. I'm not being critical - I didn't used to know their meaning either which is why I'm trying to educate here. No, the problem is that clear definitions of terms does not result in clean solutions to the problems. Go research fixed and variable costs. Learn about direct and indirect costs. Study Activity Based Costing. These are issues that real world accounts have to deal with every day and they are often very difficult and messy problems. The terms are well defined but the solutions are anything but tidy in a lot of cases for two primary reasons: 1) A shocking amount of accounting really comes down to opinion and there is no obvious way to change that. Stuff like defining when a sale occurs can be defined a variety of different ways and the best solution can vary from company to company or
So your take on it is that Apple should shut down all production immediately and cease operations because China has laws you don't approve of and that Apple has no power to change? Great plan...
I disagree completely with China's stance here but I don't think you can fault Apple for having to follow the laws of the country they're operating in.
Oh I can fault them for it. They made the choice to do business in China and they get to live with the consequences both good and bad. I understand that they are in a pickle since China could shut them down in a heartbeat if they didn't follow China's laws. But Apple put key parts of their supply chain voluntarily under Chinese authority and so they basically handed their spine to the Chinese government in the process. I get why Apple did what they did but they don't get off the hook ethically just because they painted themselves into a corner.
Not a lot of landlords are going to be interested in investing tons of money on home storage. However, lots of renters may be interested in an EV. (If they can figure out how to charge it.)
Once there are enough EVs out there it's just a business opportunity for landlords. Provide the charging stations next to where they park and have them pay some sort of markup to use them. Any landlord with a brain in their skull would be stupid not to make EV charging into a profit making opportunity.
And you add home power systems to your home once in a lifetime.
I don't think the business model here is going to be one time installs, especially since the cost of the solar panels and battery will be tens of thousands of dollars. Probably will be some sort of rental or lease arrangement kind of like how people finance their cars.
Though Stamos said he agreed with "almost everything" Cook said, in a series of tweets he called out Apple for blocking the ability to download VPN and encrypted messaging apps in China, which could provide ways to connect to the internet and send messages privately and without surveillance.
It's easy to take the moral high ground when you have nothing at stake. While ethically he probably has a valid point, Apple along with every other maker of electronics has a problem. Apple's products are mostly made in China and there aren't a lot of good alternative manufacturing options currently for the sorts of volumes and products Apple needs to make. China has a rather scary high percentage of market share in the electronics industry. It's rare to find a product that doesn't have significant China content in it. Therefore China's government has Apple by the balls if they don't cooperate with China's state surveillance policies.
Now this is to some degree a problem of Apple's own making and it doesn't excuse their behavior in cooperating with this sort of oppression. But we can understand why they do what they do even if we don't approve. Yes it makes them hypocrites to some degree but I'm not sure how much of a choice they realistically have right at this moment.
Slashdot Mirror
6 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet. 4 years ago didn't see the need for a tablet.
Tablet's aren't useful for everyone. I don't own one for personal use though my company uses them rather heavily to good effect. There are lots of great uses for one but unfortunately the software to facilitate those use cases to date has often been rather lacking.
4 weeks ago I had a hard drive crash, 100% dead, no recovery possible, thank $diety for decent backups.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with tablets?
Tablet would not do half of what I need to do (half: web browsing and email. Other half: everything else).
Tablets are useful for a LOT more than just web browsing and email. If you think otherwise then you haven't really bothered to look at them seriously.
That said, the problem with Tablets is that the companies making them (Apple especially) are treating them as either supersized smartphones or as low performance laptops instead of treating them as their own unique category of device with special capabilities. The problem is mostly with the software. Tablets should be targeted primarily at replacing a pad of paper and pencil anywhere those are used. I don't need a smartphone with a 10 inch screen. I need a product I can take awesome notes and annotate documents as well as some of the things you use a laptop or smartphone for. My company uses them for a tooling/product database on our manufacturing floor. A smartphone or laptop wouldn't work nearly as well for this purpose. Tablets should be the go to device anywhere a large touch screen or a stylus would be useful and particularly for document editing and note taking. Laptops are awesome at documents where a keyboard and mouse are the best interface (email, word processing, spreadsheets, coding, etc) but not for stuff like equations, drawing, annotations, etc. Smartphones are great where portability and touch screens are paramount but the small screen and power limitations limit them for document creation or annotation. Tablets should be their own unique thing but companies like Apple have been taking the lazy path on the software for them and just treating them as some sort of half assed smartphone/laptop hybrid that doesn't do as well as either.
