It's Apple's problem because they're not providing enough information to the banks and credit card companies. For instance if it just shows up as "APPLE PAY" on my credit card statement, instead of "AP: WHOLE FOODS FL"
That does not happen. When I use ApplePay it shows up on my credit card statement as WALGREENS #3493 or similar. I just looked at a statement to confirm. Apple doesn't even appear on the statement line anywhere unless I'm actually buying something from Apple themselves (like through iTunes). They're providing all the information the merchants need to do the transaction and do it securely. If the banks cannot be bothered to secure their credit cards then that is a problem Apple needs to work out with the banks.
Paypal used to have the same exact problem but now provide lots of details on my statement instead of just "PAYPAL."
Different company, different product, different procedures. Not remotely relevant to this discussion because Apple does not do that.
.. I had to electronically send in a picture of a government-issued photo ID and a recent utility bill showing my home address.
Google can kiss my shiny-white-hiney if they think I'm going to share any of that with them. They already know too much about me. My bank has more than adequate information to confirm my identity to Apple or Google. They don't need more than they already have.
Short story: Retailers should probably trust Google's platform more when it comes to fraud.
Right because it would be so hard to forge a picture of a government photo ID and utility bill...
Apple Pay is simply going to get too expensive for all but the most clueless merchants to use, both from the fraud and from Apple's eventual fees.
Anything Apple might charge will be a rounding error compared to the 3-5% the credit card companies charge merchants. Furthermore those fees get passed on to the customers so merchants only give a shit if their competition doesn't have to pay the same fees.
Regarding the fraud, it sounds like the banks aren't following their own security procedures which results in... duh, fraud.
It was a bad idea to begin with, and it's a bad idea now.
I could not disagree more. I'm not an Apple fanboi but I've used ApplePay and it's fantastic for customers. It's easily the best piece of tech I've seen come out of Apple since the iPhone itself. Remains to be seen how it will do in the market but Apple pretty much nailed the customer experience. If the banks cannot be bothered to follow appropriate fraud procedures then that's on them.
You have to determine what someone's yearly income is. Some very wealthy people hide most of their income for tax purposes making this difficult.
Since I am a certified accountant, yeah the concept is not new to me.
If your speeding tickets go to funding the schools, the local government will just lower the school budget (since they're going to get the speeding ticket money), and raise the police budget (since that will let them write more speeding tickets to pay for the schools).
So you give the money to someone other than the jurisdiction issuing the ticket. Or have the revenue go to charity or even refunded back to the citizens. It's not actually difficult to make playing three card monte with the budget difficult.
You have to determine what someone's yearly income is. Some very wealthy people hide most of their income for tax purposes making this difficult.
The IRS is pretty good at this. Sure there will be some people that weasel out of some money they might otherwise owe but the it doesn't make the basic idea a bad one. In the US there are some privacy and states rights issues to work through along with a general distrust of government so I don't really see such a thing becoming common here.
It hurts revenue generation for the police force because a lot of the people pulled over are in poverty and get small fines.
Revenue from illegal activity should NEVER be used to fund policing. It simply is too big of a conflict of interest. Fines from stuff like parking tickets should be used to fund other things (education, roads, etc) but it should not be available to police.
The only danger will be to someone's bank account. Anyone who couldn't tell this was a scam almost deserves to be separated from their money as a sort of fiscal Darwin award. There is not and never will be an actual mission to anywhere though this scam. Furthermore I'm tired of hearing about it and don't know why slashdot continues to give these scammers free publicity.
I wish an attorney general with appropriate jurisdiction would get involved and put the people behind this in jail.
I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution.
Then you will be wrong. We don't know exactly how it will influence our language in the long run but you can be quite certain that it WILL influence it. You can already see abbreviations and texting conventions making their way into every day usage. You don't even have to look hard. We have entire generations growing up with texting as a key means of communication. Do you seriously think this will have no influence on their use of language? If you do then you are being intentionally naive.
Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".
A distinction without a difference. Call it whatever you like and it will mean the same thing.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?
Do you even know that this does not necessarily matter? Just because it has been done a certain way does not mean it must continue to be done that way. I think lots of them know, they simply don't care and I think that is a reasonable viewpoint.
I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.
That does not imply that it is necessary or useful to others however. It's not actually required for comprehension, readability and while the extra effort is small it is not zero either. I don't think double spaces between sentences is a bad idea (I tend to do it too) but that doesn't mean it is a good idea either.
I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark.
I happen to very much agree with you on this. Never made much sense to me.
Yes, there IS such a thing as a stupid question and this is one of them.
It is correct that there is no such a thing as a stupid question. A question by definition cannot have intelligence and therefore it cannot be smart or stupid. The person asking the question CAN be smart or stupid or ignorant or informed. If someone asks a question they should either already know or be able to figure out the answer to, then that person is possibly a stupid person but the question is neither stupid nor smart. Someone else could ask the same question and it could be a reasonable inquiry. An English speaking adult ought to know that "A" is the first letter in the English alphabet whereas a young child would not necessarily know this and it would be unreasonable to expect them to know this fact. The question would be the same question therefore how could the question be stupid? Therefore the correct thing to say is that there is no such thing as a stupid question but there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot.
