You just need to be reasonably confident that you can make one in time for the actual launch. You don't need one sitting in the lab right now before you can start working on the other tasks.
Pray tell how you plan to be "reasonably confident" unless you are actually working on one? Research sometimes gets done sooner than you expect. Sometimes it takes longer. If you know you'll need a piece of technology you start working on it as early as your budget will allow to give the maximum amount of time to figure it out. If you are done early, great. Move on to other things. But procrastination is not your friend when every other part of the mission depends on it.
That is why I always told NASA to build power supplies FIRST and rockets SECOND. But they never listened and that is why we are still stuck on this rock in a gravity well.
Are you just in a particularly trolling mood today? You're spewing all sorts of dumb shit that isn't as funny as you think it is.
Sure, but it's hardly the most difficult or pressing issue.
Umm, yeah it pretty much is the biggest issue. Literally every mission depends on having an power supply with usable power, weight, and volume parameters. EVERY mission. Manned or unmanned - it doesn't matter. EVERY mission requires a power supply.
Developing a rocket and lander so we can put heavy objects safely on the surface of the Moon/Mars is a bigger challenge.
There is no point in launching stuff into space unless you can power the stuff once it is in space. They go hand in hand. There are missions that are literally impossible with the currently available power supplies. To do those missions you need a better power supply. Launching into orbit could be literally free and if you don't have a power supply adequate to the mission parameters there still will be no mission.
Also, without a rocket, a power supply is useless. A rocket without a power supply can be used for plenty of other missions.
Really? Name one mission that doesn't require a power supply. A mission needs a power supply to be a mission. It also needs a rocket to get to where the mission needs to go. It's not an either/or proposition. You need both.
We are nowhere near the point where we need to worry about powering a space colony, so why is NASA wasting money on this part ?
Because if you don't have an adequate power system you NEVER will have a space colony. It's job number one. If you don't have adequate power system there is no mission. Literally every other part of the mission depends on it. Any form of transportation is fundamentally contingent upon having a reliable power supply with a power to weight (and volume) ratio adequate to the mission parameters. With a sufficiently small and powerful energy supply, nearly any mission is possible. Without it no mission is possible.
Not even remotely true. Your should check the news. The big automakers are making big investments into EVs and have been for some time. I run a company that makes parts for some of their prototype work. I've seen them working on it for years first hand.
It's not an issue of "easy or hard", it's an issue of are you paying for it.
??? Spending money just to spend money is idiotic. Making a product just because you can is stupid. Tesla is a startup and they need to get products on the market today because otherwise they have no cash flow. GM and Ford are decidedly NOT startups and so their strategy is necessarily different. Neither approach is wrong but they each play to their needs and strengths. GM is not worried about their ability to actually make an EV. (their ability to design a good one is a little more suspect though the Bolt isn't a bad try at it) What they are worried about is whether there is a market big enough and in developing the technology so they can bring a product out when they time is right.
Which strategy will win in the end? No one knows. That's the fun bit.
Yes, because EV tech is totally the same thing as building ICEs.
For the most part it is absolutely identical. A chassis is still a chassis. A suspension is still a suspension. The vast majority of the vehicle is more or less identical to stuff Ford and GM have been doing forever. The only thing that really changes is the powertrain and they aren't clueless there either.
GM has brought EVs to market - most notably the Bolt (and Ford has done compliance cars). They have not proven competitive in the marketplace. People were more willing to wait on Tesla's waiting list than buy a Bolt.
Tesla has been selling vehicles at a loss. You can generate a LOT of interest in your product if you are willing to finance other people to buy it. I'm as big a fan of Tesla as anyone here but when they can sell their cars AND make a profit doing it you can talk to me about being competitive in the marketplace.
And 18-24 months? You realize that even with the delays, Tesla went from start of tooling to sales of the Model 3 in 15 months (April 2016 to July 2017), and hit 10k produced in the time it took GM to hit 1k? But please, go on and lecture about how major automakers can mass produce quickly and Tesla can't.
You misunderstand. 18-24 months is how long it takes them from start of DESIGN to start of production. The actual production ramp up is only a fraction of that and I assure you that GM can do it faster than Tesla because they already know how to do it. If you actually think the big automakers can't ramp up production very quickly then you have NO idea what you are talking about. I work in the industry. Tesla is doing cool shit but they are way behind the big automakers when it comes to production technology and knowing how to use it. If they weren't then Tesla wouldn't be having all these growing pains with the Model 3. They are just a young company with limited experience in high volume production. Every company has a learning curve and Tesla is right in the middle of theirs. I'm not bashing Tesla but professionally I'm a guy who designs manufacturing assembly systems in the auto industry. I actually know what I'm talking about here.
Yes, because building a gigantic battery factory is totally something you can do overnight. On pocket change, too.
Why is it that the hype from competitors never plays out as a serious threat? We're back to capex. Making good, profitable EVs takes vast amounts of capex, both in R&D, and in production. And at present, Tesla is the only company that's been doing that.