Military combat equipment doesn't need a safety margin. It's supposed to be unsafe.
It does if you want it actually do its job. I assure you that you want as much safety margin in your tank armor as possible. You want your rifle to still be able to shoot straight if it gets some dirt in it. You want your A10 to still be able to fly home after getting hit with some anti-aircraft fire. You want your engine to still operate in a dusty and super hot desert because you'll die if it fails on you. You want your submarine to be able to dive deeper than you hope to need it to dive. Safety margin in military hardware is vital. The problem is that unlike most other products, someone else is going to be actively trying to destroy your hardware and kill the operator in the process in the most aggressive manner imaginable which makes it pretty much the highest stress environment possible. The armor on the side of a battleship isn't half a meter thick because they think it looks stylish.
The stress for rockets comes from the fact that they are being asked to be reliable under tremendous force, heat, and pressure while being built as light as possible. That's a tough environment but nothing compares to war for being hard on equipment and people.
Hopefully medical equipment, especially life-support and implants, are made to very high standards.
Being made to high standards doesn't mean the product has to operate in a high physical stress environment. My company makes medical equipment and none of it is subjected to the sorts of forces and stresses you find in a rocket launch nor does it have the weight vs performance limitations. Furthermore most medical equipment doesn't have to deal with the tyranny of the rocket equation and the engineering limitations it imposes. Everything in a rocket has to be made as light as possible which causes some really tough engineering challenges - particularly because it necessarily means sacrificing safety margin and/or adding substantial cost in a lot of cases.
That's not a knock on medical equipment or the quality of it. Just observing that it doesn't have to function on the pointy end of a controlled explosion with minimal safety margin.
He didn't say humans. He said someone.
Umm, if it isn't humans then who exactly? Last I checked we have no evidence of aliens with an interest in dead probes near Ceres and my border collie isn't about to start a space program any time soon no matter how many treats I offer him.
Five hundred years ago, the fastest a human being had ever travelled was 25mph on a horse. A hundred years ago, early planes could reach 100mph. Fifty years ago, the Apollo missions travelled at 24,000 mph. In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.
You've been watching too many science fiction movies. Presuming you aren't trolling, I admire the optimism but it isn't going to go down like that. You are just extrapolating naively based on unrelated past events with cherry picked data. There is no evidence based reason to believe your hypothesis and considerable evidence to doubt it. Our progress in the last 50 years has been somewhere between mild incremental advancement and a regression in capabilities. The economics of space travel haven't improved much - basically only major nation states and a few mega corporations can afford to loft something into low earth orbit much less into deep space. Despite the efforts of SpaceX and others that isn't likely to see more than modest improvement in the next few decades. Dropping the cost of a launch from hundreds of millions to tens of millions still puts it well out of economic viability for most of the population.
My take is that it will be a few centuries before we can get more than a handful of people routinely off the surface of Earth.
Props for the abort system which apparently did its job flawlessly, but... it's a bit worrying that one bent pin on a sensor can do in the entire system.
You know there is a reason that "rocket science" is the standard analogy phrase used for a difficult endeavor. Rockets are chock full of seemingly mundane things that can result in disaster if they don't perform perfectly in extremely high stress conditions. Aside from maybe military combat equipment I can't think of any devices we make which experience tougher conditions with less safety margin.
My first computer only had 64k memory and my current one has 16GB. Cellphones used to be lugged around in cases, now they can fit on my wrist. People used to say humans can't fly. Therefore we will get the probe within 50 years.
Got any more irrelevant analogies to throw in there? How about the rate of internet adoption in third world countries or the rapid adoption of yoga pants? I have to assume you are trolling...
Pro tip. The rate of increase of memory in your computer has fuck-all to do with the problems of deep space travel.
Just because we've made fast progress in one field doesn't mean we are capable of making equivalently fast progress in a completely different endeavor. We've been doing space travel for about 60 years now and we haven't made more than incremental leaps in capabilities for 40 years. Most of the people reading this weren't even alive the last time we put a man on the moon.
It ran out of gas in the middle of no where. Eventually someone will retrieve it.... in about 50 years.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years which is FAR easier to get to. Thinking we're going to be back to Ceres to retrieve a dead probe within another 50 years seems extremely improbable. I know we're all excited about what SpaceX and the rest are doing but let's pump the brakes slightly shall we? Our progress in space isn't going that quickly. Nobody is going to fund a mission to retrieve this thing because there is no economic or scientific value in doing so. If we do send a craft capable of retrieving stuff there are FAR more interesting things to retrieve than a dead probe.
personally - I'd like them to offer a phone that is maybe a few mills thicker but has swap-able batteries.