I'll say the French have the final word on what's truly French, the Spaniards have the final word on what's truly Spanish, and the Brits have the final word on what is true and "proper" English.
Going to call bullshit on that one. Just because that's where the language originated does not grant those countries any sort of authority over how or where the language is used outside their own borders, particularly after hundreds of years. American English did not evolve from modern British English any more than humans evolved from modern apes. They both come from a common ancestor and have evolved along separate paths ever since. The Brits have no more say over how English is used than the Americans or even Chinese do. Languages do not work like that. Spanish spoken in South America is every bit as legitimate as Spanish spoken in Spain.
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a set of opinions, not a set of rules. All the difference in the world. I can point you at numerous books and experts on grammar and writing that disagree with significant portions of that overused book.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are.
There is no single authoritative set of rules for the English language. There are rules in the sense that there are commonly agreed to informal "standards" which persist for a time based on culture and comprehensibility but it is quite correct to say that that there aren't any rules in the sense of rules laid down by an authoritative body.
Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
Quite simply not true. You merely have to go back far enough in time to get to a point where the language is no longer the same. Old English is for all practical purposes a completely different language than our modern version of English.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today.
Perhaps you haven't actually studied Shakespeare. Significant portions of his writing are quite inscrutable today without an explanation of the context, temporal usage and intent. That said, Shakespeare isn't so far removed from us that it is impossible to read - it's just a few hundred years and languages usually don't evolve that quickly. Go read Beowulf in the original Old English and tell me again that the rules of the language never change over time.
We have excellent distribution systems, so that's not a problem.
The mere fact that we cannot get food to everyone who needs it despite the fact that more than enough is produced to feed everyone on the plant is clear evidence that we do not have "excellent" distribution systems. The mere fact that we have the technical ability does not mean the system is adequate to the needs of those who are hungry.
Then they settle someplace else. No actual evidence exists however to indicate wind turbines are actually causing such an effect however on any sort of substantial scale.
What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?
The number of birds killed by wind turbines is a rounding error compared to the number killed by domestic cats.
The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis.
What energy crisis? We have no lack of energy. We have a pollution crisis due to a lack of clean energy sources. Wind is demonstrably cleaner than some of the alternatives. There is no ideal energy source with no problems so it's a minimization problem. What is the least worst way to supply energy without resulting in catastrophic climate effects.
The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.
There is no energy shortage. Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation. Starvation and hunger are distribution problems, not production problems. Crime has existed since the dawn of mankind and has nothing inherently to do with overpopulation. Same for disease. At most some of these problems can be exacerbated by population but population is not the root cause of any of them.
There are products which have expensive tooling, like injection molded plastic parts; and there are products that can be made inexpensively at the click of a button, like water-jet cut metal parts, or CNC wirebending.
I'm an accountant and an engineer and I run a manufacturing company. There is no such thing as pushbutton manufacturing. It does not exist. And even if it did it would not be cheap. Nothing can be made "inexpensively at the click of a button" unless you are not accounting for all the costs involved. There is FAR more to it than merely the cost of direct manufacturing. Injection molded plastic parts require very expensive die sets and molding machines plus design and engineering time, machine operator time, post processing and more. Not to mention overhead and materials cost. You can usually get the unit cost to be low with enough volume but the up front capital costs involved are not trivial.
My company deals in small volume production a lot and we cannot really do anything for less than about $500. Even the most basic of production has enough overhead and setup cost that we would lose money on anything smaller than that even if the actual direct manufacturing costs are low.
The problem I see in a lot of open source hardware projects is a lack of value engineering
That's because the people doing it usually have a particular domain expertise and have little to no idea about the other domains involved. People that are good at product design tend to be rather terrible at tooling and process engineering and vice-versa. My company manufactures wire harnesses as a contract manufacturer. Most of the designs we see were designed by mechanical engineers with no particular expertise in electronics or process engineering. They also usually do not understand the particular details involved in wire harness manufacturing. As a result the designs are usually flawed in some way and often are too expensive or even cannot be easily made as designed. I'll see things like gold-plated terminals being specified when tin would do just fine for 1/10th the cost.
I was really hoping there was some way the donatee could fill this role.
Kind of a catch-22 there. If the donatee is to defend the patent they need to have a revenue stream to do so which presumably would have to come from the product which (probably) necessarily requires that they exclude others from using it. Not really sure how to resolve that conundrum. Patents were designed to combat the Free Rider Problem but in this case the economics of the patent system interfere with the ability of people to put something in the public sphere and keep it there in a manner similar to copyleft.
None taken. I think it would be useful to a lot of people but I have no interest in patenting it for my own profit. It doesn't make sense to pay $2000 to patent something unless you're going to make your money back. I guess I'm suggesting that a non-profit could patent and protect the donated hardware designs.
Out of curiosity, what sort of product is it? What does it do in general? You don't have to tell me all the gory details but you've piqued my interest.
Wait, you just said in your previous post that your tooling was made from milled aluminum, now you say hardened steel, which is it?
Different tooling. We have presses that use hardened steel for crimping terminals. We have other tooling for moldings that uses aluminum. We have still other tooling that is made from other materials.