No they are definitely not the only company doing that. The big auto makers are making big investments in EV tech but largely in R&D rather than production. Why? Because for them the production is actually the easy part. They have plenty of cash and experience building cars. Right now the EV market is too small to justify production for them so they are letting Tesla do the heavy lifting of building and proving the market. But Ford, GM, etc could bring an EV to market within 18-24 months. They do this all the time since that is approximately the development time of one of their cars. Their strategy is to be a fast follower which is a very sensible strategy in principle. (Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, and others do this very well) Whether it will actually play out to their favor is an open question but they have the cash to do it. In the mean time they make fairly handsome profits off their ICE powered vehicles and let Tesla take the lions share of the risk in the short run.
Now the risk is that they can't follow fast enough or with a good enough product and Tesla eats their lunch. Anyone who claims they know how it will play out is deluding themselves. I think Tesla has a strong chance to become a long term player IF they can keep their funding going (ala Amazon) long enough to get to minimum efficient scale on production. Their stock is hugely overvalued but as long as Elon can keep the hype train on the tracks that's entirely to Tesla's benefit. The incumbent automakers had better be watching what Tesla is doing carefully and taking notes because Tesla is the ones really pushing the innovation envelope in the industry and they clearly have shown there is strong demand for EVs and features not currently offered by the traditional automakers.
Facebook's AI Research group is also developing a StarCraft bot that it too plans to open source.
What would be the point of this? I'm not any sort of expert in starcraft but I'm not sure what this would prove. While there is a lot of tactics and strategy to work out, a huge part of a game like this is simply the ability to click on and order units about as fast as possible. A computer could very obviously do this faster than any human unless it was artificially limited. I have a hard time seeing how a human could keep up with a computer speed zerg rush. Is there something I don't understand about the game here?
I can't encrypt the mail that my dummy friends and acquantences send to me.
That's the reason nobody uses encryption for email. Actually making it secure is (apparently) irreducibly technically difficult. But if you are concerned about sensitive information then your ONLY option is to go figure it out and get other people on board with you. Otherwise it is no different than having a tapped phone line and you should behave accordingly. This is NOT something you can outsource to your email provider and have reasonable certainty that it is actually secure so few people actually bother. I've spent a fair bit of time researching this very topic and there appears to be no way to have encrypted emails without the parties on both ends being highly technically competent and willing to put in significant extra effort to set up and manage a secure system. Just not worth it most of the time.
1a) Users would have to, via subscription fees. Similar to having a PO box.
And why would anyone do this when they can get gmail for "free"? Again there is no business proposition here for USPS unless the government raises taxes to cover it. It's not obvious what USPS could offer me that I don't already have.
1b) The laws that apply to first class mail would have to apply to email as well, and the post office could manage a certificate store for a somewhat better than post-card level of security that develops the habit of using encryption.
Just because the laws apply doesn't mean it is actually secure. You seriously think the NSA wouldn't hack this system in a heartbeat? Sorry but I don't trust the government to keep me secure against the government. A certificate is just a piece of a long chain in securing email. Secure email is a LOT more complicated than just being a certificate authority, even with legal teeth. And there is zero chance of a government entity (which USPS is) offering email that is secure against government snooping. I trust the government to do some things competently but I don't trust them at all in this capacity.
And again you have the problem of how you plan to fund this? Show me a business plan that is feasible.
sure, but no one has the force of law they way USPS does. Intercepting usps email and fraudulent email via that service would be federal offences.
You don't need USPS to do that. You'd have to change the law anyway and you could just as easily make interfering with email delivery a federal offense in general. If you want to have USPS chase down bad guys for email related law breaking you had better have a way to fund the legion of extra postal inspectors you'd need to do it. Again, there is the money problem. Almost nobody is going to pay USPS for a service they can get for "free". Few people will care about the fact that USPS has some postal inspectors and fewer still will be willing to pay more for them.
I'm not opposed to USPS offering email services and I get why it makes a certain amount of sense. But unless congress gets behind it in a big way (which will not happen) it makes no economic sense and so it is dead before it ever starts. USPS just isn't in a position to solve any real world problem for me or most other people.
California is just making cars more expensive for everybody AGAIN...
If that means they use less gasoline and emit less pollution then GOOD. All for it.
Look, I'm all for saving the planet, but there are just some things that violate the laws of physics. You can only aspire to gas mileage levels that are so high and after that you are doomed to fail or compromise other areas like safety.
Nice strawman. We are no where close to the sort of engineering compromises you are suggesting.
You are left improving energy consumed in other ways like making the vehicle lighter (and weaker), decreasing drag by making cars smaller or the tires harder and shorter.
Lighter does not necessarily mean weaker and it certainly does not equal unsafe. Formula 1 cars are incredibly light and yet drivers can literally walk away from crashes at high speeds that would result in a fatality in your family sedan. Convenient that you ignored the most obvious way to reduce fuel consumption which is to make a car that has less horsepower. No you do not "need" 500 horsepower. Most people don't even need 100 most of the time. They might want it but want does not equal need. Or you can switch to something like an EV to improve fuel economy with less HP trade off.
You are costing me money, money I don't think is necessary and largely impossible to accomplish given the laws of physics.
You obviously are motivated by money because your grasp of physics and engineers seems lacking.
Warnings are OK, but I don't want my email provider or anyone in that chain changing my mail for any reason, even if they're trying to be helpful.