It's not just you but I think there is a better option because some people like the thinner phones and that's just as valid a viewpoint. What I think they should do is make an interface that you can attach a battery case (or other equipment) so that people who want a bigger battery can have it without the bulky kludge of doing a pass through off the lightning/usb port. Think about it for a second. Virtually everyone puts their phone in a case anyway. Why not make it easy for the case to be the mechanism to add hardware features like a bigger battery or a better camera or a headphone jack? Then people can customize the hardware to suit their particular preferences and Apple (or other smartphone makers) don't have to compromise on the core product design. Win/win and it's fairly cheap to do.
I'm not sure what more people could want them to do on this subject.
What people want is for Apple to be up front and transparent about this sort of "feature". Apple basically hid the fact they were doing this from everyone despite strong suspicions that something like it was happening. This makes it look (true or not) like Apple was up to something shady and/or coersive. Their explanation of trying to save the battery isn't implausible but by hiding the fact they were doing it it looks strongly like they were degrading performance to force upgrade sales. Had Apple been transparent about it from day one it would have been a non-issue.
I don't think the key was the breakup though.
It wasn't JUST the breakup but there are a lot of things that would never have come to pass without it, including the internet as we know it today. There is almost no way the internet or the world wide web becomes what it is today if AT&T is still a monopoly.
It was the requiring them to let other companies use their lines. That's what changed things. They owned the wires to your house, so they could say "oh, you wanna use them? Then you have to lease a phone from us. You have to get your service from us. Etc. "
The local phone company STILL owns the line going to your house. That never changed. It's true even today. AT&T's monopoly on phones in the house was broken with the Carterfone legal decision back in 1968. That decision eventually let to a lawsuit from MCI which eventually let to the voluntary breakup of AT&T. Yes, that's right, AT&T broke itself up for reasons to complicated to enumerate here. It's really interesting to read about so I highly recommend studying the history.
The mistake the regulators made with the breakup was that our government didn't make rules preventing the companies providing the wires to your house from being more than "dumb pipes". The companies providing the lines to your house should have no control over what content goes over those lines. The whole net neutrality debate comes from this decision. The companies providing the content should have no control over the lines to your house. This keeps conflicts of interest detrimental to the consumer out of the market significantly. So the breakup wasn't the success it could have been but it's very clear that the net result of the breakup was a net good for us as consumers. We got cheaper long distance, the internet, unix, competitive ISPs, competitive phone equipment makers, and a lot more. Not perfect but a lot better than it probably would have been otherwise.
Split up Standard Oil in 1910--how well did that work out?
Pretty well. At it's peak Standard Oil controlled somewhere around 90% of all oil production and sales in the US and they were renowned for predatory business practices. You really think having one private company with that much control over our energy supply is a good idea?
Split up Ma Bell--happy with the result?
Short answer yes. The reason you have a lot of the choices you do is precisely because AT&T was broken up. You might not be old enough to remember what it was like prior to the breakup but I am. Prior to the breakup there was basically no competition in the long distance call market. Unix was in no small part a result of the breakup. AT&T wanted to get into the computer business and the breakup was the price they had to pay to do it. The breakup introduced a lot of competition and innovation that likely would never have happened without it. Could the AT&T breakup have been done better? You could make a case for that. But it almost certainly was a good thing overall.
Split it up and the parts will recombine in some other form but functionally equivalent.
Umm, no. The current AT&T has no where near the market power the company had prior to the breakup. I'm not sure you fully appreciate how powerful a monopoly AT&T was prior to the breakup.
Very recently it came to light that Alzheimers may be a viral or bacterial infection and the amyloid plaques actually are a defense mechanism.
That possibility is NOT a recent revelation. We have no evidence of a specific pathogen but that's been on the list of possible causes for a long time. More than a few types of cancer are caused by viruses and many other diseases we don't normally associate with viruses or bacteria. My wife is a pathologist and she's spoken about this very topic to me 20 years ago. It wouldn't at all be shocking if some or even all Alzheimer's turned out to be caused by a pathogen. We just don't have strong evidence currently to support that hypothesis though perhaps there has been some recent data that I'm not aware of. (obviously i'm not an expert)
THe thing is, and the clue to the other two cases,was asking why didn't those bad proteins get evolved away.