There is additive manufacturing processes in aluminum and titanium, but I would still go with milling for producing injection molds
Nothing affordable to businesses like ours. I'm well aware of what is out there but it isn't going to be mainstream technology for at least another decade and probably longer.
If the tooling is costing $8000, it's either fucking massive, or you're counting the design cost in addition to the machining.
Of course the cost includes design and machining. We don't do it ourselves - we're not a tool & die shop. And $8000 for press tooling is incredibly cheap for a one off design. Even the applicators (different type of tooling) we use for crimping on our presses cost $1500-3000 each and those are standardized. A guy I work with when we need plastics tooling done works for a company that does injection moldings and their tooling is often $20-50,000+ for a die set. My company does not have the expertise to design tooling for injection molds or for our crimping presses. That leaves us with the option of either outsourcing it completely or hiring all the people and buying all the equipment necessary to bring it in house. 3D printing in anything but basic plastics requires a VERY expensive machine which is economically prohibitive and we still would have to hire the engineer with the design expertise. So I can either outsource the project for $8000 or I can spend the better part of $100,000 to do the same thing if I do it in house. Not exactly the toughest economic decision to make.
I do some work as a mechanical engineer* and I do some work in VLSI and FPGA, and my experience is that most existing mechanical tools are batfuckstupid.
I would tend to agree with you. I would also say that most mechanical engineers I've worked with are absolutely horrible at process documentation and process design. (I'm an industrial engineer so process engineering is kind of my thing) I can count on my fingers the number of designs in the last 5 years I've gotten from mechanical engineers that could be built directly from the documentation provided. It's not just the tools either. Too many of them simply are terrible at communicating their designs to other people.
Mechanical engineering is not just about the part; you also need to design the process or tool that produces it. Designing an airplane is 1/10th about the airplane and 9/10th about the factory and process that builds it.
Quite correct although as a process engineer I wouldn't sell the design short that much. You can do great manufacturing on a shitty design and it's still going to be a shitty product. Probably closer to 50/50 but your general point is valid.
It's as if every time you wrote a program, you had to write the compiler, linker and debugger for it at the same time. This is the level of sophistication that most mechanical engineering is at today.
Not really true and the analogy is a severe stretch - to the point where it doesn't really make much sense. Mechanical engineering is NOT like software engineering. It deals in tangible objects and notions like code reuse and other things that are routine in software don't easily translate.
That said, companies that do mechanical engineering well do tend to standardize a lot of what they do. One thing companies like Honda do very well is that they are incredibly disciplined about standardizing their tooling. This has enormous downstream benefits, both financial and quality. At my company most of our press tooling is standard from one manufacturer and that saves us tremendous amounts of time and money.
We really need some kind of an organization that we could donate hardware designs to that would guarantee any resulting patents would be open.
Doesn't really solve the core problems. 1) It's expensive to get and defend a patent. If you cannot defend a patent then companies with deep pockets will ignore the patent. If you don't have a patent then companies without deep pockets can copy you too. 2) Even if you get a patent that doesn't guarantee you'll be able to produce a useful product without infringing on other patents. Lots of tech products simply cannot be produced without cross-licensing agreements. 3) Manufacturing hardware is expensive even without worrying about patents. Software can be manufactured very cheaply - almost for free. Hardware requires a credible business model and substantial capital investment for even the simplest of products.
I have an interface device I've been working on for about 15 years. I can't afford to patent it and certainly can't afford to get it to manufacture.
No disrespect intended (seriously!) but if you cannot afford to get it patented then I have to wonder if it is terribly valuable. Patents cost a few thousand dollars. Costly enough to keep the casual out but it's not a prohibitive amount of money. Defending the patent on the other hand can be very expensive if it is something that others might care to copy. It's not terribly hard to get financing to patent and produce a product with some meaningful market value.
I thought manufacturers would use 3D printing to create custom tooling.
Maybe someday but not anytime soon. The tooling we need is made from hardened steel. Even if there were a 3D printer that could make it (there isn't) the cost of the machine would be astronomical right now. We'd have to create a LOT of custom tooling to justify the machine cost even if it were possible. In 10-20 years? Maybe...
And if it involves any custom ASICs, it's a very costly proposition.
It's not just ASICs. Any hardware that would involve custom tooling tends to be VERY expensive. I'm getting a quote right now on a very simple custom molded plastic connector which we are going to produce in modest volumes. The tooling is basically a piece of CNC milled aluminum and it will cost us about $8000. This is to produce a connector that will sell for about $1.00 each and we might make $0.10 profit per unit. That cost doesn't include labor, raw materials, the cost of the machine the tooling will run on, overhead, or delivery costs.
Everyone is going on and on about 3D printing and it is super cool and useful but not the way a lot of people think. 3D printing is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for any kind of volume manufacturing. It eliminates setup costs but the cost/unit of production is far, far higher than with other techniques. If the production volume is sufficient to justify tooling a process like injection molding can produce plastic parts far cheaper than 3D printing could ever hope to achieve. The part that I mention above if I were to have it 3D printed would cost about $40/unit and I couldn't get more than a handful made per day.
Manufacturing isn't cheap or easy. Software guys (understandably) tend to thing everything works like software when in fact very few industries even remotely resemble software. They tend to fall into the trap of having a hammer and thinking every problem is a nail. Manufacturing hardware could not be more different.