That's fine if you are technically competent and aware of the possible scam angles. People like my parents are a different matter altogether and a little bit of help from the email provider in their case is actually a pretty good idea. I have my father using gmail in part precisely because they do a good job filtering for spam, scams, and malware. Asking my father to do this would be a disaster waiting to happen. He's smart but the details of email technology isn't his focus in life.
I'd prefer they also don't read my mail.
Then encrypt your mail. The physical world equivalent to sending an unencrypted email is a post card. Don't write anything on a post card or an email you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone along the delivery route reading.
Whatever happened to the idea of USPS provided email, anyway?
Several problems. 1) Who is going to pay for it? What is the business proposition to USPS? 2) We already have email through countless other sources. 3) USPS has no demonstrated competence in this sort of product.
The latest figures I've got show China's GDP ahead of the US's
Those figures are wrong. China's GDP GROWTH is ahead of the US but their total GDP is still only around 2/3 of the US (~11 trillion vs ~18 trillion) China is expected to pass the US in total GDP in a decade or two and given the 4:1 population difference that makes sense all other things held equal. India might pass the US someday too if they can ever get their act together.
Of course, comparing the GDPs of very different economies is partly a matter of interpretation.
Not nearly to the degree you seem to be implying. The data and methods used is reasonably clear and while pinning down an exact number is nigh impossible, getting a pretty close number with some reasonable error bars is positively routine and straight forward. Even for an economy like China's that isn't entirely transparent.
It will be just like deleting your browser history on your LOCAL computer or what is visible in your account. It won't do shit about the data Facebook has stored about you. That will never get deleted because that is what Facebook uses to make money.
You should discuss why all these people rely on a service for income without any contractual guarantee.
The vast majority of people in any job are "at will" employees which means they have no contractual guarantee of continued employment. Ever give a tip to the waitstaff at a restaurant? There is no contractual guarantee there. Why should people using YouTube have guarantees? They knew what the deal was when they signed up. If the deal changes they can't pretend that they didn't know that was a possibility.
I'm always astonished that our current medical field requires knowledge of the mechanism of action before allowing a drug on the market.
First off your statement is factually false. There is NO requirement that we understand the mechanism of action of a drug before bringing it to market. But there is a HUGE benefit to understanding the mechanism of action first. If you don't know how a drug works then you are basically doing science by guess and check which is usually stupid, slow, and frequently counterproductive. If you don't know how it works then you can't predict what sort of effects and side effects it might have on the body. You can waste huge amounts of money, brains, and time trying to test treatments that have no chance of success because you don't understand the underlying mechanism of action. Science is based on understanding what is happening so you can make testable predictions. Without that information you are basically trusting to luck.
There are many drugs on the market for which we do not have a complete understanding of their mechanism of action. Most drugs aimed at treating mental disorders fall into this category. We don't actually know why many of them work, just that they do. There is NO legal requirement that we understand the mechanism of action prior to approving a drug. Furthermore drugs can be used for off label purposes by a physician.
I've come across treatments and potential cures that appear to work when based only on the evidence, yet can't be marketed because their mechanism of action is unknown.
No you haven't because that isn't a requirement by the FDA. What cures? What "evidence"? Stop making up strawmen to support your bogus claims.
Medical research has stagnated, for about the last 30 years.
Complete bullshit. Medical research has made astonishing gains in the last thirty years. You could only believe this if you have not bothered to look for actual facts or if you are making an argument from ignorance.
Not if they separately offer the faster Internet service for sale. As your link explains, the only way you can have illegal tying is if the bundle is the only way you can buy the product you want
No that is NOT the only way you can have illegal tying. Even the short blurb I linked to says so quite clearly. The real question is whether the tying restricts competition without providing benefits to consumers. That is an open question in this case which I do not have the answer. It is clear that in many markets Comcast is clearly a monopolist with and interest in keeping out additional competition.
It's not about the laws of physics, it's about what that person prefers. Think of it as black coffee vs coffee with cream and sugar; the same laws of physics that allow you to prefer one allow me to prefer the other. To you, one is better; to me, the other is.
If you cannot measure the difference there is no difference. That is the only way to have a rational discussion about any of this. People like to pretend they can hear/see/taste things that aren't actually there all the time. Audiophiles claim all sorts of absurd things that they cannot identify under rigorous conditions. Wine lovers have been shown to imagine differences between wines based on price tag or even the same wine with food coloring added. I'm not talking about preferences, I'm talking about actually measurable differences based in physics. You have to have those first to have a justifiable any preference. Otherwise you are just making shit up and wasting everyone's time.
Why not? If we can help some people without using drugs, why wouldn't we?
Seriously? Are you trolling or stupid? I can't tell...
Because placebos by definition do not do anything. The effectiveness of placebo is the bar we use to determine whether a medicine does anything. If it isn't more effective than placebo we don't use it because it doesn't do anything. Furthermore prescribing a placebo introduces dishonesty and potential fraud into the relationship between the doctor and patient.
I get that the ethics of lying to a patient are complex, and skeptics likely are immune, but there is a large group of people we could be helping with placebos and I see no reason not to start there.