For there to be an evolutionary pressure it needs to have an effect on reproduction. Lot's of diseases don't affect anyone until after they have passed the age where they would spawn offspring so there is no direct mechanism to remove the proteins from the gene pool.
The render on Engadget shows a camera bump protruding beyond the case!
Yeah... Apple is a little too obsessed with making their designs thin even when it's not particularly helpful in the big picture. Thin is great all other things being equal but I think some of the tradeoffs they make for it aren't ideal. (battery life, camera quality, durability, etc) That said I'd be fine with it if they would get their head out of their hind end when it comes to accessory design, particularly cases and styluses. The keyboard option they provide is CLEARLY an afterthought. They designed the iPad and only afterwards thought about keyboard design. IMO they need to start thinking of the whole system as a single design. Make an interface for the cases (not just the lightning/usb port) that allows them to do interesting things without clumsy hacks. Integrate a holder for a stylus into the device or (prob better) case. Make a keyboard that isn't just a slap on afterthought. A few magnets for holding things doesn't qualify as serious attempts at integration.
While the Apple Pencil appears to be a better design, it still is flawed. Apple has a real problem with treating accessories as total after thoughts. Magnetic attachment to the side? That's fine I guess until I want to put it away or carry it or do anything besides gently put on on a desktop and not touch it. Knocking it off the edge will be stupid easy. Even worse if you want to carry it somewhere without worrying about it falling off. How about a design that won't fall off/out with the slightest provocation? The pencil should have a case or a slot in the device itself you can slide it into when not in use. Something that I can put into a bag without knocking the stylus $diety knows where.
For all their vaunted "design" expertise, Apple really sucks at designing accessories for real world use.
Because if you don't, then you forgo your extended warranty.
Yeah that's not true. If someone told you that then they were either lying or misinformed.
Automation is destroying those jobs. Manufacturing still happens in the US, but we'll lose most of the last manufacturing jobs anyway since automation is currently improving rapidly. It's already taken most of the manufacturing jobs, it will take most of the rest in short order.
In some cases that it true. In some cases it is not. People here tend to hugely misunderstand what automation can and cannot do and the costs involved. Manufacturing in the US is going to be a lot like farming in the sense that productivity is going to continue to increase but head counts will be an increasingly smaller percentage of the total workforce. This is NOT a bad thing. It just means that economic value will come from other sectors of the economy. A lot of manufacturing jobs are boring assembly jobs that are a huge waste of human capital. China will be doing these low skill jobs longer than the US because their labor costs less but eventually they will have the same problem if they want to increase their per-capita standard of living.
Sure, but we only need the best and the brightest. We don't need the masses of asses.
You don't get to pick and choose if you actually want the best and brightest. There is no way to know in advance who the best and brightest immigrants are. Not with any reliability. Good luck picking the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs (immigrant and child of immigrant) out of a crowd. You are playing a numbers game. You bring in a lot of immigrants in the (reasonable) hope that some of them will be above average performers. Children of poor and uneducated immigrants often do very well. Immigrants often are among our best performing entrepreneurs but you'll have no way to reliably know which ones they are in advance. Furthermore we still need LOTS of low skilled people to do important but low paying jobs. Our agriculture industry is a world leader but a critical factor in that is having access to abundant low skilled labor. Putting up fences (literal or figurative) to immigrants will just make it that much harder to compete with China in the long run. We're 5% of the global population but something around 15-20% of global GDP. China has 20% of the global population and is catching up fast on GDP. If we don't bring in as much talent as we can get our hands on (no matter where it was born) the results of that competition are a predictable as a sunrise tomorrow. (spoilers: we lose without those "masses of asses")
Consequently, these immigration policies won't much affect America's performance.
You could not be more wrong. Our immigration policies will have a HUGE impact on America's performance in the future.
You need manufacturing to have a strong economy because you need lots of workers all working together in the same place with the same interests. In other words, Unions. What made the US middle class grow was Unions fought (and died) to pry money out of the hands of the working class. You can't do that at a WalMart, there's just not enough of a concentration. Also, the ruling class got this Union busting down pat.
You have the story wrong. The US HAS manufacturing. It never left despite what you might hear from the uninformed. The US manufacturing sector is over $3 TRILLION annually which puts us neck and neck with China for the largest manufacturing sector in the world. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be one the fifth largest economy in the world - larger than the UK and just behind Germany.