The Open Compute Project, which wants to open up hardware the same way Linux opened up software, is starting to tackle its forklift problem.
That's not the important problem with open source hardware. Actually making hardware is a fairly straightforward, albeit costly, proposition. I should know since I run a manufacturing company. Give me a design and an adequate amount of cash and I can get any product made and delivered wherever you want it. That's not the real obstacle to open source hardware.
The important problem is that hardware is (generally) protected by patents whereas software is (generally) protected by copyright. It's easy to write a license (see GPL) that does useful things with copyright law for a product like software. It is highly non-trivial to do the same thing with patents for a product like hardware, especially under a first-to-file patent system. To accomplish something similar to the GPL or BSD license you would have to have someone spend the money to patent a technology and then make it available for community use AND be willing and able (read $$$) to fight to protect the community. This costs a LOT of money, takes a lot of time and at the end of the day you probably cannot use it in any meaningful product without infringing on about 20 other patents from potentially uncooperative companies like Apple or Google, not to mention patent trolls.
Open source software works because of a happy confluence of circumstances. Software is automatically covered by copyright and there is zero cost to get a copyright. Software also has effectively zero marginal cost to reproduce and can be easily improved by someone skilled in development. Hardware is not automatically protected and the costs to get a patent are substantial. Hardware is not at all cheap to reproduce and while it can be improved, it takes still more money to make and distribute and test those improvements.
Lightning, while a very good physical design for a connector will likely fall soon as the power benefits of USB-C are too good to pass up
You might be right but it's not immediately clear to me how much this would matter for iPhones and iPads. I haven't gotten my hands on a USB-C yet but I'm not optimistic about it working physically as well as Lightning connectors though I'd be fine with being proven wrong. Lighting is a very nice physical connector but the main reason it exists is because the connectors for USB sucks so badly. Maybe USB-C will fix this but I'm not holding my breath.
For laptops Apple has their Magsafe connector which USB-C does not replace. I'd LOVE a single connector to provide both power and data but I think the jury is still out whether USB-C will be able to do that adequately. Would be nice if it did.
If Apple double downs on Lightning and sticks with it I would be extremely impressed with their level of stubbornness.
Apple isn't traditionally stubborn about changing interfaces so long as there are performance benefits to be had. They were among the first to drop a lot of legacy ports and were among the early adopters of USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt and others. True they've stuck with some proprietary or unusual stuff for surprisingly long (Firewire, SCSI, ADB, etc) but there were usually reasonable performance and/or user-base reasons they stuck with them as long as they did.
Does USB Type C Herald the End of Apple's Proprietary Connectors?
I'm gonna go out on a very short limb and go with "no" as my answer. Apple always finds a way to do something a little different and I doubt that is likely to change anytime soon.
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such.
Because they work. They are exceptionally reliable and are almost always recovered. They are already installed on pretty much every large aircraft out there. And they provide invaluable information in helping to determine the cause of accidents. Furthermore no practical amount of telemetry is going to tell you everything about a crash so we still would want to find the wreckage anyway so why not have on board telemetry?
How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
Ok, which global satellite system are you going to stream to? What is the protocol standard you intend to use? What are your plans to retrofit such equipment to every existing plane out there and how do you plan to pay for it? How do you plan to ensure the system is as reliable as the black boxes which have proven VERY reliable and are almost always recovered? These are solvable but not trivial problems that need to be addressed first.
It's not that streaming telemetry data is a bad idea but there are a LOT of technical details to work out, not the least of which are the standards involved and the economics of doing so.
Of course there is, when there's a thousand football players for every MMA fighter. You can find football programs at most colleges and high schools in the U.S. - can you name a school that has one for MMA?
Sort of. It's called wrestling and yes, lots of schools have wrestling programs. A huge percentage (probably the majority) of MMA fighters these days got much of their early training in wrestling and wrestling is a vital skill in MMA. Serious long term injuries are actually rather rare in wrestling and even MMA despite the very physical nature of the sports. I've been a wrestler and coach of wrestling for over 30 years and I can show you the injury statistics for that sport. I've seen similar statistics for MMA. It's far safer than you might guess as a casual observer. Certainly far safer than football on both an absolute and per-capita basis. That's not to imply there are no dangers or that serious injuries cannot result, just that it's much safer than you might think.
The reason there are surprising few long term injuries in MMA (and wrestling) is two-fold. 1) the rules are designed such that techniques likely to result in severe injury are illegal. 2) There is one official for two contestants and he is standing just a few feet away and is empowered to stop the match if an injury seems likely. That makes a HUGE difference. The sports are physical and sure there are plenty of bumps and bruises but stuff like broken limbs or torn ligaments simply don't happen often because the match gets stopped most of the time before that becomes possible. In football that isn't the case. In football the rules are designed such that certain injuries (particularly knee injuries and concussions) are ludicrously routine. Go into any sports medicine clinic and I can almost guarantee the majority of the patients there will be football players with serious knee injuries.