Sigh... BY DEFINITION you cannot help large groups of people with placebos and you sure as hell don't design a treatment system around them. That's called snake oil and the administration of false remedies is a real problem. The entire point of placebos is that they have no mechanism of action. They don't do anything by definition. That's not medicine or science. That is faith and prayer.
Or... you know... have GDP grow more than 2% year-over-year for a few years. That could never happen though...
If that happens great but it's not something you can plan for because the government has ZERO means to ensure that happens. They can guess what the growth rate will be but they cannot force it to be higher than it is. Cutting taxes and regulations will not ensure it happens no matter what politicians promise you. And 2% growth on a GDP of $18.75 Trillion is REALLY hard to pull off in the face of some of the highest labor costs in the world. Good policy is to plan your budget for what is likely to happen and if it turns out better then we all benefit. Instead we have the current leaders trying to pretend that they can force the economy to grow at improbable rates to justify bogus budget assumptions and fund a ludicrously oversized military.
I have had people suggest that maybe they can "feel" the higher frequencies somehow.
People also suggest that homeopathy actually is something more than a placebo. Doesn't change the fact that it is a bullshit claim that has yet to withstand any scientific scrutiny.
The placebo effect is real, too. You can actually cure illness with sugar pills! Bottom line: If analog sound is better in their heads then it really is better (for them).
Umm, no. That is not an objective truth we can agree upon. The placebo effect is real but you don't design a medical system around it either. Similarly, just because a single person claims they prefer an "analog sound" you don't go and pretend the laws of physics somehow are different for that one person.
It's a funny thing, the ongoing turntable sales surge shows no signs of slowing down, but nearly all new music is recorded digitally.
The only people who care about vinyl records are young people who never had to grow up with vinyl records so they lack an appreciation of what a pain in the ass they are or old farts with an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia or hipsters who want to show off. No the sound is NOT appreciably better especially after you have actually played the record more than a few times. Vinyl records are fragile, readily damaged, and generally sound like shit after any appreciable amount of use. Even if you are absurdly careful with a vinyl record it's still almost certain to get damaged at some point. Sharp needles and soft vinyl tend to be a bad combination. Whatever minor advantages they might possess are quickly lost with actual use. I don't really buy the arguments that vinyl somehow sounds better but even if it does the differences are so marginal as to be meaningless.
Be that as it may, LPs, regardless of vintage, can sound great. While pre-1980s records may be richer in tone and warmth, there are lots of more recent albums that sound just as good or better. In other words vinyl's sound quality or lack thereof has mostly to do with the quality of the original recording, and the choices made by the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers.
Sigh... "Richer in ton and warmth"? That sounds like typical audiophile bullshit to me unless you are talking about some corner cases. I'm old enough that I predate the CD. Vinyl records and cassette tapes were the only options in my childhood. No the sound was not better. Mostly worse if anything. It was just what we had at the time and we dumped vinyl records almost overnight for CDs because vinyl records SUCK to use in the real world. Any issues with digital music not sounding a particular way have NOTHING to do with analog vs digital and everything to do with engineering choices.
I'm not sure that America is "the wealthiest nation on Earth", at least per capita, but it surely is the most conceited one.
The US is definitely the wealthiest nation in total as measured by GDP. Per capita the US isn't at the top but it's in the top 20 and literally ALL of the nations ahead of it are either small to tiny countries (Ireland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Hong Kong, etc) or oil rich states like Kuwait or Norway.
As for being conceited I'd tend to agree. I'm an American and a lot of my fellow citizens get a hard on by chanting "greatest country in the world" regardless of the objective merit of that statement.
Buy their own binders, papers, and pencils sure. But textbooks? I'm not sure what country you live in but that seems like a bizarrely inefficient system.
Not really. Have you ever seen textbooks after a student has used one for a year much less several? Usually beat to heck if they used the text book the way it should be used. My school was a private school and we bought our books every year and it was actually really nice - I could use the book however I wanted. Highlighting, writing notes, etc. The real problem is that textbooks that get sold are ridiculously expensive. FAR more expensive than is justifiable because the book publishers have this nice cozy arrangement where they get to sell books for outrageous markups to a captive audience.
Making the parents buy the textbooks is effectively just a poorly administered tax on parents.
Parents are going to be buying the books most of the time anyway. Might as well make it transparent so that parents can know what they are paying for. Give some financial assistance to families that need help but speaking for myself I'd have no problem paying for books for my daughter.
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job
That's not really the problem. The problem is that once they get in it's damn near impossible to get them out of office no matter how badly they do. Incumbents get re-elected at rates over 90% thanks to a combination of voter apathy, gerrymandering, confirmation bias, and other factors.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters).
Of course you are correct but good luck getting that fact to penetrate the skull of your typical "taxes = evil" republican or worse, one of the tea party variety. So now we have a national debt of around $21 Trillion which is about $65,000 owed for each man, woman and child in the US. The ONLY way this is going to go away is to raise taxes combined with some rather drastic cuts to the military and/or medicare. (the rest of the budget isn't big enough to make a difference) The fact that tax revenues fluctuate is utterly lost in the political debate.
Slashdot Mirror
You just need to be reasonably confident that you can make one in time for the actual launch. You don't need one sitting in the lab right now before you can start working on the other tasks.