What has changed since WWII is our cost of labor and the rest of the world rebuilt. US labor today is among the most expensive in the world. As a result US manufacturing HAS to focus on capital intensive products instead of labor intensive ones. It is literally impossible for US companies to compete on labor prices. 70 years ago US labor costs were a lot closer to the global mean AND the rest of the world was recovering from WWII. Now China has a LOT of labor and simple supply and demand means that having a lot of something means it will cost less and so their labor costs less than ours because they have an abundance of it. QED products that are sensitive to manufacturing cost of labor will inevitably migrate to locations with lower labor costs. Products not so sensitive to labor costs will go to places with low capital costs. The US has the lowest cost of capital in the world currently so we get the capital intensive products instead of the labor intensive ones. In plain english we make cars and airplanes and don't make Happy Meal toys and the cheap crap you buy in Walmart.
As for unions, basically unions were TOO successful. They priced themselves out of the market for labor intensive manufacturing in a global market. And for capital intensive manufacturing there isn't as much need for unions because the pay rates are much higher and there is a lot of automation. As a result when politicians promise to bring back manufacturing jobs they are literally promising the impossible. The only way the US will get back labor intensive manufacturing on a large scale is for the cost of US labor to fall back towards the global mean. This means paying US workers MUCH less then they currently demand. Otherwise the only alternative is to automate the work which is what capital intensive manufacturing does. So pick your poison - much lower paying jobs OR automation.
Ironically when people argue against immigration in our country, they are arguing against the only thing that will allow our demographics to compete with China and India. China has 4 people for every 1 in the US and a lot of those people are very smart and hard working. Without immigrants (both skilled and unskilled), the US will eventually lose that fight just from sheer numbers. China has more labor that costs less AND a lot of very smart high end labor too. Doesn't mean the US will become some backwater but without welcoming the best and brightest into our country with open arms we don't have a prayer of keeping up in the long run.
We've known for decades that organophosphates are very dangerous. This is why they developed neonicotinoids that are much safer.
There is evidence that neonicotinoids hurt pollinators. Just because a few drops applied directly to a person don't result in a trip to the morgue doesn't mean they are "safer". Sometimes the indirect consequences are worse than the direct ones. No pollinators = no food and last I checked famine was pretty dangerous to humans.
Seriously though, just because we all grew up riding around in the back of a pickup truck doesn't mean it was safe.
Doesn't mean it needs to be banned, either.
So you are arguing in effect that people shouldn't be required to wear seat belts either? Because that's the same argument. Sometimes we need to ban behaviors that are needlessly dangerous because sometimes people don't know better and/or are bad at evaluating risk. A certain percentage of them are going to die unnecessarily and that measurably affects the rest of society in tangible ways. When others have to pay for first responders to scrape you off the highway because you wanted to do something idiotic then we get a vote on whether we permit that behavior. Obviously we can't stop someone from doing something stupid/dangerous if they are determined but we can deter some people and save some lives in the process. There is nothing physically preventing a 12 year old from getting the keys to a car and driving it but we deter them from trying by having consequences for doing so because in most cases it would be needlessly dangerous.
The question is whether these chemicals are sufficiently dangerous and costly (negative health effects, environmental cost, etc) to justify banning them. Sometimes we have to do something dangerous because the alternatives outcomes are worse or because we have limited alternative options. I'm no expert but I strongly suspect we have alternative options here and are capable of developing more. So if these chemicals are dangerous (and they evidently are) and we have viable alternatives then we're kind of idiots if we don't ban them for use cases where we don't need them.
Nice try, but no. "Tesla is still losing money" might mean what you describe.
I'm among other things a certified accountant and my specialty is corporate cost accounting in manufacturing. There is no "might" qualifier here. I described exactly what is happening with Tesla from a big picture perspective. It's nothing unusual. My company has exactly the same situation of every product we sell albeit on a much smaller scale. The company you work for does too.
But "on each car they sell" is clearly referring to the per-car production cost versus the per-car price.
Per car production costs are not a fixed number and it's a mistake to think they are. You cannot simply take the cost of the labor for the guys on the assembly line and the cost of the materials as the "per-car price" (the gross margin) and call it a day. If it were that easy there would be no need for accountants. Even if we ignore the cost of building the assembly line for the sake of argument (and we shouldn't), there are lots of day to day expenses that directly affect the cost of the product but cannot be easily or tidily allocated directly to the product. Any number you see for per-unit costs is an estimate with an army of assumptions underlying that number. It might be a pretty good and useful estimate but it's an estimate all the same. There is a saying among accountants that it's better to be approximately correct than precisely wrong.