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It's Apple's problem because they're not providing enough information to the banks and credit card companies. For instance if it just shows up as "APPLE PAY" on my credit card statement, instead of "AP: WHOLE FOODS FL"
That does not happen. When I use ApplePay it shows up on my credit card statement as WALGREENS #3493 or similar. I just looked at a statement to confirm. Apple doesn't even appear on the statement line anywhere unless I'm actually buying something from Apple themselves (like through iTunes). They're providing all the information the merchants need to do the transaction and do it securely. If the banks cannot be bothered to secure their credit cards then that is a problem Apple needs to work out with the banks.
Paypal used to have the same exact problem but now provide lots of details on my statement instead of just "PAYPAL."
Different company, different product, different procedures. Not remotely relevant to this discussion because Apple does not do that.
.. I had to electronically send in a picture of a government-issued photo ID and a recent utility bill showing my home address.
Google can kiss my shiny-white-hiney if they think I'm going to share any of that with them. They already know too much about me. My bank has more than adequate information to confirm my identity to Apple or Google. They don't need more than they already have.
Short story: Retailers should probably trust Google's platform more when it comes to fraud.
Right because it would be so hard to forge a picture of a government photo ID and utility bill...
Apple Pay is simply going to get too expensive for all but the most clueless merchants to use, both from the fraud and from Apple's eventual fees.
Anything Apple might charge will be a rounding error compared to the 3-5% the credit card companies charge merchants. Furthermore those fees get passed on to the customers so merchants only give a shit if their competition doesn't have to pay the same fees.
Regarding the fraud, it sounds like the banks aren't following their own security procedures which results in... duh, fraud.
It was a bad idea to begin with, and it's a bad idea now.
I could not disagree more. I'm not an Apple fanboi but I've used ApplePay and it's fantastic for customers. It's easily the best piece of tech I've seen come out of Apple since the iPhone itself. Remains to be seen how it will do in the market but Apple pretty much nailed the customer experience. If the banks cannot be bothered to follow appropriate fraud procedures then that's on them.
You have to determine what someone's yearly income is. Some very wealthy people hide most of their income for tax purposes making this difficult.
Since I am a certified accountant, yeah the concept is not new to me.
If your speeding tickets go to funding the schools, the local government will just lower the school budget (since they're going to get the speeding ticket money), and raise the police budget (since that will let them write more speeding tickets to pay for the schools).
So you give the money to someone other than the jurisdiction issuing the ticket. Or have the revenue go to charity or even refunded back to the citizens. It's not actually difficult to make playing three card monte with the budget difficult.
You have to determine what someone's yearly income is. Some very wealthy people hide most of their income for tax purposes making this difficult.
The IRS is pretty good at this. Sure there will be some people that weasel out of some money they might otherwise owe but the it doesn't make the basic idea a bad one. In the US there are some privacy and states rights issues to work through along with a general distrust of government so I don't really see such a thing becoming common here.
It hurts revenue generation for the police force because a lot of the people pulled over are in poverty and get small fines.
Revenue from illegal activity should NEVER be used to fund policing. It simply is too big of a conflict of interest. Fines from stuff like parking tickets should be used to fund other things (education, roads, etc) but it should not be available to police.
The only danger will be to someone's bank account. Anyone who couldn't tell this was a scam almost deserves to be separated from their money as a sort of fiscal Darwin award. There is not and never will be an actual mission to anywhere though this scam. Furthermore I'm tired of hearing about it and don't know why slashdot continues to give these scammers free publicity.
I wish an attorney general with appropriate jurisdiction would get involved and put the people behind this in jail.
I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution.
Then you will be wrong. We don't know exactly how it will influence our language in the long run but you can be quite certain that it WILL influence it. You can already see abbreviations and texting conventions making their way into every day usage. You don't even have to look hard. We have entire generations growing up with texting as a key means of communication. Do you seriously think this will have no influence on their use of language? If you do then you are being intentionally naive.
The speeches of Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King resonate to this day, without translation.
Wow, we can understand what someone said 50 years ago. Amazing. [/sarcasm]
Wait 1000 years and lets see how easy those speeches are to understand. Languages evolve but not usually quite that fast.
Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".
A distinction without a difference. Call it whatever you like and it will mean the same thing.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?
Do you even know that this does not necessarily matter? Just because it has been done a certain way does not mean it must continue to be done that way. I think lots of them know, they simply don't care and I think that is a reasonable viewpoint.
I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.
That does not imply that it is necessary or useful to others however. It's not actually required for comprehension, readability and while the extra effort is small it is not zero either. I don't think double spaces between sentences is a bad idea (I tend to do it too) but that doesn't mean it is a good idea either.
I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark.
I happen to very much agree with you on this. Never made much sense to me.
Yes, there IS such a thing as a stupid question and this is one of them.
It is correct that there is no such a thing as a stupid question. A question by definition cannot have intelligence and therefore it cannot be smart or stupid. The person asking the question CAN be smart or stupid or ignorant or informed. If someone asks a question they should either already know or be able to figure out the answer to, then that person is possibly a stupid person but the question is neither stupid nor smart. Someone else could ask the same question and it could be a reasonable inquiry. An English speaking adult ought to know that "A" is the first letter in the English alphabet whereas a young child would not necessarily know this and it would be unreasonable to expect them to know this fact. The question would be the same question therefore how could the question be stupid? Therefore the correct thing to say is that there is no such thing as a stupid question but there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot.