Pray tell how you plan to be "reasonably confident" unless you are actually working on one? Research sometimes gets done sooner than you expect. Sometimes it takes longer. If you know you'll need a piece of technology you start working on it as early as your budget will allow to give the maximum amount of time to figure it out. If you are done early, great. Move on to other things. But procrastination is not your friend when every other part of the mission depends on it.
That is why I always told NASA to build power supplies FIRST and rockets SECOND. But they never listened and that is why we are still stuck on this rock in a gravity well.
Are you just in a particularly trolling mood today? You're spewing all sorts of dumb shit that isn't as funny as you think it is.
Sure, but it's hardly the most difficult or pressing issue.
Umm, yeah it pretty much is the biggest issue. Literally every mission depends on having an power supply with usable power, weight, and volume parameters. EVERY mission. Manned or unmanned - it doesn't matter. EVERY mission requires a power supply.
Developing a rocket and lander so we can put heavy objects safely on the surface of the Moon/Mars is a bigger challenge.
There is no point in launching stuff into space unless you can power the stuff once it is in space. They go hand in hand. There are missions that are literally impossible with the currently available power supplies. To do those missions you need a better power supply. Launching into orbit could be literally free and if you don't have a power supply adequate to the mission parameters there still will be no mission.
Also, without a rocket, a power supply is useless. A rocket without a power supply can be used for plenty of other missions.
Really? Name one mission that doesn't require a power supply. A mission needs a power supply to be a mission. It also needs a rocket to get to where the mission needs to go. It's not an either/or proposition. You need both.
We are nowhere near the point where we need to worry about powering a space colony, so why is NASA wasting money on this part ?
Because if you don't have an adequate power system you NEVER will have a space colony. It's job number one. If you don't have adequate power system there is no mission. Literally every other part of the mission depends on it. Any form of transportation is fundamentally contingent upon having a reliable power supply with a power to weight (and volume) ratio adequate to the mission parameters. With a sufficiently small and powerful energy supply, nearly any mission is possible. Without it no mission is possible.
They're just not investing that much period.
Not even remotely true. Your should check the news. The big automakers are making big investments into EVs and have been for some time. I run a company that makes parts for some of their prototype work. I've seen them working on it for years first hand.
It's not an issue of "easy or hard", it's an issue of are you paying for it.
??? Spending money just to spend money is idiotic. Making a product just because you can is stupid. Tesla is a startup and they need to get products on the market today because otherwise they have no cash flow. GM and Ford are decidedly NOT startups and so their strategy is necessarily different. Neither approach is wrong but they each play to their needs and strengths. GM is not worried about their ability to actually make an EV. (their ability to design a good one is a little more suspect though the Bolt isn't a bad try at it) What they are worried about is whether there is a market big enough and in developing the technology so they can bring a product out when they time is right.
Which strategy will win in the end? No one knows. That's the fun bit.
Yes, because EV tech is totally the same thing as building ICEs.
For the most part it is absolutely identical. A chassis is still a chassis. A suspension is still a suspension. The vast majority of the vehicle is more or less identical to stuff Ford and GM have been doing forever. The only thing that really changes is the powertrain and they aren't clueless there either.
GM has brought EVs to market - most notably the Bolt (and Ford has done compliance cars). They have not proven competitive in the marketplace. People were more willing to wait on Tesla's waiting list than buy a Bolt.
Tesla has been selling vehicles at a loss. You can generate a LOT of interest in your product if you are willing to finance other people to buy it. I'm as big a fan of Tesla as anyone here but when they can sell their cars AND make a profit doing it you can talk to me about being competitive in the marketplace.
And 18-24 months? You realize that even with the delays, Tesla went from start of tooling to sales of the Model 3 in 15 months (April 2016 to July 2017), and hit 10k produced in the time it took GM to hit 1k? But please, go on and lecture about how major automakers can mass produce quickly and Tesla can't.
You misunderstand. 18-24 months is how long it takes them from start of DESIGN to start of production. The actual production ramp up is only a fraction of that and I assure you that GM can do it faster than Tesla because they already know how to do it. If you actually think the big automakers can't ramp up production very quickly then you have NO idea what you are talking about. I work in the industry. Tesla is doing cool shit but they are way behind the big automakers when it comes to production technology and knowing how to use it. If they weren't then Tesla wouldn't be having all these growing pains with the Model 3. They are just a young company with limited experience in high volume production. Every company has a learning curve and Tesla is right in the middle of theirs. I'm not bashing Tesla but professionally I'm a guy who designs manufacturing assembly systems in the auto industry. I actually know what I'm talking about here.
Yes, because building a gigantic battery factory is totally something you can do overnight. On pocket change, too.
Panasonic is the company
Why is it that the hype from competitors never plays out as a serious threat? We're back to capex. Making good, profitable EVs takes vast amounts of capex, both in R&D, and in production. And at present, Tesla is the only company that's been doing that.