Let's use an example. Running an auto assembly plant requires a lot of water. Equipment needs cooling, people need to drink, toilets need flushing, etc. It's self evident that at least some of the water used is a direct cost of manufacturing but there is a problem. There is no tidy way to assign a fixed and unchanging number for the amount of water used to produce each car. Some of it is clearly used in production and you can allocate it across the number of vehicles produced but it's not a linear function. It is FAR too expensive to try to measure all water usage for every purpose. If you change the number of units produced the amount of water required doesn't change by a matching amount so the costs don't match neatly either. And worse any allocation algorithm you can come up with will almost certainly not accurately allocate the costs for any non-trivial case. And there are countless other costs that are either impractical or impossible to neatly allocate. How much of an engineers salary should be allocated to a given product or component if you aren't tracking their time to a ridiculously expensive degree?
If you have a clean and cost effective solution to this problem please publish it in a peer reviewed journal and collect your Nobel Prize in Economics. Seriously, it's that important and difficult of a problem.
By the way, there is no fact when things are badly defined.
The problem is NOT that things are badly defined. All these terms are very well defined despite a lot of people here on slashdot being uneducated as to their meaning. Seriously a shocking amount of effort goes into defining these terms. I'm not being critical - I didn't used to know their meaning either which is why I'm trying to educate here. No, the problem is that clear definitions of terms does not result in clean solutions to the problems. Go research fixed and variable costs. Learn about direct and indirect costs. Study Activity Based Costing. These are issues that real world accounts have to deal with every day and they are often very difficult and messy problems. The terms are well defined but the solutions are anything but tidy in a lot of cases for two primary reasons:
1) A shocking amount of accounting really comes down to opinion and there is no obvious way to change that. Stuff like defining when a sale occurs can be defined a variety of different ways and the best solution can vary from company to company or
Ah rationalizing. I think that's what some Germans said when Hitler came to power too.
Didn't take you long to Godwin this conversation.
So your take on it is that Apple should shut down all production immediately and cease operations because China has laws you don't approve of and that Apple has no power to change? Great plan...
I disagree completely with China's stance here but I don't think you can fault Apple for having to follow the laws of the country they're operating in.
Oh I can fault them for it. They made the choice to do business in China and they get to live with the consequences both good and bad. I understand that they are in a pickle since China could shut them down in a heartbeat if they didn't follow China's laws. But Apple put key parts of their supply chain voluntarily under Chinese authority and so they basically handed their spine to the Chinese government in the process. I get why Apple did what they did but they don't get off the hook ethically just because they painted themselves into a corner.
Not a lot of landlords are going to be interested in investing tons of money on home storage. However, lots of renters may be interested in an EV. (If they can figure out how to charge it.)
Once there are enough EVs out there it's just a business opportunity for landlords. Provide the charging stations next to where they park and have them pay some sort of markup to use them. Any landlord with a brain in their skull would be stupid not to make EV charging into a profit making opportunity.
And you add home power systems to your home once in a lifetime.
I don't think the business model here is going to be one time installs, especially since the cost of the solar panels and battery will be tens of thousands of dollars. Probably will be some sort of rental or lease arrangement kind of like how people finance their cars.
Though Stamos said he agreed with "almost everything" Cook said, in a series of tweets he called out Apple for blocking the ability to download VPN and encrypted messaging apps in China, which could provide ways to connect to the internet and send messages privately and without surveillance.
It's easy to take the moral high ground when you have nothing at stake. While ethically he probably has a valid point, Apple along with every other maker of electronics has a problem. Apple's products are mostly made in China and there aren't a lot of good alternative manufacturing options currently for the sorts of volumes and products Apple needs to make. China has a rather scary high percentage of market share in the electronics industry. It's rare to find a product that doesn't have significant China content in it. Therefore China's government has Apple by the balls if they don't cooperate with China's state surveillance policies.
Now this is to some degree a problem of Apple's own making and it doesn't excuse their behavior in cooperating with this sort of oppression. But we can understand why they do what they do even if we don't approve. Yes it makes them hypocrites to some degree but I'm not sure how much of a choice they realistically have right at this moment.