I'll say the French have the final word on what's truly French, the Spaniards have the final word on what's truly Spanish, and the Brits have the final word on what is true and "proper" English.
Going to call bullshit on that one. Just because that's where the language originated does not grant those countries any sort of authority over how or where the language is used outside their own borders, particularly after hundreds of years. American English did not evolve from modern British English any more than humans evolved from modern apes. They both come from a common ancestor and have evolved along separate paths ever since. The Brits have no more say over how English is used than the Americans or even Chinese do. Languages do not work like that. Spanish spoken in South America is every bit as legitimate as Spanish spoken in Spain.
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a set of opinions, not a set of rules. All the difference in the world. I can point you at numerous books and experts on grammar and writing that disagree with significant portions of that overused book.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are.
There is no single authoritative set of rules for the English language. There are rules in the sense that there are commonly agreed to informal "standards" which persist for a time based on culture and comprehensibility but it is quite correct to say that that there aren't any rules in the sense of rules laid down by an authoritative body.
Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
Quite simply not true. You merely have to go back far enough in time to get to a point where the language is no longer the same. Old English is for all practical purposes a completely different language than our modern version of English.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today.
Perhaps you haven't actually studied Shakespeare. Significant portions of his writing are quite inscrutable today without an explanation of the context, temporal usage and intent. That said, Shakespeare isn't so far removed from us that it is impossible to read - it's just a few hundred years and languages usually don't evolve that quickly. Go read Beowulf in the original Old English and tell me again that the rules of the language never change over time.
We have excellent distribution systems, so that's not a problem.
The mere fact that we cannot get food to everyone who needs it despite the fact that more than enough is produced to feed everyone on the plant is clear evidence that we do not have "excellent" distribution systems. The mere fact that we have the technical ability does not mean the system is adequate to the needs of those who are hungry.
Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind?
Yes. It's basically a nonissue.
What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far?
Then they settle someplace else. No actual evidence exists however to indicate wind turbines are actually causing such an effect however on any sort of substantial scale.
How does that affect terraforming?
We're on Terra so terraforming on terra is meaningless.
What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?
The number of birds killed by wind turbines is a rounding error compared to the number killed by domestic cats.
The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis.
What energy crisis? We have no lack of energy. We have a pollution crisis due to a lack of clean energy sources. Wind is demonstrably cleaner than some of the alternatives. There is no ideal energy source with no problems so it's a minimization problem. What is the least worst way to supply energy without resulting in catastrophic climate effects.
The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.
There is no energy shortage. Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation. Starvation and hunger are distribution problems, not production problems. Crime has existed since the dawn of mankind and has nothing inherently to do with overpopulation. Same for disease. At most some of these problems can be exacerbated by population but population is not the root cause of any of them.
There are products which have expensive tooling, like injection molded plastic parts; and there are products that can be made inexpensively at the click of a button, like water-jet cut metal parts, or CNC wirebending.
I'm an accountant and an engineer and I run a manufacturing company. There is no such thing as pushbutton manufacturing. It does not exist. And even if it did it would not be cheap. Nothing can be made "inexpensively at the click of a button" unless you are not accounting for all the costs involved. There is FAR more to it than merely the cost of direct manufacturing. Injection molded plastic parts require very expensive die sets and molding machines plus design and engineering time, machine operator time, post processing and more. Not to mention overhead and materials cost. You can usually get the unit cost to be low with enough volume but the up front capital costs involved are not trivial.
My company deals in small volume production a lot and we cannot really do anything for less than about $500. Even the most basic of production has enough overhead and setup cost that we would lose money on anything smaller than that even if the actual direct manufacturing costs are low.
The problem I see in a lot of open source hardware projects is a lack of value engineering
That's because the people doing it usually have a particular domain expertise and have little to no idea about the other domains involved. People that are good at product design tend to be rather terrible at tooling and process engineering and vice-versa. My company manufactures wire harnesses as a contract manufacturer. Most of the designs we see were designed by mechanical engineers with no particular expertise in electronics or process engineering. They also usually do not understand the particular details involved in wire harness manufacturing. As a result the designs are usually flawed in some way and often are too expensive or even cannot be easily made as designed. I'll see things like gold-plated terminals being specified when tin would do just fine for 1/10th the cost.
I was really hoping there was some way the donatee could fill this role.
Kind of a catch-22 there. If the donatee is to defend the patent they need to have a revenue stream to do so which presumably would have to come from the product which (probably) necessarily requires that they exclude others from using it. Not really sure how to resolve that conundrum. Patents were designed to combat the Free Rider Problem but in this case the economics of the patent system interfere with the ability of people to put something in the public sphere and keep it there in a manner similar to copyleft.
None taken. I think it would be useful to a lot of people but I have no interest in patenting it for my own profit. It doesn't make sense to pay $2000 to patent something unless you're going to make your money back. I guess I'm suggesting that a non-profit could patent and protect the donated hardware designs.
Out of curiosity, what sort of product is it? What does it do in general? You don't have to tell me all the gory details but you've piqued my interest.
Wait, you just said in your previous post that your tooling was made from milled aluminum, now you say hardened steel, which is it?
Different tooling. We have presses that use hardened steel for crimping terminals. We have other tooling for moldings that uses aluminum. We have still other tooling that is made from other materials.