No they are definitely not the only company doing that. The big auto makers are making big investments in EV tech but largely in R&D rather than production. Why? Because for them the production is actually the easy part. They have plenty of cash and experience building cars. Right now the EV market is too small to justify production for them so they are letting Tesla do the heavy lifting of building and proving the market. But Ford, GM, etc could bring an EV to market within 18-24 months. They do this all the time since that is approximately the development time of one of their cars. Their strategy is to be a fast follower which is a very sensible strategy in principle. (Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, and others do this very well) Whether it will actually play out to their favor is an open question but they have the cash to do it. In the mean time they make fairly handsome profits off their ICE powered vehicles and let Tesla take the lions share of the risk in the short run.
Now the risk is that they can't follow fast enough or with a good enough product and Tesla eats their lunch. Anyone who claims they know how it will play out is deluding themselves. I think Tesla has a strong chance to become a long term player IF they can keep their funding going (ala Amazon) long enough to get to minimum efficient scale on production. Their stock is hugely overvalued but as long as Elon can keep the hype train on the tracks that's entirely to Tesla's benefit. The incumbent automakers had better be watching what Tesla is doing carefully and taking notes because Tesla is the ones really pushing the innovation envelope in the industry and they clearly have shown there is strong demand for EVs and features not currently offered by the traditional automakers.
Facebook's AI Research group is also developing a StarCraft bot that it too plans to open source.
What would be the point of this? I'm not any sort of expert in starcraft but I'm not sure what this would prove. While there is a lot of tactics and strategy to work out, a huge part of a game like this is simply the ability to click on and order units about as fast as possible. A computer could very obviously do this faster than any human unless it was artificially limited. I have a hard time seeing how a human could keep up with a computer speed zerg rush. Is there something I don't understand about the game here?
I can't encrypt the mail that my dummy friends and acquantences send to me.
That's the reason nobody uses encryption for email. Actually making it secure is (apparently) irreducibly technically difficult. But if you are concerned about sensitive information then your ONLY option is to go figure it out and get other people on board with you. Otherwise it is no different than having a tapped phone line and you should behave accordingly. This is NOT something you can outsource to your email provider and have reasonable certainty that it is actually secure so few people actually bother. I've spent a fair bit of time researching this very topic and there appears to be no way to have encrypted emails without the parties on both ends being highly technically competent and willing to put in significant extra effort to set up and manage a secure system. Just not worth it most of the time.
1a) Users would have to, via subscription fees. Similar to having a PO box.
And why would anyone do this when they can get gmail for "free"? Again there is no business proposition here for USPS unless the government raises taxes to cover it. It's not obvious what USPS could offer me that I don't already have.
1b) The laws that apply to first class mail would have to apply to email as well, and the post office could manage a certificate store for a somewhat better than post-card level of security that develops the habit of using encryption.
Just because the laws apply doesn't mean it is actually secure. You seriously think the NSA wouldn't hack this system in a heartbeat? Sorry but I don't trust the government to keep me secure against the government. A certificate is just a piece of a long chain in securing email. Secure email is a LOT more complicated than just being a certificate authority, even with legal teeth. And there is zero chance of a government entity (which USPS is) offering email that is secure against government snooping. I trust the government to do some things competently but I don't trust them at all in this capacity.
And again you have the problem of how you plan to fund this? Show me a business plan that is feasible.
sure, but no one has the force of law they way USPS does. Intercepting usps email and fraudulent email via that service would be federal offences.
You don't need USPS to do that. You'd have to change the law anyway and you could just as easily make interfering with email delivery a federal offense in general. If you want to have USPS chase down bad guys for email related law breaking you had better have a way to fund the legion of extra postal inspectors you'd need to do it. Again, there is the money problem. Almost nobody is going to pay USPS for a service they can get for "free". Few people will care about the fact that USPS has some postal inspectors and fewer still will be willing to pay more for them.
I'm not opposed to USPS offering email services and I get why it makes a certain amount of sense. But unless congress gets behind it in a big way (which will not happen) it makes no economic sense and so it is dead before it ever starts. USPS just isn't in a position to solve any real world problem for me or most other people.
California is just making cars more expensive for everybody AGAIN...
If that means they use less gasoline and emit less pollution then GOOD. All for it.
Look, I'm all for saving the planet, but there are just some things that violate the laws of physics. You can only aspire to gas mileage levels that are so high and after that you are doomed to fail or compromise other areas like safety.
Nice strawman. We are no where close to the sort of engineering compromises you are suggesting.
You are left improving energy consumed in other ways like making the vehicle lighter (and weaker), decreasing drag by making cars smaller or the tires harder and shorter.
Lighter does not necessarily mean weaker and it certainly does not equal unsafe. Formula 1 cars are incredibly light and yet drivers can literally walk away from crashes at high speeds that would result in a fatality in your family sedan. Convenient that you ignored the most obvious way to reduce fuel consumption which is to make a car that has less horsepower. No you do not "need" 500 horsepower. Most people don't even need 100 most of the time. They might want it but want does not equal need. Or you can switch to something like an EV to improve fuel economy with less HP trade off.
You are costing me money, money I don't think is necessary and largely impossible to accomplish given the laws of physics.
You obviously are motivated by money because your grasp of physics and engineers seems lacking.
Warnings are OK, but I don't want my email provider or anyone in that chain changing my mail for any reason, even if they're trying to be helpful.