There is additive manufacturing processes in aluminum and titanium, but I would still go with milling for producing injection molds
Nothing affordable to businesses like ours. I'm well aware of what is out there but it isn't going to be mainstream technology for at least another decade and probably longer.
If the tooling is costing $8000, it's either fucking massive, or you're counting the design cost in addition to the machining.
Of course the cost includes design and machining. We don't do it ourselves - we're not a tool & die shop. And $8000 for press tooling is incredibly cheap for a one off design. Even the applicators (different type of tooling) we use for crimping on our presses cost $1500-3000 each and those are standardized. A guy I work with when we need plastics tooling done works for a company that does injection moldings and their tooling is often $20-50,000+ for a die set. My company does not have the expertise to design tooling for injection molds or for our crimping presses. That leaves us with the option of either outsourcing it completely or hiring all the people and buying all the equipment necessary to bring it in house. 3D printing in anything but basic plastics requires a VERY expensive machine which is economically prohibitive and we still would have to hire the engineer with the design expertise. So I can either outsource the project for $8000 or I can spend the better part of $100,000 to do the same thing if I do it in house. Not exactly the toughest economic decision to make.
I do some work as a mechanical engineer* and I do some work in VLSI and FPGA, and my experience is that most existing mechanical tools are batfuckstupid.
I would tend to agree with you. I would also say that most mechanical engineers I've worked with are absolutely horrible at process documentation and process design. (I'm an industrial engineer so process engineering is kind of my thing) I can count on my fingers the number of designs in the last 5 years I've gotten from mechanical engineers that could be built directly from the documentation provided. It's not just the tools either. Too many of them simply are terrible at communicating their designs to other people.
Mechanical engineering is not just about the part; you also need to design the process or tool that produces it. Designing an airplane is 1/10th about the airplane and 9/10th about the factory and process that builds it.
Quite correct although as a process engineer I wouldn't sell the design short that much. You can do great manufacturing on a shitty design and it's still going to be a shitty product. Probably closer to 50/50 but your general point is valid.
It's as if every time you wrote a program, you had to write the compiler, linker and debugger for it at the same time. This is the level of sophistication that most mechanical engineering is at today.
Not really true and the analogy is a severe stretch - to the point where it doesn't really make much sense. Mechanical engineering is NOT like software engineering. It deals in tangible objects and notions like code reuse and other things that are routine in software don't easily translate.
That said, companies that do mechanical engineering well do tend to standardize a lot of what they do. One thing companies like Honda do very well is that they are incredibly disciplined about standardizing their tooling. This has enormous downstream benefits, both financial and quality. At my company most of our press tooling is standard from one manufacturer and that saves us tremendous amounts of time and money.
We really need some kind of an organization that we could donate hardware designs to that would guarantee any resulting patents would be open.
Doesn't really solve the core problems. 1) It's expensive to get and defend a patent. If you cannot defend a patent then companies with deep pockets will ignore the patent. If you don't have a patent then companies without deep pockets can copy you too. 2) Even if you get a patent that doesn't guarantee you'll be able to produce a useful product without infringing on other patents. Lots of tech products simply cannot be produced without cross-licensing agreements. 3) Manufacturing hardware is expensive even without worrying about patents. Software can be manufactured very cheaply - almost for free. Hardware requires a credible business model and substantial capital investment for even the simplest of products.
I have an interface device I've been working on for about 15 years. I can't afford to patent it and certainly can't afford to get it to manufacture.
No disrespect intended (seriously!) but if you cannot afford to get it patented then I have to wonder if it is terribly valuable. Patents cost a few thousand dollars. Costly enough to keep the casual out but it's not a prohibitive amount of money. Defending the patent on the other hand can be very expensive if it is something that others might care to copy. It's not terribly hard to get financing to patent and produce a product with some meaningful market value.
I thought manufacturers would use 3D printing to create custom tooling.
Maybe someday but not anytime soon. The tooling we need is made from hardened steel. Even if there were a 3D printer that could make it (there isn't) the cost of the machine would be astronomical right now. We'd have to create a LOT of custom tooling to justify the machine cost even if it were possible. In 10-20 years? Maybe...
And if it involves any custom ASICs, it's a very costly proposition.
It's not just ASICs. Any hardware that would involve custom tooling tends to be VERY expensive. I'm getting a quote right now on a very simple custom molded plastic connector which we are going to produce in modest volumes. The tooling is basically a piece of CNC milled aluminum and it will cost us about $8000. This is to produce a connector that will sell for about $1.00 each and we might make $0.10 profit per unit. That cost doesn't include labor, raw materials, the cost of the machine the tooling will run on, overhead, or delivery costs.
Everyone is going on and on about 3D printing and it is super cool and useful but not the way a lot of people think. 3D printing is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for any kind of volume manufacturing. It eliminates setup costs but the cost/unit of production is far, far higher than with other techniques. If the production volume is sufficient to justify tooling a process like injection molding can produce plastic parts far cheaper than 3D printing could ever hope to achieve. The part that I mention above if I were to have it 3D printed would cost about $40/unit and I couldn't get more than a handful made per day.