That's fine if you are technically competent and aware of the possible scam angles. People like my parents are a different matter altogether and a little bit of help from the email provider in their case is actually a pretty good idea. I have my father using gmail in part precisely because they do a good job filtering for spam, scams, and malware. Asking my father to do this would be a disaster waiting to happen. He's smart but the details of email technology isn't his focus in life.
I'd prefer they also don't read my mail.
Then encrypt your mail. The physical world equivalent to sending an unencrypted email is a post card. Don't write anything on a post card or an email you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone along the delivery route reading.
Whatever happened to the idea of USPS provided email, anyway?
Several problems. 1) Who is going to pay for it? What is the business proposition to USPS? 2) We already have email through countless other sources. 3) USPS has no demonstrated competence in this sort of product.
The latest figures I've got show China's GDP ahead of the US's
Those figures are wrong. China's GDP GROWTH is ahead of the US but their total GDP is still only around 2/3 of the US (~11 trillion vs ~18 trillion) China is expected to pass the US in total GDP in a decade or two and given the 4:1 population difference that makes sense all other things held equal. India might pass the US someday too if they can ever get their act together.
Of course, comparing the GDPs of very different economies is partly a matter of interpretation.
Not nearly to the degree you seem to be implying. The data and methods used is reasonably clear and while pinning down an exact number is nigh impossible, getting a pretty close number with some reasonable error bars is positively routine and straight forward. Even for an economy like China's that isn't entirely transparent.
It will be just like deleting your browser history on your LOCAL computer or what is visible in your account. It won't do shit about the data Facebook has stored about you. That will never get deleted because that is what Facebook uses to make money.
Basically nothing to see here. Move along.
You should discuss why all these people rely on a service for income without any contractual guarantee.
The vast majority of people in any job are "at will" employees which means they have no contractual guarantee of continued employment. Ever give a tip to the waitstaff at a restaurant? There is no contractual guarantee there. Why should people using YouTube have guarantees? They knew what the deal was when they signed up. If the deal changes they can't pretend that they didn't know that was a possibility.
I'm always astonished that our current medical field requires knowledge of the mechanism of action before allowing a drug on the market.
First off your statement is factually false. There is NO requirement that we understand the mechanism of action of a drug before bringing it to market. But there is a HUGE benefit to understanding the mechanism of action first. If you don't know how a drug works then you are basically doing science by guess and check which is usually stupid, slow, and frequently counterproductive. If you don't know how it works then you can't predict what sort of effects and side effects it might have on the body. You can waste huge amounts of money, brains, and time trying to test treatments that have no chance of success because you don't understand the underlying mechanism of action. Science is based on understanding what is happening so you can make testable predictions. Without that information you are basically trusting to luck.
There are many drugs on the market for which we do not have a complete understanding of their mechanism of action. Most drugs aimed at treating mental disorders fall into this category. We don't actually know why many of them work, just that they do. There is NO legal requirement that we understand the mechanism of action prior to approving a drug. Furthermore drugs can be used for off label purposes by a physician.
I've come across treatments and potential cures that appear to work when based only on the evidence, yet can't be marketed because their mechanism of action is unknown.
No you haven't because that isn't a requirement by the FDA. What cures? What "evidence"? Stop making up strawmen to support your bogus claims.
Medical research has stagnated, for about the last 30 years.
Complete bullshit. Medical research has made astonishing gains in the last thirty years. You could only believe this if you have not bothered to look for actual facts or if you are making an argument from ignorance.
Not if they separately offer the faster Internet service for sale. As your link explains, the only way you can have illegal tying is if the bundle is the only way you can buy the product you want
No that is NOT the only way you can have illegal tying. Even the short blurb I linked to says so quite clearly. The real question is whether the tying restricts competition without providing benefits to consumers. That is an open question in this case which I do not have the answer. It is clear that in many markets Comcast is clearly a monopolist with and interest in keeping out additional competition.
People here are already apoplectic that some people are getting free shit and not everyone is getting free shit.
"Free"? In what universe is paying several hundred dollars more for a service you don't need free?
Not to mention that this is potentially a violation of anti trust bundling laws.
It's not about the laws of physics, it's about what that person prefers. Think of it as black coffee vs coffee with cream and sugar; the same laws of physics that allow you to prefer one allow me to prefer the other. To you, one is better; to me, the other is.
If you cannot measure the difference there is no difference. That is the only way to have a rational discussion about any of this. People like to pretend they can hear/see/taste things that aren't actually there all the time. Audiophiles claim all sorts of absurd things that they cannot identify under rigorous conditions. Wine lovers have been shown to imagine differences between wines based on price tag or even the same wine with food coloring added. I'm not talking about preferences, I'm talking about actually measurable differences based in physics. You have to have those first to have a justifiable any preference. Otherwise you are just making shit up and wasting everyone's time.
Why not? If we can help some people without using drugs, why wouldn't we?
Seriously? Are you trolling or stupid? I can't tell...
Because placebos by definition do not do anything. The effectiveness of placebo is the bar we use to determine whether a medicine does anything. If it isn't more effective than placebo we don't use it because it doesn't do anything. Furthermore prescribing a placebo introduces dishonesty and potential fraud into the relationship between the doctor and patient.
I get that the ethics of lying to a patient are complex, and skeptics likely are immune, but there is a large group of people we could be helping with placebos and I see no reason not to start there.