Manufacturing isn't cheap or easy. Software guys (understandably) tend to thing everything works like software when in fact very few industries even remotely resemble software. They tend to fall into the trap of having a hammer and thinking every problem is a nail. Manufacturing hardware could not be more different.
The Open Compute Project, which wants to open up hardware the same way Linux opened up software, is starting to tackle its forklift problem.
That's not the important problem with open source hardware. Actually making hardware is a fairly straightforward, albeit costly, proposition. I should know since I run a manufacturing company. Give me a design and an adequate amount of cash and I can get any product made and delivered wherever you want it. That's not the real obstacle to open source hardware.
The important problem is that hardware is (generally) protected by patents whereas software is (generally) protected by copyright. It's easy to write a license (see GPL) that does useful things with copyright law for a product like software. It is highly non-trivial to do the same thing with patents for a product like hardware, especially under a first-to-file patent system. To accomplish something similar to the GPL or BSD license you would have to have someone spend the money to patent a technology and then make it available for community use AND be willing and able (read $$$) to fight to protect the community. This costs a LOT of money, takes a lot of time and at the end of the day you probably cannot use it in any meaningful product without infringing on about 20 other patents from potentially uncooperative companies like Apple or Google, not to mention patent trolls.
Open source software works because of a happy confluence of circumstances. Software is automatically covered by copyright and there is zero cost to get a copyright. Software also has effectively zero marginal cost to reproduce and can be easily improved by someone skilled in development. Hardware is not automatically protected and the costs to get a patent are substantial. Hardware is not at all cheap to reproduce and while it can be improved, it takes still more money to make and distribute and test those improvements.
Lightning, while a very good physical design for a connector will likely fall soon as the power benefits of USB-C are too good to pass up
You might be right but it's not immediately clear to me how much this would matter for iPhones and iPads. I haven't gotten my hands on a USB-C yet but I'm not optimistic about it working physically as well as Lightning connectors though I'd be fine with being proven wrong. Lighting is a very nice physical connector but the main reason it exists is because the connectors for USB sucks so badly. Maybe USB-C will fix this but I'm not holding my breath.
For laptops Apple has their Magsafe connector which USB-C does not replace. I'd LOVE a single connector to provide both power and data but I think the jury is still out whether USB-C will be able to do that adequately. Would be nice if it did.
If Apple double downs on Lightning and sticks with it I would be extremely impressed with their level of stubbornness.
Apple isn't traditionally stubborn about changing interfaces so long as there are performance benefits to be had. They were among the first to drop a lot of legacy ports and were among the early adopters of USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt and others. True they've stuck with some proprietary or unusual stuff for surprisingly long (Firewire, SCSI, ADB, etc) but there were usually reasonable performance and/or user-base reasons they stuck with them as long as they did.
Does USB Type C Herald the End of Apple's Proprietary Connectors?
I'm gonna go out on a very short limb and go with "no" as my answer. Apple always finds a way to do something a little different and I doubt that is likely to change anytime soon.
members of the members Sigma Alpha Epsilon at University of Oklahoma singing a racist chant
Gee, racism in the American South. Who would have ever predicted that...
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such.
Because they work. They are exceptionally reliable and are almost always recovered. They are already installed on pretty much every large aircraft out there. And they provide invaluable information in helping to determine the cause of accidents. Furthermore no practical amount of telemetry is going to tell you everything about a crash so we still would want to find the wreckage anyway so why not have on board telemetry?
How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
Ok, which global satellite system are you going to stream to? What is the protocol standard you intend to use? What are your plans to retrofit such equipment to every existing plane out there and how do you plan to pay for it? How do you plan to ensure the system is as reliable as the black boxes which have proven VERY reliable and are almost always recovered? These are solvable but not trivial problems that need to be addressed first.
It's not that streaming telemetry data is a bad idea but there are a LOT of technical details to work out, not the least of which are the standards involved and the economics of doing so.
Of course there is, when there's a thousand football players for every MMA fighter. You can find football programs at most colleges and high schools in the U.S. - can you name a school that has one for MMA?
Sort of. It's called wrestling and yes, lots of schools have wrestling programs. A huge percentage (probably the majority) of MMA fighters these days got much of their early training in wrestling and wrestling is a vital skill in MMA. Serious long term injuries are actually rather rare in wrestling and even MMA despite the very physical nature of the sports. I've been a wrestler and coach of wrestling for over 30 years and I can show you the injury statistics for that sport. I've seen similar statistics for MMA. It's far safer than you might guess as a casual observer. Certainly far safer than football on both an absolute and per-capita basis. That's not to imply there are no dangers or that serious injuries cannot result, just that it's much safer than you might think.
The reason there are surprising few long term injuries in MMA (and wrestling) is two-fold. 1) the rules are designed such that techniques likely to result in severe injury are illegal. 2) There is one official for two contestants and he is standing just a few feet away and is empowered to stop the match if an injury seems likely. That makes a HUGE difference. The sports are physical and sure there are plenty of bumps and bruises but stuff like broken limbs or torn ligaments simply don't happen often because the match gets stopped most of the time before that becomes possible. In football that isn't the case. In football the rules are designed such that certain injuries (particularly knee injuries and concussions) are ludicrously routine. Go into any sports medicine clinic and I can almost guarantee the majority of the patients there will be football players with serious knee injuries.