Sigh... BY DEFINITION you cannot help large groups of people with placebos and you sure as hell don't design a treatment system around them. That's called snake oil and the administration of false remedies is a real problem. The entire point of placebos is that they have no mechanism of action. They don't do anything by definition. That's not medicine or science. That is faith and prayer.
Or... you know... have GDP grow more than 2% year-over-year for a few years. That could never happen though...
If that happens great but it's not something you can plan for because the government has ZERO means to ensure that happens. They can guess what the growth rate will be but they cannot force it to be higher than it is. Cutting taxes and regulations will not ensure it happens no matter what politicians promise you. And 2% growth on a GDP of $18.75 Trillion is REALLY hard to pull off in the face of some of the highest labor costs in the world. Good policy is to plan your budget for what is likely to happen and if it turns out better then we all benefit. Instead we have the current leaders trying to pretend that they can force the economy to grow at improbable rates to justify bogus budget assumptions and fund a ludicrously oversized military.
I have had people suggest that maybe they can "feel" the higher frequencies somehow.
People also suggest that homeopathy actually is something more than a placebo. Doesn't change the fact that it is a bullshit claim that has yet to withstand any scientific scrutiny.
The placebo effect is real, too. You can actually cure illness with sugar pills! Bottom line: If analog sound is better in their heads then it really is better (for them).
Umm, no. That is not an objective truth we can agree upon. The placebo effect is real but you don't design a medical system around it either. Similarly, just because a single person claims they prefer an "analog sound" you don't go and pretend the laws of physics somehow are different for that one person.
It's a funny thing, the ongoing turntable sales surge shows no signs of slowing down, but nearly all new music is recorded digitally.
The only people who care about vinyl records are young people who never had to grow up with vinyl records so they lack an appreciation of what a pain in the ass they are or old farts with an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia or hipsters who want to show off. No the sound is NOT appreciably better especially after you have actually played the record more than a few times. Vinyl records are fragile, readily damaged, and generally sound like shit after any appreciable amount of use. Even if you are absurdly careful with a vinyl record it's still almost certain to get damaged at some point. Sharp needles and soft vinyl tend to be a bad combination. Whatever minor advantages they might possess are quickly lost with actual use. I don't really buy the arguments that vinyl somehow sounds better but even if it does the differences are so marginal as to be meaningless.
Be that as it may, LPs, regardless of vintage, can sound great. While pre-1980s records may be richer in tone and warmth, there are lots of more recent albums that sound just as good or better. In other words vinyl's sound quality or lack thereof has mostly to do with the quality of the original recording, and the choices made by the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers.
Sigh... "Richer in ton and warmth"? That sounds like typical audiophile bullshit to me unless you are talking about some corner cases. I'm old enough that I predate the CD. Vinyl records and cassette tapes were the only options in my childhood. No the sound was not better. Mostly worse if anything. It was just what we had at the time and we dumped vinyl records almost overnight for CDs because vinyl records SUCK to use in the real world. Any issues with digital music not sounding a particular way have NOTHING to do with analog vs digital and everything to do with engineering choices.
I'm not sure that America is "the wealthiest nation on Earth", at least per capita, but it surely is the most conceited one.
The US is definitely the wealthiest nation in total as measured by GDP. Per capita the US isn't at the top but it's in the top 20 and literally ALL of the nations ahead of it are either small to tiny countries (Ireland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Hong Kong, etc) or oil rich states like Kuwait or Norway.
As for being conceited I'd tend to agree. I'm an American and a lot of my fellow citizens get a hard on by chanting "greatest country in the world" regardless of the objective merit of that statement.
Buy their own binders, papers, and pencils sure. But textbooks? I'm not sure what country you live in but that seems like a bizarrely inefficient system.
Not really. Have you ever seen textbooks after a student has used one for a year much less several? Usually beat to heck if they used the text book the way it should be used. My school was a private school and we bought our books every year and it was actually really nice - I could use the book however I wanted. Highlighting, writing notes, etc. The real problem is that textbooks that get sold are ridiculously expensive. FAR more expensive than is justifiable because the book publishers have this nice cozy arrangement where they get to sell books for outrageous markups to a captive audience.
Making the parents buy the textbooks is effectively just a poorly administered tax on parents.
Parents are going to be buying the books most of the time anyway. Might as well make it transparent so that parents can know what they are paying for. Give some financial assistance to families that need help but speaking for myself I'd have no problem paying for books for my daughter.
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job
That's not really the problem. The problem is that once they get in it's damn near impossible to get them out of office no matter how badly they do. Incumbents get re-elected at rates over 90% thanks to a combination of voter apathy, gerrymandering, confirmation bias, and other factors.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters).
Of course you are correct but good luck getting that fact to penetrate the skull of your typical "taxes = evil" republican or worse, one of the tea party variety. So now we have a national debt of around $21 Trillion which is about $65,000 owed for each man, woman and child in the US. The ONLY way this is going to go away is to raise taxes combined with some rather drastic cuts to the military and/or medicare. (the rest of the budget isn't big enough to make a difference) The fact that tax revenues fluctuate is utterly lost in the political debate.